I got it from a black mamba.

A Black Mamba bicycle.

The kind you see in almost every village, parked under a mango tree, leaning against a mud-and-stick hut, or lined along market pavements. You might spot an uncle in a worn-out suit, trouser hems tucked into his socks, cycling one down the side of the road.

On the day I got the scar, I was sitting on the back of a Black Mamba with my little legs dangling off the sides. My uncle, only sixteen at the time, was riding at full speed along a rough red rural road canopied by eucalyptus and grevillea trees. The smell of lantana hedges on the roadside was thick and delicious. I must have been giggling my silly little self away, not a care in the world.

Then suddenly, I stuck my left leg into the spinning hind wheel of the bicycle.

I remember more panic than pain as my uncle struggled to stop the bicycle while my foot was being ground by the wheel. There was blood. There was shouting. There was panic.

My uncle tied me onto his back. By then, I must have been crying. At home, we were met with even more panic. My mother took one look at my leg, tied me to her back with a leso, and ran — yes, ran — four kilometres in slippers to the clinic. She wailed the entire way there, and bystanders would occasionally join her in lament at the sight of her poor child’s leg.

The leg was salvaged. It healed quickly.

And then began my love affair with Black Mambas.

Even after the incident, it was the first bicycle I learned to ride. At barely three feet tall, all the village children would take turns learning on the uncles’ bicycles. The technique was simple but ridiculous-looking: you had to figure out how your short legs could reach the pedals, which meant leaning sideways into the rectangular frame of the Black Mamba and riding it crookedly. There would be falls onto the red soil, into lantana hedges, and, if you were lucky, onto the grass.

And then there were the passionate companions who followed alongside as you learned to ride the family Black Mamba: Boskos.

Bosko dogs. The Africanis breed.

These, too, are a village specialty. They have tight skin, brown fur, and lean, toned bodies. They are usually named Bosko or Tiger. They work just as hard as anybody else in the village. They go to the farms with the farmers. They herd cattle in the pasture. They wander to the market on market days to beg fish scraps from vendors. They go to the river to drink water and occasionally for a swim.

And they live long, just like Black Mambas.

Black Mambas hardly ever spoil or demand too many repairs. An occasional puncture from acacia thorns might come after the tyres are thoroughly worn down. Some grease on the chain, and you have a functioning bicycle capable of surviving generations.

As for Boskos, come rain or shine, they rarely fall ill. They always know the way home, even after disappearing for strolls to visit other Boskos around the village. They know every member of the household. You could be in the market, and suddenly your Bosko would appear, slyly wagging its tail while licking your heels. They know the cattle and chickens and how to be gentle with children.

Oh, how they love to watch you practise riding the family Black Mamba.

While travelling across the continent, Black Mambas and Boskos have become my anchor.

It is such a mundane and simple thing, but whenever I see a Black Mamba bicycle or a Bosko dog, something in my heart settles into itself. Add guava trees and the scent of lantana flowers in their yellow and pink hues, and suddenly I want to take off my shoes and frolic barefoot on red roads and grey farm soil.

There is drought. Hunger. Sometimes war. Realities that fracture families and redirect movement. The young leave in search of greener pastures in concrete jungles. The old remain behind, slowly becoming fading archives of Black Mambas and Boskos.

My father likes to say he buried my placenta in the earth after my birth, and that it is the invisible cord that keeps me tethered to the land. Play never left my bones, even as I grew older. I still crave climbing the soft bark of guava trees, petting a mischievous Bosko, and riding a Black Mamba along maize fields.

These elements keep shaping my pursuits and my reasons for travel.

The farther I travel, the more I seem to circle back toward the red roads.

There is such a frenzy of rural-urban migration across Africa, often followed by a desire to leave the continent altogether. May the same roads that lead us away from home bring us back long after they have been swallowed by blackjacks and wandering Jews. May they always open up once again for Black Mambas and Boskos.

Some of us remain tethered to the land, and the earth remembers.

I craned my neck to look at my mother and found that she had been crying as she gently wiped the skin around my heavily bandaged lower abdomen. Right then, I knew how deeply she understood my pain.

Only eight years earlier, my mother had undergone a similar procedure. In her case, her entire womb had to be removed because of the enormous alien growing inside her body. Months before the procedure, she had thought she was pregnant, only to be told it was a fibroid the size of a mature yam, healthy and thriving in such an unwanted place like a weed.

As for me, the doctors were empathetic to my youth and childless state, so they did everything they could to save my womb and ensure that, should I choose to, I could still one day carry a child.

There had not only been numerous fibroids in my womb, but also a cyst engulfing my left ovary. The doctors spoke in the careful cold language of medicine, measuring my suffering in scans, prescriptions, and probabilities. They explained hormones and genetics, drew diagrams of wombs and ovaries and looked at me with pity in their eyes, knowing they could not point to the definite cause of my affliction.

The aunties, in their infinite knowledge, had all the answers. An evil eye had looked at me, seen my bright star, and decided not only to finish me, but my entire lineage. Each arrived with stories of women whose wombs had been envied into sickness, with whispered warnings about jealousy and spirits that followed bright girls.

One brought holy oil in a tiny bottle wrapped in tissue paper. Another boiled roots and leaves into bitter brown concoctions that sat in old Coca-Cola bottles in our kitchen fridge beside milk and tomatoes.

The church aunties said the only remedy to the evil eye was Jesus Christ — the name before which all shall bow. They prayed loudly over my abdomen as though my body were a battlefield between heaven and something ancient and hungry. Between the doctors and the aunties, I existed suspended between science and superstition, between what could not be explained conclusively and what could only be feared.

Do scientists know that their lack of research into the female body is a fertile soil for even more harmful beliefs and theories from adventurous minds like those of the aunties?

Damn that evil eye!

Damn the invisible thing that seems to stalk women through bloodlines and silence, through wombs that ache like inherited memory. Damn the way pain settles itself so comfortably inside women’s bodies that entire cultures rise around explaining it away. In some moments, lying awake with stitches pulling at my skin, I wanted something tangible to blame, a curse, a spirit, a jealous glance from a stranger, because it felt easier than accepting that suffering could simply bloom inside the body without reason or justice.

Rage moved through me then: rage at my body, at history, at womanhood itself, at the terrible intimacy of knowing that my mother had once lain somewhere feeling this exact same pain.

I would be okay eventually: after multiple hospital visits, countless prayers, and mysterious concoctions from the village. Not cured — because fibroids, I would learn, often return — but okay. Okay in the sense that I would learn to look at the moon with reverence and prepare myself for long, painful menstrual periods with prescriptions in hand and a warrior-like regard for pain. Three days every month, for the rest of my childbearing years.

It was an initiation, under the knife, to understand that I am every woman.

I am my mother, just as she is her mother. I am my cousin, and the women on the internet, and the women on the street. I am each and every one of them — in my bleeding, in my pain, in my anger, in my resilience, and in my determination to stay alive and in this body, despite its nature.

I am every woman!

Not the majestic kind from documentaries, either. A scruffy one. Limping through the dust in a way that is both pitiful and unsettling, not from injury, but from some natural crookedness that makes you feel rude for staring too long. Beneath that awkward gait hides something dangerous. Something opportunistic. Forever ready to pounce on some helpless idiot, first-timers in the city, country bumpkins trying to make a kill.

Like a hyena, the city does not discriminate. It will just as easily pounce on a lone buffalo that got too comfortable and lowered its guard.

The hyena may look ugly, pathetic even, but of all the animals in the jungle, it has the most villainous laugh. Nairobi laughs like a pot-bellied, kipara-ngoto-ed man with cheap liquor breath who somehow knows every brothel in the city. The kind of man who walks in and out of government offices without enduring the mandatory seven-hour queue while carrying brown envelopes that always seem insufficient at the counter.

Hyena-irobi laughs like it knows something you don’t. It sees every trap set for the poor, clueless yet determined social climbers newly arrived in Nairobbery. Like a baby antelope at the dawn of spring, galloping merrily toward fresh foliage while the leopard lies in wait, smiling.

It laughs because, even with its limp, it is always one step ahead of you.

It laughs from KICC. It laughs from the Vichochoro za Korogocho. From the Runda bungalows to the bedsitters in Pipeline. Like a goddamn hyena!

The laugh echoes because for every one simpleton bit by the hyena, two baby hyenas are born, prowling the city with conniving conviviality. Ujanja na Uganga will get the keys to this city. It’s survival for the wickedest!

Come to think of it, maybe with a 70-day hard challenge, proper leg days, some makeup, a nose job, and braces, a hyena could look like a cheetah. After all, don’t they both have black spots?

Somebody lied!

A goddamn hyena cannot become a cheetah.

Haitawork.

In those books, Moses’ face looked just like my brother’s. The teachers reminded me of the ones I saw every day, and the language was savoury and delicious to my young mind.

Wueh! Ati Moses was stealing matoke from the school shamba! Aiyayayayaya!

R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps had nothing on the fear Moses’ teachers instilled in me; the way they administered corporal punishment on Moses and his friends!

From that moment on, I felt like Ugandans and Kenyans were essentially the same people, different democracy problems, yes, but still the same people.

Growing up Kenyan, our mothers and aunties told stories of the great, mighty, and cannibalistic Idi Amin, who would supposedly eat naughty children or children who peed on their beds. There was even a film — oh, so terrifying — about Idi Amin. I am sure they showed it to children to instil fear in us, to teach us of the great evils of the world.

And in Moi’s time, they would tell us: “You see, you don’t have it so bad. Imagine if your president were Idi Amin. Compared to him, Moi is an angel.” Somewhere, I imagined Milton Obote and the Kabakas of old sighing deeply from the ancestral world, wondering where things had fallen apart.

And then Uganda gave us Jose Chameleone, and Kenyans were in awe of this rasta gangsta with a hoarse voice who could sing so beautifully. His drama-filled stories filled Kenyan Saturday newspapers, and his music played on repeat on local radio stations. Listeners would call into the mid-morning shows saying, “Hallo, can you play for me ‘Jamila Analia’? Wanawake wamemuwacha!”

As I got older, I learned about Kololo Hill through the writings of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and Neema Shah. In my literary mind, it is the place where Ugandan Indians lived before Idi Amin told them to pack their bags and leave.

I also learnt about the Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom and its pre-colonial glory. I often wonder why this was never included in the history lessons, but I suppose there was never enough time to learn about the precolonial grandeur of Africa when we had so much catching up to do, learning about the Agrarian Revolution and the Wright Brothers.

Now, I tell anybody who cares to listen that my favourite poem is Stanley Meets Mutesa by David Rubadiri. The language, the flow, the way I feel as though I am standing in Mutesa’s court watching Stanley walk in to meet him in all his glory and wisdom, and then he says, “Karibu Mtu Mweupe” - and the West is let in.

Growing up in Kenya as a jirani, this is the extent of my knowledge of Uganda. Of course, there is one more thing, but let’s not go there. It is no good, Ujirani, to look at your neighbour’s old, worn-out roof and laugh. Tabia mbaya sana.

Angel Batiste: Thank you, sir.
We’ve noted earlier that many of Africa’s writers are now living in the West and they’re writing in the West. And the content and style of their works are geared to Western audiences. In this contemporary context, is the direction of African literature changing? Are African writers living in North America and Europe writing from the continent, different from the social reality portrayed?

Ali Mazrui: …What audiences do they have in mind? It’s not enough that it’s about Africa to make a novel or a poem African. It’s not enough either that the person writing it is African. What makes a work African is the targeted audience…

And that is the dilemma.

Because many African writers in the diaspora, when writing about Africa, are no longer writing to Africans on the continent. As Mazrui suggests, the question is not simply what is written, but who it is written for, and increasingly, the answer is not us.

As an African living in Africa, I find myself more often than ever standing in the African literature section of bookstores, picking up books, reading the prologue, and thinking: this is a good book—but it is not for me.

You can always tell.

It doesn’t say on the cover that the author lives abroad, but within a few pages, the pattern reveals itself. The same story, told over and over again, in different fonts, under different titles:

A young African leaves the motherland.
They struggle to fit in.
They grapple with nostalgia.
They find other Africans abroad and build community.
They navigate interracial relationships.
They discuss migration over brunch with white colleagues.

Let me be clear, these are not bad stories.

Americanah was brilliant.
We Need New Names was powerful.

But after five books, the pattern becomes mechanical.

I know the plot.
I know the emotional beats.
I know the arc.

The harsh winters.
The identity crisis.
The moment when Fanon suddenly makes sense.
The mispronounced names at coffee shops.
The three jobs.
The lover back home, frozen in memory, young, perfect, untouched by time.

At this point, I could write one myself. And I don’t even live abroad.

Growing up African meant being born into an illusion of “going somewhere.” We learn early that Africa is not the destination. It is the starting point. A placeholder. A place you are from, but not where you are meant to remain. We are in the outskirts of the world, close enough to know what’s going on, close enough for people to visit and attempt to “help,” but never quite inside it.

So we are raised with a quiet, persistent hunger:
to leave,
to go anywhere,
as long as it is not here.

And those who leave begin to write.

But they do not write back home.
They write about back home.

At first, it is longing.

Guava trees. Grandmother’s porridge. Sunsets. The softness of memory.

Then something shifts.

The nostalgia curdles into critique, into irritation, into disgust. The dust, the slowness, the inefficiencies. The things that no longer make sense from a distance.

Eventually, home becomes something else entirely:
a place that exists more in memory than in reality.
A place flattened into story.

Africa becomes a past life.

And their writing begins to feel less like literature and more like journal entries we were never meant to read.

In part two of his book To Every Birth Its Blood, Mongane Serote introduces a new set of characters navigating volatile apartheid South Africa. One of them, Yaonne, a young South African painter pursuing art in the United States, writes a letter back home to his peers after the televised death of one of their own:

“..I am far away from home. That is terrible enough. I hear that my country has gone up in flames. That is horror, because I cannot even move from here to there, and do what you may ask. Perhaps to be a witness is my immediate answer now, knowing that flames took someone I love. I must add that perhaps to die is part of the answer also. Many other people have died. This distance and perhaps the callousness that this place is teaching me have made me able to receive the news of the dead as a great number. That is all. I have kept newspaper cuttings of reports of what happened, how our country went up in flames. I hope to be able to record all this on canvas. I need strength and courage in case I fail. Nothing is easy now, in fact, everything is deadly difficult…”

Therein lies the fracture.

Distance does not just separate; it alters perception. What is immediate becomes abstract. What is lived becomes reported. Grief becomes something you archive, interpret, and eventually aestheticize.

This is where diaspora writing begins to resemble something else. Not just storytelling, but performance.

A careful balancing act:
explaining Africa to the world
while subtly distancing oneself from it.

There is, often, an unspoken hierarchy.

The African at home becomes “the native,” observed, interpreted, sometimes pitied.
The African abroad becomes the one who has seen, who has evolved, who can now translate.

And in that translation, something shifts.

The audience is no longer us.

Meanwhile, here on the continent, life continues in its full complexity.

Messy. Brilliant. Absurd. Beautiful.

I want to read about that Africa.

Not just the Africa that leaves, but the Africa that stays.
The Africa that is old, new, chaotic, evolving.

I want contemporary versions of
Anthills of the Savannah,
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,
stories that wrestle with the present from within it.

I refuse to believe that all our sharpest voices have left.

We come from oral traditions filled with gods, forests, tricksters, tyrants, and impossible worlds. Stories that were not just political, but imaginative, wild, strange, and deeply rooted in place.

So when did we become so narrow?

When did the dominant narrative become departure?

This is why I call these migration stories Afro-elitist propaganda.

Not because migration is invalid, but because of what these stories normalize and quietly elevate.

They position leaving not just as an option, but as progression. As expansion. As arrival.
To leave is to become.
To stay is to remain.

And in that framing, a hierarchy is created.

Those who leave acquire distance, access, and the authority to narrate.
Those who stay become subject, setting, context.

The stories begin to move in one direction: outward.

And so the imagination follows.

They reinforce the idea that fulfillment lies elsewhere. They feed the illusion.

And they carry, at times, a quiet elitism, shaped by proximity to the West, by access, by distance. You can hear it in the tone: the subtle othering, the need to be understood by everyone, except the people they are writing about.

As Mazrui reminds us, once the audience shifts, the work itself shifts with it.

And then there is the familiar refrain:

It’s so hard being me.
Too African for the West, too Western for Africa.
I belong nowhere.

Woiye, si-sorry.

Wrap it up though, we do have our own fish to fry here, as you might have heard from your host government’s travel advisory.

In the 1980s, Ngugi wa Thiong’o renounced writing fiction in English in favour of Gikuyu. His argument was clear: language is not neutral; it carries memory, culture, and power. But not everyone took the same route. Chinua Achebe stayed with English and did something else with it. As Ngugi himself acknowledged, Achebe created a third position out of the tension between Igbo and English, a space where the language bends just enough for an African voice to come through without apology.

That tension, between inheritance and imposition, between structure and improvisation, is where a lot of African Englishes live.

And Kenya?

Kenya did not resolve that tension. We butchered, dissected, and rearranged the English language to fit into our Kenyanism. Kenglish became the Kachumbari with which our stories are savoured. In a way, we have colonised it back. Not by rejecting it, but by refusing to leave it intact.

Kenyans, for a long time, have been telling people—and themselves—that, “Sisi Kenyans, we don’t have an accent in our English speech.” They claim to speak English through the nose and enunciate their words PROPER.

A lie.

The enunciating is so heavy, in fact, just go search videos of Kenyans saying words like “BoMBasTic” and “LaMBistiC,” or even “LesoTHO” and “Du-Bois.”

In fact, if you are a non-Kenyan visiting for the first time, the accent hits you like a brick. Right after that, “Jambo, Karibu Kenya,” they will revert to Kenglish, and you won’t even notice the switch.

That contradiction is not accidental.

It comes from somewhere.

If you grew up listening to Kiss 100, Homeboyz Radio, X FM, Classic, you know where I’m going with this. Manze! For years, radio hosts and news presenters spoke in this carefully curated nowhere accent, UK-ish, American-ish, floating. The best way to describe it is a private international school accent. It was polished, aspirational, and, most importantly, ambiguous.

And Kenyans heard that and said: “Si, you see? That’s how we all talk. That right there is our accent.”

But outside those studios, that is not how Kenyans talk.

Outside, the language is doing something else entirely.

Kwanza, the filler words. Wueh! They sit everywhere, prefixes, suffixes, anchors holding sentences together. I had a Mexican friend who once told me that the way I kept starting sentences with “Si” confused her. In Spanish, “sí” means “yes.” In Kenyan speech, “Si” doesn’t really mean anything fixed. It’s emphasis. It’s rhythm. It’s positioning. It prepares the listener for what is coming next.

Si-you know what I mean?

And then, pole-pole, as an outsider, you begin to hear it. You start picking out the Swahili within the English. You begin to make meaning not just from words, but from placement, repetition, and tone. Kidogo-kidogo, you realise the sentence is not just being spoken, it’s being built in layers. (Side note that I just concluded now: most Swahili filler words that are written or said twice, e.g., pole-pole, kidogo-kidogo, are double entendres—how fun is that?)

Another thing that Kenya does in English speech that is very indigenous-language-coded is the call and response. A Kenyan will start a sentence and leave it hanging, not unfinished, just open. Structured like a question where the answer is already implied, but still requires you to participate, and you have to reply for the conversation to conti? —(you say)—to continue.

Conversation, here, is not delivery. It is collaboration.

And this is where the earlier contradiction becomes interesting.

Because what Kenyans deny as “accent” is actually something much deeper. It is not just how words are pronounced, it is how language is organised, shared, and inhabited. It carries rhythm from indigenous languages, structure from oral traditions, and improvisation from everyday life.

But that version of English, the lived one, is not the one that was historically rewarded.

So we learned to perform another one.

You could see it clearly on Kenyan TV and film. Prime-time shows, DSTV productions, Wahali, scenes would be set in the bundus or some local mtaa, but the dialogue sounded like a choral verse at the drama festivals. Measured. Projected. Dislocated.

Actors trying so hard not to “have an African accent” that they ended up sounding exactly like how Americans imagine Africans sound.

Not quite here.Not quite there. Not quite anywhere.

Even our humour reflected this tension. Ebu, Kenyans, y’all remember how much of our comedy growing up was just people exaggerating ethnic accents? Comedians like Mwalimu Mwanjiku would say completely normal things in a thick Gikuyu accent, and the room would collapse.

Ni sawa tu!

Me, though, I love a good Kenyan banter.

Because in those moments, unfiltered, unperformed, the language stops trying to be anything else. It becomes itself fully. Saa zingine I replay conversations with my cousins in my head, and I laugh, not just because they’re funny, but because I know for a fact no translation would ever make sense to a non-Kenyan.

Like when we’re out on a night out, and my cousin looks at me across the room and says, “Wallahi, kushuka maybe stairs,” and I say, “For me, kishuka maybe nywele,” and we burst out laughing for a good five minutes until we get the hiccups.

You can’t translate that.

And maybe that’s the point.

Because what we have done with English is not just speak it.

We have made it ours, and then, for some reason, pretended we didn’t.

That the stories came before the state.

That the books we were forced to read in school, Mstahiki Meya, Mayai Waziri wa Mayai, were not fiction, but prophecy. Written by some quiet, watchful minds who understood the script long before the rest of us were cast into it.

If that were true, then what we are living through would make a certain kind of sense. Not moral sense. Not even political sense. But narrative sense.

That would explain why the nation seems to be following and recycling the same old script over and over, where the head of state is a greedy, corrupt pig and his allies are boot-licking yes-men looking out for their own interests. And the people: tired, inventive in their suffering, fluent in complaint behind closed doors, keep a safe distance in self-preservation.

In this construct, religion is a central tool of oppressive, numbing power. “Blessed are the poor, for they shall receive true riches in heaven,” and all leadership is God-given by a merciful and loving God who somehow always picks the worst men, seemingly to test the faith of the people in His ability to redeem us.

The invisible power behind the head of state and his minions is a white saviour-always a white saviour- perhaps not a person, but a pattern. A standard. A reference point we orbit without admitting it. We conform to the patterns of its ideals of development and progress. We owe our sense of self to its books.

Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God all that is left.

And we go on to make monuments to worship his superior intelligence in the places built while he once lived among us, before, in our folly, we decided we wanted a leader in our own likeness, one that looks like us, born among us. Someone who understands.

But what does it mean to look like us if the script remains unchanged?

What does it mean to choose differently when the structure itself does not allow for difference?

To understand the workings of a circus, you have to allow yourself to think like a clown. To see the structure from within. To recognise that the performance only works because everyone plays their part. The ringmaster. The audience. The spectacle.

Even the silence is part of the act.

So who, then, sustains this construct?

Is it the state?

Yes.

Is it external power?

Also yes.

But it is not only them.

It is us too.

Whoever created this construct did not leave room for a secret back door. Mambo ni matatu: “wahame Kenya, wawekwe jela, ama wasafiri kwenda mbinguni.” Only the lucky ones get the first way out; for the rest of us, the only way out is through.

So here we are, how do we deconstruct a construct?

Death and jail only worked in the last century; now Kenya has hardened into an ungrateful bastard with chronic amnesia.

There is no clean ending here.

Only a recognition.

That something is off.
That something has always been off.
And that naming it is not the same as undoing it.

Because if this is a script, then it has learned how to survive even its own exposure.
It adapts. It absorbs. It continues.

Which leaves a quieter, more uncomfortable possibility: What if stepping off script is not a single act of defiance, but a series of small refusals that look, from the outside, exactly like compliance?

And what if we have been mistaking survival for obedience all along?

She sings in the kitchen as she brews her tea. She sings while loading the washing machine. She sings as she walks around the house and even while tending to her small garden.

If you listen closely, you’ll realize she is, in fact, singing the “Jingle Bells” Christmas carol, only with the tune of an African spiritual hymn. Sometimes she makes up her own lyrics and fits them into the melody, depending on what she’s doing. At other times, she simply mumbles to herself, like a Catholic priest murmuring a prayer over the body of Christ.

My mother doesn’t say, “I love you,” or “I’m happy you’re home again,” or even, “I have a good feeling, goddamn it.” She sings, in spiritual hymn tunes, stopping and resuming at random.

It has been a long time since my mother’s singing filled this house. Now her voice bounces off the walls, pours into the rooms, and flows out through the windows. I think she sings unconsciously most of the time, melodies rising from somewhere deep within her. That Black girl joy.

Because our mothers were girls too, just like us. Delusional and whimsical, hips swaying as they walked along jacaranda, purple paved paths. Hot-combed afros, bell-bottom jeans, thinly trimmed eyebrows, and pumps. Dreaming wild and dangerous dreams, of flying over seas, crossing borders, laughing on the back of a pickup truck, tumbling along a dusty country road.

Just like me.

I’m my mother’s little girl, a manifestation of her wildest dreams, and boy, did she dream.

After months of gallivanting across Africa, when I returned home and heard her singing, I knew she was proud of my crazy, silly little life of adventure. Despite her clenched fists and worried brow. Despite her shaking voice on the phone when she would ask, “What do people eat there? Have you had any chapati since you left?” or whispering, “You need to be careful. I saw on the news that there’s xenophobia happening in South Africa, so don’t walk through downtown Johannesburg.”

There was a heavy, moist glow in the corner of her eye when she hugged me after I got back. She said, “See, we’re just as you left us.”

A lie.

She and my father look much older. I must have worn them out with worry.

My father walks slower now and speaks less. And my mother sings.

He asks if I saw the long shields of the great King Lobengula of the Ndebele in a museum in Bulawayo. I show him pictures from Zimbabwe, and he smiles. The smile lingers. He grows quiet for a while, then says he remembers studying about them in school as a boy.

I choke on a chuckle. The last time we spoke before I left, my father could barely remember my name. He had just undergone neurosurgery after suffering a stroke.

I’m back home, but the house I left is not the house I returned to. It is no longer the house of my chaotic teenage years, full of fuss and racket. One of my childhood dogs died while I was away, and the one left is blind and slow. He sits in the corner, wagging his tail at the sound of footsteps or the promise of a pat.

I am happy to be home, despite my anxious feet aching to get back on the road. There is still so much world to see. But a new fear keeps me here; that while I ‘Wendy’ away with Peter Pan, time does not stop back home.

If only I could hear my mother’s singing in hostels and hotels far from home, while chasing sunsets and waking to new foregrounds.

I must linger a little longer.

I realize now, the girl who left this house is not the one who has returned. She is less restless now. She cries sometimes at the sound of her mother singing.

I wasn’t born in Nairobi. I was born in Uasin Gishu, in Likuyani, in a small village called Nangili. I spent my first six years there. My folks built a three-bedroom house for us; mother, father, me, and my older brother. We had a big farm too, and kept ducks, geese, turkeys, chickens, rabbits, cattle, sheep, a cat, and a dog.

I was oblivious then, but we had a lovely little set-up. A river called Kipsangui ran at the edge of our farm, and we had orange trees, gooseberries, and guava trees to climb. Every day after school, my mother demanded that I read a book, write a summary, and give it to her along with my homework. It was a lovely, wholesome childhood; sheltered, controlled, disciplined, but wonderful still.

At age seven, my folks uprooted me from the village and put me in a fancy Nairobi school. They figured it would help me compete with my peers in academia under the best conditions. They always wanted the very best for us kids, bless them. They also relocated to work and live in Nairobi.

I didn’t know it at first, but I quickly learned at my new school that I had a heavy Luhya accent. As it turned out, it was not proper to suffix your words with “ko.” Even in English speech, I had my Ps and Bs mixed up and rolled my Rs. The kids were ruthless with the bullying. In self-defence, I became shy and a quiet kid. I remained that way for most of my school life.

I was observant and curious still. I never lost my village whimsy.

Years later, I still pick up on how Nairobi kids, now grown, treat outsiders they deem beneath them, be it the “kienyeji” or immigrants from neighbouring countries. This, compared to how they treat outsiders they deem valuable, expats, passport bros, pandering white people on social media, even Kenyans coming back home after a failed career abroad or studying abroad, with an accent and a whitewashed sense of style.

The worst part is watching non-Nairobians turn into Nairobians. They cut off their wings and fit into Nairobi-ism. Like Alice in Wonderland, they lose their muchness.

At the core of being Nairobian is a facade. Pretending like you know what “flossing mauwano” means, or like the forced American accent is fooling anybody. We get it, you have some kin or pen pal in Minnesota, have been to London or Paris one time, or studied in a UK university, and have some snow bunny exes.

Nairobians will stand outside an event ordering an Uber with their last M-Pesa coins because, apparently, taking a matatu home is “giving Zimbabwe.” A Nairobian is that one kid in school who was always going to move schools next term to a cooler school, but always came back every term. Only now, they are always just on the verge of relocating abroad to Germany or Australia. Yet next month, you still bump into them, blankets and wine, acting all brand new.

Eventually, when they do move, they end up working a fast food job during the day and security at night to make ends meet in some racist-ass country, and act like they “got out the hood.”

This isn’t a rant. Heck, I’m pretending too, half the time.

Deep down, we just want to get a clabu smocha on a Friday, kuweka foundation before passing by Mwenda’s on the way to Koda, or whatever new place the Nairobi coolness gods have decided is the spot to meet up and act nonchalant while showing off our fit of the day, fresh from Gikosh.

After eight months on the road, travelling across Africa, I find myself sitting with a question asked by Africans and non-Africans alike: Why Africa?

If you had the opportunity, the time, the energy, the freedom to travel anywhere in the world, why Africa?

The question is often delivered lightly, as conversation, as curiosity. Yet beneath it sits an unspoken hierarchy. I hear it even when it is not voiced: what is there to see? What is there to experience that you haven’t already exhausted? Isn’t one safari enough? Don’t all the giraffes look the same? Aren’t the elephants interchangeable? Aren’t the people more or less the same, Bantu, a shared history of colonialism and struggle, mud and stick huts, red dirt roads? Why Africa?

The question presumes Africa as a finished idea. Already seen, already documented, already known. It imagines the continent as a single image stretched thin, as if repetition has drained it of meaning. It assumes Africa is static, that its stories belong to the past or to spectacle, that nothing new is unfolding here unless it fits a familiar frame of suffering, resilience, or wildlife.

I am aware, as the question is asked, that I am expected to justify myself. To make Africa legible. To explain why this choice makes sense in a world where Europe, Asia, and the Americas are assumed to be sites of endless variation, while Africa is treated as a singular experience, one encounter mistaken for totality.

To answer, I could easily reach for nostalgia. I could speak of the motherland, of acacia sunsets and the long silhouettes of women walking home, balancing baskets and pots on their heads. I could talk about wildlife, culture, rhythm, and warmth. All of these would be valid responses, and all of them would be easily received. They would soothe the questioner. They would fit neatly into an already familiar picture.

But as a Kenyan, these things are not novelties. Zebras and antelopes graze alongside our livestock. The women balancing baskets are my aunts, my neighbours, myself. These images belong to my everyday, not to a distant longing. So if Africa is already home, already known, already lived, then why Africa?

The longer I travel, the more I realise that the question itself is misdirected. It assumes that travel is about novelty, about difference, about consumption. It assumes movement is always outward, always away, always in search of the unfamiliar. But my journey has been something else entirely. It has been a movement inward, laterally, across familiar ground rendered distant by borders and time.

I did not set out to discover Africa. I set out to encounter my kinfolk, to see them, and to be seen by them.

Again and again, I was reminded of this distinction. When people asked my name and I said Mwivanda, the response was never what nationality is that? No one asked for a passport explanation. Instead, they asked, what family name is that? Where are your people from? Who are you connected to? Identity here was not administrative. It was relational. It was assumed that a name carries lineage, that it belongs somewhere, that it ties you to others.

In the markets, women asked whether I had left the rains falling where I came from. In salons, my hair was cornrowed without commentary. My curls and shrinkage were not anomalies to be managed or explained; they were signs of health. Of familiarity. Conversations flowed without the need to establish difference. I was not an exception. I was not an exhibit. I was simply another sister passing through.

The further I travelled, the more fear I lost. Not the absence of caution, but the shedding of a particular anxiety, the one that comes from being watched, measured, and misunderstood. I felt myself grounded and tethered to the land, a daughter of the soil. Not because the land was romantic, but because it was legible to my body. My posture changed. My breath softened. I stopped translating myself.

My tongue loosened too. I learned variations of Bantu as one learns variations of a melody already known. Mvua became Mvula. Sima became Nsima. The shifts were subtle, familiar, intimate. Language did not mark difference so much as continuity. It reminded me that borders are recent inventions, and that speech remembers what maps forget.

Travelling in Africa while African feels like visiting a distant aunt beyond the hills. There was recognition without interrogation. People asked about my mother, her health, and my father’s toil. They asked when I would get married, whether any of their sons would do. The questions were intrusive, affectionate, absurd, and grounding. They placed me within a web of expectation and care. I was not anonymous. I was held.

And yet, even as this sense of belonging deepened, the question lingered: Why Africa? Not as something to answer outwardly, but as something to turn inward. Why did this movement feel so necessary? What was being restored?

Part of the answer lies in the way Africa is spoken about, and not spoken from. African stories are often archived, historicised, flattened into anthropology or nostalgia. They are treated as completed narratives, best preserved behind glass or footnotes. But on the road, I encountered stories unfolding in real time. Not curated, not explained. Simply lived.

The dance was not staged. It was happening in the street. Masked dancers raised dust into the air, their movements sharp and joyful and precise. Women cooked Sadza with Kapulanas tied around their waist as storms gathered overhead, laughter punctuating the rhythm of labour. These were not performances for an audience. They were acts of continuity. Of presence.

Africa is not waiting to be interpreted. It is not suspended in the past. It is happening,now, loudly, quietly, unevenly, beautifully, contradictorily.

And still, I resist turning this into celebration alone. Because the danger of beauty is that it becomes another spectacle. Another reason offered up to justify the continent’s worth. As if Africa must always explain itself, through suffering or splendour, to deserve attention.

So why Africa?

Because no matter how far I go, I am not required to become smaller here. I am not reduced to explanation. The land remains recognisable: shades of red and grey, uncles bent over tilling the soil, backs curved in a posture older than borders. The cities sound familiar too, the slow, dramatic hustle, different fabrics, different patterns, the same rhythm of movement and negotiation.

Because here, I am not asked to represent anything. I am not an ambassador. I am not a contradiction. I am not a story to be consumed.

To see my kinfolk is not simply to observe them, but to become oneself among them. Seeing, knowing, documenting, being seen, these are not separate acts here. They fold into each other. The gaze is mutual. Recognition moves both ways.

Ubuntu is often invoked as a soft philosophy, a comforting idea. I am because we are. But lived, it is more demanding than that. It asks you to be accountable. To be legible. To be held in relation. It does not allow the illusion of total autonomy. It reminds you that identity is not self-authored, but co-created. “ Sawubona,sisi” - I see you, sister. “Habari”- what is the news from where you come?. The greetings flow with familiarity and care.

So perhaps the question should not be Why Africa?

Perhaps the better question is: Why is Africa always asked to justify itself? Why is movement toward kin framed as limitation rather than expansion? Why is familiarity mistaken for lack of imagination?

I did not travel Africa to find myself. That language feels thin. I travelled Africa to remember that I was never singular to begin with. That my body, my name, my tongue, my fears and ease were shaped long before I arrived anywhere else.

Africa, because to be African is not an experience to exhaust. It is a relationship to enter, again and again, from different portals along the road.

And because here, the question finally loosens its grip. It stops demanding an answer. It dissolves into something quieter, more grounded:

Why anywhere else?

Whenever people from non-ugali-eating countries ask me what ugali tastes like, I freeze. Not because it’s complicated, but because it isn’t.

Ugali is ground maize flour cooked in hot water until it becomes a dense, obedient lump of starch. It is not sweet, salty, savoury, or spicy. It is bland. It exists. Ugali, also known as pap, sadza, sima, nsima, ubwali, posho, depending on where you are standing on the continent, is food stripped of personality.

Growing up in Kenya, ugali was my least favourite meal. Unfortunately, my father is from western Kenya, a region not only known for ugali consumption but celebrated for it. Ugali was a staple in our home. Even when we didn’t eat it daily, my father never missed a day. Not even on Christmas. Kenyans will understand why even on Christmas is just bananas.

Kenyan Ugali

Western Kenyan ugali is huge. This is not optional; it is a defining feature. It is firm, fist firm. The maize is harvested, dried, taken to a kisiagi (maize mill), and ground into flour. Once cooked, ugali must be eaten hot off the jiko or cold the next day with chai. There is no in-between. Microwaving ugali is taboo. If it isn’t, it should be.

Ugali is eaten with the hands. You pinch off a portion, mould it into a ball, make a depression with your thumb, scoop stew, and eat. If you reach for a knife and fork, get outta-here. Take your bougie ass elsewhere.

Anybody can eat ugali. In my family, there is a running joke that no DNA test is needed for my nephew. The child was weaned on ugali and fish soup and refused everything else, including candy.

The further I travel from home, the more I crave the ugali I once detested. Not for its taste, but for its essence. Travelling across Africa has turned me into an ugali connoisseur of sorts, sampling textures, firmness, and methods across ugali-eating countries. What changes is not the flavour, but the philosophy.

Ugandan Posho

I had my first Ugandan posho in a local restaurant in Kampala. I ordered posho with chicken. What arrived was a mountain of posho fit to feed eight construction workers. Beside it sat a bowl of chicken soup with a single chicken breast floating in the middle like an island.

Where there should have been greens, there was—brace yourself—a piece of matoke.

Banange! How do you serve posho with a side of matoke?

That said, the posho did not disappoint the Luhya in me. I am my father’s daughter after all. Firm, well-cooked, unapologetically bland. My mother’s ugali remains the gold standard at 10/10. Ugandan posho earns a respectable 9.5/10.

Zambian Ubwali

I tasted ubwali in northern Zambia after our bus broke down on a red, dusty rural road, hours from the Tunduma–Nakonde border. The driver went for supplies. We were stranded for the day.

A group of us walked to a nearby homestead and asked for food. We paid, helped cook, and watched ubwali being made from scratch. Maize kernels were crushed in a wooden mortar, ground by hand into flour, then stirred into boiling water over a three-stone fire.

The ubwali was rough, grainy, sticky, and firm. It was served with beans and sardines, a survival meal. Under the circumstances, it was nourishing and grounding.

Ubwali: 6/10, generously awarded.

Zimbabwean Sadza

I had my first sadza in Bulawayo, prepared by my friend Chioniso. I grew nervous watching her cook, constantly stirring, very little flour. This felt wrong.

The sadza spread on the plate. It did not sit. It was soft, closer to porridge than ugali. And yet, it worked. Well-cooked, comforting, paired with fried chicken and greens.

Sadza earns a calm 7/10.

South African Pap

My first pap experience was at a hostel braai in Cape Town, by a pool, under the sun. Pap in its natural tourist habitat.

It was smooth, bland, firm but not ugali-firm, soft but not sadza-soft. It could sit on a plate. It behaved.

Pap: 5/10.

Rwandan Ubugali

Let us go straight to the issue. In Rwanda, ubugali is seasoned.

Seasoned!

The entire point of ugali is that it is bland. Any flavour should come from the accompaniment. If you don’t enjoy the taste of ugali itself, there are other foods for you: pilau, fufu, kondowole, and mashed potatoes. Leave ugali alone.

The ubugali was firm and well-cooked. The salt ruined it.

Rwanda, stop!
3/10.

Tanzanian Ugali

My first Tanzanian ugali was in Mwanza, served with Lake Victoria’s dagaa and spinach. The ugali looked perfect, a neat round mound. Upon pinching it, I discovered small hard balls of uncooked flour hiding inside.

Since then, many Tanzanians have tried to salvage their ugali reputation. Poleni, ndugu. First impressions matter.

Tanzanian ugali: 3.5/10.

Malawian Nsima

I first had nsima in Lilongwe. Tender but firm, well-cooked, slightly oiled. Just enough oil to stop it from sticking and allow perfect rolling in the palms.

It was served with okra and fried chicken. The oil was distracting, but I must honourably mention nsima served with fried grasshoppers, which tasted remarkably like prawns.

Nsima: 7/10.

Mozambican Nshima

I had nshima on the beach in Vilanculos, served with the largest fish I have ever seen on a plate and liberal amounts of piri-piri.

Perfectly firm. Perfectly bland. Confident.

Mozambique came prepared.
10/10.

Eswatini Lipalishi

I had my first lipalishi in Kaphuga village, Eswatini. It was cooked in a pot.

A round pot!

East Africans will understand the gravity of this offence. Pots are for soups and porridge. Ugali demands a sufuria and respect.

That said, the lipalishi slapped. Served with thick red bean stew and cabbage, it remains my favourite experience. I’ve eaten lipalishi since, with boiled meat in Mbabane, with chicken dust on the streets of Matsapha. None have compared.

Eswatini: 10/10.

In hindsight, ugali has grown on me. I eat it now, willingly. I am yet to taste ugali from Botswana and the Congos. When I do, I will return with an update.

Until then, to all ugali lovers and haters, eat your lump of starch in peace.

By Mwivanda Gloria

When I first left Africa, I became aware of an expectation placed upon me to perform my Africanness. The demand was subtle but persistent, and it caught me off guard, like I’d forgotten my leopard skin skirt and iron spear back home in Wakanda. In Africa, there was no such performance. One simply was. Whether fluent in English or speaking a local language, whether urban or rural, one remained African without explanation or proof. Identity did not require legibility.

Outside the continent, this certainty fractures. You are still African, but now under inspection. Africanness becomes something others believe they already understand, having inherited its image from American cinema, documentaries, and inherited mythologies. When you fail to conform to this image, confusion follows. The discomfort is not yours, but theirs, and yet it is you who is asked to resolve it.

The foreign gaze searches for reassurance. It expects humility reflected in the self as shame, cheerfulness mistaken for simplicity, and over-the-top shows of gratitude applauded as black joy. It anticipates a narrow emotional register: warmth without complexity, resilience without anger, suffering without bitterness. The Africanness performance demands a shallowness of mind and meekness of the soul, a dog-like character. Any deviation is seen as arrogance, as a forgetting of one’s place. Clarity reads as haughtiness.

Questions arrive disguised as curiosity. Stories are requested, not to understand, but to confirm. Aren’t the people poor? Aren’t the children starving? Is there water, electricity, or order? The answers matter less than their familiarity. What is being sought is not truth, but coherence, a narrative that stabilizes the observer’s worldview and preserves Africa as a fixed, consumable idea.

Within this dynamic, performance is quietly rewarded. Certain accents, gestures, hairstyles, and references are met with approval when they align with expectations. Praise functions as instruction. Over time, one learns which versions of the self are received with ease and which generate tension. Adaptation begins not as deception, but as economy, an attempt to move through the world without friction.

This is where the fracture deepens. What begins as a strategy risks becoming a habit. The performance, repeated often enough, starts to feel like pride, like representation, like loyalty to an imagined motherland. Yet something is lost in the exchange. The self becomes calibrated to the gaze of others, shaped by anticipation rather than conviction. Self-loathing begins growing from the fertile soil of a borrowed sense of self.

The violence here is not overt. It lies in the slow erosion of interior authority. In the quiet question of whether identity is being expressed or curated. In the uneasy realization that one is being applauded not for who they are, but for how well they embody what is already assumed and palatable.

Africanness, once lived without commentary, becomes a role negotiated under surveillance. The danger is not that the performance is demanded, but that it is learned, rehearsed, and eventually mistaken for choice.

They called him Uncle Rodgers.

He dressed with consistency rather than novelty. His outfits did not chase the week or the weather; they held their own from Monday through Sunday. Rain or shine made no difference. A sharp haircut, a hat chosen with intention, pressed trousers with a visible line of ironing, clean socks meeting polished Italian shoes. Ruff Cut, Samson, sometimes Dickies or Brentwood. Not as labels to announce taste, but as tools he had mastered over time.

In Ngwane Park and the neighbouring Zakhele township in Manzini, Uncle Rodgers occupies a quiet but permanent place in the genealogy of Pantsula and street style passed down from his father. Younger people may not dress like him now, but traces remain in how they pay attention to detail, how they carry themselves, and how clothing is treated as something to be earned through care. His influence survives not as imitation, but as residue.

I met him over the weekend during an unplanned visit to Ngwane Park. He looked exactly as expected, which is to say, unchanged. After a brief, unplanned shoot, we spoke. I asked what advice he would give to the younger generation about fashion. He did not elaborate. He simply said, “Take fashion seriously.”

At first, the statement felt plain. But ‘seriousness’, in this context, had nothing to do with ambition or industry. It read more like discipline. To take fashion seriously is to show up for it daily, without drama. To iron your trousers properly. To clean your shoes. To respect your own body enough not to rush how you present it to the world. Uncle Rodgers’ style does not feel effortful now because the effort has already been absorbed into habit.

Walking through the neighbourhood with him clarified this further. People greeted him with nods, brief hellos, and small acknowledgements exchanged without interruption. He received them without performance or inflation. There was no sense of celebrity, only familiarity, earned over time through consistency.

I asked whether he had ever wanted to pursue fashion formally, as a model or designer. He said no. The answer felt almost odd in a moment where visibility is often mistaken for purpose, and style is quickly converted into content. For Uncle Rodgers, clothing is not a platform. It is not a statement to be explained or a brand to be leveraged. It is personal. If someone takes inspiration from it, that is incidental. If not, nothing is lost.

There is something quietly radical in this refusal. In a time where selfhood is often performed outward, Uncle Rodgers practices a form of inward authenticity. His style is not detached from the community; it is woven within it, but it is not offered for consumption. It belongs to him first.

In this way, his fashion operates less as expression and more as ethics. It is about care, repetition, and respect. Comfort, here, is not laziness but alignment. Authenticity is not loud; it is sustained. The street recognises this, not only because it is impressed, but because it understands the labour behind it

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Uncle Rodgers does not dress to be seen. Yet he is. And perhaps that is the difference between style that performs and style that endures

Barely a month later, I found myself in the Kingdom of Eswatini, leaving Mbabane for the countryside, when I came across Woza Nawe: Swazi Village Homestay. A simple online listing, nothing flashy. I reached out to Myxo, who manages the homestay, and a day later, I was on my way to Kaphunga Village, a landscape of rolling hills, scattered homesteads, and valleys that seem to hold quiet stories.

From the moment I arrived, something struck me, not in a dramatic way, but in the gentle precision of a place that knows itself. Traditional huts with clay walls and grass-thatched roofs stood beneath the silhouettes of cattle skulls mounted above doorways. Indigenous vegetation surrounded the homestead, alive with birds during the day and with crickets and frogs singing into the night. These were not aesthetics curated for visitors; they were the living texture of daily Swati life.

My own hut was spacious, cool, and simple. It rained that night. I remember falling asleep smiling, wrapped in the kind of quiet that only comes from being held by nature rather than observing it from a distance.

The next morning I visited the local school. The students were excited, curious about Kenya, curious about travel, curious about everything outside their hills. The administration welcomed me warmly. I joined the kitchen staff in preparing the day’s lunch and listened as they explained the Eswatini curriculum. It felt less like volunteering and more like a small exchange of presence. Nothing forced; nothing staged.

Back at the homestay, I began daily SiSwati lessons with Lwazi, a young man who works there. Our sessions flowed easily from language to culture to the little questions that reveal how people truly live. We compared traditions, laughed at our similarities, and learned from our differences. What stood out to me was the absence of performance. No one tried to “sell” Swati culture; people simply lived it, and I was allowed to witness.

Evenings unfolded according to the natural rhythm of the village: the young men heading off to soccer, the young women gathering for handball, children returning from the fields with cattle, women preparing dinner. Some days I joined in; other days I sat quietly with a cup of lemongrass tea steeped straight from the garden. Everything was participatory, but never imposed.

The authenticity is the core strength of Woza Nawe’s model.
There is no choreography for tourists, no contrived cultural shows, no exaggerated rural aesthetics. The homestead is kept neat because it always is. The meals, pap, beans, and cabbage are what local families eat. The invitation is simple: blend in, learn, exchange. The curiosity flows both ways; the cultural exchange is mutual, not extractive.

When I finally sat down with Myxo to understand how he built this ecosystem of community involvement and sustainable tourism, his answer was disarmingly straightforward: discipline and consistency. But behind that simplicity was a blueprint

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He explained that the key is to work through the existing structure of authority: elders, households, teachers, and youth leaders, rather than bypassing them. Each stage of developing the homestay involved the relevant community members. Communication remained constant. Ideas evolved as the community shaped them. Flexibility was essential; sustainability came from allowing the project to grow organically rather than imposing an external vision.

What Woza Nawe demonstrates is that effective community involvement is not the result of funding, technology, or elaborate strategy. It emerges from:

• Honoring existing social hierarchies and systems of influence
  
  

• Ensuring genuine community ownership of the project
  
  

• Keeping the experience rooted in everyday life, not spectacle
  
  

• Maintaining constant communication, transparency, and adaptability
  
  

• Creating space for mutual exchange, not one-sided observation
  
  

This model works because it does not distort the community to fit tourism. Instead, tourism adapts to the community.

Myxo has quietly mastered what many eco-tourism projects struggle with: how to remain sustainable without eroding cultural identity or turning people into performers. He is open, thoughtful, and generous with knowledge. Anyone seeking guidance on community-driven eco-tourism would do well to reach out to him at info@wozanawe.com.

I welcome you to experience Swazi Village Homestay; Woza Nawe: Come One, Come All.

When I first set out on this journey, I braced myself for unfamiliar places, for strange roads filled with mythical creatures and wildernesses I had only heard about. Yet the further I go, the less strange anything feels. On roads where I thought I might lose myself, I find a version of me that feels more honest, more recognisable. I find mirrors of myself in women and girls whose languages I cannot speak. I see landscapes I once held only in dreams and childhood memories. And I wonder how long my soul has known this, how patiently it has waited for me to arrive.

The mud houses with grass-thatched roofs.
The small farms with baby corn shoots pushing through the soil.
Farmers bent over the earth, unbothered by the sun.
Guava trees and lantana fences.
Jacarandas blooming.
Nandi flames burning bright from a distance.
A sudden burst of bougainvillea — red, orange, purple.
Same old roads.

There is always an older man cycling along in a worn-out coat and hat. A woman walking with a baby tied to her back in a kanga, kitenge, kikoi, Kapulana; a basket of cassava, yams, or bananas balanced neatly on her head. Smoke rising from a distant hut. The smell of fresh pap, ugali, sadza, nsima drifting through open-wall kitchens. Children waving at passing trains and racing beside the road until their legs give out and they tumble into the grass laughing, that sweet African childhood.

These same roads feel comfortingly familiar, each one leading me home in its own way, each one lined with faces that could be my own people. I hear the calls, Wena. Wewe. Nawe. I turn and find the caller. I respond when they say sisi, dada, auty, ready to be a sister once again on these same roads.

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People meet me with warmth. They greet me, slip effortlessly into conversation. I listen. I don’t understand, but I listen anyway. I smile and nod; they smile back and keep talking. They ask a question. I smile again, and somehow they understand. Then they code-switch to English and ask my name — a trick question. With a name, they can begin placing me: why I feel familiar yet foreign.
A name like Mwivanda — African, probably Bantu, but not from here.
Still, they call me sisi. Sister.

The script repeats itself across Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Eswatini. I look too local not to understand. Worse, I feel too at home not to reply — so I try. I learn the basics, fumble them through conversations, laugh to cover my confusion. They see right through it and laugh with me. We high-five.
Eh, sisi.

It’s not just the spoken language. The body language feels instinctive, as if I never left home. The raised eyebrows, the animated faces, the rise and fall of intonations, the hums and whispers. The mood shifts I can sense without needing translation. A universal language, but more intimate here, among people who recognise me as their own.
Sisi. Wena.

I feel at home in these strange tongues. They meet me with empathy that isn’t performed, love that isn’t layered with suspicion. No veil of “other,” no complex of outsider. I see and I am seen. We marvel at each other’s familiarity, each other’s difference.

Then the scent hits me: guava fruit, lantana flowers. Smells from my childhood.
And I know, deeply, quietly:
I am home.

The hum of everyday life rises around me, infused with rhythm, with language, with memory. A place both foreign and familiar. A belonging that precedes comprehension. A home my tongue is only now learning to name.

I am in Vilanculos, Mozambique, volunteering as an English teacher at a small children’s center. Portuguese is the language spoken here; English is rare. Each morning, I gather six children, aged nine to thirteen, for a one-hour class.

I know my privilege. I come from a partially English-speaking country. My family worked tirelessly to give me the best education they could. I am grateful. But here, I sit in spaces where education is neither accessible nor prioritized. And yet, skills and creativity are everywhere, abundant and untamed.

This morning, children from three to thirteen sat in a circle, crayons in hand. Sunflowers, geckos, suns, and mysterious, impossible shapes filled their notebooks. I should have smiled, praised, and joined in. But instead, I felt a tightening in my chest, a sinking stomach. The moment felt performative, coached, rehearsed, trapped between innocence and expectation, especially for the older children.

Other volunteers, non-African, cooed at the drawings, called the children “so smart” and “brilliant.” My nausea grew. This is the cycle I cannot unsee: children raised to depend on aid and encouragement rather than mastery; guided into mediocrity by a system that praises effort but rarely teaches sustainable independence. By eighteen, many will work the resorts built on their ancestors’ land, marry, have children, and repeat the same cycle.

And me? I want to scream to them: You can have more. Dream bigger. Learn a skill, master it. Do not let the world dictate your limits. But I know what they see: a privileged African, living white-girl dreams of adventure. After the class, I will walk back to my hotel, take a nap, and go swimming in the ocean later. In their eyes, I am part of the same machine; I just happen to look like them.

It is humbling to be an African traveling in Africa, to see the limits of perception mirrored in the eyes of those you wish to empower. It is humbling to carry privilege like a fragile, heavy ornament. And yet, through the discomfort, a quiet hope remains: maybe, in small moments, the spark of possibility can leap across the divide, however briefly

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Traveling in Africa, while African, is never simple. It is layered, contradictory, full of aspiration and guilt, admiration and unease. It is a reminder that seeing is never the same as changing, that intention alone cannot rewrite history, and that sometimes the most profound work is learning how to bear witness without breaking under the weight of what you see.

So how can I afford to travel? I’d like to say, “Honestly, I don’t know. I just keep getting on the next bus and the one after, crossing borders with pocket change.” And while that’s true, it’s a bit like when people with flawless skin say, “I just drink water.” Both answers are honest, but they make you want to roll your eyes to the back of your head.

I don’t have a secret or a formula. The truth is, I’m reckless, with a pinch of crazy that convinces me I can do anything I set my mind to. I work for food and accommodation wherever I can. I sell stock photos online. I occasionally write for money. Do I make enough to live the nomadic life I do? Not quite. So, I cut my costs. I travel mostly by public transport, and I eat cheap at local joints. So far, it’s worked. I’m willing to ride it out and see how far I can go on this third way

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One of the things that keeps me going is that I’m yet to encounter a challenge so big it’s made me rethink my choices. Another is the quiet knowledge that I have nothing to go back to, no plan B. Of course, I have family and friends back home, but they have their own lives to live, as I do mine. This is my life now, on the road. I love it deeply. There’s absolutely nothing I’d rather be doing than collecting a handful of stories across the continent, on pocket change.

My advice to anyone who wants to follow this path: make sure you have nothing to lose. Only then will you have everything to gain.

I don’t know what the road ahead holds in store for me, but I’m excited to find out, one ‘third way’ at a time.

How could there be a sugar shortage in a country where sugarcane is available on every corner, down every road, through every neighbourhood? It felt like walking into a farming village full of dairy cattle, only to be told there is no milk.

Naturally, I went down the rabbit hole of trying to understand where Malawi’s sugar had gone. Explanations were everywhere, but clarity was nowhere. Some say the sugar is being smuggled into Tanzania. Others claim the industry prioritises exports over domestic supply. Still others point to the unavailability of a crucial compound in sugar production. The list goes on.

The truth is, nobody seems to know. What is clear is that Malawi is in the grip of a sugar crisis. My hypothesis? A deliberate, systematic hoarding of basic commodities like sugar, only for prices to be hiked once scarcity bites. It is a cruel strategy that further impoverishes Malawians.

“Let them eat cake??” Where, exactly?

So, who is hoarding the sugar from the Sweet Warm Heart of Africa?

And this is where the donor darling narrative returns. Allow me to break this down with a Game of Thrones reference: “Chaos is a ladder.” But I’ll go further, chaos is also a portal. It opens the door for things that would never be accepted under normal circumstances. When everything is upside down, the abnormal begins to feel ordinary, even acceptable. And in such conditions, people will agree to almost anything just to survive.

When ordinary people can no longer afford the basics, donors swoop in with pity, saviour complexes, and “aid packages” tied to punishing conditions. Dependency deepens, and the donor ultimately benefits. The sugar crisis becomes more than a supply issue; it becomes part of a machinery that keeps Malawi kneeling, when they clearly have the upper hand: vast sugarcane plantations and local sugar manufacturers.

Malawi today could easily be the setting for a sequel to Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid. There is much work to be done in reclaiming dignity, sovereignty, and self-determination across Africa. Yet here we sit, silent, baffled, as stranger things unfold before our eyes

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I will pose and smile for your photos too.
What? You want me to stand here?
Next to this landfill, leftovers from two donations ago,
Next to the pit latrine, for those bugs and flies Afro-aesthetic.
Say less.
A selfie with my younger, snotty-nosed, no-shoes cousins?
You got it.

Darling Donor,
Seduce me with your charismatic pity party,
And I will dance for you in my pati-pati.
You know, for the culture:
Strike a banana smile, worship the ground you walk on.
I will caress your ego,
Stroke it with praises and song,
Tongues wagging in ecstasy.

We shall name our schools after you,
And our children will learn the history of your forefathers,
Stand in awe of their odysseys to civilize the savages of the earth.
We shall inscribe your names on the Cornerstones.

Darling Donor,
You can do no wrong in my eyes,
A saint you must be.
Now, allow me to do a ritual for you:
I will put on my best performance,
You can parade me on your screens,
Let the world see my woes,
My inability to handle them,
Let them internalize my undying gratitude for seeing the human in me,
A mere savage in the Savanna.

Darling Donor,
If ever in doubt of your worth,
Visit me, I am your ever-poor, simple servant.
Come, Darling Donor,
Make me your Donor Darling,
So long as I remain your mirror.