Remember when you were young? I do.
I remember a time of dreams and expectations, and above all, a time of
promises to myself to live a life less ordinary. To achieve something truly exceptional before
its all over. One moment that has
remained lodged in my memory was from a cold winter night in Grahamstown in the
nineties, when I was a brash young first year student at Rhodes
University. I was having coffee with one
of my residence mates, it was about 2am and we had been talking shit for
several hours. It was then that I
noticed, for the first time, that my friend had a large map of Africa on his
wall. I had seen maps of Africa before,
but this one was different. In addition
to the usual basic national borders this map featured a level of detail that I
had never seen before. This map had
roads, and these roads led directly from places I knew all the way to places I
had only read about and even to places I had always thought were fictional,
like Timbuktu.
I was hooked. I
returned to that map many times that year, following the thin, winding tendrils
of road from the Johannesburg I knew to places that became the growth points of
my dreams. Places like Ouagadougou. Tambacounda.
Bangui. Morogoro. Tataouine.
Yes, Tataouine – where Luke Skywalker grew up. But more on that later. I resolved during those bold, dreamtime days
that I would venture up those winding roads, explore those mysterious places
for myself and live the exceptional life I had been craving for so long.
Rhodes was a great university for honing my newfound
interest in the glorious continent to the north, as it was a popular choice for
students from places like Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ghana and Malawi. I got to know many of them and never tired of
asking them about the places they came from.
In time I started going to visit, and I’ve been discovering Africa ever
since. By 2006 I was engaged to an
irresistible force of nature named Tracy Hammond, and we were looking for
wedding venues in Malawi and Mozambique by driving there in our Honda
Jazz. It turned into an epic three week
adventure that I will write about next week.
By Matthew Angus-Hammond (@T2T_Matt)
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