Ben and I pulled up to the Zimbabwean border at Kazangula as the sun began it’s lunchtime baking of the planet. We were one of seven tourist vehicles amongst a steel stream of idling cargo trucks stretching from the weigh station far into the horizon. Gathering our yellow, purple and pink, clear plastic document folders, we left the cruiser and entered the plywood and fiberglass border agency. The air was thick, hot and stale inside. A black Namibian tour operator [...]

Categories: Africa South

The excitement of our draw with Slovenia had inspired Ben and I (Someday, you will understand America, I swear). The FIFA office was sold out of the next game, so we met a West African scalper. He had two prime seats for cheap, selling $160 tickets for $80 a pop, in our next match against Algeria. Getting out of the beginning round, proving American soccer had legs, hinged on our victory against Tunisia’s neighbors and North Africa’s sole team at [...]

Categories: Africa South

Ed dropped us off when traffic slowed our roll to nil. “Well, here we go,” Ed said, waving his hand to the traffic cop and his fluorescent vest. Ben and I hopped out. We both carried American flags, the stars and stripes wrapped around my neck like an emo scarf and Ben caped like a Trojan with red, white and blue. The road shot straight towards Ellis Park past single-story brick houses with high fences. Suburbia with teeth, lined with [...]

Categories: Africa South

Mark and Joy made us a very proper, big fry-up for our last meal in their wonderful home. They even packed us fresh fruit for the road – which turned out to save the day. We bought some pastries at a local bakery before heading south by southeast from Bulawayo, heading to Botswana. Ben’s friend Jaynie had an old pal named Peggy in Gaborone who’d offered to put us up for a night. The goal was Johannesburg and it’s month [...]

Categories: Africa South

The cruiser had warmed in the sun, and we thawed insided, shielded from the wind. Starting it in the shadow of the Citadel of Greater Zimbabwe, we headed west, to Bulawayo.   The second largest city in Zimbabwe, with streets wide enough for a team of oxen to turn around, Bulawayo was home to my friend’s parents. Mark and Joy had offered a warm meal and a hot shower, and after the frost of Greater Zimbabwe, nothing seemed better.   [...]

Categories: Africa South

Leaving the damp cold of the Bvumba, we retraced our route to Mutare, where we filled our tank with dollar-a-liter street-diesel and bellies with cream-filled doughnuts. Satiated, we hightailed it south and then west to the center of Zimbabwe’s and it’s despot’s symbology. Western archaeology and racism supported for centuries the view that, sans the Romans and Egyptians, Africa was a uncultured, uncivilized place of tribal savagery. So strong was this mental construction that when J. Theodore Bent excavated the [...]

Categories: Africa South

With Drifter’s fading into the rearview mirror, the road took us south through Mutare and then up into the Bvumba hills. A thick curtain of silver mist blanketed the green mounds of land as our blue diesel smoke vanished behind the white African Goose. We then entered what had been Zimbabwe’s high-class tourist region, passing lodges and hotels too expensive for us. Getting desperate with the fading day and plummeting heat, we pulled over at a nursery and horse ranch [...]

Categories: Africa South

The terrible luck along the Swahili coast had forced us to retrace our route back into Malawi. We drove hard, crashing after dark and rising before dawn in Mikumi and Iringa. Driving through the Chinese highway project in the Valley of the Baobabs, a change of seasons was evident in the squat trees’ bare limbs. The temperature plummeted farther west and Fall hit somewhere near the border of Songwe. Inside Malawi, we stayed west on the big road inland through [...]

Categories: Africa South

A well-dressed man stopped me inside the second-hand clothes market in Lilongwe, Malawi. Between the piles of fabrics, he asked in smooth English if I knew what juju was.   “Magic?” I guessed, flashing back to a good friend named Nathan Howard Hanson. The man laughed cynically as he handed me the day’s front page story: an expose of Malawian government officials who pay witchdoctors for potions, spells and curses to advance political careers, boost rallies, rig elections or destroy [...]

Categories: Africa South

We were forty kilometers outside of Dar es Salaam, when the bad luck took hold. Outside of a diesel station in Mimuja, a screaming siren blew past us, it’s gargantuan police chassis heading west. Ben and I were grimy and confused: the cruiser’s engine was leaking. We hadn’t noticed the siren’s predecessors; just the lone SUV blaring by. As the siren faded, I saw an empty road left and right. I hit the right green blinker and pulled west out [...]

Categories: Africa South