AAfter a lifetime of travelling Africa—thirty countries, and twenty years guiding groups and expeditions across the Sahara—I’ve learned a thing or two about what this continent asks of its visitors.

The Western traveller often arrives with baggage—not just in their hands, but in their heads. We carry images of famine, drought, poverty, conflict, disease, corruption, coups, wild animals, the “dark continent.” The truth, in my experience, is almost always the opposite.

I have never seen a starving child. I have never been caught in open conflict. The only illness I’ve had is malaria, no worse than flu if treated quickly. I’ve lived through two coups in Mali. Both times, we heard whispers beforehand that something was coming. Soldiers walked into the president’s office, told him his time was up, and that was that. The next day in the market, you wouldn’t have known anything had happened.

Over the years I’ve guided hundreds of travellers. My safety record is 100%. Two cases of malaria, the odd bout of diarrhoea—nothing more. The reality of Africa is not chaos or danger, but resilience, rhythm, and light.

The second lesson is time. Africa does not live by the clock. There is morning, midday, afternoon, evening, and night. There is near, not so near, quite far, far, and very far. Arrange to meet at midday, arrive at two, and you’ll be early. I often say my work is teaching Westerners to let go of time, and Africans to respect it—and somewhere in between, we meet.

Once you adjust, African time becomes a gift. The journey is enjoyed for what it is. The destination is not a moment on a schedule, but simply the end of the day. Stress fades. The chase ends. We become nomads again—living only in the now.

That is why I don’t do itineraries. They bind the traveller to a timetable. Instead, I keep things open, flexible, ready to change direction when chance or whim suggests. It keeps us in the moment. It keeps us alive to Africa.