Africa trip: Travel book “Between Zanzibar and Lüderitz” by Simon Riesche – Travel

Traveling without a specific purpose, just for pleasure, is something the man can still understand. Even if he would never do it himself and probably couldn’t. But even if you do, it certainly won’t be in overcrowded shared taxis over bumpy slopes or in uncomfortable trains.

In this conversation with a travel acquaintance, Simon Riesche once again experiences the discrepancy between visitors like him and locals. He, the German author, experiences as an exotic adventure what is an annoying and paralyzing everyday life for the inhabitants of the countries in southern Africa that Riesche crosses.

In other moments this becomes even more obvious, for example when he visits Victoria Falls: Rich tourists fly over the impressive waterfalls in helicopters, while the people who sell the tickets for them ask for used shoes that you probably don’t have need more. “The poverty may be greater in other places in Zimbabwe,” writes Riesche in his travel report “Between Zanzibar and Lüderitz,” but “hardly anywhere is the world’s inequality as noticeable as in this African Disneyland.”

Simon Riesche, who has been reporting from Cairo as an ARD correspondent since the beginning of this year, undertook a second crossing of Africa last year. In 2010 he had already traveled overland from Egypt to South Africa for the World Cup. This time the journey takes him from east to west, from Tanzania via Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia to Botswana and finally Namibia. Always use public transport. And on the trail of a questionable adventurer.

Paul Graetz was a former officer of the German protection troops in the colony of German East Africa who had the idea of ​​being the first person to cross the African continent in a car – which he was able to achieve with great difficulty. It took Graetz a total of almost two years, from 1907 to 1909. He wrote the book “Across Africa in the Car” about this adventure.

With this book in his luggage, Simon Riesche sets off on his journey, reading it first on site, parallel to his own progress. And in doing so, he becomes increasingly disturbed by Graetz’s worldview. The author was a convinced colonialist and master’s man, and Riesche writes in the foreword that he can bear this reading less with every page.

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So what’s the point of all this? Well, on the one hand, despite everything, Riesche admires Graetz for his will to never give up and the wealth of ideas with which he reacts to unforeseen situations. On the other hand, and above all, Simon Riesche experiences from day one: “The topics of the present mix with the stories of the past.” Read critically, Graetz helps him get to know these stories better.

Anyone who travels on public transport, like Riesche, and usually away from tourist hotspots, rarely meets other people who are not from Africa either. Accordingly, he repeatedly becomes the personification of “the West”. To “the” descendants of the colonialists. Riesche has to be accused of massacres by Europeans on several occasions. And is also very often treated with very privileged status.

He looks for encounters, even unpleasant ones. Right at the beginning, Riesche meets the elderly Isaria Meli, a grandson of Mangi Meli, in Tanzania. He was executed by the Germans in 1900 as an alleged conspirator and his skull was sent to the Empire. And to date it has not been returned. Apparently he can no longer be found.

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Old wounds, a deep-rooted skepticism. But there is also a great mutual interest in each other. Riesche’s report is neither an adventure boast nor a self-reflection. The book is primarily a description of conversations and encounters. Of states. It’s an attempt to get closer to people’s everyday lives. As good as it gets for a stranger. With open-mindedness, curiosity and respect, Simon Riesche gets quite far.

Simon Riesche: Between Zanzibar and Lüderitz. On a road trip and time travel in southern Africa. Knesebeck Verlag, Munich 2023. 224 pages, 19.99 euros.