Air journeys in Africa always have an unreal quality. One sits, encapsulated, air-conditioned, sipping cooled fruit juice, gliding over the heads of people who stare up from the shade of their mud huts and have never thought to go more than twenty miles from the place they were born. They will live and die within sight of the same mountain. This is not to say that some Africans have not been great travellers. The eighteenth-century journals of writers such as Gustavus Vassa record journeys from Africa to the West Indies, Virginia, the Mediterranean and even the Arctic. But they also bear eloquent witness to the dangers and hardships incurred by anyone so foolish as to venture too far from that tiny area where ties of kinship and blood afford some protection. Most village Africans have a geographical knowledge that rapidly becomes mythical. In my own village no one had ever seen the sea and, at night, old men sitting around the fire would ask me repeatedly whether such a thing really existed. They were horrified at the mere thought of it and, when I described waves, swore they never wished to see such a thing. One seasoned traveller claimed to have seen it at the nearest city some eighty miles away and made much of his description of it. I never had the heart to tell him that he had only seen the river in flood.

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