Outriders Africa: Essays on Exploration and Return

Summary

Journeying outside the boundaries of one’s society to see and discover how others live, or what lies beyond the horizon, is central to our humanity and the birth of inventions and creativity. Travel writing provides opportunities for both self-exploration and ethnocentrism. It is therefore unsurprising that some of the most enduring stereotypes about Africa and Africans have come from travel writing by European men and women, with tropes of monstrosity, backwardness, inferiority, infantilism and foreboding. In the last few years, a handful of Black and African authors have emerged in the travel writing scene. They are however not enough to counter-balance the damaging legacy that 400 years of white European journeying authors has brought to the genre. The Outrider project is an invitation for writers to explore travel writing through the “African Gaze”. Two paired writers travel in and through the same society and write about their experience and encounters from their own embodied perspective.