From Casablanca to Cape Agulhas
On foot, bicycle and skateboard
I wanted to look at our continent with fresh eyes and not through the stereotypes in the media, of war and famine
When a 20-year-old Moroccan set off on foot to travel south through Africa with only $80 in his pocket, he had no idea of the adventures that lay ahead. The kindness of strangers enriched Othmane Zolati’s four-year journey, even saving his life. Now his epic tale is told in the documentary Africa and I, showcasing the astounding diversity of the continent and its people through his eyes, writes Claire Keeton
Pushing his bike through thick sand on the border between Ethiopia and Kenya, Othmane Zolati was lost and dehydrated. For the first time on his solo journey from Casablanca in Morocco to Cape Agulhas in SA, he did not know if he would make it. Drinking the oil from his last can of tuna had not relieved his thirst, and all he had left was peanut butter.
Travelling light across Africa — by foot, bike and skateboard — Zolati had no safety net. “If you have an idea, you must just start even if you have nothing. I had only $80 [about R1,000] in my pocket and an old Nokia phone,” he says.
At 20 years old, Zolati set out with a sleeping bag, a borrowed backpack, borrowed tent and a cheap camera lent to him by his sister, for three months.
That turned into four years. The only dates that mattered while he was on the move were the visa stamps in his passport.
Of his decision to cross the semi-desert alone, he says: “I had to leave Ethiopia before my visa was finished and the quickest way to Kenya was about 150km across the desert. It was too sandy to ride but I knew I could walk that in about five days.”
Three parched days later, disorientated and pushing his bike away from the lake instead of towards it, Zolati started hearing the grinding gears of a truck.
“I thought I was hallucinating, especially when I saw a big tank with ‘Clean Water’ on top of a truck. I dropped my bike, took my water bottle and started to run.
“The driver was listening to music and did not hear me shouting. It was like a movie,” says Zolati. But the man noticed him before it was too late and stopped to help, despite the risk of his truck getting stuck in sand.
“I opened the tap and the water was really hot.
As I drank, it brought me back to life,” Zolati says in an interview ahead of the release on Thursday of a documentary about his unique trip called Africa and I.
His lean fingers are restless while he talks in a coffee shop, even though he is settled — for now. He is staying with an American doctor he met at a barber shop run by a Moroccan friend. He has no need of a barber himself, his luminous eyes framed by long dreads.
The kindness of strangers that he encountered on his journey, north to south, made his trip.
He says, in a lingering French accent: “I wanted to look at our continent with fresh eyes and not through the stereotypes in the media, of war and famine.”
And when he did run into 10 men armed with AK-47s in no-man’s land — who were involved in a conflict over water and cattle with a neighbouring tribe — they were not hostile to him. “It was scary but not dangerous. They stopped me and took only water, not by force. In the end they shook my hand,” he says.
“This is why I was travelling: to see things differently and change my perspective.”
In Malawi, Zolati was arrested and locked up because he had no visa, which cost $100 he did not have. “I skipped the border and I got caught. I could pay the $50 needed to get out but I did not have the rest. The guy at immigration paid it for me,” he says.
That man was one of dozens of people he remembers with gratitude. “My journey was about meeting people, hearing their stories and experiencing their culture. If I met someone interesting, I could stay a week or a month. I would go with the flow.”
“I always wanted to see what was on the other side of the mountain,” says Zolati of his curiosity since childhood.
His family hoped that he would study further when he graduated as an electronic engineer and work a
9-5 job. “That is not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he says.
Instead, he turned his back on clocks and calendars. Asked on what day he stood at the southernmost tip of Southern Africa, after completing his epic journey, he muses: “It was going into spring.”
It was also pre-pandemic when he skateboarded across the border into SA, which had refused him visas four times before allowing him in. Covid has forced him to slow down, allowing him to make
Africa and I with award-winning co-director Chris Green.
During his trip Zolati lost days of his life, not to a virus but to parasitic infections. “The first time I got malaria I was sleeping under a truck in the harbour at Abidjan, in Côte d’Ivoire. For 10 days I had fever and couldn’t eat or talk.
“In the beginning, I did not know about malaria but after that I had medicine with me,” says the young adventurer, who got malaria twice more.
Urinating outdoors and not in a white porcelain bowl, he did not at first notice the blood in his urine which was a symptom of bilharzia, needing treatment. Treating little worms in his toes was another necessity.
Avoiding big predators was a big challenge. “I got a puncture when I was cycling in the Lake Turkana National Park in Kenya, and I had to spend the night and it was scary. The animals were loud and at that stage I had no experience at all with wildlife.”
Zolati learnt survival skills along the way, taking advice from residents about what to do. Travelling alone, on a shoestring, also exposed him to how people lived in the poorest neighbourhoods — and their generosity.
“When I was in Bamako in Mali, I was eating breakfast and I met a man who asked where I was from and where I was going, and what I was doing.”
Most days Zolati would wake up with the sun, eat some muesli or oats with water and drink tea, before hitting the road.
“This man said I should come and stay at his place, and I went with him. He had a wife and a baby, and a room that was about two metres by two or three metres, with no water or electricity. I said I would pitch my tent next to the room, but he said I must not sleep outside.
“He wanted me to sleep on the bed and they would sleep on the floor. That’s how nice people are, even when they have very little,” says Zolati, who stayed, but on condition he could take the floor.
“Then I went to a cybercafé to share pictures and was connected online with a Moroccan friend in Bamako. He was an engineer with a fancy villa in a wealthy neighbourhood and his driver came to pick me up.”
Zolati said that his hosts exhorted the driver to take care of him and prayed for him as if he were family.
People were concerned about his safety wherever he went. For example, in Benin, where voodoo is an everyday practice, he was given a ring to protect him.
“I lost that ring many times, in the sand, in a swimming pool and it was weird how I would find it. I do not believe in any of this and, going downhill in Tanzania, the ring fell down and I did not find it anymore,” he says.
Meanwhile, his family back in Morocco — he grew up south of Casablanca in the coastal town of El
Jadida — worried about him, relying on erratic calls and the photos and blogs he posted to follow his progress.
“At first, I could call only every 15 or 20 days, but once I got a smartphone in Abidjan, I could WhatsApp them all the time, if I had network. They didn’t want me to go and were scared for me but now they are proud of me,” says Zolati, who has two older sisters and a younger one at home.
The initial leg of his journey, walking and hitchhiking from Casablanca to Abidjan, was the slowest. But he worked in the capital selling shoes, in a sweet and biscuit factory and in a hardware store until he had enough money to buy a bicycle, smartphone, camera and a new tent.
“The bicycle cost $70 and was very normal. There were 20 others like it,” says Zolati, who cycled bike races on the road from 12 to 16 years old. He cycled the second leg of his trip, from Abidjan to Palma in Mozambique, where he switched to a skateboard.
“In Tanzania I e-mailed a skateboard company and they delivered a longboard to Zanzibar.”
From Tanzania to Mozambique he strapped it onto his bike along with his other kit. But once he reached Mozambique, he donated his bike and skateboarded onwards to Malawi, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, then back to Mozambique, to Swaziland and, ultimately, into SA.
The exhilaration he felt on reaching Cape Agulhas was bittersweet for the man voted “Adventurer of the year” by the 2018 Moroccan Adventure Film Festival.
“I was looking forward to finally reaching my goal and felt excited. But imagine, for years every day you have been moving and struggling to get some money and food, to get a visa, and then one day ‘boom’ it is all finished!
“I was depressed for more than a month,” says Zolati, who found it difficult at first to adapt to “normal” life in an abnormal pandemic era.
“Now I’m enjoying having a home again and a routine, being able to go to the gym and see friends,” he says. His host is his mentor and guide and “one of my supporters in Cape Town”, says Zolati, thankfully.
Africa and I — which Zolati directs as executive producer — has distilled 220 hours of footage and eight hours of interviews into a 90-minute documentary, but he still struggles, in conversation, to highlight one country or another.
“Ethiopia,” he says, after a pause. “Ethiopia is totally different from any other country in Africa. You put one step across the border and you see this in the faces.” He also appreciated their food.
Ethiopia, on the horn of Africa, is one of only two of the African Union’s 55 member states that has never been colonised, though Ethiopia was occupied by
Italy during World War 2.
Zolati’s visit to the House of Slaves memorial on Gorée Island, off Dakar in Senegal, also made a lasting impression on him. “I felt so sad to stand at ‘The Door of No Return’ and think about the thousands of slaves being taken from Africa.”
He wished that he could have visited ancient monuments, for example the great mosques of Timbuktu, but terrorist incursions in Mali at the time prevented that. Yet he explored other attractions, including the waterways in Benin, known as the “Venice of Africa”.
The wonders and diversity of each of the 24 countries where he travelled, and of the people he met, are etched into his memory, as are their shared experiences.
“I found the music and culture could be quite similar,” says Zolati. “In Ethiopia, they have a dance and music which is almost the same as the Berbers, who are a southern tribe in Morocco. How come on this edge of east Africa is a similar tradition to that in northwest Africa?”
Above all, he remembers the hospitality. “In every country in Africa people were most hospitable.”