David Livingstone spent thirty years wandering across Africa. In our main episode we spent forty minutes talking about him. We may have missed a few spots. Dan Kobayashi, a writer and longtime Africa analyst, helps us fill in the blank spaces on the map. Dan spent 13 years as an expert on Southern and Central Africa for the U.S State Department, and most recently analyzed global power competition on the African continent. He has worked at the U.S. Embassies in Lesotho, Zambia, Malawi, and Botswana and has organized U.S observation of five African elections. We get into the geography we skipped, especially Malawi and Tanzania, and the complicated modern legacy of Victorian missionaries. We also discuss the importance of humility when traveling, and why a walking safari can be both the best and most nerve-wracking way to see wildlife there. He is currently a writer, consultant, and stay-at-home father based in Geneva, and writes at expatriarch.substack.com. If you would like to hire him for Africa analysis, strategic communications, or writing and editing projects, or to publish his memoir "Africa: A Love Story," ask us for his email. Show Notes & Reading List Destinations Discussed * Zimbabwe: Harare, Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls), Mana Pools. * Zambia: Lower Zambezi National Park, South Luangwa National Park, Zambezi Breezers. * Botswana: Kalahari Desert, Okavango Delta, Deception Valley Lodge, Chobe National Park, Maun. * Tanzania: Zanzibar (Stonetown), Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater. * Malawi: Zomba (Chancellor College), Majete National Park. * South Africa: Kruger National Park, Sabi Sands. Books & References * Men with Tales (Safari guide anthology) * Livingstone by Tim Jeal * Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal * Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller Links * Expatriarch: Dan Kobayashi’s Substack – Subscribe Here * Further Reading: “I Suppose I Have to Talk About Lesotho Now” by Dan Kobayashi Episode Transcript Jeremiah: Hello and welcome to a special bonus edition of By Their Own Compass. I’m Jeremiah Jenne, and I’m really pleased today to be joined by Dan Kobayashi, a thirteen-year Africa analyst for the State Department’s Office of Africa Analysis. He spent quite a bit of time living and working in the places we talked about in our David Livingstone episode. Dan, thank you for joining us today. Dan Kobayashi: Happy to be here. Jeremiah: Now, in our episode, one of the things that was difficult was that David Livingstone went to so many different places in southern Central Africa, and because we had to narrow it down, we chose Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. But of course, there were so many more places we could have covered. What are some of the places that we missed, and what are your impressions of the area where David Livingstone once explored, traveled, and lived? The Missing Pieces: Malawi and Tanzania Dan Kobayashi: Sure. When I first heard you were doing this episode and you invited me on, I thought the choice of Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Botswana—”Zim-Zam-Bots” for short—was slightly curious. Zimbabwe and Zambia everyone obviously thinks of with Livingstone because that’s where Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls) is, right on the border. There are statues of him on each side of the border. I knew that he had crossed the Kalahari and whatnot, but it was in some ways almost a footnote to me. The third country I think of really very heavily with him is Malawi. Part of that is because Malawi is my first African home. It’s probably my favorite place on the continent. And then, of course, I also think of Tanzania, because Zanzibar was the epicenter of the slave trade, which he worked so tirelessly to abolish. Tanzania is where he had his famous encounter with Stanley—though I’ll note, Burundi claims it was there. I’ve got a picture of myself, which I sent to you actually, in front of the monument in Burundi commemorating their meeting, which absolutely did not happen there. That makes it an even better picture. Tanzania and Malawi are sort of the ones I think of more than Botswana. That said, Botswana is a critical place. And I could go on and on about Malawi and its joys as one of the underappreciated locations in Africa and home to the single most lovely, nicest people I’ve ever met. But “Zim-Zam” and Botswana are places for perhaps more accessible travel than Malawi, with the qualification that Zimbabwe is not always accessible. First Impressions and Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe Dan Kobayashi: The first time I was in Africa south of the Sahara was Christmas 2007. I flew into Harare, Zimbabwe, to meet my then-girlfriend, who was a doctor and who I met while she was doing a Master of Public Health at Harvard. She’d worked in Zim previously and had gone off to take a job in Malawi. I met her in Zimbabwe in Christmas 2007, and I was a pretty experienced traveler. I’d been to some weird places so Africa might not have been as completely different. But Zim in that particular moment certainly was. One of the tips she gave me at the time was, “Don’t bring one hundred dollar bills.” But this was the period of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe. You would trade, like, twenty US dollars, and you would get—going to betray my New England roots here—a hockey bag full of bricks of 200,000 Zimbabwe dollar notes, all of which were effectively worthless. You couldn’t get more than that. You had to do business in local currency, but you couldn’t exchange currency on the local market. The official rate was something like 40,000 to 1, and the real rate was 1.8 million to 1, and it was going up every day. It was the highest inflation on record aside from one particular period in Hungary. So, it was a case where if you went to a bar, the second beer would literally cost twice as much as the first beer. Jeremiah: Wow. Dan Kobayashi: So you’d buy them two at a time. It was just for an introduction to Africa... it was sort of stunning. Without local help, we’d have been completely out of luck. But my girlfriend had a Zimbabwean colleague who sort of helped us through the system with fixers and how to change money on the black market, because even if you wanted to do it on the legal market, you couldn’t do it, and you’d be changing money for nothing. It was very important to do it in very careful ways. So this is my introduction to Africa. I’m there as a tourist. I’m not doing any work. I’m not doing sort of “do-gooder” stuff or even neutral stuff. I’m just there to visit my friend and see the sights. But to this day, it’s probably the strangest and most difficult situation I’ve ever traveled in. There was this question of, “Well, if you run out of US dollars to change on the black market, what do you do?” It’s a three-day line to wait at the ATM, and they’ll only let you take out maybe twenty dollars US worth of money at the official exchange rate, which is you’re effectively getting robbed. Same thing with Western Union. We actually had a period where we had to cross over into Botswana at Vic Falls to get Botswana Pula out of an ATM, which we could then change into US dollars, and then take back into Zimbabwe and change for local currency. Jeremiah: That sounds like quite an introduction to a place. And I would guess over the years, as you move from being a tourist to working or in an official capacity, I wonder, as you saw other people come into Malawi, Zimbabwe, and other parts of Africa for their first time... did you start to catalog a list of the most common rookie mistakes that people coming to Africa tended to make? The “Farmerista” Approach and Humility Dan Kobayashi: I was blessed to go in with a reasonable amount of humility because the doctor I was traveling with came out of the Paul Farmer school—what are often called “Farmeristas”—which is one of extreme humility, self-flagellating humility almost, in the context of Africa, or Haiti in the case of Farmer originally. So there was a real emphasis on respect and local knowledge. Don’t think that you’re so great or so smart coming from outside. Don’t think you understand people. Don’t think that they’re ignorant of the Western world. They have TV. They have radio. Though Malawi only got TV in 1996. I should add: don’t assume that a person of no particular competence in the US is somehow of more competence in Africa. I’d visit Chancellor College in Zomba, Malawi—the old colonial capital, which is like the fourth biggest city in Malawi—but it has the national college. The professors there are real professors. They’re not interested in having some random American come in and teach there. There are no jobs for that, any more than I could walk into Harvard and say, “Hey, I’m a very smart guy.” But it’s easy to be arrogant. One of the themes that’s unifying from Livingstone’s time through to today is Africa remains a place where Westerners, especially white Westerners frankly, of no particular distinction can go and be treated like they are something more than they are. But I think you have to be frank about the fact: I am not Livingstone. I am not going there in that time. As monstrous as some of these adventurers were, they were doing wild, incredibly risky things in places that really were unknown or relatively unknown to people like them. Stanley, as you correctly note, was a huckster and a charlatan. But you can’t say he lacked for physical bravery. Going into the African interior, having almost everyone on your mission die, and then somehow escape and do it again—just as Livingstone did, until it of course caught up with him eventually—is no joke. And that is decidedly not what we are dealing with as visitors to Africa, even in quite remote and rural places now. Perceptions of Livingstone Dan Kobayashi: To answer your question about perceptions of Livingstone, I do think Livingstone i
