At 25, I bought a one-way ticket to Johannesburg in the months after Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town was published. My hazy goal was to re-create his overland journey across Africa, except I’d do it from Cape Town to Cairo. My desire was to crisscross Southern and East Africa and head north with just a backpack and a tent. I didn’t have a map or a specific plan. There were only flip phones at that time, so there would be no way to tell if I was lost or off track. My only desire was to wander with no sense of when I’d arrive or what route I’d take to get there.
Back then, many of my idols were wanderers. But the one thing they all had in common was that they were white men. Bruce Chatwin. Jack Kerouac. Ernest Hemingway. And of course Theroux. They never had to explain their decision to go on the road or off the map. They just did it. They didn’t worry about being judged, persecuted, or, worse, raped or killed.
The message I was bombarded with in my 20s was that wandering was for men; destinations were for women. Destinations have expectations written all over them. They’re about timelines. When will I arrive? What will I desire when I get there? But I wanted to go to a place where I didn’t know who or what I would be on the other side. I wanted to go to a place where I wasn’t time bound. What I didn’t understand back then, although I felt its dark tentacles, is that a woman is always on the clock.
Capitalism is at least partly to blame. We’ve all learned to see ourselves as cogs in a much larger machine, bowing down to the twin ideals of busyness and optimization. Yet a woman’s clock and a man’s clock are different animals. A man’s clock is external. A woman’s clock, we’re told, is internal. And like her supposed unique ability to nurture the young and sick, our clocks are considered an instinct: primal, biological, natural. In 1978, The Washington Post declared on its front page: “The Clock Is Ticking for the Career Woman,” instilling an existential dread in generations of women to come. Women who wandered had always been seen as suspect. If women’s nature was all about hearth and home, those women, like me, who wanted none of it, were seen as misfits, outcasts, abnormal.
Which, in my early-to-mid-20s, was fine by me. I relished the idea that I was different, special. I thought I’d figured something out that no one else had realized yet: that the only way to win at the game of life was to opt out altogether. The normal milestones of a mortgage, marriage, and motherhood were rigged in my mind. They were for the unimaginative. The straight-and-narrows. The women with polished manicures and the men in boat shoes with sweaters draped over their shoulders. I’ll never be like them, I told myself. I’ll keep moving, spending one week in Nairobi and the next in Kampala.
