Last year I decided that I really wanted to go to Ethiopia and Malawi, and had a wonderful trip to the south of Malawi for several days? With a few quick in and outs to Addis.

This year I desperately wanted to get back to Ghana - where I haven’t been for six years.

That obviously won’t be possible now, and I’ve been thinking today about my last trip there.

I spent 8or 9 days in Accra, and we do so much work with people across the country, that not having been there for so long feels absolutely unacceptable.

Of course, my colleagues have been, but the lockdown and travel restrictions have made me realize how much I love traveling, and what an incredible loss it is to not be able to visit the cities we have engineers and scientists and innovators and researchers in.

My experience in traveling the continent consistently for seven years has been so completely contradictory to the perceptions many hold of Africa, so much that I find it impossible to understand how one can do so and hold on to misconceptions and colonial attitudes.

And of course I know where those come from, and how rarely a lens or perspective is dropped by simply getting closer to what you are viewing, but when this lockdown is over, we can travel freely, I urge everyone - South Africans especially:

Travel your continent.

With all the xenophobic undertones (and overtures), and the odd South African perception of being apart from the rest of the continent, I can think of no better way to celebrate the ability to move and enjoy the company of others than by traveling Africa.

Go drink and Orijin in Lagos at a bar while you wait for traffic to pass. Have prawns at Bogobiri. Go be inspired by female entrepreneurs at @WeAreMettaNBO. Chat to the juakali in Eldoret. Paddle down the Nile into Lake Victoria. Visit the extraordinary university in Blantyre.

Listen to music, talk to engineers from @MakCEDAT in Kampala. Stand on the roof of the Hilton in Windhoek and let the vast emptiness of Namibia into your soul. Take a walk along the coast in Dakar, and let the Senegalese who live their shame you with their incredible athleticism.

Discover world firsts, like a portable ECG in Yaoundé, a bloodless malaria test in Kampala, a Nanofilter in Gongali, a neonatal care unit in Rwanda. Meet people who value the world and the people in it, not for what they can get from them, but for the stories they tell.

Travel your continent.

Look past the red dirt and the acacia trees and the sunsets. The rag to riches stories and the development projects.

Be a part of what you were born into. Learn a language. Read local poets. Stories. Songs.

Listen. Really listen.

Be here.