FORTUNATE TRAVELLER

The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end. — Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, XII.
Maa Temple Jammu
Non-fiction

Vaishnadevi Yatra: A Pilgrimage by Mitra Rupsha

January 21, 2022

‘She khanik thake shunyer opor, khanik thake neere’ – Lalon Fakir (thy prevails in the empty sky sometimes, thy sometimes prevails in the waters)  Katra was glistening before my eyes as we huddled along with all our spirits heightened to an ideal – an absolute peak. I was unaware of how much we needed to walk; rather I was just preoccupied with scaling the ragged heightening slopes of the hill for…

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Essay & Review

Africans in Jamaica: A piece of Africa in the Caribbean by Leslie Gordon Goffe

September 24, 2021

Jamaicans have talked about going back, one day, to Africa since the days of Marcus Garvey. But it is Africans, from East, West, and from South Africa, who have come, instead, to Jamaica. There are Ethiopians here, like Yodit Getachew-Hylton, an aeronautical engineer from Addis Ababa, married to a Jamaican government minister. There are South Africans, like the writer Peter Abrahams*, who has lived in the hills above the Jamaican…

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Poetry

To an Indian Child in Nairobi by Segun Akinlolu

September 10, 2021

As we can see through the work we’ve published so far here on Fortunate Traveller, travel stories can be presented or told in many different artistic genres or forms. Though we commonly think of the travel book or travelogue as the main form of travel literature, artists have also turned to poetry, music, dance and visual arts to capture something of their travels. In today’s post, the travel story comes…

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News & Announcement

Announcing the Release of our Anthology and Chapbooks: An Introduction from the Editors

June 4, 2021

When we teed off Fortunate Traveller, our travel journal, from the University of Benin, Ugbowo Campus five years ago, we wanted to add value and bring focus to African travel writing. We particularly wanted to curate new voices and help identify promising travel writers to a wider readership and publishers. With you, our readers, we have come a long way together on this mission. Although we still have a long…

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Non-fiction

Of Tattoos and Mangoes by Kevin Dimetres

December 18, 2020

The dark lines of ink covering her tattooed face couldn’t dissuade eye contact, and for a moment, we both caught each other staring. The woman’s stretched earlobes dangled under the weight of her circular earrings. I almost couldn’t look away. She held a mango in one hand and pointed directly at me with the other, signalling for me to kick the mud off my sandals before climbing up the steps…

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Non-fiction

A Travel Playlist: The Music of My Journey to Dakar by Tọ́pẹ́ Salaudeen-Adégòkè

August 21, 2020

‘The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather.’ –Teju Cole; Known and Strange Things I: Confusion Na Quench It all began with an acute anxiety commonly associated with departures – probably it should be entered in a psychiatry textbook as travel anxiety, if it hasn’t been already. I had also exhibited the foolery of drinking a bottle of Pepsi late the previous night. The combination…

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Non-fiction

Going the way of Poetry in Lagos II by Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera

August 2, 2020

Now, I am going into Freedom Park through its narrow entrance, with the stage not very far off by my right hand, enlarged photographs of some very famous people like the poets Wole Soyinka and Niyi Osundare, the YPP Presidential candidate Kingsley Moghalu, and a number of people who I do not know, but I’m sure are important people. I find my way around the big compound to the event…

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