I am an African. I am proud to have been born and lived my life on this grand, primordial continent. I speak English, but I’m as English as an American. Our Boyes Family arrived in Cape Town from India in 1824. I am a 6th generation South African. My ancestors grew from the African soil and stayed. Every molecule in my body is African. I have no other identity. At the age of 23, I moved to Botswana to live in a remote wilderness area in the Okavango Delta. A skinny white guy with a dream to feel African. I wanted to feel vulnerable, get lost, and be accepted. I wanted to know everything. I clearly remember the first night in my little canvas cottage under a faraway sausage tree. It was late-summer. A thunderstorm was rumbling in the distance and the baboon roost was restless. Bell frogs and crickets outnumbered the stars and sang for them. I was alone. I felt alive. For the first time, I was living. I was lost in the wild surrounded by the buzzing, crawling, growling, grunting, thundering abundance of life. It rained all night. The ebony forest was musty, wet and dripping when I walked to Vundumtiki Camp just before the first light of dawn. It was dead still. My heart was pumping in my ears. When I lit the fire, the baboons were stirring in the branches above. They were soaked through from the downpour. As the mopane logs flickered bright, I sat quietly watching the first light emerge from the stillness. Connected to everything around me, we stepped backwards in time. It was my first glimpse into prehistory, a wilderness before us. With every sunset in the African wild, you breath in and know you are alive. With every sunrise you breath out and smile. The secrets that have guided my life have come to me sitting alone with the sun. I have come to realise that, in the end, we are all Africans. Many of us got lost on an unending walkabout around the globe becoming increasingly consumed by the technologies that distracted us from our innate wildness in the present moment. We must live for today, the sunset and sunrise, to breath in and breath out and feel alive. We must celebrate the people that stayed behind when everyone else left. Photo: @pete_k_muller