otherPriorities.com was supposed to become a site for texts and think pieces, written exchange and debate on Africa, the West, and the Rest of the World. It didn’t work.
Since 2021, I have used it to offer short stories in which I pursue the coming-into-being of humanity. I explore the human condition and how the way of life differs in Africa and the West. My account is based on facts, occurrences, and images from the media and science, as well as my personal and professional life as a Swiss diplomat in Africa.
In early 2025, Mystery Publishers in Nairobi has published as a book the first set of my stories on human evolution from our animal past to the point where Homo sapiens leave Africa: In and Outside Africa. A Story of the Human Condition in Africa and the West.
But I have many more stories to tell, and my writing continues. You can follow the sequel here. And I repeat my notice to the reader: All of this remains eclectic, anecdotal, and regressive.
Dominik Langenbacher
View and order In and Outside Africa: The Book
For the stories of the sequel: The Story Continues
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Before going there to represent the Swiss government and defend Swiss interests, I would always read myself into the history and culture of the country of my new accreditation. Reading my way into Sierra Leone and Liberia, I fell into the history of another Back-to-Africa movement. It took place some 20’000 years after the Afro-Asiatic peoples returned from the Arabian Peninsula to North Africa, in the late Stone Age. Since then, the natural unity of mankind as hunters and gatherers had broken up into various civilisations, all with different cultures and values. Around the Mediterranean Sea, in cultural exchange
The longer I live, the more I get to understand that I am just passing through – a migrant – on this wonderful Earth of ours. I spent my childhood in migration with my parents on the three continents of Europe, America, and Asia. The bigger part of my diplomatic career, in labour migration, I spent on a fourth one, Africa. And not even in my retirement here in Nairobi do I get to be a sedentary local. In summer of 2023, Bilha and I visited an old Swiss friend and his Zimbabwean wife in their retirement in the
Let’s take the 3.2 million years since Lucy took us down from the trees and stepped away from our chimpanzee ancestors as one day, 24 hours. About nineteen and a half hours ago with Homo habilis, the Stone Age began. Homo sapiens evolved one and a half hours ago. And those that left Africa did so only 27 minutes ago. Considering that this is 60’000 years, it is still a very long time. To put it into perspective: In the same anthropological time measurement of one day since Lucy, my own lifetime is only the last 1.97 seconds of
The Book
The Story Continues