The Story Continues

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 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

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

In 1958, Guinea, Liberia, Ghana and Ethiopia in Sub-Sahara Africa and Morocco, Tunisia and Libya in North Africa became independent. That made seven African states supporting the Pan-African Congress and its slogans of Hands off Africa! Africa Must Be Free! Down with Imperialism and Colonialism! In 1960, The Year of Africa, a third of the African countries gained independence. In 1963, over thirty Heads of independent African states met in Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, and signed the Charter of the Organisation of African Unity OAU. This was Africa’s first continental institution of independent states. And by the end of