This is not my personal story. It is the story of Africa – that stunningly beautiful yet helpless and not very serene mother watching her children lead separate, at times antagonistic lives while she is dreaming of having them live together as members of the same family. A dream we may or may not see in our lifetime.

I left Mauritius one fine Tuesday morning to head to Addis Ababa – Africa’s diplomatic capital – for a two-day conference on journalism. The distance between Port Louis and Addis is only 3,000 kilometres. I can literally see the African Union and the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UN-ECA) buildings from my window in Port Louis.

There were no direct flights to Addis and no flights to Nairobi that day. So I embarked on a four-and-a-half hour journey to Johannesburg, put up with a five-hour transit period before I could spend another five-and-a-half hours flying to the place I could see from my window the day before. All in all, that is a 15-hour journey from Africa to Africa. In that time, you could reach any European or Asian capital you want and be home in time for dinner!

I landed in Addis at 6 a.m. on Wednesday, exhausted but relieved. I had an invitation letter from the United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on Africa, a request for visa on arrival from the African Union and my passport in hand. The queue at immigration was moving rather quickly and I rejoiced at the improved efficiency compared to my last visit three years earlier.

The immigration officer looked at my papers and disappeared for a while. Then about three young guys took me into an office and informed me that I could not get into the country as my name was not on the list of guests to the conference. Then began a harrowing session of interrogation which turned out to be quite unnecessary as they had all decided I was lying. It took six hours before it was decided that I was not a criminal and that I was no threat to the country I came to.  That was not Trump’s America or a hypothetical Lepen’s France. It was Ethiopia, Africa!

The words of UNECA’s Director Prof. Said Adejumobi, at a previous conference in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, about the Tripartite Free Trade Area, were ringing in my ears. “If it is easy for non-Africans to enter our member-states whether they are business persons or not,” he had said, “then why ‘quarantine’ our own citizens in national borders?”

The hardest part of such an experience is not so much the fact that I had by then spent over 20 hours travelling from Africa to Africa. It is not so much the helplessness I felt throughout the time I spent at the Ethiopian immigration counter being tossed from one officer to another. It is the rudeness and contempt of the young immigration officers which I found shocking. No respect for my dignity as a citizen and – in the capital of diplomacy – no respect for the organisations which had invited me!

I don’t have the arrogance of saying that all borders should be open to me nor is it the first time I was stopped at immigration. After all, when you are travelling on an African passport, you expect to be looked upon with suspicion in Africa. A few weeks before, I had been stopped at the border in Bulawayo for lack of clearance by the Zimbabwean Media Council. However, the officer handled the situation with a great deal of humour and gave my colleagues and me one-day visas and we had to report to the police station the next day. In Addis, the faces were callous, unwelcoming and stern!

The two-day conference over, I took the plane back on Saturday, taking the shorter route – or so I thought – through Nairobi this time. I reached for the brown bread sandwiches I had ordered from the hotel and enjoyed what is euphemistically called French toast – in plain English, fried bread.  The cook must have decided I was wasting away and needed a maximum number of calories on my journey back. I must say, it was tastier than what I had ordered and was thankful for that. I am not sure the other customer who got my order and missed his grease fix was as grateful.

I landed in Nairobi about an hour late – a bit of a feat since the flight was only two-hours. By then, I had missed my connection to Mauritius and had to spend another day in Nairobi, before going to Johannesburg and connecting flights to Mauritius! No other flights. No other way. In Nairobi, it took over an hour to retrieve my luggage – which had initially been checked to Mauritius – and it took forever to drive through the fume-infused Nairobi traffic which hasn’t improved one iota since I last visited.

I landed in Mauritius at 7.30 p.m. the next day! That means that for a two-day conference in a country 3,000 kilometres away, I spent more than six days out of the country!

This is the story of connectivity in Africa. This is the story of the free movement of goods and people in Africa. This is the story of Africans in Africa! This is an invitation to put our arrogance and delusions aside, take a hard look at ourselves and honestly deal with the problems of Africa. No one else is going to do that for us. No one else should!

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