I have several passions in my life. I love music. I used to organize parties and DJ back in the days. I love interior design and soccer. These passions faded a bit with time. The one passion that was constant in my life was travel.
As a child, my parents regularly brought me to Togo, Benin, and Senegal to visit our family. Later, I was lucky to travel to many countries across Europe, Asia, and North America while working in the Financial Services industry. Several times a year for vacation, I flew somewhere to explore new horizons. I love to discover new places; I like the feeling of being a foreigner, I love to meet people different from who I usually hang out with, I love to learn words from foreign languages, I love history, I love traditions, I love architecture. I love all the unexpected that travel brings to you.
The Misrepresented Africa
I traveled the world, and I have always considered myself a global citizen. However, there is one place that means more to me. It’s Africa. I love being there; it soothes me; it makes me feel home and abroad at the same time. Before modern airports were built in Africa, I remember that first blast of hot air when you step out of the aircraft to take the stairs that lead to the tarmac. It meant that I am going to have fun, that I am close to my roots, that I am where I belong.
How sad it is to know Africa’s bad reputation. We mostly hear about Africa when there is terrible news like war, hunger, diseases, or some oddity that makes people from western countries smile (like when a president gets elected with 96% of votes). Consequently, most people have a very distorted image of Africa.
Spread A Positive Narrative About Africa
MEET AFRICA was created to change this image. The team behind MEET AFRICA will share its love of Africa and hope it will be contagious. But above all, our goal is to have guests meet Africa, the real Africa with all its contradictions. The welcoming culture of Africans, the contrast between traditions and modernity, the gap between life in cities and villages, the respect for ancestors, and the growing numbers of young entrepreneurs. I would also like to share a little bit of the history of Africa that is not taught in classrooms, which explains so much of the present.
MEET AFRICA’s mission is to show Africa to those attracted to Africa, to the curious, the adventurer, or to anyone who loves to meet people. Because beyond history, landscapes, and culture, Africa is about encounters. It’s about those kids striking a pose in front of our camera, it’s about that young entrepreneur who wants to be a millionaire selling chicken, it’s about that woman with her baby in the back dancing to the sound of drums, it’s about that old villager who can talk for hours about how to protect local flora, and it’s about that artist painting with vegetal paint near a waterfall.
