The Sunday News
Ngqwele Dube, Life Correspondent
DRIVEN by the longing for the place she calls home, Dot Bekker managed to overcome the trepidation that comes with driving more than 20 000km across two continents to make a return to the city she was born in.
Bekker was born and raised in Bulawayo but left the city in 1981 for Cape Town, South Africa. In 2018 after a long consideration and travelling around Europe, she decided it was time to come back home and while most would have thought of catching a flight, she decided to soak in the beauty of the African continent and drive to Bulawayo.
While some made efforts to dissuade her, telling her Africa is a “jungle” fraught with dangers and little security especially for a white woman driving alone, Bekker was determined to explore the continent before setting up base in the City of Kings. She left the city after fighting broke out in the townships in 1981.
Bekker says an “unhappy marriage”, “miserable weather” and longing to be in familiar surroundings made her brave the eight-month long journey.
“In 2016 I realised that I had to get out of my increasingly unhappy marriage, I was depressed, overweight and miserable and I knew that this person I had become wasn’t me. I left almost everything I owned and decided to see what life held for me. With 35 plastic crates, a small mosaic table, a chair and a rug I left.
“The decision now was what to do? I asked myself a question I often asked my clients. If money was no object, what would you do?” My answer was I would go home. I had been a foreigner longer than I had been a local. I had enough of being in cold Europe, in more ways than the weather. I felt it was time to return home.”
Bekker revealed that one of her goals had been to be in Africa for her 60th birthday and she left Europe five days before the special day arrived, taking a ferry from Spain to Morocco in November 2018.
Her journey took her mostly through the West African coastal route as she drove through Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea (Conakry), Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Republic of Congo, Cabinda (Angola), Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Namibia, Botswana before arriving in Bulawayo.
The travels through the 18 West African countries took 20 000kms over eight months and two weeks, during which she was all alone except for two weeks when her niece joined her.
A business coach, Bekker bought a Ford Transit van that she modified at her nephew’s workshop where she built the inside of the vehicle into a camper, which she used for the journey and she is still using it as her home.
She said with no carpentry skills, it took her nine months to complete building the inside of the car.
Bekker revealed the journey was made pleasant by the different people she came across who greeted her with “warm smiles, waves, help and kindnesses” adding the kind-heartedness and their warmth “restored my heart and my soul and made me laugh again”.
She said roads were one of biggest challenges she faced and she struggled over two-and-a-half days to get from Nigeria into Cameroon having had to follow Global Positioning System (GPS) co-ordinates on a track that was worn out, crossing broken wooden bridges and rivers with a two-wheel drive, which she hardly got over the second gear.
Bekker, who has written a book about the journey but is yet to be published, says living in a van has been made easy by the fact she earns her livelihood doing business coaching and building websites and with Internet she can do it from anywhere.
She started a non-governmental organisation, Kusasa that is aimed at uplifting the girl child and is already paying school fees for three “high achieving girls from vulnerable and disadvantaged backgrounds”.
