The expedition
Kingsley Holgate, the Natal-born adventurer Getaway magazine called the most travelled man in Africa, had already taken his family from the Cape to Cairo by the continent's waterways, up the Zambezi, round the world along the Tropic of Capricorn and from Durban to the Somali border in Land Rovers and a dhow. The Outside Edge was the biggest of them: to track the entire coastline of Africa clockwise from the Cape of Good Hope, by Land Rover wherever a track ran and by inflatable boat where none did, through the 34 countries that line the edge of the continent. Between them the family had suffered malaria 63 times, and the expedition was built round malaria prevention under the banner One Net One Life, together with the Right to Sight spectacle programme and Teaching on the Edge mobile libraries. It carried a Zulu calabash filled with seawater at the Cape, to be emptied at the journey's end, and a Scroll of Peace and Goodwill carrying messages of support from across Africa.
The send-off from the Cape Peninsula on 27 April 2007 was a Guinness record attempt: 347 Land Rovers of every kind, from Series Is to Freelanders, drove in convoy no more than two vehicle lengths apart over the measured stretches, one of them Chapman's Peak Drive, beating the previous record of 261 set at Towcester, and finished at the De Grendel estate for a Land Rover jamboree. Seven days later the four expedition Land Rovers crossed the Orange River into Namibia and were escorted by Namdeb through the Sperrgebiet, the forbidden diamond coast — Chameisbucht, Baker's Bay and the ghost mining settlement of Bogenfels — to Lüderitz, a stretch normally closed to travellers. The expedition cars were named in the Holgate tradition: two Defender station wagons called John Ross and Mary Kingsley, after the explorers, and a Defender 130 TD5 called The Stomach because it carried all the food. Kingsley, his wife Gill and son Ross, the expedition leader, formed the core of the team.
From Namibia the route ran north through Angola and round the bulge of West Africa to Pointe des Almadies on the Cap Vert peninsula of Senegal, the continent's westernmost point, then across the Maghreb to Ras ben Sakka at Cape Blanc in Tunisia, its northernmost, and along the Mediterranean and down the Red Sea coast. In Sudan the team tracked their own path for 1,200 km through the roadless Nubian desert. By June 2008 they had covered 57,768 km and 413 days and were working south down the 2,470 km Mozambican coast, where one Land Rover was flooded crossing a river, towards re-entry into South Africa at Kosi Bay. They reached Cape Agulhas, the southern extremity, and arrived back in Cape Town in mid-July 2008, 448 days out — 'battered and bruised, just like the cars' — and emptied the calabash into the Atlantic on Nelson Mandela's birthday. The final tally was 33 of the 34 coastal countries; the team had set out to distribute 100,000 mosquito nets to pregnant women and mothers of small children, along with thousands of pairs of spectacles and mobile libraries for remote communities.
Holgate's book Afrika: Dispatches from the Outside Edge was published by Random House Struik in 2009. The Holgates went on to Boundless Southern Africa in 2009 in Discovery 3s, and to every remaining country of the continent in later Defenders; The Stomach, still in the fleet, later crossed Somalia to Ras Xaafun and drove the Karakoram Highway to Kathmandu.
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