Continental Drift

For her first trip to Africa, aboard an HX Hurtigruten cruise ship, Sarah Greaves Gabbadon confronts her assumptions about what a homeland means

- Sarah Greaves Gabbadon

THE RAPIDLY BRIGHTENING sky was painted with swaths of orange, pink, and yellow. The early-morning light revealed a city that seemed to be little more than a patchwork of haphazardly planned mid-rise buildings in varying states of repair, punctuated with sprawling bushes, trees quivering in the morning breeze, and lawns sloping toward the nearby sea. The nocturnal beep-beep of tree frogs gave way to the insistent chirp of morning birds that rise from the trees to swoop across the sky like animated chevrons. As I watched the Senegalese sunrise on my first day in Africa, I was vibrating with anticipation. Dakar was waking up, and I was here to witness it.

In 2018 I was gifted a DNA testing kit. Although I was born in the UK, I am also Caribbean - my mother is Barbadian and my father is Jamaican. But it had never occurred to me to consider what had happened before the islands. The results showed 29 percent of my DNA coming from Nigeria, 29 percent from Scotland, and the remaining 42 percent from the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, Togo, Mali, and Cameroon. These clues to my ancestry ignited my desire to finally visit the continent. Would Africa feel like "home"?

The opportunity arose last fall, courtesy of HX Hurtigruten Expeditions, the sister brand to Norway's Hurtigruten cruise line, which sails to places like the Galápagos Islands. The company had debuted its West Africa route as part of an effort to offer more warm-weather destinations that spotlight rich ecosystems and cultures. (This route is currently on hold per instability in the region.) We were to sail round trip from Dakar to Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau's Bissagos Islands, and the Gambia.