Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature: Belonging (Aug 2026)
Decolonising Travel, ed. Faith Adiele
Free
In My Journey Home, the PBS documentary about returning to my father’s village in Nigeria, there’s a shot of me sitting among the roots of an enormous tree, the tree that famously protected the villagers during the civil war. As legend had it, wherever the federalist troops’ axes struck the tree, blood flowed, and the invaders soon fled the village. I was also reflecting, that day, on my siblings’ natal trees in the family compound, saplings planted with their placentas at birth, rooting the three of them to a specific patch of earth before they could walk. I never had one. I was born an ocean away. Sitting there, camera rolling, I wondered: how do you begin to belong somewhere you were never planted?
That question — impossible to answer in the moment, obvious only in hindsight — turns out to be the one running under nearly everything in this issue, once you open the definition of travel writing to include roots-return journeys and other high-stakes trips: pilgrimage, repatriation, inheritance, refusal. It’s a theme with real resonance, and this issue’s submissions reflected that. It was also our largest pool yet, a sign of Panorama’s and Decolonising Travel’s growing reach.
And something happened organically, without any call for African voices specifically: six of the nine pieces we’re running are set in Africa, half of them written by African/diaspora authors, telling our own stories on their own ground...
...I hope you’ll sit with these nine pieces the way I sat under that tree — not as a tourist passing through, but as someone asking a real question without a guaranteed answer.