Dear Friend, Most Important Event Of The Year And - Promise Project: Fill & Download for Free

Oh boy.This is a really tough question.And I’m afraid that I think every other answer to this question so far is, in at least one important respect, seriously wrong.And the reason I say so is that, after I had drafted this answer, I was forced to think again, and rewrite it from the ground up.I started answering this question a few weeks ago, at a time when the only Riefenstahl film I had seen was Triumph of the Will, her celebrated film of the 1934 Nazi Party congress at Nuremberg.The only secondary material I knew about her was Susan Sontag’s article ‘Fascinating Fascism’, which was one of the first genuinely critical articles about her in the heyday of her revival in the 1970s, and Ray Müller’s fascinating documentary about her, Leni Riefenstahl: Die Macht des Bilder, known in English as The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.Since then, dear reader, my Riefenstahl journey has been more extensive.I’ve read Steven Bach’s biography Leni, and have conscientiously broadened my experience of her work by sitting through not just Triumph of the Will all over again, but also her earlier film of the 1933 Nazi party congress Victory of Faith, her later and shorter film of the Wehrmacht’s participation in the 1935 congress Day of Freedom: Our Wehrmacht, and her mighty two-part epic Olympia.I even watched the 2016 movie Race, about Jesse Owens’ participation in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, because Riefenstahl, played by Carice van Houten, is a major character in it.Leni Riefenstahl is one of those phenomena, like a car accident, from which it’s surprisingly difficult to tear away your gaze.I draw the reader’s attention to the accompanying comment:Besides the Nazi loving part, was she an artist of talent?What this answer, therefore, is going to look at, are these two questions:What does ‘good’ mean, in the context of Leni Riefenstahl?What is ‘talent’, in that context?What does it mean to talk in terms of ‘talent’ in a filmmaker, absent of what the filmmaker was actually trying to do?To answer this question, I think we need to review the facts of the case.Normally I’m a stickler for using original titles but here I think that would be needlessly pedantic, so I’ll be using the standard English translations of the movie titles.Riefenstahl got into film in a way that says something about her enormous and, in many ways, admirable self-confidence.She was a dancer, and she was carving out a career in early 20s Germany with her own self-taught dancing stylings when she began to suffer from foot injuries.As she told it herself to Müller, she was going to see a doctor about her foot, and was standing in Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station in Berlin, waiting for a train, when she saw a large poster advertising a movie, Mountain of Destiny by Arnold Fanck. She was so entranced by the poster that she forgot all about seeing the doctor and went to see the movie instead.She was so entranced by the movie that she started assiduously going to every movie event she could find out about, in the hope of appearing in one of Fanck’s movies herself. Finally, at a hotel, she ran into the star of Mountain of Destiny, Luis Trenker, and reportedly told him ‘I’m going to be the leading lady in your next film!’ This was, she claimed. in spite of the fact that she had never been in a film, and had no acting experience, only dancing experience.Trenker was impressed by this 22-year-old beauty, and wrote to Fanck, explaining how he’d met this crazy girl who was probably out of her mind but very beautiful, and absolutely determined to make it in movies. He sent Fanck some of the headshots Riefenstahl had given him. Fanck saw them, contacted Riefenstahl and very soon she was indeed cast as Trenker’s leading lady in The Holy Mountain.I think that this story shows something about how Riefenstahl impressed people, and how she went after what she wanted, and always seemed to get it.Riefenstahl would later claim that this was her film debut.It wasn’t. She had a chronic tendency to lie about herself, which is amply documented in Bach’s book.Her first appearance in a film had been as a handmaiden in the 1925 film Ways to Strength and Beauty.That’s her, screencapped as you can see from the film itself, which is on YouTube.Ways to Strength and Beauty, which I watched for the purpose of this answer (and not simply because it contains many shots of naked people, including Riefenstahl herself), is interesting because in its crude, slapped-together way, it prefigures many things that Riefenstahl would later use in her own films, especially Olympia. The admiration for physical beauty. Slow-motion shots of athletes. Nude dancing by the sea. The general, open-air physicality of the whole thing, erotic but strangely not actually sexy.The camera is always plonked front and centre, and Riefenstahl as a director would learn to make the camera soar and glide. But there’s no doubt that Ways to Strength and Beauty had an impact on her, especially how her camera loved to linger on healthy and beautiful bodies, preferably in states of tasteful undress.That search for beauty, without any considerations of its context or what the beauty represented, would be the thread that guided her filmmaking.Riefenstahl’s career as an actor was spent first in Fanck’s films, and then, briefly, in her own. She started directing aged 30, with The Blue Light, which she also starred in.The Blue Light, like the films that Riefenstahl made with Fanck, belongs to the genre of the Alpine film, in which epic adventures took place halfway up tall mountains. There was something genuinely heroic about the Alpine films, because they were generally shot on location, and the actors had to learn to mountaineer; Riefenstahl herself became a pretty good one, often climbing in bare feet and without safety aids.She didn’t lack physical courage. She performed her own stunts. While shooting The White Hell of Piz Palü, she had a scene in which she was supposed to be winched up a cliff-face, unconscious, and a small avalanche was supposed to hit her. Fanck told her that that they’d just throw a bit of snow over her, but an actual unplanned minor avalanche hit her, and she was badly bruised for days afterwards, and fumed at Fanck—but, as she later remembered with satisfaction, they got the shot, which ended up in the final film.This was the kind of thing that made her feel like she was really paying her dues.The Blue Light, from 1932, which I admit to not having seen, was from a script by Riefenstahl herself and Hungarian film critic and writer Béla Balázs, with some extra script work by Carl Mayer. I wish I had seen it, for the purposes of this answer, but one of the things that it did was establish Riefenstahl’s peculiar kind of stardom.Riefenstahl’s screen persona was, as it says in the documentary, kind of the anti-Marlene Dietrich.Dietrich was, in her German films, glamorous, mysterious, sexy, subversive, quintessentially urban: a femme fatale.(Dietrich in The Blue Angel.)Riefenstahl’s screen persona, in Fanck’s films and her own, was haughty, noble, passionate, idealistic, generally asexual, and (at least in The Blue Light) a child of nature:An irony, here, is that Riefenstahl herself was absolutely not asexual.If she hadn’t been a film-maker who lavished so much time and energy on make the Third Reich look great, that might have been something that we could have celebrated about her. She was seldom a woman who let a man hold her down. She went after whoever she wanted, usually got them, and she had a remarkable talent for staying friends with them after the passion had gone. She had many lovers, though not as many as Dietrich, and many of them collaborated with her for years. (One man she had a brief fling with was one of her cameramen, Hans Schneeberger: his wife Gisela will become the secret hero of this answer, for reasons which will become clear at the end.)And one of the things about her which may earn our sympathy is that, just as today women who have a lot of relationships tend to be harshly judged in the media and by the public, so was Riefenstahl. One of the misogynistic jokes about her that circulated in her earlier career was the nickname Landesgletscherspalte: ‘the nation’s glacial crevasse’, an allusion both to her asexual onscreen presence and her many off-screen romances.Once she started hanging around with senior Nazi leaders, this nickname became Reichsgletscherspalte, ‘crevasse of the Reich’.In fact, though it was rumoured that she was Goebbels’ lover, or even Hitler’s, there’s no evidence that she was either. However, as Bach’s book shows, she didn’t mind people thinking that she was, if it helped her to get her way.And—up until 1939, anyway—she always got her way.Which brings us to what made Riefenstahl the filmmaker that we still remember today.Dietrich had her eye on the US, and she had strong political views.Riefenstahl loved working in Germany and, according to herself, had no strong political views at all.And yet the film she would make three years after The Blue Light would be her most infamous film of all: Triumph of the Will, her film of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.How could this be, from someone who was supposedly apolitical?In Müller’s film, there’s a moment of darkest comedy, where Riefenstahl insists that she was a purely apolitical filmmaker and basically agreed to make films about the Nazi party congress for artistic reasons, and that she hated Goebbels. He, in turn, reads out extracts from Goebbels’ published diaries recounting pleasant evenings he’d spent with her and others. Riefenstahl gets to her feet and angrily denies that Goebbels wrote any such thing, even though the evidence was lying on the table between them.The truth is that Riefenstahl lied, continually, about how involved she was with the Nazis, and how much she supported them. Bach tells of how, when Riefenstahl was still working on The Blue Light, she met her producer and former lover Harry Sokal, who was Jewish, and she thrust a copy of Mein Kampf into his hands, telling him he must read it, and adding in starry-eyed terms of Hitler: I must meet that man.And while plenty of people argue that Riefenstahl’s reputation rests upon her film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, I think we have to admit that it also rests on Triumph, which for all that it depicts some of the greatest criminals in history, and glorifies a movement which we rightly regard as being one of the worst calamities of the 20th century, is a wholly achieved work of art in ways that, if we start to think about them, we may well find rather alarming.Riefenstahl actually made three Nazi Party congress films.The first one, Victory of Faith, was shot at the 1933 Congress, and it’s very interesting to compare it to Triumph.Riefenstahl, recalling it years later in Müller’s documentary, hated it. She complains bitterly and at great length to him how she had been called in to shoot it at the last minute and she hadn’t had time to prepare, and indeed there’s an amateurish, where-am-I-meant-to-be-standing quality about some of the behaviour in Victory of which there is absolutely no trace in Triumph.It was shot only a few months before the Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler and his faction expunged the remaining leftist elements from the party, and indeed Ernst Röhm is a principal character in it, standing alongside Hitler and making speeches. After Röhm’s downfall, Hitler ordered all copies of the film destroyed, but one was found in the archives of the German Democratic Republic. (Thank you, communism, for your assiduous work in film preservation.)And yet, we can see in Victory how Riefenstahl is having a dry run at what she will bring to perfection in Triumph. In the mountain films, characters are frequently shot against dramatic skies to give them a fateful, heroic quality, and so Riefenstahl’s camera dollies along ranks of SA men, shooting them slightly from below, to get the same effect. It has what became one of her most tiresome clichés, turning up in film after film: a shot of church bells tolling against the sky.Riefenstahl later claimed that she’d been called in to shoot Victory ‘while the congress was in progress’.This was a lie. The congress took place in September, and she had been in discussion with Hitler and Goebbels since May about making a ‘Hitler film’.And yet, despite the hiccups where the Nazis themselves don’t seem to know what they’re doing, she very quickly worked out how to shoot the congress itself for maximum dramatic effect. There are countless shots in Victory that prefigure shots in Triumph, such as shots of Nazi banners fluttering from medieval buildings, and her beloved dolly shots along lines of sturdy, impassive SA- and SS-men.One of the interesting things about Victory is the physical difference between the SA men and the SS men: a lot of the SA men are middle-aged guys, lumpy specimens with that small clipped Hitler moustache designed not to interfere with the workings of one’s gas mask. By the time of Triumph, these older men are gone: either shoved off-camera by Riefenstahl’s preference for beauty, or possibly purged from the party itself.By October 1933, on the strength of the final cut of Victory, Hitler had already decided that Riefenstahl would shoot the following year’s congress.This goes against her later claim that she was informed only a week before the 1934 Congress that she was going to shoot it. There is a letter dated April 1934 in the files of UFA, the German film and television company which was under Nazi control, stating that Riefenstahl had been appointed by Hitler himself for making the film about that autumn’s party congress.There is no doubt that Riefenstahl sought, and obtained, permission from the party to integrate her crew into the Congress as much as possible.Her crew were given paramilitary-looking uniforms so that they wouldn’t stick out if caught on camera. They built a camera lift in the monumental mast behind the speaker’s podium, which caught some of the most spectacular shots of the film:This often-reproduced shot from Triumph is actually a remake of an almost identical shot in Victory, except that in Victory there were only two guys: Hitler and Röhm:A year later, it’s Hitler, Himmler and Viktor Lutze, Röhm’s successor as SA leader. The inclusion of Himmler in the 1934 salute to the dead is a sign of how power had shifted between the two films: the SS was coming up, the SA was on its way down.Tracks were constructed for dolly shots. Holes were made in the speaker’s podium so that cameras could get the crucially important angle for shooting Hitler: slightly from below. (Hitler Cam, as TV Tropes calls it.)She ended up with 61 hours of rushes.She was her own editor, and over five months, she edited it down to 107 minutes. Her enthusiasm was evident when she talked about taking an hour-long speech by Hitler and editing it down to just ten minutes to get the ‘best effect’.She crafted the film so that it would convey the Nazi Party Congress for maximum aesthetic impact.And that is what’s brilliant about it; and that is also the problem with it.She herself argued, to Ray Müller, that Triumph was not a propaganda film, because, she said, propaganda films have a voiceover which tells you what you’re supposed to be thinking of what you’re watching.She said it was an ‘art film’, no more, no less.But she undoubtedly knew what the programme for the congress would be. And despite her claim that she just pointed her camera at what went on, her camera is not an independent artistic viewpoint of the activity at the congress. Riefenstahl’s shots are integrated into the overall presentation of the congress itself. She was aiming to show the Nazi party congress in the best possible light.Speeches were reshot later. Close-ups of attentive SA and SS men were taken later.Riefenstahl did not just show up and film what happened.She helped to shape the way the Nazis presented themselves to the world.Triumph of the Will, for all its formal beauty, seems today puzzlingly unlike how it seemed to viewers in the Sixties. Pauline Kael talked about it as an ‘outrageous political epic’.But it’s also stupefyingly boring.The relentless performances of the Horst Wessel Song.The fluttering banners.The grinding speeches. The rote adulation of the Führer. The wearisome sight of men marching, marching, marching in perfect step.The total absence of gratuitous detail.The absence of humour, intimacy, randomness—anything that might take away from the spectacle of a people united behind the idea of the party and its incarnation in Adolf Hitler.We can talk about its rhythms and its flow and its grandeur all we like. But does anybody who isn’t actually a Nazi positively enjoy watching it? As opposed to maybe just admiring the skill and work that went into it?Do we come away from Triumph of the Will with renewed faith in Hitler, and in the profound inner truth of the Nazi movement? Because that was the whole point of making it.Riefenstahl’s protestations that she was making an art film are thoroughly unconvincing, even if we ignore the documentary evidence about the circumstances of its making, because the film itself is only interested in the kind of beauty and grandeur that the Nazis themselves wished to project.Triumph of the Will and Victory of Faith both place the Nazi party front and centre. This displeased the Wehrmacht, and so in 1935, Riefenstahl made a shorter film about their military demonstration in that year’s congress, Day of Freedom.I won’t go into much detail about it here, but the distance she’d travelled from Victory of Faith is remarkable. The camera swoops and moves with much more assurance. The action shots are genuinely exciting, even though much of it isn’t the actual demonstration but the rehearsals for it. Riefenstahl could probably have made a war movie, if she had wanted to.And, actually, she did want to. One of her long-term plans was to make a movie of Kleist’s Penthesilea, starring herself as the Amazon queen from Greek mythology. She liked the idea of herself riding into battle, and experiencing a grand and tragic love for Achilles, and choreographing enormous battle scenes. She even took horse-riding lessons. But the film never got further than vague plans, before WW2 got in the way.In 1936, Riefenstahl did her most ambitious and perhaps most accessible film, except on account of its enormous length: the two-part Olympia, divided into Festival of Nations and Festival of Beauty.One of the kindest things I can say about Olympia is that it’s an improvement on the Nazi party congress films in one important respect: the viewer doesn’t necessarily know what’s going to happen next.With Olympia, Riefenstahl for once had a cast of individuals who weren’t all dedicated to the single-minded promotion of the Reich. Famously, she had Jesse Owens, who took home four gold medals, and who her camera lingers over as it lingers over everyone else, admiring his grace and power no less than it does that of German athletes.The 2016 movie Race portrays Riefenstahl as a plucky young independent film-maker, determined to defy nasty Goebbels (who in that film is considerably handsomer and less superficially charming than the real man supposedly was), and that entirely reflects Riefenstahl’s own later attempt to pretend that she had always hated Goebbels and had always had trouble from him. But once more, the historical record shows otherwise.The point of Olympia was to attempt to make Germany look like a normal nation among others, not some huge military machine. And it’s easier to sympathise with the joy on the face of an athlete who’s just won, or who is congratulating a colleague, than it is to sympathise with the joy on the face of a young girl smiling at Hitler.But, damn, the film goes on. Bach points out that Riefenstahl under the Nazis had a degree of creative freedom that very few filmmakers have ever had: almost unlimited resources and money, and also final cut. She shot Olympia by having her cameramen film basically everything, and then spending months assembling 1.3 million feet of film, 250 hours of footage, into some sort of shape. (She was, again, her own editor, and that fact suggests that at least part of her technical skill was her hard-won ability to organise a gigantic mass of footage. She was not initially a great editor, but she became one.)Again, the technical achievement is remarkable. Almost all the sound recorded on location was unusable, so the entire soundtrack had to be put together separately by engineers, with every last commentary, and crowd chant, and bird call, and sound of a ball being kicked, or an athlete landing in sand, being recorded onto optical film with a maximum of eight tracks, which were then mixed down into a single track. Any mistakes meant that they had to do it all over again.The film wasn’t delivered until 1938, by which time it had assumed its two-part form. But again, the initial excitement of not always knowing the outcome soon palls, because Riefenstahl’s fascination with pretty images is often at odds with the viewer’s desire to find out just what is going on, as when she shoots the shadows in a fencing match, rather than the fencers themselves; or when she runs the camera backwards to have divers coming up out of the water. Her eye runs away with itself.And again, as with the congress films, many events are simply not what they are presented as being. She had athletes repeat their achievements for her cameras at night, when the crowds had gone, and presents them as if that’s actually Owens winning the high jump, or whatever. She seldom felt the documentarian’s responsibility to show what actually happened. (None of the wins and achievements are falsified. It’s just that you can’t always be sure that you’re actually watching so-and-so win the gold medal that they indeed won. You could be watching them ‘winning’ it later.)When the second film finally closes, on Albert Speer’s dazzling Cathedral of Light, it is…a relief.When war broke out, she signed up to be a war correspondent, and entered Poland with a film crew, in uniform, with a pistol on her belt. In the town of Konskie, she is said to have witnessed the massacre of Jewish civilians by German soldiers, an event she remembered rather differently from everyone else who was there. A picture of her taken on the day appears to bear out eyewitness reports that she was horrified by what she saw:Still, two weeks later she was filming Hitler’s victory parade in Warsaw, after which she ceased to work as a war correspondent, only a few weeks into the war itself.But a picture is only a small piece of evidence.Riefenstahl always claimed that she was not a very political person.But after seeing Hitler speak, she was excited by the promise he seemed to represent for Germany, and she was hugely impressed by the impact of the party meetings she saw, and she just wanted to put that on film. She said later that, when she found out the extent of the Nazis’ crimes, she was horrified, and bitterly regretted having supported them in the first place.Once again I’m turning to Walter Benjamin for some guidance. His essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ reached its final form in 1939, and Benjamin’s conclusion seems to me to throw light on what makes Triumph’s virtues as a film—its single-minded focus on maximum aesthetic impact—so deeply troubling:The increasing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two sides of the same process.Fascism attempts to organise the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them rights.The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these politics unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.*The violation of the masses, whom fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into serving the production of ritual values.All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations.*Emphasis in the original.Even if Riefenstahl had been telling the truth about what she was trying to do, even if she had merely sought to present the Nazi Party Congress as an object of aesthetic contemplation, that is precisely what she succeeded in doing.But that was exactly what the Nazi party wanted her to do. When we aestheticise politics, we move ineluctably towards the glorification of war and conquest.Triumph of the Will is not interested in what it all means. There is no mention that Ernst Röhm was in the previous film, and why he isn’t in this one, apart from a curt remark in one of Hitler’s speeches about how the SA had undesirable elements which are now gone. (Yeah, like, its leader, one of your most loyal comrades.)There is no mention of, say, Dachau concentration camp, which had been opened in March 1933.It simply invites you to marvel at the spectacle.We can’t watch the film the way she watched it, because even if she didn’t know then what the Nazis had already done, we do know, and we know what they would go on to do.And I would go further: after we’ve seen Triumph of the Will, there are a lot of things that we can’t watch the way we used to watch them.And that’s why the comment Beside the Nazi loving part, was she an artist of talent? is, or should be, such a haunting question.Because I think Leni Riefenstahl’s career teaches us the humiliating lesson that there are times when being ‘an artist of talent’ is simply not nearly enough.In any case, the historical record shows that she did work extensively with the Nazis on the planning and preparation of her films, and that she was not ‘forced’ to make them, by Hitler or by anyone else; and that her later claims that she was an apolitical artist trying only to realise her vision are at best culpably naive, and at worst fraudulent.She spent much of the rest of her long life energetically suppressing attempts to tell the truth about her past. She loathed Sontag’s essay. She fought with Müller during the making of his film, because he kept pressing her on difficult questions, although they ended up with a somewhat guarded friendship.But she never came clean. She went to her grave insisting that she had nothing to apologise for, and regarding the Nazis’ crimes, if she had only known, et cetera.(I haven’t even gone into her use of Gypsies from a concentration camp in her wartime romance Tiefland, which does her no credit whatever.)But I want to finish on one anecdote from Bach’s biography.When Riefenstahl’s earlier work was re-released under the Nazis, she sometimes casually cut credits for Jewish film-makers she’d worked with. Béla Balázs and Carl Mayer’s names were cut from The Blue Light, for that reason. But during the war, she sometimes used what was left of her influence to protect people.Her old cameraman Hans Schneeberger’s wife Gisela was half-Jewish, and when, in the last months of the war, Gisela Schneeberger was on a train full of wounded soldiers and launched into an angry rant about Hitler, she was arrested. Riefenstahl had a word with the local Gestapo chief, and Gisela was released.As the Allied soldiers neared Berlin, Riefenstahl fled the city and stayed with the Schneebergers for some weeks. When they heard that Hitler was dead, Gisela exulted, but Leni took to her bed weeping.The next day, the Schneebergers left for somewhere safer. Leni followed them, and found them in a hotel owned by a relative of theirs. The hotel owner told her that he didn’t take Nazis.Leni barged past him and went to the Schneebergers’ room, and demanded to know why they had abandoned her.Are you crazy? Gisela shouted at her, while her husband stood in silence.Did you really think you could stay here with us? You thought we’d help you? You Nazi slut!This is the first point in Riefenstahl’s biography where anyone seriously stands up to her.And it made this particular reader want to cheer.

‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’. Word count: 3,703+. Breaks are a vital part of the experience.It is the 19th century, chaos reigns.In the North of Africa, Egyptian nationalism, awoken by humiliations at the hand of the French and British bubbles to the surface, contesting for power are figures from her past, and possibly her future. In the Maghreb, the existing Ottoman dependencies are a den of pirates. In Morocco, Sultan Sulayman continues the work of making his kingdom modern; the memories of the glories past, present across walls and in monuments to victory from ages past, haunt him.Throughout Dar-el-Islam, desolation abounds. The Mughals, the Ottomans, the Andalusians, all were broken by the infidel “Franks”. “The end of the world is nigh, the 13th Mujaddid is soon to come”. Across West Africa, the Muslim scholars of the Fulbe, survey their region and find much to be improved. Their nomad cousins are oppressed by behaviours and laws that are unIslamic, the people are half-taught, mumbling words of prayer they do not understand and then running to bow before trees. Worse, their Kings encouraged this syncretism, despite their sworn word to submit before Allah and heed the words of his prophet. As Usman Dan Fodio crossed the Benue, on his way home, to Gobir, “there is much to be done” he thought to himself.Kassa looked down at the very dead bandits at his feet, too young to have died like this. Selassie, his favourite teacher at the monastery would no doubt be displeased at his adoption of violence, but what choice does a man have in these times, Zemana Masfint, the scribes call it; A time of judges, but no King. That should change, that will change. These were the times for it, he had heard that the Omani Sayyid had moved his capital to the Zanzibar island, that in the interior new states were rising…Rozwi, Buganda. Even those Catholic Ba-Kongo were recovering from their near-destruction by the Jaga cannibals. Indeed, these were good times for change, for peace.The Governor of the Cape was not a happy man. Those Boers were at it again, fermenting trouble in the interior, he would have to go save them from their selves and make peace with the natives…again. Damn Afrikaans! Meanwhile, in an interior kraal, a screaming child woke up the neighbourhood. It’s a boy his Mother was told, what will you name him? Shaka, she replied.Here, watch this video starring that guy from Grey’s Anatomy.I know what you’re thinking… Why do people even like the x-box? The buttons are everywhere, and the exclusives roster is rather weak. Don’t look at me, I dunno, must be an American thing, like then insisting a game where the foot meets ball for a grand total of 2 minutes, is “football”.The point of the video was to showcase choice.The two things which in my opinion determine history are “the times”, that is the general confluence of choices, arriving at a certain point and place in the time. The second and most important is "choice". The big, What-if? For example, a whole bunch of choices left me here, writing this answer at this moment; some recent, like how I’m an NFL fan just because I’ve always found FIFA boring and play Madden instead, some as far back as 1963, when my Grandfather sent my Mother to school.The 19th century was a pivotal time for the continent. The population was trending up, due to improving agricultural productivity and the literal fruits of the Atlantic exchange. Old empires were tilting, new states on the horizon. It was an era of growing state centralization, the leaders of the continent weren’t stupid, as vital cogs in the global trade system, and not ignorant of global events, or immune to the general pressures of the age. When the explorer Hugh Clapperton arrived Sokoto, he and the Caliph Muhammad discussed India. Arab traders were in contact with centralised states as far as Southern Africa. African tradition, or to be more exact, a traditional practice common to Bantu culture is to invite a guest to share news from their journeys. Thanks to the giant news dump, Mecca was, and is, Arabs were very informed. So, African leaders, both Muslim and non-Muslim, they kept up with “the times”.I’ll try to tell the story of what the continent would have been absent the European interlude. Short version, a whole lot of slavery, wars and a genocide or two thrown in, but with resulting states a lot more stable and with more global influence than at present. Now, this is all from my head, typing at a furious pace, so I apologise, there will be no specific dates, merely a sense of rolling centuries. I’ll do my best to adhere to the likely strategic decisions the states of the time would have taken, you can always ask for explanations behind my thought process in the comments section. If while reading you find a name that strikes you as familiar, rest easy, it was done on purpose. Very well then, unleash the Kraken! Or you know, let the story begin.It all started in Egypt, “civilisation”. If Africa was the dark continent, then Egypt was akin to the Pharos on the Alexandrian coast, a beacon of light drawing the fireflies of the world. They all came in their brief bursts of glory: Alexander, Caesar, Selim the Grim…in time, it drew the greatest man of the age. Napoleon’s victory beneath the shadows of the pyramids was the first of many dominoes. His victory was one more sign of the decadence ailing Islam. The pieces he left behind as he sailed to Paris and in the end, Waterloo, were picked up by one of Africa’s greatest rulers. An immigrant who was everything Alexander Hamilton dreamt he would be.Muhammad Ali was the leader of the Albanian contingent of troops sent to reclaim Ottoman suzerainty in Egypt. There he met with forces aspiring towards national strength, forces dissatisfied with Mameluke rule, he would harness those forces, and with blood and iron forge modern Egypt. The reverberations of his actions would be felt across the continent and beyond.If you’re thinking, that contains a fuck tonne of oil and sits atop one of the world’s most strategic trade routes. Fifty points! to your House of choice.For the purposes of this answer, we’ll assume that the European powers don’t let him keep Greece, handing it, its future revolutions, and the citizenship of the Greeks of Quora, back to the Ottomans. But the strictures of the question mandate that European countries have no designs on Africa. This makes France act an actual ally to Egypt. France fights Egypt’s corner, just as hard as the British fights the Ottomans. #They agree:• He withdraws from the gates of Constantinople• Signs a non-aggression pact with the Ottomans• Keeps the rule of Egypt hereditary in his family• Keeps Syria and the useless parts of Arabia, excepting the vital coastal areas. Britain occupies them, safe in the knowledge that her jewel is once again safe.If you’re thinking, Winston Churchill will be hopping mad when EAPET (Egyptian-American Petroleum Company), makes certain discoveries in those “useless parts”, you put Sherlock Holmes to shame.We’ll leave off Muhammad Ali and his considerable achievements to examine the reaction of the rest of the continent.Since the day the Romans burnt Carthage, the Maghreb states of Tunisia, Algeria and Libya (using their modern names for convenience) have had their fates always determined by the two states to their right and left. At present, the haven of the Barbary pirates, terrors of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, their trajectories do not project as high as that of Egypt or Morocco. Ottoman control has long been devolved to local potentates. #They’re fated to end up annexed by their neighbours.#Sultan Sulayman in modernising Morocco is met with the problem which has long plagued the monarchies of the nation, the nomadic tribes of the bilad al-Siba: the territory of disobedience. He, having examined the history of his state arrives at the obvious solution, imperialism. In a rousing speech before the Kaids and Shaykhs, he lays out his vision of a Greater Morocco. Seizing control of the labour, timber and gold of the Soudan, bringing more of the fertile lands of the Maghreb under Moroccan control, and seizing control of the Tunis port. To the rousing cheers of the gathered notables, he promises Andalusia…..On the first day of the first month of the second year of the 19th century, a man sat on the golden stool and became a god. What his old name was, it does not matter. With due reverence, the gathered representatives of the original states united by Osei Tutu into the Asante asked the god its name. Osei Bonsu (the whale) he replied.West Africa in the 19th century underwent its version of the Sengoku Jidai, the politics were driven, just beneath surface, by the reorientation of the region’s trade, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Interior states who took advantage prospered, and seized control of their coasts thrived. These would be the Mandinka under Samori Toure, the Asante (hence the significance of “the whale”) and Dahomey. The Sokoto caliphate, phenomenal though its rise was, would not survive. Her rulers were Millenarians, awaiting the world’s end and the final pilgrimage to Mecca. More structurally, it was a confederation of monarchs soon reduced to mutual bickering, once the original revolutionaries had died. Most importantly, if in the past, its control of the “horse route” had lent her power, now that the gun was king, it came back to bite her in the arse. The last state of the region is the Oodua Kingdom.Usman Dan Fodio’s jihad-inspired the toppling of the Ancien Regime across the Soudan. In particular, the ancient Oyo Empire, at what seemed its zenith crumbled amidst internal problems and was broken by the hands of the Caliphate. Waves of refugees streamed Southwards. With the fall of the hegemon, anarchy ensued. States jostled for control of markets and trade routes, old hurts were avenged, vassals like Dahomey free of Oyo’s yoke, went on the warpath, Eko, or Lagos as the Portuguese captains from their anchored ships called it, swelled with the human results of anarchy, getting prosperous in the process and with their export, changing forever the cultural milieu of the Americas. Refugees begat more refugees, and yet, out of the chaos…the darkness, light.Amidst mountains and caves, the previously disunited Egba were united by Sodeke, and there founded Abeokuta (a refuge from the storm), Kurumi, the most feared war chief of his time founded Ijaye, the war chiefs of old Oyo founded Ibadan on a hill overlooking the plains, finally, the Alaafin Atiba arrived to turn the village of Agoye into the town of Oyo. The Yoruba having lost their homes in the Savannah had found new ones in the forest. Alaafin Atiba entrusted the safety of their homes to the two most powerful states, and at Oshogbo, Ibadan proved itself worthy of that trust, forever ending the drive south of the Caliphate. It and Ijaye were successful in annexing the territories they had been “given” by the Alaafin. Peace seemed on the horizon, tradition and ambition, however, interfered.Alaafin Atiba had lived a colourful life, a rogue of man, but one who nonetheless had suffered much misfortune in his life. A fighting companion for most of them was his son, as death loomed, he had but one wish, that tradition be broken, and his son rather than die with him, be his successor. He entrusted his final request to his dear friend, the Aare of Ibadan. On the Alaafin’s death, the two most powerful states of the region found themselves on opposing sides. Kurunmi the old warrior, the autocrat of Ijaye stood for tradition, the war boys of Ibadan, that military republic damned the old ways, war followed. Ibadan won. Drunk with victory and absent the guiding hand of its wise old Aare who had died in the final push against Ijaye, the new Aare, the young rash Latosisa declared “a war to end all wars”. He would punish the states who had sided with Ijaye, unite the lands, ending wars forever. In opposition were the states he wished to punish, united in a coalition, the Ekitiparapo. Lending tacit support was the Alaafin, wary of an overweening Ibadan ruled by rash generals. In opposition, were the returnees of Sierra Leone, the Saro as they were called. Slaves rescued by the British anti-slavery squadrons, and manumitted slaves from South America who nevertheless chose to return home, they both found a home in a land, they called #Sierra Leone, from there, those who remembered their roots drifted to Yoruba land, most finding a home in Abeokuta.The war meant to end all wars lasted 16 years. It was called Kiriji, an onomatopoeic name for the first wars fought solely by gun-wielding infantry in the land. The 16 years had seen them go from muskets to repeating rifles, and yet, neither gun, nor artillery, not the sheer number of enemies a surrounded Ibadan faced had broken her; tens-of-thousands died, and yet, she fought them all to a standstill. #Finally, the Alaafin sent his oldest eunuch, bearing his personal standard, in the middle of no man’s land between both armies, the standard was planted. The Alaafin had put his ancient authority on the line of peace.#At the Alaafin’s palace, representatives from throughout the land met to discuss the changed situation. The good news was that the Egba had broken Dahomey’s expansion at the gates of Abeokuta. The Western and Northern frontiers were safe. The gathered delegates hailed the representatives of Abeokuta, strangely dressed men, graduates of the Fourah Bay College at Sierra Leone, where apparently the white man’s ways were taught. Gingerly, the Alaafin rose and relayed the bad news. The news filtering in from the East. The threats by the white men to themselves end the trade in slaves, and then, he spoke of their homes in the Savannah, he pointed to the bones of his Father awaiting internment at old Oyo. A lot was said, what matters are the results, recorded for posterity by the Abeokuta delegates. There, the representatives all prostrated before the Alaafin, hailed him as Kabiyesi (one who is never wrong), committed themselves to peace, and on the suggestion of the Abeokuta delegates, who told them it was the source of the White man’s strength, accepted the Alaafin as their constitutional monarch, something called democracy and themselves as one.In East Africa, Tewodros II re-establishes centralised control in Ethiopia. His battles with the Ethiopian Church over clerical privileges lose him their support, and his disastrous foreign policy ends in a British invasion, during which he commits suicide. He is succeeded by Yohannes IV, who defeats two Egyptian invasions, but dies defeating an invasion from the Mahdi. His successor Menelik II #reaches a pact with Ismail, Muhammad Ali’s successor. They delineate their borders, the Coptic church in Egypt is once more allowed to dispatch Abunas to Ethiopia, Menelik is granted a free hand in the coastal regions of the Horn of Africa, Ismail sends military advisers to aid this prospect, Menelik lends Ismail troops to aid his bloody pacification of the lower Sudan, and more Arab tribes are encouraged to migrate southwards. Stuck between the two cooperating states, the dissident tribes of the region are all but destroyed, with the remainder bound to the land, with much of the marshes of South Sudan turned to cotton fields to make up for the drop in supply during the American civil war.From the Zanzibar islands, Sayyid Said asserts control over the city-states of the East African littoral. #In the interior, the rising power of Buganda pushes its old overlord Bunyoro inwards, into the present day DRC. Egyptian engineer and explorer, AbdelRahman Amr, in a special project for the Khedive, discovers the source waters of the Nile. This magnificent scientific achievement inspires the formation of Nile Congress, a diplomatic congress modelled on its European counterpart. In the wake of the diplomatic congress, follow British, French and Egyptian industrialists. The East African interior is fully opened to commerce, a rail line from Alexandria to Mogadishu is completed. The Suez Canal is constructed, increasing Egypt’s strategic value and diplomatic standing. An invitation to the European Congress follows…In Southern Africa, the Great Trek and the Mfecane end with antagonistic states across the region, but two supreme; The Zulu and the Afrikaans. The Mfecane equally leads to the formation of the different states of Central Africa.The 19th century equally sees the unification of Madagascar.#As the 19th ended, the borders of the states of Africa had roughly emerged. Most were sprawling, empires covering millions of square miles. Central Africa was the exception, the Mfecane had led to the formation there, of a collective of small states, jealous of their independence, keen to play off the Zulu behemoth on their southern flanks against the Kongo to their West, and the Rozwi and Bunyoro neighbours to their East. Egypt was the most advanced, stretching from Syria, across the Arabian peninsula, all the way down to a border she shared with Ethiopia, Bunyoro and Buganda. Possessing a brown water navy, but a first-class army, it was the continent’s undoubted hegemon.The 19th century equally saw the entrance of Christian missionaries, invited in West Africa by the Saro and heading up from Southern Africa via the Cape. These, of which the most famous were David Livingstone, Henry Townsend and Samuel Ajayi Crowther converted many, and most importantly, played a role in the mitigation of the internal slavery. Bible, plough and #Adam Smith tracts in hand, they were able to convince the monarchs of the region that the plantation systems they were using to meet the commodities demand of the legitimate trade was not effective. The collapse of slavery in Europe, and then post the civil war, in the Americas, in addition to diplomatic pressures led to wholesale manumissions of slaves across the continent.#On the 14th of February 1944, on a battleship, anchored in the Suez Canal, Farouk, Deputy of the Messenger of Allah, Keeper of the holy places of Mecca and Medina, Honourary President of the Nile Congress and Khedive of Egypt rose from his prayers. Turning his back to Mecca, he went on deck. Waiting for him seated, was an old man in a wheelchair, the most powerful man in the world. They discussed many things: oil, the coming victory, the Atlantic Charter, the United Nations… They parted ways that day, their two nations did not.The key events of the 20th century. Being cognizant of the fact that I’m 3,000 words in… bullet points galore!WW1• #The African nations due to the virtue of proximity have friendlier relations with the Western European powers. Plus Egypt emerged as a rival to Turkey’s caliphal authority. WW1 plays out same old, except instead of Lawrence of Arabia, you get Lawrence of Egypt. Rather than Arab tribes and guerrilla actions, you have a third front and a modern army. Egypt sides with the Entente, in a two front war, and with Egypt advancing from Syria, Gallipoli likely works. Ataturk’s Turkey is dismembered by the Allies and the Greeks, with all the tension that will cause in the hypothetical future. Egypt gets Iraq for her troubles. Without the colonial levies, the European powers, however, suffer more casualties, their anger at Germany leads to Versailles. The Russian revolution still happens.• #The depression and the examples of the USSR triggers a series of attempted Marxist revolutions in the Dahomey and Zulu states (the historically most autocratic). The suppression by state and allied authorities is brutal. Hitler comes to power. During the Spanish civil war, Morocco pounces on her contested territories with Spain. Mussolini deterred from an invasion of Ethiopia by the Nile Congress, binds himself closer to Hitler, thus the Axis.• #WW2. Same old-same old. Caveats: coming to power on revanchist lines, the fascist Franco sides with the Axis, pushing Morocco into the allied camp. War ends with the Greene-Almyantris agreement leaving 24% of the Iberian peninsula in Moroccan hands. A significant cause of tension for years to come.• #Egypt gets France’s seat on the UN Security council. The Free French are forced to fight from the British Isles.• #No State of Israel. Just no way I can see it happening. Israel was brought into existence by the hands of Israelis, its survival assured in the face of invasion by multiple Arab states. In this scenario, it would instead have to contend with a unified state, a winner in two world wars, a UN Security Council member and the world’s oil superpower. I get the sense that given a choice between oil and Israel, oil wins. The Jews of the region stay Egyptian citizens.African states profit as neutral suppliers of war materiel across two wars.• Cold War increases American influence across the continent. The Autocratic regimes of the continent side with America against the Soviet revolutionaries. American influence, however, aids market, if not political liberalisation.• Apartheid remains the official policy of the Afrikaans Republic. This triggers a full-scale migration of blacks to black majority states in the region. Tension is palpable in one of the new world’s trouble spots.• Cold War ends…The End of History.The 21st century is too soon to tell, that and 3500 words in, I’m pretty sure nobody reads this to the end. If you did, bravo! Use your imagination to think through the effects of globalisation on the continent? Liberalism or a Reactionary backlash, you decide!Hashtags are meant to indicate alternative history scenarios. Thanks for reading.Achtung! Ad…tis…ment: Interested in the entirety of Africa’s actual history? Then you might want tomake the “choice” to check out my Patreon page. Still in the boring phase of setting out the methodology behind African History, but the swashbuckling achievements and what if scenarios are drawing ever closer.

A bit about my tripI'm a total Eat Pray Love, Hero with a Thousand Faces knock off, completely unoriginal. I left the corporate and start-up world for a stint to do a bit of cliche soul-searching for 6 months. It has taken me across 4 continents and 6 countries. I traveled alone, as a 30 year-old, single women.It's the best investment I've ever made in anything, and it was in myself and my own happiness. Whether you are a woman, or man; single or taken; old or young, I promise you the return on investment on a trip like this is worth it.A bit about me.Over the past couple years I helped get Little Black Bag, a fashion ecomm site with a social gaming angle off of the ground. Before that I've worked in creative doing everything from interior graphics, product development, book design, illustration and international advertising for clients like BCBG, Skechers, Disney, and even the Oprah Network. I worked an average of 50-80 hours a week.I started getting weary of the grind to work more, consume more and felt an unhealthy balance of workaholism and the American Dream. I realized my motivations were changing and I wasn't interested in the money, status or having any more stuff. Once my priorities changed, I had a hard time finding the same hustle I once had.A few wonderful people in my life including my business partner, my mom and a dear friend all suggested a spirit quest or sabbatical of sorts. It was something I had been deeply considering for years but was too scared to do because I didn't want to or know how to leave my comfy life.Through some big changes, I finally found the resolve to leave a relationship that wasn't right, sell most of my earthly possessions, except for some clothes, and move out of the condo near the beach. What I gained was an enormous amount of freedom.I began a completely unplanned America cross-country road trip and international journey.Off I went without a real plan. It was more of culmination of 4 years of thinking about doing it, wanting to do it, and then finally deciding to just do it. It turns out all you need to do is buy a ticket and then you kick your ass into gear to do the rest.It's been the most important thing I have ever done with my life and I'd love to help with resources regarding how others can do it too.What kind of skills do you need?I would say the big skill is finding the grit to follow through on the desire to do it. Once you really decide to do something, you somehow find the way. I don't know if that's actually a skill, but it is certainly a necessity to do this kind of journey.The ability to do some online research will be helpful as 80% of travel information can be found on the good ole internet.Cultivating openness and building relationships has been a huge part of the success of my trip. I'm open to meeting people in all walks of life and have real conversations. People can be truly incredible. Getting to know people who you might not have otherwise known, was more important than anything I ever saw including the Igazu Falls or the Colca, the deepest canyon in South America which are both profound and awe inspiring.They've guided me through their cities, gave me hugely beneficial advice, introduced me to local food, let me stay with them in their homes and provided me the inspiration or energy to keep going even if I got exhausted on the road. I learned to not be afraid of people of or immediately judge what's new or different culturally.Flexibility to roll with the punches is also important. Things change every day, whether its bus schedules from place to place or bad weather messing up your plans. You will get lost, you will get frustrated, you will get sick. This stuff comes and goes and is usually rewarded shortly after with an amazing discovery, the best meal of your life or a new friend that changes your perspective. So just go with it and let go a little. Trying to control every aspect will make your trip a miserable chore rather than an exciting journey.Language learning isn't necessary but I'd Highly highly encourage it. Your travels will be more rewarding if you know a little of the language or are willing to learn it. You don't have to be a pro, although it helps. Start day one. Have a dictionary, learn the basic alphabet and pronunciation, keep a little journal with new words. You have a lot of time on your hands traveling so you might as well learn a little something. Language reflects thoughts and cultures and learning Spanish, and the basics of Quechua, Portuguese and Korean has given me insights about people and belief systems that observation alone would never given me.Listen to yourself. This one sounds sort of dumb and basic, but I really think getting in touch with instincts helps on the trip. Don't go down that road that feels wrong. I believe this insight to look within has kept me safe from unsavory environments or characters. I think hearing my needs put me where I want to be when I'm supposed to be there. I asked myself daily what I wanted, what I was learning and why I was there. I kept a journal to focus my energy to better recognize my voice.How much money you ask?Where, When, for How long, and How do you travel are the questions you should ask.Budget completely depends on where you go, how you travel, the duration of the trip and if you can work while you are on the road. Costs will will range enormously depending on if you want to do excursions or tour adventures, meander across countries or continents, or just live somewhere new. It will also vary if you research costs and can negotiate.Are your tastes higher end or are you happy living in a 6-person dorm hostel eating street food? Can you work on the road to supplement your living or are you going to be draining savings? These are questions you need to ask yourself to start developing a budget or a plan.Regarding my trip, here are some cost benchmarks.South America is relatively cheap. I opted for Peru, Boliva and a bit of Brazil for my trip. Peru cost me about $25-35 a day to live more than comfortably at $12-15 hostels a night, Bolivia cost about $12-15, where hostels ranged from $8-10 a night, and Brazil which cost substantially more cost about $40-50 a day because I went out more, did more tour activities and the cost of living is higher.If you are brave enough there are a lot of places around the world where things aren't commercialized, and you can do some incredible adventure activities for next to nothing. This can be affected by your language ability because it becomes much easier when you can communicate with locals.Some of the most beautiful hikes I went on cost nothing. I'd take a car through the Andes which cost 33 cents and the hike was free. The cave entrance at Huagapo Peru was 5 soles or less than 2 dollars including the tour guide, and I got to stay in huge, mostly undiscovered the cave named after the tears of the mountain gods, alone to meditate in the darkness and write by the river for hours.Where tourism has become an organized industry, expect to pay more- Ex: Uyuni in Bolivia cost $100-120 bucks to do a 3-4 day all inclusive excursion into the salt flats and the volcanic desert via SUV with 5 other travelers. Machu Picchu Camino Inka trek cost more like $400 for 4 days and 3 nights in tents with 15 internationals.In many places in South America, standard buses can only cost 20 bucks to drive across the country. As I briefly mentioned, if you travel in a localized region you can take collectivos/combis/micros (locals who own a vehicle and do a bus-like service privately, simply arrive at the terminal area, put a sign in their window and wait for their car to fill up) for less than a dollar for a hour ride into the country side. Note that this kind of transportation can leave you smashed in a small conversion van with 20 other locals or in a station wagon filled with 9 people for 15 min - 2 hours. They may or may not have showered in a couple weeks, but luckily there are always windows you can roll down.It is important to note here, that I did specifically avoid some countries like Chile and Argentina for monetary reasons. The US charges huge fees and tariffs for everyone to visit us, so the rest of the world has reciprocated this, which means only Americans have to pay an extra 100-200 dollars to enter a country even if it's just a bus ride through. I totally understand the reasons on both ends (the US fee and the countries reciprocity) but this is such a short-sited policy, its infuriating. If anyone needs a good global education, its us, Americans, the superpower that exports a ton of awful, dumb, misinformed culture. And 200 dollars, which could be the budget for 1-2 weeks of travel just to enter a country is ridiculous, especially when that money could be going to the local economy. My only rant :)Once I got to London, it obviously cost a lot more to live. Same with the developed portion of Asian, namely, S. Korea. (This part of the trip came about because of a lucky chance. I couldn't find a one-way return flight to the States for less than $2000 from Rio at the time, but I got a round trip from Rio > London > Seoul > London > Philly for $1200. Thanks CHEAP FLIGHTS | Find Airline Tickets & Discount Airfares | Fly.com)I decided to give CouchSurfing a whirl. Through Europe and Asia, the short part of my trip (only one month combined) I stayed in 4 places total for no more than 3-4 nights at a time. It was one of the greatest and sometimes most random experience of my life. You learn that people can be good and open. Every experience was completely different, so if you try it once and aren't sold, try it a couple times more to give it a fair shot. Sometimes it can be slightly uncomfortable based on a personality difference or strange living arrangement.Not paying for a $20-30 hostel a night was a great way to save some money. You also get an insider view of the country which was a lovely bonus gift. I got to explore new neighborhoods I wouldn't have otherwise found, was introduced to new cuisine I didn't even know existed or may not have been gutsy enough to try, and got to ask some questions about the culture to someone living locally for an extended period of time.It was a wonderful way to travel, though I wouldn't want to do it the entire sabbatical. Having privacy in nicer hotel rooms from time to time helps you recharge your batteries. Staying in social hostels can be absolutely fun and rewarding and you can find travel buddies to explore when solo wandering gets lonely or boring.Food in Europe and Asia range enormously. You can find street food vendors, shop in grocery stores and markets and cook for yourself which is the frugal way to go 2-3 dollars a meal, or you can go eat a dinner for 50-200 dollars. It's totally up to you. I'd encourage a little bit of both to get a full sense of a place if you can.At the end of the day travel can cost as much or as little as you want it to. You have to know what you are looking for and what is comfortable to you. There were times I wanted to really live at the minimum I could spend (a 5 dollar hostel and bought 3 dollars worth of food at the market.) There were other moments through the trip I realized I have an appreciation for some luxurious comforts and the finer things in life and I'd stay a couple nights at a beach front 5 star place and spend 150 dollars on dinner. It was a balance for me. I didn't have a hard set budget, instead, it was a range I wanted to spend and an idea of what I wanted to have left over at the end of the trip. I'd spend more some days and then pull back others. It all ended up working out just fine.How I Paid for My TripFor me, I used the money from my savings, my retirement, the money from selling my belongings and my tax return. I wrote a full blog post about how I had the money do what I did if you are more interested in exactly what I did to save for the trip by all means pop by the blog and read more. I didn't save specifically for the trip but I also don't have much to go home to financially. It can be a risk you take with this.Volunteer OpportunitiesThe funny thing you realize when you are traveling, is that you really only NEED food, water, transportation and shelter. Those things are all things you can get cheaply or even free. Everything else is just gravy.There are a lot of wonderful volunteer and work options on the road to help fund the trip and cover the basics. Many backpacker hostels allow you to stay for free if you work for a stint. Some friends in Rio and Cuzco lived in a hostel, set up events, worked the bars, answered emails and other administrative jobs.EcoTrulyYoga camps will feed you vegetarian meals, give you 2 yoga classes for a day and give you housing for 30 USD a day. This was a great opportunity to get fit and healthy and meet some very interesting people. These camps are all over the world. I stayed in one in Lima Peru and it was wonderful.I stayed at a the Beopjusa Buddhist Monastery and Temple in central South Korea and ended up helping them with basic marketing. I helped out with SEO, built out a wikitravel page, photographed the grounds, wrote reviews, updated their site, and reached out to vegetarian and volunteer travel databases for them. It was supposed to be cleaning and other odds and ends, but once they found I out I could use a computer and write in English they were happy to use my skills accordingly. The gave me starlit chanting sessions, tea with monks, hikes, 3 vegetarian meals a day, and even paid me at the end. (a normal stay is $50USD a night.) I stayed for a week for free.There are a ton of other options like this. A lot of Americans decide to teach English in China or Korea for a year. The pay is actually reasonable and I've met some folks paying off their entire debt from private university education because the cost of living is low and the job pays for housing.The best thing I can tell you for finding out options is start with a google search like: with "Volunteer in 'Country you'd like to Visit'". Yup, that easy. Read, cross reference, and then reach out by email to find out what your options are.Learn other ways of making extra money.Some people put their homes up on AirBnB or Craigslist to do short term rentals. Just have a trusted friend around that can handle some of the details like welcoming people and providing a key. Also you might not be available because wifi in certain areas can be sparse.Monetize a current blog you keep, sell assets online like stock photography or illustration, or review hostels on the road. If you are willing, there are always ways to make moola. Abroad, what would be seemingly worthless in the western world goes very far. When you talk to other travelers, you learn a lot of ways people have made money while traveling, so while it's a huge risk to some, just go and have the faith in yourself that you can figure it out. Most of this, I learned on the road.Remember that if you are a writer, a lawyer who reviews contracts, designer or have any other such online, projects-based job you can freelance and charge their US rates and live on international costs of living. I did a bit of writing, designing and other creative consulting services while on the road. This takes prep work while you are in country, you can't just magically have a freelance career. If you want one, do it already.When saving for the trip many people take on a second job whether it's freelance or waitressing during the weekends. This hustle can be humbling and the best thing is to not have an ego about how to make it happen, You may think, I'm a Sr. level person, I can't be seen working at a coffee shop or be found moonlighting. Well, then, don't go on a trip then. If you want to make extra money, do it. Or don't spend the money you make. Its that simple.I think many of the professionals on this site would be astounded at how little you need to travel and live. Most kids I met on the road who saved enough to travel worked jobs not much more than minimum wage, but moved in with family or friends and just cut their bills so they could save. I personally liked the reset button of what I think life costs.Summery: paying for your tripDo some research about where you want to go, the cost of travel, save for that amount of time and add 20% to stay on the safe side to give yourself wiggle room, then save. When you get there, stick to your budget :)If you are scrappy like me, just make it happen, freelance, couch surf, make friends, volunteer or whatever you want to do to make it more of an adventureConsideration in your budgetObvious:Accommodations (couch surf, volunteer, hostels or hotels)Food (markets, street food or going out)Activities (planned excursions and general going out),Transportation (from country to country (flights/trains), city to city (flights/ buse/boats or even cars) or within a city (metro/taxis/buses)Less ObviousGifts - small hosts gifts like pens in South America, or coffee in Asia go farGifts for friends and family back homeLaundry (services - usually only 1-3 dollars a load), most times I hand washedLost or stolen replacements (I lost 2 cameras. yes 2- 1 lost battery that was irreplaceable and one camera was stolen on a bus. You Will lose things on the road. Not having a place for your things, missing daily rituals, matched with having to move from hostel to hostel, being jet lagged and or rushed to catch last minute buses makes even the most responsible person lose some basics from time to timeUnexpected activities (like a last minute unplanned trip through the Bogs of Pantanal in Brazil or a Salsa Club entry fees.)Toiletries on the road rather than carry around huge heavy plastic bottles.Emergency money for health or travel problemsI kept a daily budget. I just noted down what I do, where, when and calculate how much it is in American dollars using the XE currency app. It's easy to lose track when you are using play money and exchange rates shift from 1USD :7 Bolivians to 1.5 Pounds to 1 USD. Cost of things become very relative so this practice was grounding and became a nice little chronological diary of my activities.Remember that bills continue existing so look at deferring loans, getting ahead of them and saving. Turn off things like hulu, netflix, smart phone plans. In your savings process, pay off the high interest loans so you don't have to worry about them. Pay off your credit cards.How much planning is really necessary?There are a million things you can do to plan but I don't recommend overdoing it.Pretrip, do research to find the best plane ticket price and get general sense how much it will cost to live. Look at your air mile or hotel points, see if they get you a free ticket or a stay somewhere. This sounds ridiculous, but look at the world map and really see where things are located. Most peoples international geography knowledge isn't quite honed so you should have an idea of what countries are next to each other and how far away things really are.I got also on Pinterest and and did some Google image searches to check out really beautiful places I didn't want to miss and those spots created a general framework for where I wanted to go.Big activities like Machu Picchu require reservations. They only allow a certain amount of people on the trail a day and it fills up fast. It's also closed for a couple months of the year for rainy season and maintenance. I wanted to climb Machu Picchu for my 30th birthday, so I had to book it 2-3 months in advance.Check out immunization needs and visa requirements once you choose countries. You don't want to get to a country to be turned away. Notify banks about your exit. Make copies of important documents. Just try not to miss the basics that will make your life easier.During the trip, to plan my week I hang at a coffee shop for an hour or so the day I get somewhere new just to get a sense of where I what I want to check out, what's available and a note few things I absolutely don't want to miss.Booking a day at a hostel when I travel somewhere new, just to get my bearings, can be helpful. I usually do this only the day before. This will keep you from feeling stranded somewhere without a place to stay or getting in late and trying to wake someone up to give you a room. Otherwise, I don't like to prebook much of anything.I like to explore the area once I'm there to see if I want to move neighborhoods. It's great to stay at hostels off the main path once you get a sense of a new town. The managers of these places are always local small business owners. Not only do I love supporting the local economy rather than the corporate conglomerate as a general rule, but people who's heart (and savings) are behind a place will make the stay really intimate and go over and above to make sure you are comfortable.You could also look into staying with friends or CouchSurfing (which I mentioned earlier) ahead of time which will take some planning and correspondence.Another major thing I do during my trip, is get a local map of the transit system, city and region I'm in as soon as I get there, which can be found at hostels, tourist or information offices. I also preload Google Maps of the area on my smart phone so if I don't have wifi, I can still see where I'm located and use the compass because GPS works without internet. This trick is amazing, I found out about it the first week of my trip from a smart Danish traveler who had been on the road 6 months.I am an example of not planning much. Generally, I just wander or ask questions to locals about where I should go next. A trip like this is about freedom and adventure, not a to do list. I haven't had a guide book, itinerary or travel planner and I don't think you need one. It's been incredibly fruitful leaving things really open.My favorite way to travel to do is jump on a bus and see where I end. I also love riding the metro, popping up and seeing if I want to stay and meander. It's important to remember, that if you got somewhere, you get always come back the same way, so fearless exploration is the way to go. Unplanned venturing becomes easy with some street smarts and openness to going along with things you might not normally do, like hitchhiking on the islands of Korea or going to a tango club with a local girl you met while working at a Buddhist monastery.I will reiterate, the most important part to mention about planning is that the only thing you actually NEED is a ticket there. When you decide that, you just figure out the rest.To make life a little easier, do some research about what to pack will help you be a little more prepared on the road. Your belongings become very important when you have to carry them and they are all you have. You can always buy things on the journey but the basics below have been a huge help to me. This is a general list, so when planning your own adventure take into consideration weather, altitude, cultural norms and activities.Here's my Basic PackList -I'm an LA girl who managed to travel with only a carryon and a very small backpack.FlashlightNotebook & pen2 debit cards (yes two. have a backup, international arms infamously eat cards and banks make it miserable to send a new one)CameraSmartphone/tablet with music and content loaded (you can't stream like you can in major US cities) international wifi-readySunscreenKnife/multiuse toolEarphonesEarplugs - for loud hostels and long loud bus ridesPadlock and Key -for lockersChargersUniversal ChargerTravel Towel- microfiberExfoliating synthetic washcloth (microfiber cloths don't scrub you dry like terry cloth so you'll want something with a little grit. Plus, sometimes you get dirty on the roadReusable water bottle - I like the collapsible kind because it takes up less spaceBug RepellentBasic medkit (simple stuff, bandaids, neosporin, a wrap and some advil)Lighter /Matches - for candles, or starting a fire or in my case lighting incense in stinky hostels.Hat (s) - winter and or baseball capSunglassesLayered clothing - make sure it can mix and match and synthetic so it dries fastthermals, leggings, light jeans, clothes that can go from day to night (button downs for guys, light dresses for girls) something you can wear in a range of settings.Minimal underwear - wash it on the road.Rain jacketWool socksHiking shoes/sandals/ a pair of shoes that can be worn in a range of activities (ballet flats for girls, dark shoes for guys) so you can go out to a nice restaurant or bar or walk around a city without looking like a total tourist.Day packOptional /Activity based/ gender specificBaby wipesCipro (flaxen)- I'm not big into antibiotics, but this has saved me a few times! Its a cure all travelers sickness pill and you only need one.Pashmina scarves - 1 light one heavier can be used in 100 ways.Aluminum mug and sporkMakeup - minimalEye mask - to catch up on sleep. sometimes 18 hour bus rides require some shut eye or when you need a good nap mid day. (the freedom of being able to take a nap is just amazing. Yeah for sabbaticals )Toiletries - minimalBasic food - you can get it on the road but i liked having some nuts, granola bar or drink mix when the water tasted foul from a potable tableWater potable tablets or UV water cleanerKey ResourcesRead up on some travel blogs. These people are professional travelers and they've been most places and faced most obstacles all over the world. They've been a great resource for packing, getting from point A to point B or advice about what to do if you are in a jam.TravelWiki has been a good resource as well. I tend to stay away from Trip Advisor. I think most of the reviews are pretty generic and point you to the same corporate Lonely Planet places.Looking back, small trips also really helped me prepare for a long solo one. Start with small bites- take an unplanned road trip away for a long weekend. Camp, or CouchSurf. Pack as little as you can and see what you don't use. Get a taste of the travel life see what you really need to live on; it's surprisingly less then you'd imagine. See how you travel. Travel with a friend and see what it's like to travel together (a good travel partner can make your break your trip.) See how you handle the stress of jet lag, not knowing the language or being unfamiliar with a culture somewhere. Every person is different so you have to know yourself to plan for something like this.You asked what this was like giving up everything and doing it.It's terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. Leaping into the unknown is scary as hell, but with the biggest risks comes some of the greatest rewards. New business ideas, new skills, new inspiration, new friends, new beliefs in yourself come to you easily and openly. Grand stories happen on the road, that's why there are so many movies, songs, books and poetry about it.Widened perspective, new found appreciation for the small things and being able to be proud of the fact that you did something most people just talk about are all game changers. The best and the brightest have done it. You become the Hero and one of the thousand faces is yours.