Somy Solomon
For centuries, Africa has lived in Kerala’s imagination through stories of trade, migration, adventure, and opportunity. Yet, when we look closely at the travelogues, memoirs, and popular narratives that shaped this connection, one pattern becomes unmistakable: most of these accounts are written through a male gaze.
The Indian Ocean world, often celebrated as a space of mobility and exchange, has been narrated largely through men’s journeys — merchants, sailors, traders, missionaries, and later, male migrant workers. Their travel writings mapped Africa as a land of labour, danger, exoticism, or conquest. Africa became a stage where masculinity was performed: the adventurous traveller, the successful migrant, the explorer of unknown worlds. But what happens when women begin to tell these stories?
Women’s gaze
In recent years, modern vloggers, tourists, and hitchhiking women travellers from Kerala and India have begun to challenge old stereotypes. Their digital narratives are breaking away from colonial-era tropes and patriarchal travel traditions.
