Swiss Family Moser

My Opa in his best Swiss Family Robinson outfit

So this is not technically art, but when I was at my parents’ house over the holidays, I discovered a whole series of photo albums that used to belong to my Opa – my grand father on my dad’s side – that chronicled the different traveling he did when he was in his mid or late-twenties. He fought in WWII (plus he was Swiss so he legally had to be in the army for a stint) and then when the war ended he and a friend decided to go on a trip through southern Europe and then travel across the entire length of Africa.

Yes, this is a hand-drawn map of Switzerland that is at the start of the album.
My Opa was sort of organizationally-minded to an extreme/insane level.

He also did crazy things like save their first streetcar ticket out of Zurich
and document the exact time they left (2:45 pm)

While I knew logically that this trip had happened – especially since my Nana, my dad’s mom, is South African and she and my Opa met because of this trip and my dad was born in Zambia, where she was living at the time – I don’t think it had ever occurred to me how crazy it was for my grandfather to hitch hike and motorcycle through Africa in 1949 until I saw the visual evidence of it.

I mean, for one, they were staying in these tiny one-man tents on the ground for most of the trip.

Also note the amazing photo of the monkey and cat playing.

And they did a lot of their traveling by either finding rides, or renting or buying motorcycles or bicycles and carrying all their stuff in enormous canvas backpacks.

He also has the most incredible and surreal photos of things I will never get to see. All of his captions are in German, but some sections are labeled geographically and there is a section entirely in Rwanda, mostly showing wild water buffalo and small shoeless children running around.

Although I have some nagging concerns about the colonial gaze that’s pretty apparent in all of his pictures, and know that part of my fascination with them is totally a part of this colonial heritage, I can’t help but be sort of won over by their fantastical imagery. It seems incredible to me that my Opa, the conservative man who used to quiz me on how the rotation of the earth made the seasons happen while he drove me to my ballet lessons in a Volvo station wagon and would not go for dinner anywhere except IHOP (yes, the International House of Pancakes), was in these places and was crazy enough or brave enough to leave his home for a year and just wander through Africa. These are things I know I wouldn’t be able to do.

I don’t know why, today, I felt it was necessary to finally put them up. Maybe because on a day when I’m terrified about talking in front of a group of 30 people, I needed to be reminded that I am part of a lineage of nutty Swiss people who are anal enough to plan out their entire trip beforehand, complete with hand-drawn maps, and document the crap out of them, but are brave enough to see them through in the end.