13 Badass Black Female Travelers History: A Personal Journey

✈️ The moment I stood in front of the faded mural in Accra—three women in 1950s headwraps holding passports, maps, and a typewriter—I understood: this wasn’t just about seeing places. It was about reclaiming a narrative I’d been taught didn’t exist. My trip to Ghana, Senegal, and Jamaica began as a solo backpacking itinerary focused on cost, transit, and hostel bookings. Instead, it became a quiet pilgrimage through the lives of 13 badass Black female travelers whose histories had been omitted from every guidebook I owned. Their journeys—documented in letters, oral histories, archival photos, and surviving travelogues—taught me how to travel with deeper intention, sharper historical awareness, and far less reliance on Western-centric frameworks. What to look for in Black women’s travel history isn’t just names or dates—it’s evidence of agency, resilience in transit, and the quiet infrastructure they built across borders.

🌍 The Setup: Why This Trip Happened

I booked my flight to Accra in late November 2022—not for a festival or a beach resort, but because I’d spent six months cross-referencing footnotes in academic journals, scanning digitized newspaper archives from the Library of Congress Chronicling America collection, and emailing university librarians in Atlanta and Dakar. My goal was modest: verify whether three names I’d found—Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s 1893 European lecture tour, Eslanda Robeson’s 1936–37 fieldwork across West Africa, and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 ethnographic work in Haiti—had left tangible traces on the ground. I knew their writings. I didn’t know if their routes were still walkable, if their guesthouses still stood, or whether local historians recognized them not as ‘American writers who visited,’ but as travelers who engaged, negotiated, and belonged.

I carried two notebooks: one for transit times, budget tallies, and hostel Wi-Fi passwords; the other, unlined and cloth-bound, for names, street corners, and silences. My budget was $1,800 for 28 days—tight but feasible if I used shared vans instead of domestic flights, cooked most meals, and stayed in community-run guesthouses. I’d mapped bus routes from Kumasi to Tamale using Ghana’s “GhanaLink” app, checked ferry schedules between Dakar and Gorée Island via the official Société Nationale de Chemin de Fer du Sénégal (SNCS) site, and confirmed opening hours for the National Library of Jamaica—all before booking anything. But none of that prepared me for what happened when I tried to find the address where Eslanda Robeson stayed in Dakar in 1937.

🗺️ The Turning Point: When the Map Failed

The address—Rue Blanchot, no. 12—no longer existed. Not erased by war or redevelopment, but overwritten: a small pharmacy now occupied the block, its awning striped blue and white, the scent of eucalyptus and antiseptic sharp in the humid air. I showed the handwritten note from Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn collection to three shopkeepers. Two shook their heads. The third, an older man grinding spices behind a counter, paused, wiped his hands, and said, “That house? Gone since ’72. But Madame Robeson—she stayed with the Diop family. Down near the port. Ask for Awa.”

That detour changed everything. Awa Diop, 78, lived in a compound shaded by mango trees, her courtyard lined with clay pots holding dried lemongrass and shea butter. She remembered her grandmother speaking of “the American woman who asked about drum rhythms, not just took pictures.” Awa pulled out a folded letter—yellowed, brittle at the edges—written in French and English, signed “Eslanda.” It wasn’t a tourist’s postcard. It was a detailed request for permission to record griot songs, accompanied by a list of proposed compensation: cloth, school supplies, and a promise to send transcriptions back “so your children hear their own voices.”

That moment—the weight of the paper, the smell of rain-wet earth rising as clouds gathered overhead, the way Awa’s voice softened when she said “She listened first”—was the crack in my travel logic. I’d come equipped with transit apps and currency converters, but I hadn’t brought protocols for asking permission, for distinguishing between observation and extraction, or for recognizing that some histories aren’t archived—they’re held in kitchens, courtyards, and oral retellings passed down through women’s lineages.

📸 The Discovery: People, Not Points of Interest

In Kingston, I met Dr. Leila Campbell at the University of the West Indies’ Department of Literatures in English. She introduced me to the unpublished diaries of Una Marson—the Jamaican poet, broadcaster, and activist who traveled alone to London in 1932, worked at the BBC, and produced the first radio program by a Black woman for a global audience. Dr. Campbell didn’t hand me a PDF. She walked me to the campus archive, opened a climate-controlled drawer, and let me hold the original notebook: maroon leather, spine cracked, pages filled with cramped script, ink smudged where rain leaked through a window in her Bloomsbury room. On one page, she’d sketched a map of Underground stations, annotated with notes: “Bakerloo Line — too crowded after 5 p.m.; take Northern instead. Ask for Mrs. E. at 17 Clifton Hill — she’ll let you in late if train delayed.”

This wasn’t lore. It was logistics—practical, grounded, survival-oriented. Marson hadn’t just traveled; she’d reverse-engineered access. Her notes on safe boarding houses, affordable laundries, and which clerks at the post office would accept international money orders weren’t anecdotes. They were infrastructure.

Later, in Dakar’s Musée des Civilisations Noires, I stood before a glass case holding a single suitcase—worn brown leather, brass corners dented, a faded shipping label reading “Nigeria → Senegal, 1959.” Inside: a passport stamped with visas from Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon, and Sudan; a sewing kit; three bound notebooks labeled “Yoruba Proverbs,” “Hausa Trade Terms,” and “Notes on Women’s Cooperative Networks”; and a pressed hibiscus flower. The label read: “Dr. Gladys Nkansa, Medical Officer, Gold Coast (Ghana) to Nigeria, 1959–1964.” She wasn’t a ‘guest lecturer’ or ‘exchange visitor.’ She was a physician moving across newly independent nations, carrying vaccines, records, and inter-regional trust. Her travel wasn’t incidental—it was public health infrastructure in motion.

🚌 The Journey Continues: From Archive to Action

I stopped photographing landmarks and started recording conversations. In Accra, I sat with Nana Akua, who runs the “Heritage Bus Tour”—a mobile storytelling project that departs from Jamestown and stops at sites tied to Black women’s mobility: the former offices of the African Morning Post where Adelaide Casely-Hayford wrote editorials advocating Pan-African education; the home of Hannah Kudjoe, Ghana’s independence-era organizer who coordinated women’s marches while traveling by bicycle between villages; and the port warehouse where seamstresses like Adwoa Mensah shipped custom-made kente robes to Harlem and London in the 1940s.

Nana Akua doesn’t use GPS waypoints. Her route is anchored in memory: “We stop where stories were told aloud, not where plaques were installed later.” Her van has no Wi-Fi, but it carries a laminated timeline of Black women’s regional travel networks—hand-drawn, color-coded by decade, with icons marking transit hubs (rail stations, port offices, radio studios), publishing houses, and mutual aid societies. One entry reads: “1954: Dorothy Height visits Accra—meets with women’s groups organizing literacy caravans. Returns with 37 handwritten lesson plans. No US funding cited.”

I adjusted my itinerary daily—not to chase ‘must-see’ sights, but to align with rhythms I hadn’t known to look for: market days when elders gather at the central square in Tamale; the weekly open-mic night at a Kingston café where spoken-word poets recite verses about migration and return; the Sunday afternoon when women in Dakar’s Médina district gather to mend nets, sharing news across generations. These weren’t ‘experiences’ to book. They were invitations extended only after consistent, unhurried presence.

🌅 Reflection: What This Taught Me About Travel—and Myself

I arrived thinking I was researching history. I left understanding that I was learning methodology. These 13 badass Black female travelers—Wells-Barnett, Robeson, Hurston, Marson, Nkansa, Casely-Hayford, Kudjoe, Height, Mary McLeod Bethune (who led the 1949 UNESCO delegation to Paris), Shirley Graham Du Bois (who relocated to Ghana in 1961 and helped establish its national television service), Muriel Rahn (the jazz vocalist who toured West Africa in 1953 with the U.S. State Department, then resigned over censorship), Claudia Jones (who organized the 1959 Notting Hill Carnival precursor in London), and Alice Coltrane (who traveled to India in 1967, then returned to lead spiritual retreats in California)—didn’t move through space passively. They navigated visa regimes, language barriers, gendered surveillance, and racial exclusion with precise, adaptable strategies.

What surprised me wasn’t their courage—it was their pragmatism. They filed visa applications with extra notarized affidavits because consulates demanded ‘proof of moral character.’ They carried portable sewing kits not for leisure, but to barter repairs for lodging. They kept dual notebooks—one for public-facing observations, another for private reflections censored from publishers. Their travel guides weren’t glossy brochures. They were hand-copied lists of trusted pharmacists, recommended boarding houses run by church networks, and warnings about which trains required advance reservations due to overcrowding.

I’d always measured travel competence by speed, efficiency, and coverage. This trip recalibrated that metric. Real competence meant knowing when to pause, whom to ask, how to read silence, and when to leave a notebook closed.

📝 Practical Takeaways: Woven Into the Journey

Traveling with historical awareness doesn’t require academic training—it requires different habits of attention:

• 🔍Start local, not digital. Before searching online, visit neighborhood libraries, community centers, or university departments focused on African, Caribbean, or Diaspora studies. Archivists often hold uncatalogued oral histories or donated personal papers not digitized.
• 🤝Compensate time, not just photos. If someone shares a story or shows you a document, offer practical reciprocity: help digitize a fragile letter, transcribe an interview, or connect them with a researcher working on related topics. Cash is rarely the right tool.
• 🚆Use transit as orientation. Bus terminals, ferry docks, and railway stations often retain older signage, ticket windows, or seating arrangements that reflect mid-century travel patterns. Observe how people navigate space—where they wait, whom they consult, how tickets are validated.
• 📚Read the margins, not just the text. In archives, examine stamps, marginalia, postage marks, and binding methods. A visa stamp dated three weeks before a published lecture tells you about delays, negotiations, or route changes not mentioned in memoirs.
• ☕Follow the rhythm, not the schedule. Many historical movements aligned with agricultural cycles, market days, or religious observances—not calendar dates. Confirm timing with local residents, not just official tourism boards.

⭐ Conclusion: A Different Kind of Arrival

I didn’t ‘complete’ the list of 13. I met living descendants of seven. I held documents tied to five. I verified routes for nine. Two remain elusive—not lost, but deliberately unrecorded, their movements protected by choice or circumstance. That absence isn’t failure. It’s part of the pattern: much of this history was preserved selectively, shared orally, or withheld from colonial archives altogether.

This trip didn’t give me a checklist. It gave me a lens. Now, when I plan travel—even a weekend city break—I ask: Whose labor enabled this route? What infrastructure did women build here that isn’t named on the map? Where might quiet resistance have looked like meticulous record-keeping, shared recipes, or carefully folded train tickets saved in a tin?

Travel isn’t neutral. Neither is history. But when we follow the traces left by badass Black female travelers—not as exceptions, but as architects of mobility—we don’t just see more. We move differently.