Legacies of the slave trade era pepper West Africa.

Forts, once depots for the evil trade, dot Ghana's coastline.

On a lake in Benin, houses are still built on stilts — a practice that began in the times when people were forced to flee from slave traders on the water.

Adventure personality Kingsley Holgate has been wandering through such places in his ambitious malaria prevention campaign, handing out mosquito nets to pregnant mothers and to children, on an expedition around Africa's coastline.

"Around five million people have benefited so far," Holgate said in Johannesburg this week, referring to both the recipients of nets and beneficiaries of the malaria education campaign.

'A humanitarian turnaround'

He called his journey "a humanitarian turnaround", not just when nets were handed out on the Slave Coast but also when the expedition journeyed up the Niger River to Djenne in Mali.

There it joined in the Islam custom of giving at the end of Ramadam, "during these times of tension between Christians and Muslims".

Holgate broke his journey in Dakar, Senegal, to come home to receive a R200 000 cheque for more mosquito nets from one of his sponsors.

Two hundred days after leaving Cape Town in a procession Holgate believes was made up of "a record number of Land Rovers", he spoke of reconciliation and forgiveness in post-war Liberia, his fears for the country after peacekeepers withdraw and post-war progress in neighbouring Sierra Leone.

Then there was the world's largest voodoo fetish market in Lome, Togo.

"There's a Western misconception about people putting pins into statues to send out curses," said Holgate.

An encompassing religion

"It's a very encompassing religion and extremely peaceful. There are beliefs in everything: the soil, the wood, the trees."

In the jungles of Cameroon, the expedition vehicles joined a string of others stuck in the mud, until local pygmies cut road after road through the forest along which the vehicles could leap-frog.

"That was only after we had paid the toll and they had their share of smokes. Their energy levels and passion would then be at fever pitch."

Holgate pointed out that his malaria prevention campaign involved personally handing nets to the people for whom they were intended.

"They don't end up in the wrong hands," he said, noting that other malaria prevention campaigns had seen 80 percent of mosquito nets destined for people in Freetown in Sierra Leone on sale in neighbouring Guinea.

Ahead of Dakar is a long beach drive across Mauritania, Western Sahara and Morocco, the beginning of a stretch of Africa less affected by malaria where the expedition will focus on its other objectives.

It is also handing out spectacles to those with bad eyesight as well as education material to help improve literacy and get people to sign its scroll of peace friendship.

The first two people to sign the scroll at the start of the expedition were former president Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.

The expedition expects to hit malaria country again on the coast of Ethiopia and to be kept busy handing out nets down Africa's east coast — almost all the way home to South Africa.

Sapa