After decades as a BBC journalist and – latterly – one of the corporation’s best-known news presenters, you may well associate Clive Myrie with more serious endeavours. Indeed, it was a little jarring to see him – just a few hours before presenting the latest Trump-flavoured bulletin last Tuesday – reclining on the One Show sofa to promote his latest travelogue, declaring himself “a warrior god”. As unlikely as this recent-ish pivot might seem (he previously presented Clive Myrie’s Italian Road Trip in 2023, and the Bafta-winning Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure in 2024), I’m here for it. As a chronicler of cultures, Myrie is faultlessly fun and eager, and his African Adventure is no exception. This series of 10 half-hour episodes set in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Morocco is infused with joy and hope, while also not entirely adopting a fingers-in-ears approach to some of the bigger issues affecting the continent – be it environmental concerns or health inequalities.
We kick off in South Africa, a place Myrie knows well from his time posted there as a foreign correspondent for the BBC. He catches up with a former colleague, Milton Nkosi, and the pair reflect on the stories we tend to hear about the country. The news, says Nkosi, “is not wrong, but it can be one-sided”. Their episode in Soweto is a beautiful thing: a corrective to some of those more difficult stories about the country and its largest township, which also acknowledges its complex history. Myrie was, he says, inspired to get into journalism in the first place by the stories he saw on the news back home in Bolton about apartheid. Now, all these decades later, he finds himself having lunch with Nkosi and Ndileka Mandela, Nelson’s eldest granddaughter. They reflect on Mandela Sr’s humanity, and Myrie seems genuinely touched to find out that – by chance – they’re even eating the great man’s favourite food (braised oxtail, if you were wondering).
South Africa is full of fun: “Banksy who?” says Myrie, as he grabs a spray can and helps artist Senzo Nhlapo with some street art. Mucking in is the theme of the whole series, in fact, whether he’s cooking a huge pot of bunny chow, a South African dish with Indian roots (“I feel like I’m rowing a boat in the Oxford and Cambridge boat race,” he says, the stirring proving a challenge) or helping out at a craft centre in Durban supporting women with HIV/Aids (“maybe in about six months,” he says, looking down at the minuscule part of a beaded pin he has managed to complete, “I would have a South African flag”). Whether it’s trapeze lessons or jazz drumming or dancing to the country’s thriving amapiano dance music, you absolutely cannot fault his enthusiasm.
As mentioned, the series doesn’t shy away from some of the more difficult issues affecting Africa. The strongest part of the series are the episodes filmed in Ghana, where Myrie covers much ground – contemporary and historical. As the child of Jamaican parents who came to Britain during the Windrush era, Myrie knew he had West African descent due to transatlantic slavery. Here, he visits the vast fortresses where enslaved people were held: “I’ve spent my whole life reporting on the inhumanity of human beings to fellow human beings,” he says, “but this is personal.” He is also welcomed by the Fante people in a naming ceremony that is a pure delight to watch, and he is thrilled with his new sobriquet: Papa Kojo Abaka. As for the contemporary, the deeply troubling issue of textile waste (much of it from the west) leads Myrie to visit the Or Foundation in Accra, masters of recycled fashion who make him a fetching outfit from sportswear that would otherwise have ended up polluting the country’s beaches. He meets people with ingenious ideas for solving the continent’s biggest problems, including a startup whose AI-powered chatbot aims to give Nigerians health advice on the go, amid a worrying shortage of doctors (staggeringly, we are told, around a third of all maternal deaths across the world occur in the country).
The Morocco episodes feel most like a traditional travelogue, but they’re still a lot of fun – even if Goat Milking with Clive Myrie does have a touch of the Partridge about it, as an idea. Really, though, this is a wonderful series which shows that the much-maligned celebrity travel show can be educational, informative and really moving (and, crucially, that destinations other than Italy are available). And with so much more of Africa to see, here’s hoping they give him a few weeks off from the news again soon.
• Clive Myrie’s African Adventure aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now
