Deo Kato hadn’t planned on running through South Sudan, but crossing into Ethiopia would have cost him the funds of his whole trip. So once he reached a dead end at the border between Kenya and Ethiopia, he decided that he’d have to take the risk if he wanted to achieve his goal of running the 14,570 km from Cape Town to London.

The 37-year-old Ugandan-born, London-based runner, activist and personal trainer started his journey on July 24, 2023, from Cape Town’s Long March to Freedom monument, which commemorates the anti-apartheid struggle. Why? “To tell the history of migration from Africa to the world,” he tells OkayAfrica in a video call from Aswan, Egypt, where he is recovering from an ordeal in South Sudan.

The initial route would have taken him from Uganda, a detour he incorporated to visit his family, through to Congo, but the outbreak of civil war required him to stay in East Africa. There, Ethiopia and Sudan are also at war and while the borders aren’t fully closed, the region is presently too dangerous to run through.

Instead, Kato and his partner Alice Light initiated the campaign “Run for Sudan,” in collaboration with the Refugee Run Club and other groups, as part of which Sudanese runners who had to flee to the U.K. will run the length Kato would have in Sudan. “We’re trying to put out a message to reach as many different people as possible,” says Kato. “The silence around the war in Sudan is deafening, especially in Western media.”

On his alternate route through South Sudan, Kato met kind and welcoming people who encouraged his project and its message. On his quest to tell the story of human migration as a counter-narrative to slavery, colonialism and African migrants “invading” Europe, the region around South Sudan proved to be a good example for his argument: humans have always and are always migrating, contemporarily for the same reasons as in prehistoric times.

“Uganda and South Sudan have a good relationship,” he explains. “People can move without too much restriction. Ugandans go to South Sudan for opportunities, because it’s a developing country. South Sudanese in turn go to Uganda, because it’s a developed country and they can improve their living standards.” While there is a lot of movement, there are also many restrictions because of the conflicts in the area.

Before he started running, Kato received several warnings that Africa wasn’t a safe place for such an adventure. “These concerns are exaggerated and blown out of proportion,” he says. “African nations are as safe as any other countries around the world. Each country comes with its own problems.” While it is true that there are unsafe areas, he suggests simply following local advice on which places to avoid. “Most people are extremely friendly, they welcome you into their homes, give you tea, and do everything they can to make you feel as welcome as possible.”

Safety takes on a different meaning depending on the country; in Botswana, Kato was informed that wildlife runs completely wild in the northern part of the country and he unexpectedly had to cross into Zimbabwe. In the countries further north, the danger of animals is replaced by the danger of a system in which authorities can abuse their power arbitrarily. Where migrants cross borders easily in Southern Africa, the northern parts are full of military checkpoints.

On day 315 of his run, Kato was leaving Juba, the capital of South Sudan, planning to run 60 km (37 miles) that day. “I was in the zone and had built up all this strength in my legs to run 60-70 km (37-43 miles) each day,” he says. They, Kato on foot and his Ugandan driver Mulondo William in their car, approached a checkpoint. “We’d been going through checkpoints and were aware of the procedure. We thought it’d take one or two minutes to show them the papers.” Kato kept running while William was stopped and after another 30 minutes, a car drove up behind him.

“Inside the car were two plain-clothed individuals. I felt that something wasn’t right,” remembers Kato. “They took us back to the major checkpoint and we were taken to the office and interrogated. They asked us why we were there, what we were doing, and what our intentions were.”

Kato and William were stripped of their phones and car keys, their vehicle was searched and then locked. “They refused to believe our story about the project. They thought we were Ugandans who entered the country illegally even though we had visas, stamps, and could prove everything.”

When he reaches London, Kato is planning to turn his journey into a documentary film, so he has a small camera with him. “They thought we were journalists and said we needed a letter from the Ministry of Youth and Sports, which we didn’t have.”

Still unaware that the situation would escalate, Kato and William asked the officers to help them get the letter they apparently required. “They had all the barriers up,” he says. “All they had to do was understand our position and where we were coming from, and things could’ve been different.” Instead, they were taken at gunpoint to a military house and held under arrest — nobody told them what for or how long. They weren’t allowed to make any phone calls or contact lawyers.

They were held in custody for three weeks, without speaking to the outside world. Light, who is also Kato’s project manager, didn’t hear a word from him. After running every day for 315 days, the sudden stillness sent his body into shock. “My mind was giving me signals, continuously saying ‘go go go go.’ You need to gradually slow down and I didn’t know what to do,” he says. He felt internal shifts, his breathing wasn’t well and he suffered from body aches — both from lack of movement, but also because he was sleeping on a concrete floor without anything for ten days, sharing a cell with four other men.

When they were transferred to another prison, they were able to freely move around and started telling people about their situation. “People in the prison were so friendly,” he says. “You’ve seen so many movies about prisons, and then even an African prison, but the people have mostly been arrested wrongly. Once they knew why I was there, they were willing to help even more. Because they knew that the journey I’m on is actually to help all of us, especially Africans.”

The South Sudanese inmates especially were unhappy about Kato’s treatment. On average, foreigners are kept in a South Sudanese prison for at least two to four months, but one inmate who got released and deported to his country of origin found Light online and told her about the situation. At that point, she didn’t know if Kato was alive, because she hadn’t heard from him in weeks.

Light started doing the work to get them released and when they got out on June 23, they were advised to leave the country as soon as possible. “Once you’ve been arrested, you’re more likely to be arrested again, because they have you in their record and will find a reason,” says Kato.

He flew to Egypt two weeks ago and is preparing to continue his tour next week. “Even though I had this experience, I’m coming out with more drive to complete this journey,” he says. “I’m taking some time to heal, I still have some stomach issues and I’m rebuilding my muscle strength. I’m not fully there yet, but I’m working on it.”

He has more drive because he has lived through the injustice so many migrants are subjected to: arrested and deported without any reason because movement is limited by arbitrary borders and oppressive systems.

“It has given me a different insight,” he shares. “There are people who are able to escape conflict and there are people who physically can’t leave. Even though I knew that some people won’t be able to leave their home, I didn’t think that they would be this restricted in their movement. It’s not that they don’t want to leave, they do, but they can’t. Or that leaving would create even more danger to reach a promised land. That could mean sacrificing life as it is or as they know it. Or sacrificing loved ones. And that is the greatest sacrifice I have encountered.”

Kato highlights that he is only able to do this trip because he is a British passport holder, which gives him a freer range of movement than passport holders of African nations. “If I had a Ugandan passport, it’d be very difficult for me to go to Egypt,” he says. “Now I just turn up on the day and get a visa on arrival. African passports are weak and need to be strengthened within our own continent.”

Once he reaches the Mediterranean, he will begin running the European leg of the tour, which would be an unthinkable endeavor with a Ugandan passport. “It’s extremely restricted and I wouldn’t be able to dream of this project.”

Considering the many obstacles he has encountered both physically and mentally, how has Kato made it this far? It’s nearly impossible to physically prepare for all the different terrains of such a trip, so Kato focused on strengthening his mindset, trusting that physical fitness would happen on the go.

“The mental part was about trying to stay calm and believing in myself,” he says. “I was getting a lot of rejections, people saying that it’s not possible, because it’s never been done before. I have to put myself in a state of mind where I know that I’m going to finish it regardless of what happens along the way. Zone into my own belief and block out the external noise. Understand that I have the strength and capacity to execute and deliver.”

He had planned to say a little mantra and do a ritual every morning, but that went out of the window in the first month. He laughs at the memory. “I have to take every day as it comes,” he says. “I might be running in the same country or city or community, but everything changes all the time, because I’m moving on a daily basis. Now my mantra is ‘take the day as it comes, embrace it and experience it.’”

Between unexpectedly high mountains in Tanzania, torrential rainy seasons, and the scorching heat of the Sahara, Kato knew that he had to rely on local advice on how to deal with the various environments he would be running through. Now that he is in the Aswan heat at 47 degrees Celsius (116.6 degrees Fahrenheit), he finds that the locals are sitting in the shade and drinking tea, and that he’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who can give expert advice on how to run in this climate at this time of the year. But he is determined to succeed.

Kato originally planned on running the tour in 381 days, inspired by the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott during which African Americans protested for civil rights for 381 days. Previous challenges have seen him run 10km (6.2 miles) for 381 days in a row, inspiring other runners to follow suit and turning this movement into the longest protest run in history.

Alongside the many initiatives he has created through his runs, his time in South Sudan inspired him to add another cause to this impressive journey. “We are working to free all the people that were arrested with us in jail,” he says. “Eventually, we want to work towards freeing more people around the world that shouldn’t be in prison.”

When asked about the most memorable moments of his trip so far, he smiles and shakes his head at the difficulty of answering this question. “I think what surprised me the most was Zimbabwe’s beauty,” he says. “I was having a hard time, because it wasn’t part of the original route and we weren’t prepared for the fast change in language, currency, and rural areas — we had a culture shock. But as I got further north, I was suddenly hit by the nature and wildlife of the country.”

Picture this: Kato is running into the sunset in a national park (which he had been told not to go to) and discovers elephants on their way to drink water at the end of the day, meeting other animals, dipping their heads into golden lit water. “It stays in my mind as one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen,” says Kato. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment.” (OkayAfrica)