Keith Boyd, now 59, began his run from Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront on July 27, 2023, and after 301 gruelling days, entered the Guinness Book of Records for the fastest run by a man from Cape Town to Cairo.

As he left Cape Town, he noticed how soft the ground was – ‘the soft spots,’ he explains this feeling. 

“You have to feel the land, read the people, understand where you are. You cannot just run and ignore everything around you as if it doesn’t exist.”

Through South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, the terrain was familiar yet testing. However, when he crossed the equator in Kenya, something shifted.

“Once you cross at Nanuki, I don’t know how to explain this to you, but it seems the world just goes crazy to me,” Boyd recalls. 

“The equator—I don’t know what it is, but once you cross it, you’re getting into more open territory, bandits, cattle rustling, guys with AK-47s.”

The Reason it all Matters

“Rainbow Leaders started because I saw myself in the children across Africa,” Boyd tells IOL, his gaze steady.

“If it weren’t for the kids, I wouldn’t have done the run. I promise you, the kids brought so much joy into our interactions,” Boyd says warmly. “Children are our future. The difference between people who achieve phenomenal things in their lives and those who don’t have too much self-doubt.”

Boyd writes in his memoir: “I founded RainbowLeaders.org.za to reverse this downward socio-economic spiral after receiving my MBA. Through RainbowLeaders, (I) sought a 301-day run to educate and motivate young Africans to take power through their vote, elect prominent leaders, and hold them accountable.”

For Boyd, the key to ending poverty lies in the hands of the millions of young Africans across the continent and not just in South Africa. His run from Cape Town to Cairo was an acknowledgment that RainbowLeaders needed a bigger voice to raise awareness and funding for our youth; the future leaders.

He recalls a young girl in southern Ethiopia carrying firewood under the relentless sun, tasks that women and young girls of Africa are delegated, thinking back to the hard, intimate labour.

“As I passed and saw those big brown eyes of hers, in that very moment in saw my daughter Shannon. And I’ve seen Shannon get by. And I thought, jeez, that’s Shannon. But she’s in another life. This could have been my daughter,” he says. “And I think that’s what I’m trying to say. I want to change outcomes for people like this.

Making a difference

For 40 years, Keith’s specialty was telecommunications. He understood how to connect wires, grids, and networks. However, this run through Africa made him realise that the most important network was the human connection. 

“I’ve taken so much from the world,” he reflects to IOL. “Not a cent (from the sale of his book) comes to me. Not one cent. I paid for everything, including the printing. All of it goes to Rainbow Leaders. I will die poorer in a financial sense. But I hope that’s not called wealthiness.”

He pauses, then adds with conviction: “If I go to my grave having tried to make a difference, will I have less money than I might otherwise have had? Absolutely, I will. Because there’s no way—I’ve taken so much effort away from my business stuff. But wealth is about saying, did I make a difference in the time that I was allotted?”

In the middle of the conversation, Keith did something he’d never done before; he pulled out a pen and wrote a set of numbers in IOL’s copy of his memoir.

Quick Maths

“Mathematically, 1.02 to the power of 20 equals 1.49,” he explained, writing the equation carefully. “What I’m proving to you is that if we could get our economy to be 1.5 times the size it is in real terms, we’d have 50% more jobs.”

He continued with precision: “Our economy needs to grow 3.7% a year for 10 years. We just need to do that for 20 years. Sorted. Before my 80th birthday, we can fix poverty in this country.”

Does he believe this can happen?

“Do I think we will? No. Do I know that we can? Absolutely. I absolutely can prove to you this is doable.”

He insisted that the solution wasn’t complicated: “You can’t build a healthy society on a broken economy. We can’t expect gender-based violence, gangsterism, substance abuse, any of those ills to go away as long as we have poverty at the levels we have them at.”

The Power of The Youth

Boyd’s message is urgent for the current generation of young voters, not only South Africa, but Africa as a continent; he cites a sobering statistic: “Local government elections 2021, we only had a 17% turnout of 18- to 29-year-olds. Only 17% of eligible under 30s voted.

“The young people that we talk to, they say ‘we don’t trust politicians. Full stop’,” he explains. “Now that’s a problem because then they opt out of democracy. Which actually means that you throw the baby away with the dirty bathwater.”

His solution is simple but powerful. 

“Make your vote a fluid thing that follows performance. Today I vote for you. Tomorrow I don’t. Your vote is your power.”

He believes in what he calls ‘peaceful rebellion’: “We have to rebel against poor leadership. We have to rebel against it, but we can do it in a peaceful way through the ballot box. We don’t have to kill anybody.

“We don’t have to scare anybody. We don’t have to threaten anybody. We just say, no problem. See you at the ballot box.”

Awakening

“Until the age of about 17, I was blind. I was living in a bubble,” he admits.

It took working in an insurer’s actuarial department and serving in the army to break through that conditioning.

The blindness was not physical, but inherited – the product of a society structured to separate, categorise, and simplify social status based on race in South Africa under the apartheid regime. 

Growing up in apartheid South Africa, he was surrounded by walls both literal and invisible. Schools, neighbourhoods, and social spaces were divided by law and custom. Ideas about race were ingrained, imperial as fact rather than opinion.

He recalls a childhood moment that now seems almost absurd.

“A friend tells me when I’m seven or eight years old, ‘Do you know black people can’t see in colour? They only see in black and white.’ I didn’t raise my eyebrows. I went, it must be true, right?”

Keith’s time in the actuarial department introduced him to people from all walks of life. His illusion of the past, shattered later through compulsory service in the army, accelerated the change. Routine, rank, and shared responsibility left little space for abstraction. People he had once understood only through hearsay became his comrades, brothers, colleagues, peers, friends, and family. 

“It took working and serving to break through that conditioning,” he said. By the time he planned his run from Cape Town to Cairo, the lessons from his past, and lived experiences had already reshaped his perspective.

Crossing nine countries — South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, and finally Egypt was not a myth of maps; rather, each country was a living, breathing continent with human beings, like us all. 

During his run from Cape Town to Cairo, after crossing into Ethiopia’s Amhara region, he was kidnapped and robbed.

He managed to escape captivity on his own and then made contact with the South African embassy in Addis Ababa, which coordinated with the Ethiopian federal government to provide a military escort for the remaining 600‑kilometre stretch toward the Sudanese border.

The escort set out but was soon stopped by the lead officer, who judged the route too dangerous to continue.

By this point, the group’s Sudanese visas were nearing expiration, so he and his team decided to fly to near the border, complete the Sudan and Egypt portions of the journey by air, and then return later to finish the approximately 500‑kilometre segment they had missed.

A Story That Continues

As our time together comes to an end, Boyd left us with profound words.

“I don’t believe in leaving a story behind. I don’t believe in leaving a journey behind that can continue.” His run may have ended at the Metema border post after 301 days, but the real journey for Keith Boyd – the one toward economic growth, youth empowerment, and a more just Africa – has only just begun.

And with that, Keith Boyd—runner, activist, father, and unwavering believer in Africa’s potential—left us with both a challenge and a promise: that the next generation will carry the torch forward, one vote, one action, one deliberate choice at a time.

His journey was never just about distance or records; it was about connection, courage, and the belief that change begins with purpose.

Running Africa

Having had the pleasure of being given a signed copy of Keith’s memoir, and before leaving, Keith explained why he wrote Running Africa.  

Running Africa was written through the lens of Keith’s life story, shaped by a need to step back and see the African continent rather than in fragments. The legacy he wishes to leave as a socio-economic activist is rooted in change: to challenge and ask why poverty persists, and to imagine what an African future could look like without it.   

“A world record to me is no more use than a Gucci handbag. It’s not important,” he says. “But as a platform to give us a better voice, to get us heard, to get the word out there—if you read this book, it allows us to tell the story, and it allows us to raise funds for Rainbow Leaders.”

* Keith Boyd’s memoir, Running Africa, is now available, with all proceeds supporting Rainbow Leaders, ensuring that his story may continue to inspire, empower, and transform the lives of young Africans.

IOL.

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