This article studies alterity in John Slaughter’s travelogue Brother in the Bush: An African American’s Search for Self in East Africa (2005). The book chronicles the author’s travels in Africa in the wake of a life-altering experience that makes him want to change the way he lives and sees the world. He therefore travels to Africa in order to search for a new self and a view of the world free from the materialist greed, insularity and artificiality of life in the West. However, Slaughter’s Africa is, more than an actual geographical space, a well of metaphors and images that he uses to discuss the alienation of middleclass life in the West. These metaphors and images are meaningful primarily from the point of view of the life that he wants to leave behind, and the alterity of Africa therefore adds few ‘new’ insights and adds little to his process of inner change.