'Our Long Walk' celebrates its first birthday

Paid subscriptions now promises to deliver even more exciting content to your inbox

In July last year, I switched to Substack. I called my new blog ‘Our Long Walk’, a not-so-subtle reference to the title of my first book.

See, I had been writing a blog since January 2012 (with the even-more-inspired title of ‘Johan Fourie’s blog’!) But it had become stale, static and, frankly, boring, and I had become bored with it, too. For over a decade, I posted my thoughts on WordPress. I had written more than 500 posts, many of them longer than 1000 words, to an audience of around 800 subscribers.

Then I heard about Substack. It seemed fresh and innovative and fun, and in July of 2022 I decided to take the leap. I lost about half my subscribers because of a technical issue with the conversion. But as the graph below demonstrates, it took me only a few months to gain back those readers. After a year on Substack, my readership has tripled.

I realise that these are tiny numbers in the Substack universe. My 1300 subscribers pale in comparison to the readership of the economic historian Anton Howes’ Age of Invention (21 000 subscribers) or the economist Noahpinion’s 140 000 subscribers, to name just two popular bloggers. But think of it this way: a single post on my blog is read by more people than I teach in an entire year at Stellenbosch University.

My ideas also reach audiences far beyond the typical university student. Although most of my subscribers are South African, my posts (delivered on a Monday at 10am South Africa Standard time) reach all corners of the world, and are sometimes even picked up by the press. Only last week did The Economist cite one of my earlier posts on ‘semigration’ to the Western Cape.

Over the last few months, Kelsey Lemon has helped me clean up my entire archive of posts. They are now all available on Substack for free. (Almost all of them are in English, although there are a few that remain in Afrikaans. When I have the time, I’ll ChatGPT-translate them too.) Kelsey did an amazing job. She is a brilliant History student who just graduated with a Master’s degree (cum laude). She is also on the job market. Hire her. (Write to me for more info.)

Substack also allows for innovation. At the start of this year, I introduced guest posts, delivered on a Friday (at 10am SA time). I’ve had many scholars contribute their ideas. On Friday, Joachim Wehner and Dan de Kadt wrote about their latest research investigating Cecil Rhodes’ attempts to disenfranchise black voters in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony. There are many more thought-provoking posts in the pipeline.

I also quietly launched a paid subscriber service on Friday. (A big thank you to those who upgraded over the weekend!) While all my usual columns will remain free, I hope to write more about my (unpublished) new research and, very excitingly, about my new book project. I plan to have draft chapters delivered to paid subscribers for their feedback. Several other innovative post ideas exclusively for paid subscribers are also in the pipeline. Make sure to sign up to receive those over the coming months.

Free and paid subscribers can expect the same weekly edition of ‘Our Long Walk’ in your inbox every Monday morning. If you’ve enjoyed reading my posts, I would appreciate it if you were to recommend it to others too. And feel free to comment, critique and contribute new ideas. As Coldplay reminds us: It’s better to be a comma than a full stop.