So in about 1973, after having been away from home hitchhiking for well over a year, I left Lusaka in Zambia after having spent over four weeks in hospital with hepatitis and made my way towards (then) Rhodesia.
This involved hitchhiking to the Western edge of Zambia, about half a dozen steps in Angola and then into Caprivi – which I think is now known as "the Zambezi region" and then into Botswana and to the Rhodesian border. Of course Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe.

By that time I then picked up a ride and with some young people in a Land Rover. We got to the border – and they all got in except the immigration official came to me and without any explanation said I wasn't welcome and stamped "PI" - Prohibited Immigrant - in my passport and that was that.
I turned around and hits like the way I had come back to Lusaka. I decided to travel to South Africa – then still under the apartheid system – through Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland – now Eswatini – and then into South Africa.

In Lusaka I teamed up with an American that I had bumped into – Lorin Stack.

We set off. Got lots of rides along the mostly bumpy dirt roads and eventually arrived at the Malawi border.

My hair at the time was pretty short – just over my collar, having two or three months earlier been cut by a Ugandan army barber when I had been an unwilling guest of the Ugandan army at various establishments around the country (The Last King of Scotland – another story).
But obviously it wasn't short enough. Also I was still wearing South Sea Bubble Loons – one of the few bits of clothing that remained with me since I had left London all those months ago.
I suppose Malawi was a pretty conservative country. Lorin was a pretty short back and sides sort of guy and so he didn't have any problem but the Malawi police on the border decided that I was a hippie and that I was a subversive danger to all of Malawi society.
Result: I was arrested – and both Lorin and I were put in the cells. The police were pretty decent actually. The cell wasn't too bad – probably the best I had been in and out of the nearly half-dozen or so which I had spent time in in Africa – and the police themselves were friendly and the food was okay.
The next morning they gave us a pair of scissors and Lorin cut my hair back above my collar. The police also gave me a needle and thread and I was told to sew my very wide bell bottom trousers so that they were pleated inside.
And so with short hair – and and trousers with newly narrow legs, the police decided I wasn't a hippie any more and that there was no danger to the state of Malawi – and they let us go.

We hitchhiked to Blantyre which was the then capital of Malawi (I think now it's Lilongwe) and there it was a far more cosmopolitan attitude and I cut the stitches of my trouser legs and shook them open to their full 16"(or whatever it was) glory.
Free at last!