Keep moving

The most portable safety habit Harry has, and the one he states as a rule rather than a reaction: if you stop, you make yourself a target. Attention is not the danger; standing in it is. So he keeps walking — through a crowd forming around him, past a confrontation starting, away from someone objecting to the camera.

It is not bravado and not avoidance. He is explicit that he doesn’t run, doesn’t argue and doesn’t stop to explain himself at length, because all three fix him in place. The pace is normal walking pace.

Two related rules that are not this one: when people don’t want to be filmed is about how to handle the camera specifically, and be assertive with touts is about sellers who want your business. This one is about what your feet do when a situation is forming.

How Harry applies it

Where he says it outright. Walking through West Point in Monrovia, he gives the reasoning in one line: if you stop, you make yourself a target. Same in the old city of Mogadishu, where a confrontation starts near him and may be about him — his instruction to himself on camera is that in Somalia you keep walking, you don’t stand there for two minutes.

Where it’s about generosity rather than threat. In Antananarivo, giving to one person produces a crowd within seconds, and his method — the same one he uses in Lagos — is to give a little, explain, and keep moving. The alternative is not more generous; it is a crowd he then has to get out of.

Where it’s about hospitality. In Kandahar the crowd forming around him is friendly — free tea, free sugar cane, a jeweller pressing a ring on him — and he still moves on, because his rule in an unfamiliar area is to keep moving whatever the crowd is made of. This is the entry that shows the rule isn’t really about danger.

The video where he states it and then breaks it

Medellín’s El Centro gives the rule its clearest wording — in a foreign situation, don’t stall, keep moving, never stay in one position too long, delivered straight to camera as advice.

Ten minutes later he sits down in the same square to have his portrait drawn, and stays put for the better part of quarter of an hour while a crowd forms around him. He notices, and narrates it: they have gathered because they can see he is spending money. Nothing happens. He checks his pockets afterwards, out loud.

That is worth having on the page for two reasons. It shows the rule is about situations that are forming, not about never being stationary — a transaction you started, in a busy square, in daylight, isn’t the thing it guards against. And it shows the cost of getting that judgement wrong is what he does next anyway: check you still have everything.

Demonstrated in

• 48 Hours with West Africa’s Most Notorious Warlord 🇱🇷 — the clearest statement of it, in West Point.
• I Ignored Western Media and Went to Mogadishu, Somalia 🇸🇴 — applied to a confrontation he can’t read, in a city where he is moving with armed security anyway.
• Inside the Taliban’s Most Notorious City (Afghanistan) 🇦🇫 — the same rule applied to a crowd that is being kind to him.
• The Country Everyone Knows But Nobody Visits 🇲🇬 — the version for giving money, where stopping would be worse for everyone involved.
• How Dangerous is Johannesburg, South Africa really? 🇿🇦 — the entry that shows what the rule costs. He announces it in the first minute in Johannesburg’s CBD and then walks past the checkers players and the watermelon seller he would normally have spent an hour with. A video with almost no conversations in it, because of a decision made before the first one could start.
• Solo in Colombia’s Best City! Medellin 🇨🇴 — the rule stated as advice and then set aside for a street portrait, with the crowd it drew and the pocket-check afterwards.