Customer Reviews

The Black Nile: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While the book's subtitle boasts, "One Man's Amazing Journey...", a cliched line that probably should be forbidden from any future use, it is nonetheless quite accurate. Tracing the waters of the Nile from Uganda to Egypt, Morrison brings us on a journey not only across thousands of miles of Africa but also through a vast diversity of peoples and their rich and often troubled history. Weaving recent and historical events with the story of his own journey he provides an unique window onto a part of the world all too easily and often ignored. Furthermore, he casts light onto the diverse forces at play behind the conflicts that occasionally make headlines in West newspapers. What many often portray in simplistic terms as strife between Christianity and Islam, Morrison exposes as complex and fluid allegiances and schisms. Often these are less about religious differences and more about the dynamics between the wealthy and poor, those in power and those outside, competing tribes and families, and other fault lines.

The book's core however is really a travelogue, and it moves at a swift and compelling pace. The first half of the book focused largely on the interplay between Morrison and a long-time friend who has joined him on the first leg of the journey. Their procession up the Nile in their small boat delves into their personal histories, the author's work as a journalist stringer, his friend's easy life working in a resort in the United States and frequent trips to the bottom of a bottle. Unable to get a visa into Sudan, and burnt-out from the oppressive heat and relentless insects, his friend leaves Morrison midway into the narrative. Once alone, Morrison spends more time examining the people he meets, the history of the places he visits, and on his own reactions to the situations he encounters.

The narration is occasionally gritty, making the rugged, unpredictable, and often sad lives of the people he meets tangible. Sometimes this tangibility is off-putting, reducing people to the mere the functions of their bodies. More often however the gritty realism of the situation stands in contrast to these people's humble perseverance. Simple dichotomies, between good and bad, friends and enemies are turned on their heads when presumed enemies of friends are gracious and welcoming.

"Life in extremity is difficult to explain-things happen and people don't know why they are happening. Some events were fortunate and others were disastrous and that's how it went."

There are no simple answers in the book. The alliances he examines are constantly reshaped and reevaluated. The landscape similarly is in constant flux, changed by logging, droughts, and streams of garbage. Massive dams threaten rich farmland and traditional ways of life while bringing much needed electricity and development to impoverished towns and cities. This book raises questions, answers a few of them, and will leave a lasting impression.

While the book itself is a fine narrative about a man's journey through Uganda, Sudan and Egypt, one is led to expect it will be traveled by boat down the Nile. That expectation is given in the both the title and in the very beginning chapter as the author, Morrison, outlines, more than once, his plan to boat down the Nile beginning from Lake Victoria, the Nile's origin, to the Egyptian city of Rosetta where the river spills into the Mediterranean. It even seems like the majority of the trip will be spent with his friend Schon, who adds a lot of humor to the book. Yet after only about a week of rowing on a boat they purchased from a friend and a few days spent in a small village for a respite, both Schon and the boat are gone, and apparently so are all of Morrison's plans to journey down the Nile.

The rest of the book is about Morrison making his way north on anything but a boat. When he isn't on mostly undependable buses, he's encountering and recording the people of Uganda and Sudan who have been affected by the catastrophic, decades-long war and by the equally catastrophic presence of the big oil companies that forcibly destroy entire villages to make way for oil refineries. His interviews with these people are both heart-breaking and hopeful, but it took me until page 186 before it dawned on me that Morrison was never getting back on a boat again. Why did he change his mind? And why does he never tell us that he has abandoned his original plans? The rest of the book is still an interesting read, but it was a hard slog finishing it once I realized Morrison was not delivering on his promised beginning.

I'm giving the book three stars because of Morrison's excellent writing, but I do feel a little tricked by the title and will read other people's reviews before I read any of his future books.

"Longest River, Wide Adventure: A revelatory, sometimes harrowing journey from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean". Book Review, By Hugh Pope, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, BOOKSHELF, Saturday, AUGUST 14, 2010, page W8.

When Dan Morrison began a 3,600-mile road-and-river journey down the length of the Nile River, he started at Lake Victoria in Uganda. As he reports in "The Black Nile," his account of the grueling trip, he was led to a rooming house on an island and shown a "six-by-seven windowless cell." The ceiling was "a layer cake of plastic, tree branches, more plastic and corrugated metal, all covered by a moss of dusty cobwebs. A red plastic basin of dirty water sat near the door; a foam mattress occupied half the floor." The walls were painted "an optimistic blue," and he was similarly full of hope: "It's perfect," he told his host.

The windowless cell turns out to be one of the nicer places he stays on the trip through Uganda, Sudan and Egypt to the Nile's terminus in the Mediterranean. This is hard-core African travel: trying to sleep on flop-house floors, struggling through thigh-sucking holes in treacherous beds of matted hyacinth and papyrus, enduring the maddening frustrations of broken-down bureaucracies, and coping with the long silences and sudden terrors of bush wars.

Mr. Morrison's trip is more alongside the river than on it. The Nile's beguiling line on the map has not been a through-route for many decades. The collapse of colonial empires, wars and the failings of modern states have made several stretches virtual no-go zones for outsiders except missionaries and a few stubborn Cairo-to-the-Cape adventurers--some of whom pay for their romantic dreams with their lives.

Travel along the river has rarely been easy, except for the post-World War II era of flying boats, and the colonial way-stations are now only marked by the hulks of a few old river steamers, sunk and rusting at their moorings. Sensibly, therefore, Mr. Morrison doesn't pretend that he will float down the Nile like some satellite phone-equipped Huck Finn. His quest, he says, is to bind together and make better sense of a region mostly known for its many dead ends--the ancient land of the Nubians steadily being submerged behind dams, or the vast, mysteriously burning Sudanese swamps of the Sudd. Mr. Morrison is also a writer in search of material: In an early mission statement, he declares himself "tired of struggling for crumbs of piecework from a fast-shrinking roster of newspapers and magazines. The hustle made me feel small. I needed to do something big."

Finishing the trip was certainly an achievement, and "The Black Nile"--a title never explained, perhaps chosen both to sound ominous and to illustrate Mr. Morrison's preference for the river's origins in Black Africa--is a cautionary tale for would-be travelers in rough territory about the need for preparation, patience, humor and friendship. The harder the going for Mr. Morrison, the more expressive his writing. He describes the "visual tinnitus" of flat waters and swamp plants. He starts the day with muscled arms that are "coiled pythons" but after long hours of paddling are turned into "useless sleeves of cement." He rides in a Land Cruiser madly driven on "invisible currents of wet paste." A truck ride in Sudan is intensely comic, recounted by the author with slow-motion precision as the gear-shift breaks off and the resourceful driver puts his foot on the clutch and opens up the under-floor transmission so that he can still change gears--with a screwdriver.

Dangers, amusing road-trip predicaments and well-turned phrases compensate for the book's lack of an over-arching argument. They also temper the exasperation the reader might begin to feel with the repetitive reality of putting up with stifling bus rides, plodding in search of cheap hotels and seeking out the happy hours where international-aid workers seek solace in unhappy lands. Mr. Morrison offers a nod of respect for normal people and settled states in the Nile region--Egypt's Aswan ferry feels like a homecoming to civilization, for instance--but he gives them little space.

The great Nile culture of Egypt is too well-known for his taste; it warrants just one of 10 chapters. A boatman named Fony offers him his felucca to ride a stretch from Aswan to Luxor, but on learning that the only people plying the river are tourists, Mr. Morrison prefers a second-class rail car "to avoid the wordy wake of Gustave Flaubert, Florence Nightingale and William Golding."

His own accounts of Egypt's ancient sites or tense backwaters of the Islamist insurgency are workmanlike but perfunctory. He scorns Luxor's development-minded city fathers as being interested in "emulating the Luxor casino in Las Vegas." A vendor selling pharaonic fakes who describes modernization's crushing of old ways is depicted as work-shy and implicitly mocked for his expensive-looking wristwatch.

Instead, pride of place goes to backwaters like Malakal, Juba or Jinja, which even readers familiar with the region will have to keep turning back to find on the book's maps. We're told in a loving chapter and a half that Malakal, a Nile-side settlement in Sudan, is an earth-tracked tipping point between Africa and Arabia, which both sides of the north-south conflict take turns looting.

Mr. Morrison wears his journalistic experience lightly--he sets out with a tourist map so poor and out of date that, he discovers, it puts towns on the wrong side of national borders. But his reporting background, which includes writing for Newsday and National Geographic News, allows him to step back for some deft backhanded analysis. He notes, for instance, that Egypt's crumbling inertia makes the entire country feel like a "slow-decaying element."

His heart is clearly in the upper reaches of the Nile, in Uganda and Sudan, which he finds "dynamic, changing" and which afford him an opportunity to explain how the "madmen" and "dreadlocked child soldiers" of the insurgent Lord's Resistance Army use calculated mayhem to get their way. Since 1987, these apocalyptic Christian-tribal guerrillas have ranged between Uganda, south Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mr. Morrison gets through territory partly controlled by the group, but not without a heart-in-throat moment when he reads that 40 travelers were murdered on a road he had just driven down.

The book is at its best in Sudan, describing a country torn between the dividing lines of many Nile worlds: Muslim and Christian, desert and jungle, oil wealth and poverty, Arab and African. Mr. Morrison shows how hard it will be after years of war and famine to reintegrate the south with the north, or for the south to govern itself as an inclusive, coherent state. He finds an occasional ray of hope--people seem surprisingly ready to let bygones be bygones, as when he has to hunt hard in Malakal for any physical or political damage caused by street battles a few months before. But a sense of foreboding is more common. He meets a Sudanese aid official who tells him: "A girl child here has a nine times better chance of dying in childbirth than of finishing primary school."

"The Black Nile" is not so much about the river as it is about the lands where it flows. Mr. Morrison travels mostly by minivan, jeep or truck. On the Nile itself, he rides through southern Sudan in a Norwegian aid group's raft, bristling with soldiers and weapons in case of attack from forces opposed to the Sudan's 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. He boards a ferry to voyage down Lake Nasser, the long lake formed in the 1960s by the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's Aswan High Dam. And early in the trip, accompanied for a while by a childhood friend, Schon Bryan, Mr. Morrison paddles a canoe on the river. But the two never open Mr. Bryan's bag of fishing rods.

Even if he wasn't often wet with more than perspiration, Mr. Morrison does pay ample attention to the Nile's troubles as a waterway. The problems begin at its source, where the over-fished Lake Victoria is increasingly clogged with hyacinth, which has to be mechanically hauled out. Three decades ago, the author tells us, fish were abundant and many of them five feet long; Mr. Morrison sees fishermen making do with undersize 15-inchers.

One Ugandan "Nilometer" measuring the river's ever-varying level shows the river below the lowest recordable mark. Demands on the Nile's bounty can only grow as tributary states above Egypt and Sudan-- Uganda and Ethiopia in particular--are making new demands for water as they seek to develop their own agriculture. The author's clear-eyed asides illustrate the conflicts of interest over various countries' needs for power-generating, flood-controlling dams. At the site of Sudan's new Merowe Dam, "cement trucks churned on the tarmac, men walked with hard-work swaggers, and--whatever the serious human rights issues, the forced displacement, the lack of environmental review, the destruction of farmland, the arrest and torture of opponents--I had to admit the thing was a sight, big and impressive and cool."

Above all, Mr. Morrison's peppery anecdotes, his refreshing honesty and his ability to show how Africans view their difficulties save "The Black Nile" from being simply a memoir of an author's self-prescribed endurance test. Instead, the book gives us a compelling portrait of life along the Nile--from lonely fishing communities on Lake Victoria to the cacophonous collisions of Cairo. Mr. Morrison's more discouraging encounters also quietly pay tribute to triumphs of the human spirit. Mr. Bryan, the author's companion and verbal sparring partner for the first third of the account, later writes to him: "It's good to be desperate once in a while. Gives you an appreciation of the looks on people's faces when they're desperate and you're not."

--Mr. Pope is the author, most recently, of "Dining with al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East" (Thomas Dunne).

A nearly perfect book--entertaining from start to finish, well written, nicely edited and full of great scenes and vivid, larger-than-life characters.

It's hard to keep up with all the historic changes in Africa these days: first a revolution in Egypt, now an entirely new country in southern Sudan. If you want to see, hear, taste and smell what these countries are like at ground level, traipsing through the marshes and the mud of Egypt, Uganda, and Sudan in a series of broken-down boats, buses, jalopies and barges, each more dilapidated and perilous than the last, in the company of a witty, compassionate ne'er-do-well who describes himself as having "the posture of a boiled shrimp," then The Black Nile is a must-read.

First things first: The Black Nile is not a primer on African history. It's a river quest, an erudite travelogue in the grand tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Bruce Chatwin. A former newspaper reporter, Morrison clearly knows how to do his homework. But reading The Black Nile, you get the feeling he plowed through a stack of history books--and then did us the favor of distilling them into a few highly concentrated passages, doled out at just the right moments, the way a clever bartender knows just when to give you a shot.

Take his description of the Sudd marshes in southern Sudan, the world's largest wetlands. In one paragraph of beautifully condensed prose, he takes us from A.D. 61, when the Roman Emperor Nero dispatched his troops to find the source of the Nile, to the 19th-century slave trade, what Dinka lore calls "the time when the world was spoiled." A simple description of a marsh, a boat, and a lonely soldier becomes a meditation on brutality, endurance, and time.

Morrison does not linger long in one place; my only criticism is that the characters he meets are so intriguing that I often long for more. But he packs a lot of interaction into these brief encounters, and you get the feeling he'd be a ball to travel with. The way he disposes of his boat will make you wish he had a boat for every little town along the Nile.

What makes the book is Morrison's empathetic eye, his talent for zooming in on lonely, incongruous details and characters. The chairs made out of ammo crates labeled "Parts of Typewriter"; the old lady who pours tea out of a container labeled "Carbolic Acid," and stirs it with a spoon cut from a tin cooking oil container; the car batteries so painstakingly refurbished and retrofitted that they were "almost artisanal."

In Juba, the outpost for Sudan aid workers, he notes how the thousands of people working for the UN and other humanitarian groups have driven the prices of basic foods higher than in New York or London. Impoverished locals have to rely on the watery runoff from ful, stewed fava beans, a common subsistence food in North Africa and the Middle East: "Those who couldn't afford the beans themselves subsisted on whatever protein might be found in ful water, the leftover broth. It wasn't that vegetables and fish weren't arriving daily from Uganda; it was that no one could afford them who wasn't on a foreign payroll." This is first-class observation, and The Black Nile is full of moments like it.

Dan Morrison takes the reader on a gripping, amusing, well-researched and ultimately profound trip on the Nile, from its Ugandan wellsprings to Alexandria. Along the way he encounters both the familiar -- a far cry from the way Westerners often depict Africa - and the dangerous: well-armed crazies, religious radicals, brash exploiters and creepy quick-buck artists. The writing is fresh, honest and novelistic, laced with pertinent history and fast-moving anecdotes. The characters are well-drawn, including that of Morrison's close friend and traveling partner, who is one part adventurer and another part cautionary straight-man. The book is visceral at times, causing me to imagine myself as an explorer. I suggest everyone take this heart-pounding trip. It is truly a great adventure, but be forewarned: It ain't Disneyland, and you're not likely to forget it.

You've got to admire the guy. Tracing the Nile, from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean, he goes through some of the most dangerous country in the world. He's also got a pretty engaging style, and certainly has some interesting stories to tell.

That said, I ended up disappointed. For one thing, he's very focused on the politics. He *is* a journalist, but I often got confused who was who, or who did what to whom, or why I should really care. When he focuses on the actual travel or the individuals he meets, the book is much more successful.

Another thing I didn't like is that he really didn't go down the Nile under his own power except for a very small section of it from Lake Victoria to Lake Kyoga, both in Uganda (a couple of days tops). The rest of the time, he's hitching rides, riding a steamer, taking a bus. Interesting in itself, but I felt a little cheated.

I guess I was expecting something along the lines of Blood River: The Terrifying Journey Through The World's Most Dangerous Country, or Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure, or On the Water: Discovering America in a Row Boat.

I recently have developed an addiction to travel books and especially those about long journeys in remote or troubled areas of the world. Dan Morrison's tale The Black Nile of traveling up the Nile came into my radar and I knew it would be a must read for me.

After reading several other books about traveling through Africa, I was aware that the journey would have more roadblocks than the traveler could have anticipated and this was the case with Dan Morrison and his traveling companion and childhood friend, Schon Bryan. Arriving in Kampala in Uganda, they hope to find a boat to row up the Nile in, but since they can't find one they need to have one built. while they are waiting they explore their environment and take a boat trip on Lake Victoria.

Dan Morrison a journalist, who has worked around Africa, the Middle East and South Asia has a somewhat snarky style and can be both amusing an informative. He is quite capable of thinking on his feet and this enabled him to get through difficult situations during his journey up the Nile. His friend Schon was able to journey only part way before health and time constraints made him return home to the US.

Morrison aptly describes the appearance, climate, political scene and differences which exist between Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan and Egypt. As a journalist he is interested in where the story is in each part of his journey. While in Southern Sudan he makes a side trip to the oil fields even though he was told it was forbidden to go there he found a way to visit and question the people around about it and its impact.

Ironically he concludes:

"Down the length of the Nile people lived and even thrived under extraordinary constraints. But Uganda and Sudan were dynamic, changing. There, the future was unwritten and --however unevenly -- the horizon was growing. It seemed the opposite held in Egypt: Here, your fate was obvious and you would never be free."

I recommend Morrison's The Black Nile for anyone wishing to know more about this area of the world.

Mr. Morrison boats, walks and mostly takes assorted perilous bus rides that skirt the Nile. This book is like an introductory sketch of the countries the Nile passes through.

We are given history, geography and introduced to a few of the people who inhabit this region. Most of the people the author converses with are men as we would expect in this part of the world. Often their stories or version of events are contradicted by others encountered by the author later on. Such are the perplexities of recent history.

The author interviews a few American evangelists that are in the Sudan. I do find their presence troubling in view of the already existing religious strife in the Sudan. Outsiders in embattled countries should always proceed with caution and that can be difficult to do when religion is involved.

Most of the book is on Uganda and the Sudan with only the last 35 pages on Egypt.

I have to admit that it took me a few weeks to pick up this book. My husband bought it and I was thinking "boy book" (I tend to read fiction and memoir). But I did pick it up and then I couldn't put it down. Yes, this is a book about a very troubled part of the world. Yes, it introduces some geopolitical and environmental problems that seem intractable. But what I didn't expect was the sense of humor and wide-open Experience with a capital "E." Morrison takes the reader to a part of the world where few will travel and he gives not just a lay of the land or a catalog of woe but a sense of the people -- as individuals. It wasn't until I was reading "The Black Nile" that I realized most of what I know about Africa and Africans is broad, general, removed. Faraway. This book is individual, specific, upclose. Vivid. One of the jacket reviewers uses that word and I can't think of a better one. A truly excellent book.