Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart (Hardcover)

by Tim Butcher (Author)
Key Phrases: river passage, river descent, Congo River, Lake Tanganyika, River Without (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
For me terror manifests itself through clear physical symptoms, an ache that grows behind my knees and a choking dryness in my throat, writes British journalist Butcher in the preface of this devastating yet strangely exhilarating account of his six-week ordeal retracing the steps of 19th-century explorer H.M. Stanley's Victorian-era travels through the present-day hell that is the Republic of Congo. Setting out into the war-torn, disease-infested backcountry of Congo in 2000 against the wishes of just about everyone in his life—family, friends, editors and a wild assortment of government officials (the corrupt and the more corrupt)—Butcher quickly finds more horror than he'd previously experienced in his 10 years as a war correspondent (With my own eyes I had peered into a hidden African world where human bones too numerous to bury were left lying on the ground). His tale is chock-a-block with gruesome details about the brutal Belgian rule of the late 19th century as well as the casual disregard for life on the contemporary scene. Part travelogue, part straight-forward reportage, Butcher's story is a full-throated lament for large-scale human potential wasted with no reasonable end in sight. (Oct.)
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Kira Salak Even seasoned war correspondents balk at the thought of being sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Few places offer such a smorgasbord of danger: rape, massacre, genocide, cannibalism. War ravages eastern Congo, and only the most hard-core aid organizations operate in the interior. This grim setting is the backdrop for British journalist Tim Butcher's travelogue cum history, Blood River. Ostensibly, Butcher traveled to the Congo to retrace the route of explorer Henry Stanley, the first Westerner to chart the Congo River, in 1877. "I wanted to do . . . something that had not been done for decades," he explains, "to draw together the Congo's fractious whole by travelling Stanley's 3,000-kilometer route from one side to the other." Yet Blood River is less an adventure tale than a journalistic investigation of what has gone wrong in the Congo, and why. "Congo stands as a totem for the failed continent of Africa," writes Butcher, a correspondent for London's Daily Telegraph. "It has more potential than any other African nation. . . . But it is exactly this sense of what might be that makes the Congo's failure all the more acute." Butcher's trip was treacherous, though he enlisted aid workers and missionaries to help him. Along the way, he encountered ragtag villages where starving locals had fled from marauding militias; bleached bones littered the jungle. People constantly warned him not to continue. "This is a terrible place where terrible things happen," a Congolese priest told him upon his arrival in the decrepit, war-torn town of Ubundu. Yet Butcher plodded on, and the only violence that befell him was an attack by army ants. As he recounts the journey, Butcher takes on the role of archaeologist, sifting through Congo's shady present to unearth vestiges of the nation's former promise. In 1885, Belgian's King Leopold II declared himself owner of nearly a million square miles in central Africa. The Belgians quickly exploited the region's natural resources, particularly rubber, using the natives as forced laborers to create one of Africa's wealthiest colonies. After the Congo gained independence in 1960, corruption and despotism sent it reeling into a civil war that took more than 5 million lives -- the worst toll in an armed conflict since World War II. Butcher's discoveries paint a poignant picture of Congo's lost hope and prosperity: "I took a few steps and felt my right boot clunk into something unnaturally hard and angular on the floor. I dug my heel into the leaf mulch and felt it again. Scraping down through the detritus, I slowly cleared away enough soil to get a good look. It was a cast-iron railway sleeper, perfectly preserved and still connected to a piece of track." Butcher constantly juxtaposes present and past realities, giving his narrative the surreal feel of time travel. His journey is complemented by quotations from Stanley's travel narrative, Through the Dark Continent, published in 1878, and by numerous interviews he conducted with local people, including Congolese mayors and Greek expats. Butcher's breadth of knowledge is both impressive and eclectic. We learn the technique of making cassava flour and the origins of Congolese Primus beer. What we don't learn about, however, is Butcher's own, inner experience. "The reader of a good travel book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage . . . but to an interior, a sentimental, or temperamental voyage," wrote travel writer and novelist Norman Douglas. Blood River succeeds admirably as reportage, but not as essay. If the author comes to any personal revelations by the end of his grueling trip, we're not privy to them; the result is disappointingly one-dimensional. Readers must decide what they want from a travel book, and whether this one's thorough interweaving of history, geography and politics makes up for its lack of introspection.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (October 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802118771
• ISBN-13: 978-0802118776
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #162,268 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A rather ordinary book about an extraordinary hellhole , November 22, 2008

By	R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Tim Butcher was the African correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that sponsored two of Henry Stanley's African expeditions. Butcher got the notion to re-trace Stanley's trek across the Congo, from Lake Tanganyika to the mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic Ocean. In 2004, during a relative lull in the bloodshed and anarchic mayhem that has convulsed the interior of the Congo for decades, Buther took six weeks to make the journey, by motor-bike, UN river boats, pirogue, helicopter, and jeep. BLOOD RIVER is his account of his trek, interspersed with history of the Congo, from the initial colonization of the Portuguese, to the brutal and greedy rule of King Leopold and the Belgians, to the post-colonial era, during which the rape and exploitation of the country, and the attendant bloodshed, has continued apace, perhaps at times even intensifying.

There undoubtedly is much of interest and value in BLOOD RIVER, but there are three overriding problems with the book. First, I have the sense that Butcher tends to be sloppy with his facts. For example, he implies that ebola was one of the tropical diseases that confronted 19th-Century European explorers and he states that Joseph Conrad, when he came to the Congo for his one mission there (the basis for Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness"), was "a professional skipper of steamboats." Minor errors, to be sure, but they force me to take all of Butcher's factual pronouncements with a grain of salt.

Second, Butcher's writing is ordinary. He is prone to needless repetition, and far too often his writing is cliched and overly melodramatic. For example: "That moment when I left the east bank of the river was special for me. I had achieved something that many people had thought impossible by crossing overland from Lake Tanganyika all the way to the Congo River, through some of the most dangerous terrain on the planet. With my own eyes I had peered into a hidden African world * * *." Or: "I sat in the darkness, thinking of my journey so far and how remote this area had become. A yachtsman on the southern seas or a climber in the Himalayas had more chance of rescue than I did."

Third, Butcher is not what you would call self-effacing. He is mightily impressed with himself and he tries mightily to make sure that we are equally impressed. Time and again, he writes about how dangerous and unprecedented, even reckless, his trip was. To be sure, for six weeks he had to endure tropical heat and insects, eat unappetizing native foods such as cassava, wait in squalid quarters while he made arrangements for the next leg of his journey, and be harassed by some officious and arrogant Congolese. But nothing life-threatening or especially painful actually happened to him.

Reading BLOOD RIVER is not a waste of time. In particular, it reinforces the principal point I have taken from other books on contemporary equatorial Africa, namely, that conditions now are worse than they were a third of a century ago and there is little reason to believe they will improve in the near future. But, whether you are interested in the Congo or the genre of adventure travel, there are other books out there that are more worth your time.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A THINKING/CARING GUIDE TO THE PRESENT CONGO , September 17, 2008

By	Mary Jo Loehle - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Tim Butcher's book BLOOD RIVER was recommended by Amazon last summer and I bought it because I am fascinated by the Congo. Having read King Leopold's Ghost,In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, Heart of Darkness as well as The Poisonwood Bible, I was intrigued by an update on the Congo, especially by someone adventurous (I did think crazy)enough to try to follow Stanley's journey across Africa from east to west in the current political/savage climate.
Mr. Butcher is a journalist, so he knows how to use words to convey a mood, or a place or a person. And in this book, he is at his best. You are tugged along almost reluctantly on his trip,knowing that he obviously survived, but wondering how he could have possibly made it all the way. Everyone told him not to try it, but somehow there were also very helpful people along the way.
The one man who begged him to take his four year old with him, the guys on the motorbikes, the pirogue pole guys and the captain of the boat are all unforgettable. I especially liked that Mr. Butcher would bring in historical asides, liked the making of the African Queen and Katherine Hepburn in the hotel that is no longer there, or the travel guide that his mother had. He brings in all the hard historical stuff also, like the Belgians and the hand cutting, as well as the slavery trade.
If you want a book that has it all, plus pictures, get this book and hop on behind Mr. Butcher as he pursues a dream/nightmare journey through Africa.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exploring the Congo more than a century after Stanley, September 4, 2008

By	A. J. Cornish Bowden (Marseilles, France) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fifty years ago the Democratic Republic of Congo -- then just ceasing to be the Belgian Congo -- had a modern network of roads, railways and river transportation, with adequate accommodation available in all of the main centres. Today none of that exists, and the only practical way of getting about is by air, and that with difficulty and even danger. As Tim Butcher remarks at one point, "I looked at the sickly child and tried to think of another country in the world where a baby born in the same place half a century earlier had less chance of surviving than today" (the last few words are quoted from memory, and hence are probably quoted inaccurately).

So when he decided to follow Henry Morton Stanley's land route in the 1870s from Lake Tanganyika to the River Congo and then follow the river to Boma, on the coast, this was not the trivial task it would have been in the 1950s, and many experts on the country said it would be impossible and dangerous and that he would almost certainly be killed if he attempted it. In some ways he had an even more difficult task than Stanley, with no Zanzibari bearers to carry all his stuff, and no guns to shoot anyone who tried to thwart him. Nonetheless, he largely succeeded (with considerable help, it must be said, from a series of aid workers and United Nations representatives), apart from flying about a quarter of the total distance, from Mbandaka to Kinshasa ("no capital city in the world more unrepresentative of its country"), when he felt to ill to continue. He describes Mbandaka as "a sad collection of ruins", but unfortunately this description applies equally well to almost everywhere he went.

Apart from its interest as a modern adventure story, Blood River is well worth reading for what it tells us about the modern Congo, and how it got that way, with much information about Stanley's initial colonization, exploitation as the personal property of King Leopold, later as a Belgian colony, and now independent, with essentially permanent armed conflict.