Customer Reviews

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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 more 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.

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.

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.

"In August 2004 I booked a flight from Johannesburg to the Congo, wrote my first will and kissed Jane goodbye."

On that note, Daily Telegraph reporter Tim Butcher set off on what can only be described as one of the most quixotic expeditions imaginable. In the early years of the 21st century, he had somehow fixated on the idea that he should follow in the footsteps of a former Telegraph reporter -- 19th century explorer and colonialist Henry Stanley (he of "Dr Livingstone, I presume" fame) -- and travel overland and on water the length of the Congo river, thousands of miles to the point where this massive river finally reaches the Atlantic.

Easier said than done. To start with, there is the fact that for the last half century or so, Congo is a country that people try to get out of rather than into. (At one point, a resident of Kisangani tries to persuade Butcher to take his four-year-old son back with him to South Africa, because there is no future for him there.) Aid workers and diplomats thankfully leave the day their postings expire, while members of the UN mission (the longest-running of its kind) exist in tiny airconditioned enclaves in the equatorial jungle and similarly count down the days. Almost the only non-Congolese who seem to enjoy life in the country are those who have come to exploit its mineral assets -- cobalt, diamonds and gold, among other products. They, as Butcher shows, live in protected compounds in Kinshasa.

Indeed, it's that legacy of "asset stripping" -- which Stanley helped ignite -- that Butcher chronicles as he somehow manages to battle his way from one community to the next along his pathway. From the Arab slave traders who raided from Zanzibar in the East to the horrific Belgian colonial regime (read King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa for more of that ugly saga), and later to the excesses of Mobutu, Congo's post-colonial dictator, the scores of tribes that collectively make up what we know as the Congo have had little chance to prosper from the growth in global wealth. On the contrary, as Butcher shows repeatedly and eloquently, with every year that has passed since the first eruption of post-colonial war in the 1960s, they have less and less contact with the rest of the world. Jungles have taken over hospitals that once were leaders in tropical medicine and grown over railroad tracks so completely that it is impossible to see where they once led. Highways have become tracks that barely accomodate bicycles laden with mountainous loads of palm oil, that vendors will push for a 600 km, six-week long round trip in exchange for a $50 profit. Only imported ornamental plants show where once the comfortable villas of the Belgians once stood.

Indeed, the value of Butcher's adventorous yarn (and it's so suspenseful, it's almost impossible to put down) is to show us what happens to people that the rest of the world exploits and then ignores. The plight of the Congolese is worse than if Stanley had never mapped the Congo in his famous expedition; today, any vestiges of a rule of law (whether colonial or tribal) has vanished and anarchy rules. Even subsistence has become nearly impossible. Butcher notes the absence of animal sounds from the jungle canopy; there aren't enough animals in the jungle to satisfy the need for meat and protein, however, and the staple diet of Cassava leaves the Congolese emaciated, he notes.

The story of this starvation and abandonment of any hope; of the violence lurking just around the next bend in the river or the jungle pathway; should serve as just as much of a call to arms as did the famous reports of Morel and Casement a century ago. (Their denunciations of Belgian King Leopold's horrific regime led to public pressure forcing him to turn over what had been his personal fiefdom to the country as a formal colony.) Everyone Butcher encounters is stunned that he has been able to cover the terrain he has. "It took me a while to convince him I was not lying," he says of one such meeting. In some cases, the reader can detect, lurking just beneath the surface, a sense of astonishment at what they may view as a self-indulgent Western journalist embarking on some esoteric historical project at a time of such chaos.

Thankfully, Butcher himself is alert to the danger that his white face may mean for the aid workers and locals who help him along his way. In one town, he is ushered out even before daylight, as the priest who shelters him for a few hours tells him that the mai-mai (or armed gangs) will learn of his presence. And with this book, and its moving look at the life of a country that is actually reversing the course of progress, he has, in my opinion, transformed what may have started as just a foolhardy and self-centered expedition into something more valuable. With the publication of this book, there is no excuse for the horrors of today's Congo to continue to go unnoticed in the global community.

The journalist Tim Butcher took to cross Zaire from East to West on the traces of Stanley. To reach the Congo River he had first to travel west, through provinces that have been in a state of near-permanent rebellion for more than 40 years, and where cannibalism remains as real today as it was in the 19th century, when bearer parties refused to take explorers there for fear of being eaten. Even if he made it to the river, he would still have 2500 km of descent before reaching the place where the Congo River spews into the Atlantic. A stretch where there was no more official traffic. It turned out to be a more nerve racking journey he could have ever imagined.
One has to know that Zaire was ever more run down economically since the colonial power left the country in the sixties. The whole infrastructure broke down, railway, streets, ferries, shipping, no matter which stage of a journey you choose it will not only be adventurous but also dangerous, because marauding gangs roam the country. What the author accomplishes is daring. His journey does not so much differ from the journeys of the explorers of the 19th century.
Butcher has an unbothering style of writing. He is not inclined to exaggerations. He is not in need of that. The events speak for themselves! He underwent the process of understanding the political and economical background which made Zaire to what it is now. Nothing to gloss over. The whites exploited the country but also built it up, that the exploitation could go on. The blacks exploited the country and its people even more. The people have no perspective, their hearts are broken and vulgarizing.
The territory that Stanley staked in the name of the Belgian King Leopold witnessed what many regard as the first genocide of the modern era, when millions of Congolese were effectively worked to death trying to meet the colonialists almost insatiable demand for resources. And since independence, foreign powers have toyed with the Congo, stripping its mineral assets and exploiting its strategic position, never mindful of the suffering inflicted on its people. At every stage of its bloody history, outsiders have tended to treat Congolese as somehow sub-human, not worthy of the consideration they would expect for themselves.
The author is often meeting eye witnesses of massacres and other atrocities. The safest place for a Congolese is the forest, in which he escapes whenever marauders haunt the village. And Butcher as well finds a liking in the jungles which are so much nicer than the dismal villages and decayed cities. There are also no embarrassing fraternization scenarios or occult orgies as for example Hanlon has it. Butcher is about humanity and reason, about development aid for the Congolese that they find to a humane life.
The wars had one major effect in that there were only two ways left for the Congolese to get on with life. Before, there was a system of schools to go to paid for by the state, a transport system so that people could reach other parts of the country, a health system so that one had a chance of recovery. But then all was gone "so that you only have two real options - you join a church, the only organisation that provides an education, a way for someone to develop, or you join one of the militias and profit from the war."
The collapse of the state meant that its people either relied on the charity of outsiders or took to violence.
"But the major lesson I learned on my trek through modern central Africa was that the most valuable asset stolen from the Congo was the sovereignty of its people."
Before Stanley and the white rule, the people of the Congo had a sense for local power. The society was tribal with the authority lying in the hands of the village chiefs. No chief could ignore the will of the subjects. Decisions had to be taken, at least partly with the interest of the people in mind. The whites stripped all aspects of sovereignty from the people and they got it never back.
"One of the great fallacies about white rule in Africa was that when it ended, power was handed back to the people of Africa:"
Instead it was hijacked by elites who publicly claimed they were working for the interest of the people, but were in fact only driven by self-interest. In Zaire it was Mobutu who ignored the plight of his people. Dictators and undemocratic regimes conceal their own malicious administration and corruptness by claiming sovereignty. They cloak themselves in it to dismiss the right of any outsider to hold them to account.
I can recommend this book. It is worth reading. It closes a gap in understanding this region and the problems of the black continent. It is altogether a stunning travel book through one of the remotest places on this Earth. But do not try to walk in his footsteps!

Tim Butcher is to be saluted for making and recording this extraordinary trip. It was every bit as dangerous as Stanley's, if not more. He faced the same diseases and supply problems as Stanley and his men. While armed enemies haunted Stanley, Mr. Butcher is vulnerable to more powerful weapons and is traveling essentially alone.

Descriptions of the former civilization are striking, especially coupled with the author's observations of time going backwards. Mr. Butcher describes hotels, roads, functioning railroads and means of production from the colonial period and their present state of damage and decay. He has a deep sense of history and a keen eye for the present. He helps the reader imagine the plight of those who scramble to stay alive while natural and man made forces hold them back and the extraordinary qualities of those who can somehow maintain.

While this book is very good there was not enough of it for me. The author writes of bicycle traders, guides on land and river, UN and missionary workers and government officials, some of whom he spent a lot of time with. He usually described their encounters and something of their history or point of view. I wanted to know more. We don't if they live in huts or houses. Do they, and all locals are men, have a wife (wives) or kids? It is not so much that they speak English or French, but it is how did they became so good at a second language or come into their positions? While Mr. Butcher spoke with female aid workers and missionaries, there is not one interview with an African woman.

Aid programs appear to be band aids on huge problems. What do these aid agencies do? From this book, they receive supplies and their staffs live in air conditioned pre-fabs. I don't remember a single description of a clinic or the dispensing of aid.

In his discussion of what went wrong, it's clear that the need for the rule of law far transcends the need for democracy. Libertarians should take note of the consequences of a weak government. In these discussions of the African continent, the stability of Botswana and Namibia are not cited.

I'm giving this book 5 stars because of the value of the author's actually doing this and putting it down and because it is so readable that I gobbled it up.

When Tim Butcher describes a city in the modern Democratic Republic of Congo as "a sad collection of ruins," he could well have been describing the entire country, whose endless struggle over control of its rich resources during the past 100-plus years has left it mostly in shambles. This highly readable account of Butcher's attempt to follow the path of Henry Stanley's 1784 expedition to map the Congo River gives ample testimony to the difficulties of not just travel but of daily life in this sadly exploited nation.

Tim Butcher deserves praise for both bravery and for honest-reporting. His successful retracing, by land and river, of the route of the Stanley expedition that mapped the Congo River over 125 years ago was an act of bravery-and this tale could stand alone as a travel adventure. But it is more than that. It is a skilled portrait of the Congolese people, and the author's revelations open up a roomful of questions. Tim gives thanks and credence to the many Congolese, both black and white, who helped him complete his journey. But an elephant remains in that room full of questions provoked by this book. Why does the Congo remain so dysfunctional? What is it about the people occupying this huge area of great potential that keeps them mired in catastrophic failure and terror? To be sure, the Belgians who ruled this colony were often brutes who basically went after the riches. But they also built and left behind viable systems of communication, transport, education, and governance. Today that is all gone. In the Congo, Mobutu was one of the first and probably the most important of many kleptocratic tyrants that have ruled this land. In Mobutu's wake corruption became the norm. Tim refuses to make a blanket-judgement on the people, and points to the fine, brave inhabitants who are the heros of his narrative. They protected him and gave assistance without asking. They wanted the Congo to become stable and free from terror and despair. Tim relates in passing the musings of a Malaysian skipper of a barge he traveled on. This UN employee, who was himself a native of an ex-colony that was once considered dysfunctional, called the Congo a place of "wasted opportunity", with people who "don't want to make money for themselves-they just want to take it from others". Is this too cruel a judgement? Is there no hope for this essential heart of Africa? There is no easy answer to that question in the pages of this fine but sobering book .

After visiting Congo (DRC) in August of 2008, I decided to read Tim Butcher's book BLOOD RIVER. I found it paints a very accurate picture of conditions in this stricken country today. As the author portrays, just being in Congo is an adventure all by itself. It is dangerous, upsetting, and yet fascinating. Travel is every bit as hard as he says.

The book is exciting because you're never sure how the author is going to get from one destination to the next considering all the obstacles in his path. Yet through perseverance he somehow manages. Besides being an exciting adventure, it is an insightful visit to a hidden corner of modern day Africa.

I was particularly interested in his description of conditions on the set of Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn's 1951 movie "The African Queen" and how they have deteriorated in the 50 years since its filming. Sadly, conditions all over Congo continue to deteriorate. But for the armchair traveler who want to experience life in one of the most little travelled places in the world, read this book.

Tim Butcher decided to follow the footsteps of the explorer Henry Stanley across the Congo. The most dangerous part of his journey was by motorbike from Kalemie to Kisangani, where he acknowledges he was incredibly lucky in not being attacked by Mai-Mai rebels. He uses the country's Voie Nationale (National Route), which due to lack of maintenance, can't be traversed by anything heavier than a light motorbike, which then must be manhandled over fallen trees. At one point, he encounters a village where the children have never even seen a motor vehicle, although the older generation have told their children stories of trucks and buses. The author marvels that this is probably the only place on earth where the young have experienced less technology than their elders. The remainder of his trip was by river boat (with some exceptions), and is anticlimactic compared with the earlier overland segment.

Tim Butcher repeatedly slathers praise on the moral integrity and work ethic of the Congolese who help him. But the question arises in every chapter: Why is the Congo such a basket case? Butcher says it is because of the legacy of colonialism, but this argument wears thin after a half-century during which other ex-colonies have coped better with the challenges of nation-building. In even the worst-governed countries, it's still possible to drive a jeep on their main highway, but not in the Congo.

It is fashionable to blame everything on the Belgians, but this book reminds us that the Belgians created a network of well-maintained roads, riverboats, and railroads, and also maintained the rule of law, albeit undemocratic and overtly racist. Yet the post-independence regimes have engaged in atrocities and have allowed the infrastructure to decay. Under the Belgians, the trains ran on time; now they don't run at all.

This is a superb and unforgettable book, but I suggest skipping the earliest portion, where he covers Congo history and his own preparations. Dive into Chapter 3, where the adventure begins.