The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe [Paperback]

Dervla Murphy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1996

In January 1992, Dervla Murphy prescribed herself several carefree months and embarked on a cycle tour (pedalling and pushing) from Kenya to Zimbabwe via Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia on the cyclist's equivalent of a Rolls Royce called Lear. Before long, she realized that for travellers who wish to remain stress-free, Africa is the wrong continent. Inevitably she was caught up in the harrowing problems of the peoples she met; the devastating effects of AIDS (ukimwi is Swahili for AIDS), drought and economic collapse; scepticism about Western "aid schemes"; and corruption and incompetence, both white and black.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A brave and thoughtful Irishwoman, 60-ish Murphy (Transylvania and Beyond) specializes in treks through remote regions. Here she recounts a 3000-mile, four-month bicycle ride through southern Africa, at first seeking a ``carefree ramble'' but soon learning that most of her planned route included the region's ukimwi (AIDS) belt. Thus, Murphy's travelogue, which mixes her reflections on colonial legacies with well-etched encounters with border bureaucrats and generous locals, is shadowed by the specter of loss: a young prostitute, her siblings' sole support after their parents died of AIDS, struggles to make her clients use condoms; an expat doctor agonizes over the dilemmas of notifying the HIV-positive. Given her encounters with troubled Africans as well as her views of ineffective Western aid workers, Murphy concludes-a bit simplistically-that it's time for the West to withdraw, to leave Africans ``to sort out their own future.'' Despite that, this book-first published in the U.K. in 1993-remains resonant.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Overlook TP (July 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879516712
• ISBN-13: 978-0879516710
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #350,766 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #6 in Books > Travel > Africa > Zimbabwe
  • #29 in Books > Travel > Africa > Kenya

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A different view, March 22, 2000

By 

Thomas G. Parsons (New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe (Hardcover)

A couple of years after reading The Ukimwe Road, which I found to be excellent reporting, I was surprised to find so many negative and emotional views posted here. I have repeatedly recommended this and other Murphy books to friends as good entertainment and the most unbiased sources of on-the-ground information in print. Where Dervla Murphy has gone, we can learn truth that is seldom found in more conventional sources.

The picture she painted of the seriousness and extent of the AIDS problem in Africa was well supported by her first-hand (if anecdotal) evidence. Subsequent developments have shown that her alarming portrayal was accurate, and hers was in print *years* before the authorities began to recognise the scope of the problem. She did an excellent job of illustrating the wide range of psychological devices used to deny or minimise the problem.

Her portrait of the plight of a well-informed woman who despaired of protecting herself against AIDS, saying "You just don't know what it means to be a woman in Africa" still haunts my memory.

Official accounts, however alarming, have not yet caught up with Murphy's detailing of the cultural and social situations that have made the present disaster inevitable. Slowly and belatedly, news accounts are reflecting what she told us years ago. She can hardly be faulted for failing to suggest a solution, when any solution must involve massive cultural change: iconceivable to the locals as well as to western liberals.

This is not a cheerful read, like some of her other books, but it may be one of her most important.

Bias note: I have read and enjoyed almost all of Dervla Murphy's books, and bought a couple. I'll buy the rest for my permanent library when cheaper paperbacks appear. I do not share her political views (which I believe are far to the left of mine), but I do not find that this has made her observations any less valuable. She has my respect.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, July 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe (Hardcover)

Remaining rather drained from one of her other recent trips (the trip to Transylvania, for D. Murphy fans), Murphy decides to take a trip just for fun (the fact that she decides to bike through several African countries alone at age 60ish for a relaxing break tells the reader a great deal both about her and about what the book will be like!). She isn't even planning on writing a book for this trip. Yet as she travels along, she sees the ravages of "the slim disease" (ukimwi, or AIDS) everywhere. She also sees some of the causes of this, such as the poor treatment of women, imported Western values that haven't meshed with local customs (leaving societies in a state of moral limbo), and so on. This prompts her to share some of her experiences with us.

This book has many good qualities. The best is the author herself. She can describe her situations aptly; I greatly appreciate her language. She is genuinely interested in learning about the places she visits, and in meeting their people. She isn't afraid of new experiences, and knows how to laugh at mistakes that she makes, and be flexible when needed. Another likeable aspect of the book is the places she visits. Unlike many trips, which only visit big or well-known areas, Murphy makes a point of visiting non-touristy villages where she can actually see what African life is like. Lastly, while her discussions on AIDS are difficult to read, they seem more frank than could be found in most books.

On the other hand, this book did have some weaknesses. The biggest weakness that I saw was her opinionated responses to situations. While her thoughts are certainly more likely to be accurate than those of many tourists who just go in, take some pictures of famous monuments, and take off again, she certainly has her own share of bias. It made me uneasy to read it. I've read some of her other books; I tend to admire her and think I have a fair clue of roughly how much to accept or reject from what she says. Yet in this book she spent far less time on observation and far more time (it seemed) on sharing opinions. She also didn't seem to know exactly what she thought. For example, she criticized many missionaries for pushing abstinence, blithely ignoring the cultural ramifications of that. Yet at times she indicated that the solution was the current situation, except with more condoms, at times a return to polygamy was advised, and at times she thought the Africans should indeed go for sex with just one parter, their spouse. And would women best be helped by gaining more freedom, in a Western style which didn't fit with the rest of their culture? In sticking with African ideals that cruelly exploited them and left them extremely vulnerable to AIDS? Granted, no one knows the answers to these questions and so uncertainty is certainly okay; however, I felt that she overcriticized others who genuinely want to help.

All in all, this book was a good book, and I would recommend reading it. It gives a great deal of information in an interesting way. However, I would caution all readers to take her comments with a grain of salt, and consider carefully her opinions.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A loner's important journey into Africa, November 5, 2003

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe (Hardcover)

Since 1964 Irish writer Murphy has been traveling the world by foot and bicycle and writing about her experiences. An outspoken loner, drawn to the more remote parts of the globe, her beautiful but rugged experiences fascinate and educate the armchair traveler - without inspiring similar ambitions.

As a 60th birthday present to herself, Murphy undertakes a 3,000 mile journey through Eastern and Southern Africa on her Dawes Ascent mountain-bike, "the cyclist's equivalent of a Rolls-Royce," named Lear. The trip was a "self-described unwinding therapy.....a carefree ramble through some of the least hot areas of sub-Saharan Africa."

But "carefree" it is not, though nothing - not heat, torrential rains, hunger, illness, hostility or impassable roads - can stop her.

Murphy is greeted in Nairobi by drought and a mothers' hunger strike which rapidly degenerates into a riot when paramilitary troops arrive to disperse the women. Leaving the city as quickly as she can, Murphy contemplates the contrast between Western luxuries and construction projects alongside the shanty towns and hungry children.

From her first stop in a dusty village for a Tusker beer, AIDS predominates and a pattern is set which endures thoughout the lands and cultures she passes through during the coming months. By day she enjoys the solitude and scenery of rural Africa; by night she is embroiled in local discussions of politics and Western incursions and AIDS, often dodging individual pleas for help in getting to the land of opportunity - the West.

Ukimwi is Swahili for AIDS. In Africa, wherever she goes, it surrounds her. Some blame Western conspiracies and medical experiments; missionaries preach behavioral changes and deny condom distribution; men say they cannot survive without a variety of female partners; wives say their husbands refuse condoms; prositutes say they would have no business if they insisted on condom use.

Everywhere Murphy meets widows, orphans and more orphans.

She at first resists the pull of AIDS. For her this is a pleasure journey and she can do nothing to slow the epidemic. But it has become part of the fabric of culture, threatening traditional family life, taking the most productive and leaving behind the old and the young to fend for themselves.

In addition to the scourge of AIDS, Murphy finds much of Africa suffering from economic collapse, spurred in large part by misguided Western "development projects" that destroyed the local agrarian economy, often displacing the people and departing, leaving behind devastation and tribal strife.

She meets hospitality and hostility, and takes what comes; be it a bedbug, mosquito-infested tourist hotel, or an earthen floor, or a spontaneously offered bed in a local home. She sets out at dawn hardly knowing whether to expect a corrugated wartorn road or spectacular mountain scenery or a beguiling path that ends in a swamp (through which she is guided by a silent tribal elder). She pushes Lear up rutted mountain tracks and hurtles down, marveling at the African cyclists she meets everywhere - man cycling, two children on the cross bar, wife behind holding baby and toddler, and a heavy load balanced over all.

With a cast-iron stomach, she eats and drinks whatever is available (which is generally awful), especially enjoys her beer, cycles through bronchitis and is finally felled by malaria. Even that she comes to regard as fitting - ending her journey in Zimbabwe where "Blacks had been subjugated as nowhere else in British Africa." Murphy concludes that Westerners ought to get out of Africa once and for all - that Western systems have not "taken" and have only undermined traditional culture.

Whether you come to agree with her or not, her harrowing, thrilling, eye-opening and heartbreaking journey will stay with you when other travels are long forgotten.