I'd seen this book in airport bookshops throughout my travels for years, and it always sounded compelling enough that I knew I'd read it someday. Once I started, I could hardly put it down.
From the first page, it made me recall my own trip in the safer countries of southern Africa just a couple years ago, setting up and taking down my own tent repeatedly while moving about amidst a group of intrepid campers riding a commercial truck outfitted with a bare passenger cabin: the dusty, gravel roads all over, with only a few city streets being paved; sleeping under mosquito nets; carrying all belongings in but a single carry-on bag; pre-dawn chills that gave way to unrelenting tropical heat like I've never felt in my life.
From his opening paragraphs, I could envision my own African experiences of enthusiasm and disappointments that he would face on such an unbelievable journey overland from Lake Tanganyika to the Congo River: that part of the trip alone consumes the entire first half of the whole book! Unlike my own African adventure, he must navigate through the territory of marauding rebel militias, going by motorbike through rainforests that consumed the train tracks his own mother uneventfully rode through the Congo when it was still a Belgian colony.
Butcher devotes a great deal of his narrative to assessing the failed state of what his subtitle calls 'the World's Most Dangerous Country'--which it certainly is among! He rhetorically observes that there are surely few places in the world that are less advanced today than they were a half-century before, but that is the unfortunate case with the Congo.
Where once it had cities connected by trains and highways, and steamboat traffic plied the Congo River, the incessant civil strife and looting of its public resources by its long-time, post-independence dictator and his cronies has meant that no such roads, railways, or river boats exist anymore; it hardly has a functioning postal service or landline telecommunications.
He poignantly observes ruin after ruin, of buildings, river boats, and train cars, in settlements throughout his journey, noting for example the once-chic hotel that had hosted Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart while filming 'African Queen'--today nearly completely consumed by the forest.
Such is the fate of a country as vast as all of western Europe, a motley aggregation of numerous tribes united only by the vast river drainage of land from which the Belgian King Leopold II and his country as a colony thereafter exploited in resource extraction, to the deaths of manifold millions of people--not an exaggeration: as Butcher notes, this genocide predated that of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, and was the original impetus for human rights organizations to come into existence.
Unfortunately, the harrowing past still lives: at its writing, roughly a thousand Congolese die every single day as a corrupt system still siphons away the bountiful natural resources (once ivory and rubber, now diamonds and cobalt) to external sources, with no investments in infrastructure or the human capital of the Congo itself.
Only the UN, international aid organizations, and religious orders give any semblance of humanity to people so racked by intractable violence in their cities, such that those very entities--the sources of all his means of transport in his journey--must all travel about by air, which makes his moves overland through such hostile territory such a challenge of incredible proportions.
But as he learns and repeats as a mantra: cities are bad for their lack of safety, but open forests offer some cover of protection. Even the fauna of the wilderness aren't as big a threat: he reveals that because so many people have been driven out of unsafe settlements by armed gangs, there is nary a bird nor monkey to be heard in the rainforests, and he writes of only one massive crocodile and no hippos while on the river. All have been decimated to give protein sources to starving jungle-dwellers otherwise reliant only on nutrition-lacking cassava, which they may not have the time luxury to grow and prepare because instability keeps them on the move.
What he was able to do was nothing less than astonishing, a true frontier-blazing effort enabled by the kindness of strangers along the way with sparse preparations. Most of his trip was sheer, random luck at being able to avoid the violent pitfalls that would render it nearly impossible. Along the way, he does dodge rebels and succumbs to jungle sickness, all while playing the ongoing game of bribing urban bureaucrats to keep him on the move.
It's not a journey any reader could undertake, as eerily primitive as that of Henry Stanley, whose 19th century river voyage he re-creates, so living through the vicarious telling of his twists and turns makes for a rollicking read, especially to anyone who is beguiled and enchanted by Africa, the Mother Continent of humanity itself, an ethereal beckoning which obsesses and haunts Butcher to undertake his saga on its Blood River.
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John A Marr
What is wrong with Africa in one book
Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on June 10, 2018
