Author: Tim Butcher
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.
