Blood River by Tim Butcher

From The Week of August 01, 2010

There is simply no way to measure the toll in human suffering exacted by imperialism. Put your finger on a map of the world; chances are, it will land near or on a country that has been convulsed by colonial rule, either in the giving or the receiving. It's taken centuries for Latin America to recover from Spanish rule, while Asia, though economically better off, isn't doing much better coming out from under the British. But of all the continents to have been plagued by this most rapacious of monarchical externalities, Africa has suffered the most. Perhaps it was that they had no history of a civil society to fall back on when colonialism finally ran its course. Perhaps the crimes of the Germans and the Dutch, the British and the Belgian, were simply too grievous to return from. No matter the cause, much of Africa's torment is directly attributable to European influence and nowhere is this more true than the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Mr. Butcher, a British journalist, something of an insane adventurer, took it upon himself to re-trace the path of Henry Morton Stanley's trans-African journey. Though much of the distance is traveled by boat on the Congo river, the gruelling overland trek Mr. Butcher endures is both harrowing and astonishing, as he contends with unreliable guides, dangerous mercenaries, monstrous insects and killer viruses to complete a most remarkable odyssey. Why remarkable? Despite the passage of some 140 years, it was barely any easier for Mr. Butcher to complete the mission than it was for his predecessor, Stanley. A hundred and fourty years, in which the Western world went from horses to airplanes, from wagons to Ferraris and, here, nothing has changed. Mr. Butcher describes in heartbreaking detail how much of the environment Stanley would recognize. In fact, in many ways, it is in even greater disrepair now than it was a century ago, as the more modern conveniences of railroad tracks have succumbed to the oblivion of disuse. Along the way, Mr. Butcher describes the people he encounters, inspiring and sinister, while acting as tour guide for the reader uneducated in the area's history. The scars left by the Belgian overlords lingers on in one of the most lawless places left on Earth.

Mr. Butcher's portrait of a failed nation is moving and disturbing. Though he lacks Megan Stack's lyricism, the raw emotion is similar as he tests the limits of his mental and physical endurance in a place antithetical to human civilization. This is a monument to anti-imperialism, a 350 page attack on the price of interfering in another society's affairs. Who knows what Africa might have been without Western arrogance. We'll never know for now it is the continent of the gun. And we well know how much damage the uneducated can do with that most devastating of human inventions. (4/5 Stars)