I was left feeling the hopelessness of it all after reading the book and definitely wouldn’t say it’s a “light” read. It definitely makes you appreciate their tenacity to keep going, despite these constant setbacks. The townspeople simply wait for the rebels to leave and rebuild time and time again. Nothing to stop the rebels from entering towns time and time again, causing the people to flee to the bush, while they ransack their goods. No one seems to be able to explain where it all went wrong and the future looks even more bleak as there is absolutely no control over the people in the region.
He encounters many interesting people along the way, from tribal chiefs to Catholic priests, all helping him piece together what exactly happened to the bustling towns that could be reached by train or port in the 50’s. The journey Butcher takes is filled with the constant danger of being attacked by rebels, yet his desire to complete this quest keeps him moving forward despite everyone warning him that he will never make it out in the bush.
Once bustling towns in the 1950’s and 60’s, they have become 3rd world communities with no running water or electricity since civil wars broke out in the 60’s.
Butcher’s goal is to take the same path a fellow Telegraph writer, Stanley, took nearly 100 years earlier to see what’s become of the Congo River and neighboring towns since. Out there between me and the Atlantic Ocean lay a primeval riot of jungle, river, plain and mountain stretching for thousands of kilometres.Blood River by Tim Butcher is a true account of the authors journey through Africa via the Congo River in 2004. The eastern sky was slowly growing more pale, but I turned to face west.
He was ‘driven’ to make the trip by an obsession partly stoked by his mother, who, before he was born, had travelled by train across the country in its latter days as a Belgian colony. Stanley thus charted the greater part of the course of that mighty river, then unknown.īutcher’s was a plucky intention, since the Congo (which we had to call Zaire under Mobutu) has been notoriously chaotic and virtually lawless for decades across most of its territory, equal in size to Western Europe. In 2002, he chose a lull in the conflict that has riven the Democratic Republic of Congo since the fall of Mobutu in 1994 to follow the route of H M Stanley’s epic journey between October 1876 and September 1877 from the western shore of Lake Tanganyika to the mouth of the Congo River. When war correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000 he quickly. Tim Butcher was for a while the Daily Telegraph’s man in Africa.
0 kommentar(er)
