He’s careful to distance himself from the white supremacist view of Africa as a collection of basket-cases, as though that is all that could be expected of ‘these people’. In Butcher’s presentation of it, it’s one disaster after another. Butcher isn’t going into any details yet.)
(I know from other sources that there was little attempt among the Belgians to pretend to be bringers of enlightenment to the benighted natives as there was with, say, the Brits in India. What she doesn’t mention – but Butcher does, briefly – is the beastliness of the colonial regime that kept the trains running on time. In her words – Butcher is a journalist on the Telegraph, and his mother is no liberal – this was before all the ‘beastliness’ began after Independence. In his description of it, based on her memories, postcards and souvenirs, West Africa at that time sounds like India: transport links were reliable, and it was as safe for young white women to travel as it would have been in Europe. Best by far is the journey his mother made at the very end of the Belgian colonial period in the 1950s. There are several personal connections which we indulge him in because, well, some of them are quite interesting. The country is all smashed up: nothing works, the corruption makes the awful practices in other African countries seem rather low-key, and even a taxi-ride across the capital leads to the driver being beaten up almost as a matter of course.īut then other time-lines are set running, and other stories. This is one of the time-lines, no doubt the one we’ll get used to being on once he actually gets moving. The Preface begins with him in the Democratic Republic of the Congo about to set off in August 2004.
Maybe because he does go on a bit… but hey. I don’t know why I’m being sarcastic about it.
He must have survived, so he has to turn on all the taps to fill us with enough admiration and dread. Butcher wants us to know exactly how dangerous/ brave/ foolhardy he is being even to contemplate the trip. And he hasn’t even started on his journey yet, the one that some old hand refers to in the subject box of an email as ‘Death Wish’. In all the time-lines that he has set running – I’ll come back to those – terrible things keep happening. I’m listening to an audiobook read by Tim Butcher himself, and from the start you know it’s going to be harrowing.
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