A voyage beyond reason

Travel:Intrepid is one word for Tim Butcher. Insane is another. His decision to retrace Henry Morton Stanley's 1870s journey along the Congo River is truly beyond reason.

Elder journalistic colleagues told him the plan was "suicidal". Hardened Congolese nationals just shook their heads in disbelief at the idea, especially when Butcher explained that he wished to complete the journey entirely by land and water in a reproduction of Stanley's historic trip.

It takes some courage to cover this terrain, which is almost certainly more dangerous today than it was in Stanley's era. What is now the Democratic Republic of Congo has seen the highest loss of life in any conflict since the second World War. Four million people were killed there between 1998 and 2006, and scores more continue to die at the hands of anti-government rebels or drugged-up, armed gangs known as mai-mai.

"The only protection I carried was a penknife and a packet of baby-wipes," Butcher narrates, before setting out.

A journalist with the Daily Telegraph, formerly posted to cover Africa, Butcher is courageous in another sense - for he dares to follow a trail of literary giants into the country formerly known as Belgian Congo. Adventurer-authors from Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement to Evelyn Waugh and Conor Cruise O'Brien have trod this soil. Two outstanding works of reportage - Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost and Michela Wrong's In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz - have also emerged from the country in recent years.

Despite such competition, Butcher deserves a special place in the cannon of Congolese, if not African, travel writing. A vivid account of an audacious quest, Blood River provides a unique, worm's eye view of what is arguably Africa's most troubled state.

The book reads in part like a Boy's Own adventure tale, with Butcher playing the role of the amateur explorer, transported from Middle England to a strange world of pygmies and cannibals. There are plenty of what Waugh might have called "ripping yarns" from the journey, such as the occasion Butcher comes under attack from a massive column of ants, or the various times he struggles manfully against corrupt officialdom.

One memorable episode sees the author escaping a ferocious lightning storm in a wobbly pirogue propelled by four paddlers. On reaching the shore, he scrambles for safety into a vacant, thatched hut on the river-bank: "By the time I had retrieved my soggy head torch and cast a light around the room, my four companions were asleep, their limbs all folded together for warmth like the blades on a Swiss army knife."

Butcher's passion for history comes across as somewhat eccentric in a country of severe poverty, where a fragile peace process outlaws recriminations. ("History is a luxury people cannot afford around here," one toughened aid worker tells him.) Yet Butcher makes a strong case for more remembering and not less, wondering "what hope there can be for a place if . . . lessons from the past are never heeded".

He is at his best recounting stories from the people he meets en route. The harshness of African life is illustrated by an impoverished palm-oil salesman who lives 300km from the nearest market, and by a fisherman who pleads with Butcher to adopt his son in the knowledge that the boy would have a better life abroad.

The only sour note is struck at the end of the book when Butcher, perhaps feeling the need to convey an epiphany of sorts, draws some fairly sweeping conclusions about Africa from his trip. Adopting "the Congo" as a symbol for the continent, he argues that former colonies in Africa have regressed since independence. Furthermore, he blames Africa's woes largely on what he calls "sovereignty-stripping" by foreign and domestic powers.

Whatever about the accuracy of Butcher's analysis, one gets the impression that it could have been written without him ever leaving a newspaper office, let alone climbing into a leaky canoe.

In the dying pages, he puts great store on the views of a shady former diamond-trader from "Rhodesia" and a UN peacekeeper from Malaysia who wonders: "Why are Africans so bad at running Africa?"

This may well be a valid question. But answering it calls for an entirely different sort of book.

The strength of Blood River is its capturing of the small picture, not the big. One of the many enduring images from the work is Butcher's chance encounter with a man called Kabinga Sabiti during a temporary stop in the bush to repair the author's motorbike. Dehydrated to the point of near- unconsciousness, Butcher managed to scribble down a comment from the man over the din of a gunning bike-engine.

The journalist was quickly on his way, with the following words in his notebook: "Thank you for coming. Since the war came we have not seen many outsiders. The UN came here once, but only by helicopter and they touched down and left in just a few minutes. Please help us find peace."

Joe Humphreys is an Irish Times journalist, currently based in South Africa

Blood River:A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart By Tim Butcher Chatto & Windus, 363pp. £12.99