caledonianne's review against another edition
4.0
After the efficiency, regulation, stability,economic sophistication and mega-success of Switzerland as set out in Diccon Bewes' Swiss Watching it’s rather hard to imagine where to go next. It came to me in a flash – look for the polar opposite. There was a minor snag in that I had already found it some years ago when my reading group read Tim Butcher’s excellent Blood River, an account of both a ripping Boy’s Own Adventure, tracing the route of H M Stanley along the Congo River, and of the slow and lingering death of the Congo as a viable state. It was scheduled as the conclusion of the book group’s burgeoning fascination with the Congo, an interest first kindled by Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and continued by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Butcher, former Chief War Correspondent and Africa Bureau Chief of The Daily Telegraph is clearly a glutton for punishment; after the hair-raising adventures in a thoroughly dysfunctional state described in the best-selling Blood River, he sets out again to recreate the dangerous and ambitious exploration of jungle trails through Sierra Leone and Liberia undertaken in 1935 by Graham Greene as detailed in Journey Without Maps. Greene was accompanied on his trek by his redoubtable cousin Barbara, a socialite who made the transition from the elegance of the literary salons of London to the suffocating heat of West Africa with considerable aplomb. This was thanks in part to their trek being accompanied by an entourage of 26 porters, three servants and a chef who each night set up their camp with the tin bath, pair of chairs and brace of beds (at which point I was irresistibly reminded of the well-travelled bedstead which had such a starring role in Lady Franklin’s Revenge). There were also hammocks to transport the pair when the going got especially rough – relied upon by Greene when he became perilously ill and it took Barbara’s stoicism and practical good sense to ensure his survival. After the trauma of reading about the terrifying risks and insane rigours of Butcher’s solo Congo trip it was a relief to find that this time he had his own retinue – David Poraj-Wilczynski, son of a former colleague and a recent Oxbridge graduate who’d been dabbling (without much enthusiasm) in banking; the irrepressible local overland guide Johnson Boie, a former refugee who had worked for aid organisations as a tracing officer, re-uniting war-torn families; and the self-contained Mr Omaru whose trusty Yamaha AG transports the party’s heavy rucksacks ahead to their daily rendezvous point.
Mr Greene, who later became a World War II MI6 agent in West Africa, set out on his 1935 mission with a book contract and a more noble commission: to investigate the re-emergence of slavery in the two countries on behalf of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. Butcher speculates that this may be an act of restorative justice – the Greene family fortune had been made in slave-dependent sugar plantation in St Kitts – and this book is enormously informative on the history of slavery in the region, back to the 18th-century when the dominant Temne chiefs had no hesitation in selling the prisoners captured in inter-tribal wars to white outsiders.Sierra Leone’s origins lie in a plan cooked up in 1786 by the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor (whose strange bedfellows included genuine utopian idealists, racist proponents of repatriation in the Enoch Powell mode, and slave operators who viewed London’s freed slaves as potential sources of agitation that threatened their business).The Londoners were joined by former slaves who had fought with the British in the American War of Independence, and who had struggled with the climate of their post-war sanctuary in Nova Scotia, and with ‘recaptives’ -. Africans deposited there having been rescued from slaving ships by the Royal Navy as it patrolled to enforce William Wilberforce’s slaving ban The bankruptcy of this first venture to establish the Province of Freedom as a black-run state led to its annexation by the British as a full colony. Liberia, it feels counter-intuitive to say, was less fortunate.
It was the brainchild of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United State, a white-run operation of dubious intent – there are even suggestions that it kidnapped former slaves in America and forcibly transported them back across the Atlantic as a sort of ethnic cleansing. The number who travelled willingly was always small, and inevitably tensions grew between these transplanted coastal settlers who were encouraged to form an elite, and the indigenous inland peoples. Distressingly, once the settlement declared independence in 1847 – a century before this became the norm in the rest of the continent – evidence slowly gathered that the new rulers were turning the ‘country people’ into their vassals, and – in an act of ultimate betrayal – selling them overseas.
Built on rocky foundations, the recent history of both countries has been tragic, with military coups, civil wars, brutal inter-communal violence, child soldiers and regimes of terror founded on the lust for ‘blood diamonds’. As a journalist Butcher had covered these conflicts at considerable personal risk, and his knowledge shines through in the clarity with which he explains the political machinations of the brutally corrupt and incompetent regimes of Samuel Doe, Liberia’s first indigenous leader and his nemesis and erstwhile comrade Charles Taylor who also committed numerous atrocities when fomenting the earlier civil war in Sierra Leone. As he follows Greene’s trail he becomes increasingly intrigued by the dancing ‘devils’ associated with the secret bush society, the Poro. The devil he firsts sees, with its long grass skirt, carved mask, and whirling dervish routine, sounds a lot like the sort of theatrical spin on traditional culture indigenous peoples around the world stage to charm the shekels from the pockets of gullible Westerners, and Greene thought that the power of the Poro had waned. Butcher – way off the tourist trail - holds to its continuing power, and remembers fetish-worshipping combatants in the civil wars buying into this ancient spirituality by indulging in ritual cannibalism, to gain greater battle strength by eating their enemies. He advances sociological theories on the structures and atomisation of Liberian society that sustain this malign force. He also reminds us how these belief systems can leak into our own supposedly rational and largely secular lives, reminding us of ‘Adam’ the ritually-slaughtered victim of the ‘Thames Torso’ killing.
It was instructive to read this book while the UK was enduring its longest heatwave for more than a decade, though our constant gripes were provoked by temperatures 10C below those Butcher & Co routinely negotiated. Even as we moaned and fanned ourselves most of us spent much of the time in air conditioned offices, rather than trekking over the uneven jungle floor, burdened by daypacks and insects, sweltering under the canopy of trees, and on the look out for fearsome scorpions, psychopathic chimpanzees, and the constant throngs of night-time rats. As a tale of endurance it was remarkable, all the more so because he managed to find a couple of ancient tribesmen who had, as children, encountered the whisky-drinking, note-taking Greene party.
I closed the book inspired to read more Greene, not just those of the famous novels I have yet to read, but also to go back to the short stories, particularly The End of the Party which I remember haunting me when I first read it as a teenager because, largely brought up with male cousins, it reminded me of the party terrors of our inevitable birthday games of Murderers in the Dark. Are children really still encouraged to play this malevolent form of Hide and Seek? I also feel that I want to know more about spunky Barbara Greene. On return to Blighty she described the trek from her perspective in the book Land Benighted, much of which seems to be available on Google, though my aversion to reading on screen may mean that it’s better to track down a copy of its 1990s reissue as Too Late to Turn Back. As for Mr Butcher, it’s three years since the publication of Chasing the Devil. Time for a new adventure, please!
Butcher, former Chief War Correspondent and Africa Bureau Chief of The Daily Telegraph is clearly a glutton for punishment; after the hair-raising adventures in a thoroughly dysfunctional state described in the best-selling Blood River, he sets out again to recreate the dangerous and ambitious exploration of jungle trails through Sierra Leone and Liberia undertaken in 1935 by Graham Greene as detailed in Journey Without Maps. Greene was accompanied on his trek by his redoubtable cousin Barbara, a socialite who made the transition from the elegance of the literary salons of London to the suffocating heat of West Africa with considerable aplomb. This was thanks in part to their trek being accompanied by an entourage of 26 porters, three servants and a chef who each night set up their camp with the tin bath, pair of chairs and brace of beds (at which point I was irresistibly reminded of the well-travelled bedstead which had such a starring role in Lady Franklin’s Revenge). There were also hammocks to transport the pair when the going got especially rough – relied upon by Greene when he became perilously ill and it took Barbara’s stoicism and practical good sense to ensure his survival. After the trauma of reading about the terrifying risks and insane rigours of Butcher’s solo Congo trip it was a relief to find that this time he had his own retinue – David Poraj-Wilczynski, son of a former colleague and a recent Oxbridge graduate who’d been dabbling (without much enthusiasm) in banking; the irrepressible local overland guide Johnson Boie, a former refugee who had worked for aid organisations as a tracing officer, re-uniting war-torn families; and the self-contained Mr Omaru whose trusty Yamaha AG transports the party’s heavy rucksacks ahead to their daily rendezvous point.
Mr Greene, who later became a World War II MI6 agent in West Africa, set out on his 1935 mission with a book contract and a more noble commission: to investigate the re-emergence of slavery in the two countries on behalf of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. Butcher speculates that this may be an act of restorative justice – the Greene family fortune had been made in slave-dependent sugar plantation in St Kitts – and this book is enormously informative on the history of slavery in the region, back to the 18th-century when the dominant Temne chiefs had no hesitation in selling the prisoners captured in inter-tribal wars to white outsiders.Sierra Leone’s origins lie in a plan cooked up in 1786 by the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor (whose strange bedfellows included genuine utopian idealists, racist proponents of repatriation in the Enoch Powell mode, and slave operators who viewed London’s freed slaves as potential sources of agitation that threatened their business).The Londoners were joined by former slaves who had fought with the British in the American War of Independence, and who had struggled with the climate of their post-war sanctuary in Nova Scotia, and with ‘recaptives’ -. Africans deposited there having been rescued from slaving ships by the Royal Navy as it patrolled to enforce William Wilberforce’s slaving ban The bankruptcy of this first venture to establish the Province of Freedom as a black-run state led to its annexation by the British as a full colony. Liberia, it feels counter-intuitive to say, was less fortunate.
It was the brainchild of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United State, a white-run operation of dubious intent – there are even suggestions that it kidnapped former slaves in America and forcibly transported them back across the Atlantic as a sort of ethnic cleansing. The number who travelled willingly was always small, and inevitably tensions grew between these transplanted coastal settlers who were encouraged to form an elite, and the indigenous inland peoples. Distressingly, once the settlement declared independence in 1847 – a century before this became the norm in the rest of the continent – evidence slowly gathered that the new rulers were turning the ‘country people’ into their vassals, and – in an act of ultimate betrayal – selling them overseas.
Built on rocky foundations, the recent history of both countries has been tragic, with military coups, civil wars, brutal inter-communal violence, child soldiers and regimes of terror founded on the lust for ‘blood diamonds’. As a journalist Butcher had covered these conflicts at considerable personal risk, and his knowledge shines through in the clarity with which he explains the political machinations of the brutally corrupt and incompetent regimes of Samuel Doe, Liberia’s first indigenous leader and his nemesis and erstwhile comrade Charles Taylor who also committed numerous atrocities when fomenting the earlier civil war in Sierra Leone. As he follows Greene’s trail he becomes increasingly intrigued by the dancing ‘devils’ associated with the secret bush society, the Poro. The devil he firsts sees, with its long grass skirt, carved mask, and whirling dervish routine, sounds a lot like the sort of theatrical spin on traditional culture indigenous peoples around the world stage to charm the shekels from the pockets of gullible Westerners, and Greene thought that the power of the Poro had waned. Butcher – way off the tourist trail - holds to its continuing power, and remembers fetish-worshipping combatants in the civil wars buying into this ancient spirituality by indulging in ritual cannibalism, to gain greater battle strength by eating their enemies. He advances sociological theories on the structures and atomisation of Liberian society that sustain this malign force. He also reminds us how these belief systems can leak into our own supposedly rational and largely secular lives, reminding us of ‘Adam’ the ritually-slaughtered victim of the ‘Thames Torso’ killing.
It was instructive to read this book while the UK was enduring its longest heatwave for more than a decade, though our constant gripes were provoked by temperatures 10C below those Butcher & Co routinely negotiated. Even as we moaned and fanned ourselves most of us spent much of the time in air conditioned offices, rather than trekking over the uneven jungle floor, burdened by daypacks and insects, sweltering under the canopy of trees, and on the look out for fearsome scorpions, psychopathic chimpanzees, and the constant throngs of night-time rats. As a tale of endurance it was remarkable, all the more so because he managed to find a couple of ancient tribesmen who had, as children, encountered the whisky-drinking, note-taking Greene party.
I closed the book inspired to read more Greene, not just those of the famous novels I have yet to read, but also to go back to the short stories, particularly The End of the Party which I remember haunting me when I first read it as a teenager because, largely brought up with male cousins, it reminded me of the party terrors of our inevitable birthday games of Murderers in the Dark. Are children really still encouraged to play this malevolent form of Hide and Seek? I also feel that I want to know more about spunky Barbara Greene. On return to Blighty she described the trek from her perspective in the book Land Benighted, much of which seems to be available on Google, though my aversion to reading on screen may mean that it’s better to track down a copy of its 1990s reissue as Too Late to Turn Back. As for Mr Butcher, it’s three years since the publication of Chasing the Devil. Time for a new adventure, please!
tanyarobinson's review against another edition
4.0
Tim Butcher's books are a great way to get to know Africa. Early this year I read Blood River, his account of traveling through war-torn Congo following the route of Henry Morton Stanley, and was fascinated but disturbed by his journey. Chasing the Devil is an account of Butcher's trek through parts of Sierra Leone and Liberia, tracing the steps of a journey novelist (and later MI6spy) Graham Greene took in the 1930s. Though hazardous and difficult, this quest seemed less suicidal than Butcher's DR Congo quest, so I was more able to relax and enjoy reading the book!
Modern Sierra Leone was settled by former slaves and blacks from the British Empire, though it did go through a protectorate period ruled by whites. Liberia became a sort of new hope/dumping ground for blacks from the United States before the Civil War, and is unique in post-colonial Africa as having been always led by blacks. Even here, however, the Americo-Liberians (elite newcomers), who represented about 10% of the population, ruled over the 90% "country" indigenous peoples, and the same sorts of civil conflicts have plagued the land in the last 50 years.
Butcher's books are travelogues, they're histories, they're commentaries on the anthropology of the native groups, but I especially love his journalist's spin trying to analyze WHY Africa is so troubled. I think his points about tribal loyalties over national interests are solid, as is his reading on community survival over individual success. This book's repeating theme of the Poro bush tradition of Devil power was especially fascinating, and showed what a hold these "secret societies" with their initiation culture have over the native peoples. Native rituals and legends are kept secret on threat of death, so much is unknown, but it's proven that human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism (eating an enemy's heart to gain his strength, for example) are still practiced in the back country of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Butcher shows how even this has played a role in the continuous civil unrest.
I absolutely recommend journalist Tim Butcher's books on Africa - quite a trip!!!
Modern Sierra Leone was settled by former slaves and blacks from the British Empire, though it did go through a protectorate period ruled by whites. Liberia became a sort of new hope/dumping ground for blacks from the United States before the Civil War, and is unique in post-colonial Africa as having been always led by blacks. Even here, however, the Americo-Liberians (elite newcomers), who represented about 10% of the population, ruled over the 90% "country" indigenous peoples, and the same sorts of civil conflicts have plagued the land in the last 50 years.
Butcher's books are travelogues, they're histories, they're commentaries on the anthropology of the native groups, but I especially love his journalist's spin trying to analyze WHY Africa is so troubled. I think his points about tribal loyalties over national interests are solid, as is his reading on community survival over individual success. This book's repeating theme of the Poro bush tradition of Devil power was especially fascinating, and showed what a hold these "secret societies" with their initiation culture have over the native peoples. Native rituals and legends are kept secret on threat of death, so much is unknown, but it's proven that human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism (eating an enemy's heart to gain his strength, for example) are still practiced in the back country of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Butcher shows how even this has played a role in the continuous civil unrest.
I absolutely recommend journalist Tim Butcher's books on Africa - quite a trip!!!
katyjean81's review
4.0
This was an interesting perspective on parts of Africa that I know nothing about. It was a pleasant blend of history and modern travel writing. Recommended for folks interested in learning about Liberia and the history of slave trade and colonialism.
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