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Blood River by Tim Butcher is the bestselling travel writing book of recent years and with good reason. When he wrote it Mr Butcher was the Johannesburg correspondent of the ‘Daily Telegraph’ and while covering events in Africa he became interested in the journey of the British/American explorer H.M. Stanley across the centre of Africa, discovering what became the Belgium colony of the Congo.

Butcher wondered if the journey could be repeated again today and he started to make inquiries as to its feasibility. The Congo today has almost become a byword for a failed state, a country beset by lawlessness, with large areas  controlled by warlords whose bands rob and murder at will. Many of the people Butcher contacted thought he was mad to contemplate travelling in the Congo and even the ‘Telegraph’ washed their hands of him, but after a lot of effort he was ready to start his journey.

Being a journalist the book is very well written, compelling reading, the best travel book I’ve read in years (but that’s not saying much). Butcher interweaves his own story with Stanley’s, and with the history of the Congo from it’s discovery, through the colonial period and onto how it became the wreck of a state it is today. Very hard and dangerous travelling, as most of the country’s infrastructure has collapsed, and he was very lucky to get as far as he did. In the end though he had to resort to flying, this is a country where waiting months for transport to move is not uncommon.

After reading the book I was lucky enough to see Mr Butcher give a lecture about this journey at the Royal Geographical Society in March 2009, where he gave an overview of his trip illustrated with pictures, which gave further insights into the situation in the Congo.

He empathized one of the themes in his book, that the world has allowed the Congo, a vast country the size of Europe and containing millions of people to go backwards. During the colonial period the country was connected to the modern world but due to corruption and war the country is now no more developed than when Stanley passed through in the 1890’s. Nature is encroaching again; there is a wonderful scene in the book where Butcher and his motorbike driver stop in the jungle for a rest. Walking around Butcher knocks his toe against something solid, so he drags the vegetation off to discover a rail. He then realizes that in colonial times this jungle track had trains and railway carriages running through it, now it had been completely reclaimed by the forest.

In the book Mr Butcher was very unsympathetic to the Belgian Colonists and it’s true they operated a form of apartheid and people couldn’t move freely without permission.  However in his talk he acknowledged that they did build the only infrastructure the country’s ever had and most crucially they provided the one thing that is now so sorely lacking, the key to development, to everything in fact – the rule of law. He reminded us that the killing goes on, much of it tribal with thousands being killed every month and that this gets almost no coverage in the West.

However there are now new colonialists in the Congo – the Chinese. Of the very few goods that make it into the interior, nearly all of the them are made in China, and that has killed off all the indigenous trade. In their hunger for raw materials the Chinese have done deals (given bribes) to what remains of the functioning government to exploit the country’s mineral wealth. Mr Butcher pointed out that the Chinese are building infrastructure again, but the roads and railways only go to places where the Chinese have an interest, the mines, there is nothing for the people.There’s no doubt that all the machines and material will be imported because the Congo has nothing; but that was the case in Colonial times. In fact the Chinese don’t only bring in their own engineers and managers they also bring in their own labourers, so the Congolese don’t even see the benefit of a few menial jobs. There are thought to be around a million Chinese now working in Africa, taking the jobs from people who only have one asset – their manual labour.

During questions at the end of the lecture Mr Butcher was asked why he thought African countries did not progress after colonialism, while countries in Asia powered ahead. His opinion was that African cannot tolerate success. If an African wins something, or succeeds in business, his neighbours and often his own family will try to take it off him or some how bring him down. He felt that until Africans can look at success as a positive thing, the continent will not progress.

When asked why he thought such a dangerous journey had been successful Butcher felt it was because he had spent a lot of time choosing good guides, they had been the key. He mentioned that he had been contacted by the parents of a traveller who had been in West Africa trying to replicate the journey of Mungo Park. This man has disappeared without trace and even though his parents have been out to Niger distributing leaflets and posters his body will probably never be found. It’s most likely he was the victim of the people he was travelling with. Such is Africa.