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Tim Butcher

Blood River: Vintage Voyages Paperback – July 23 2019

by Tim Butcher (Author)

1,628 ratings

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A compulsively readable account of an African country now virtually inaccessible to the outside world and one journalist's daring and adventurous journey.

When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H.M. Stanley's famous expedition - but travelling alone. Despite warnings that his plan was 'suicidal', Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vessels including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid workers to a campaigning pygmy, he followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers.

VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

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Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage Classics
Publication date

July 23 2019
Dimensions

12.9 x 2.4 x 19.8 cm
ISBN-10

1784875384
ISBN-13

978-1784875381

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Review

A remarkable, fascinating book by a courageous and perceptive writer. One of the most exciting books to emerge from Africa in recent years—Alexander McCall Smith

An intrepid adventure. In making and describing this journey, Tim Butcher has followed in the footsteps of Stanley and Conrad. It takes a lot of guts to yomp through the Congo and he obviously has plenty of those. But it is the wit and passion of the writing which keeps you engrossed—Giles Foden

This is a terrific book, an adventure story about a journey of great bravery in one of the world's most dangerous places. It keeps the heart beating and the attention fixed from beginning to end—Fergal Keane

A masterpiece—John le Carre

Tim Butcher deserves a medal for this crazy feat. I marvel at his courage and his empathy—Thomas Pakenham

About the Author

Tim Butcher has worked for the Daily Telegraph since 1990 as foreign affairs leader writer, defense correspondent and Africa Bureau Chief. He is currently living in Jerusalem where he is The Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Classics
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 23 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1784875384
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1784875381
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 267 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.9 x 2.4 x 19.8 cm
�鶹�� Rank: #568,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #866 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
- #1,178 in Travel Writing
Customer Reviews:
1,628 ratings

About the author

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Tim Butcher

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Tim Butcher is a British best-selling author and explorer whose books blend history with travel.

His latest, The Trigger, tells the story of the young man who sparked the First World War a hundred years ago by shooting dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand on a street corner in Sarajevo. Tim trekked across Bosnia and part of Serbia on the trail of history's greatest assassin, Gavrilo Princip, making a number of discoveries missed by a century of historians.

His first book, Blood River - A Journey To Africa's Broken Heart, told the story of an epic solo journey through the Congo. Translated into six languages, it topped the Sunday Times best-seller list in Britain and was shortlisted for various awards from the Samuel Johnson Prize in London to the Ryszard Kapuściński Award in Warsaw.

For his second, Chasing The Devil, he walked for 350 miles through Liberia along a trail blazed by a whisky-sozzled Graham Greene in 1935. He discovered, among other things, that Greene's life was saved by his indomitable but unsung cousin, Barbara Greene. The book made it onto the longlist for the George Orwell

A former foreign correspondent with The Daily Telegraph, Tim specialised in covering awkward places at awkward times: Kurdistan under attack in 1991 by Saddam Hussein, Sarajevo during the Bosnian War of the 1990s, the Allied attack on Iraq in 2003, Israel's 2006 clash with Hizbollah in southern Lebanon among other crises.

He was awarded the 2013 Mungo Park Medal for exploration by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and in 2010 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Northampton for services to writing. Born in 1967 he is based in Cape Town with his family.

For more details, pictures and contact details please go to: https://www.facebook.com/timbobutcher

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CharliM
Amazing book
Reviewed in Canada on July 19, 2022
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I was born in the Congo and grew up there. There's so much history in this book that I was never aware of. After 2 years in the US, we returned to Elizabethville (Lubumbashi) in 1963, shortly after the UN/Katanga war. (My grandparents had escaped to Northern Rhodesia during the war after enduring a couple of days sheltering in an office building on a mission compound in Elizabethville, caught in crossfire between UN and Katangese troups.) I remember after that being aware that there was rebel activity in eastern Congo and we needed to be ready to leave, but then I remember hearing that the rebels had been forced back and we didn't have to leave. Throughout my childhood we tried to be out of the country on June 30, as there was always unrest over that time. Mobutu came to power when I was a child, and he remained in power until long after I had left to live in Zimbabwe and then South Africa, until finally he was no longer president, after I had moved to Canada with my husband and children. Ever since I can remember there's been civil war in the Congo. After reading this book I understand why the Congo was always such a mess. This book is very informative, very readable. I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the history of Africa.

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Brian P.
Want to learn about the Congo? Here's a Good start!
Reviewed in Canada on March 20, 2009
If you are looking for an introduction to the Congo that mixes travelogue with history this would be an excellent choice. The �鶹��.com description gives a good summary of the details. I found myself reading tens of pages at a time, looking forward to when I could pick it up again. With reference to the reviewer who thought it was dull... well, I don't think Tim was trying to write a "thriller" ...And as far as the author not doing the whole tip "on his own," well, I believe Morton Stanley had a whole entourage! Anyway, definitely worth reading.

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Matt
Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on August 26, 2014
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Great mix of history and adventure. Enjoyed it immensely.

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Ann Bank
Small printing
Reviewed in Canada on June 7, 2023
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Unfortunately, the printing in this book was too small for me to read without reading glasses, so I never read it. That’s the problem with buying books online.

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Brian Maitland
Joseph Conrad in reverse
Reviewed in Canada on April 17, 2012
Terrific unique angle on the current crisis in the Congo (or it is just "Congo" now?). The author, Tim Butcher, is a foreign correspondent for a British newspaper--specifically the same newspaper (The Telegraph) that sponsored Stanley famous search for Livingstone in the same region.

He comes up with this crazy and scary plan to traverse Stanley's route from the source of the Congo River to its mouth. What, as hopefully some of you will realize, this area on our planet has seen millions die in conflicts that it would take another book to explain involving mineral wealth, age-old tribal grudges and politics that stretch back to the Belgian Congo era.

His journey (and the cover is terribly deceiving as the author doesn't paddle in a canoe/kayak) involves motorbiking along rough trails (there are really no functioning roads anymore in the heart of Africa), being priouge-d along by boats paddled by Africans, slow steamboats not headed to China and jeeps driven by aid workers.

The journey is really not the interesting part at all as not much exciting or truly dangerous happens to Butcher. Just the jawdropping amazement of how slow and frustrating his journey becomes and the stories he hears along the way from the better than average people affected by the rebel attacks, food and housing shortages and the entire mess in a region that should possibly be one of the wealthiest on the planet if it was run properly.

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a loyal reader
Couldn't put this one down
Reviewed in Canada on December 6, 2007
A fascinating and often hair-raising tale, mixing historical narrative of Stanley's epic journey with the author's own incredible -- and incredibly dangerous -- travels by motorbike and riverboat down the Congo. His reflections on his own journey, his travelling companions and on the future of this broken land twist are by turns humorous and despairing, and reflect his understanding and deep attachment to Africa. Anyone with a love of Africa, or who has ever travelled there or wanted to, should not miss this book.

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�鶹�� Customer
Much ado about nothing.
Reviewed in Canada on March 18, 2023
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FEH !!

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NeonFilm
An incredibly brave and worthwhile journey.........
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2012
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Tim Butcher's book charts his experiences during an incredibly brave journey tracing tha path that HM Stanley took to chart the course of the great Congo River that courses through the Democratic Republic of Congo. The route that Tim takes traverses some of the most lawless and subsequently dangerous regions on the planet.

Much press reportage regarding the DRC has focussed heavily on detailing the nature of atrocities perpetrated by the various warring factions. Much of the more academic literature charting the effects of the conflict in the DRC has documented in great numerical detail the magnitude of illness and death whilst also undertaking detailed sociopolitical analyses of the roots of the DRC's problems. Useful as these approaches are, they often do not provide much substrate for developing empathy with what it must actually be like to live in the conflict regions of the DRC. What Tim Butcher has done particularly well is to capture the quiet desperation and terror of the people having to live in remote regions of the DRC without the protection of the rule of law or a properly functioning state apparatus. This is coveyed incredibly well both by Tim's own reactions to the situations he encounters and also through his vivid descriptions of the lives of the people he meets. The threat of danger lurks throughout the book like a spectre just out of sight - and thank goodness it reamined so and that Tim completed his journey unharmed.

Highly recommended as a valuable, highly readable addition to the literature highlighting the enormity of the problems facing central Africa.

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ANUP P
Excellent travelogue
Reviewed in India on March 26, 2018
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Best for some one who really desires to know about Congo and the general state of affairs in Africa. Makes very good reading.

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Edge
The vicarious African journey you can only be shocked by but never take yourself
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2021
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I'd seen this book in airport bookshops throughout my travels for years, and it always sounded compelling enough that I knew I'd read it someday. Once I started, I could hardly put it down.

From the first page, it made me recall my own trip in the safer countries of southern Africa just a couple years ago, setting up and taking down my own tent repeatedly while moving about amidst a group of intrepid campers riding a commercial truck outfitted with a bare passenger cabin: the dusty, gravel roads all over, with only a few city streets being paved; sleeping under mosquito nets; carrying all belongings in but a single carry-on bag; pre-dawn chills that gave way to unrelenting tropical heat like I've never felt in my life.

From his opening paragraphs, I could envision my own African experiences of enthusiasm and disappointments that he would face on such an unbelievable journey overland from Lake Tanganyika to the Congo River: that part of the trip alone consumes the entire first half of the whole book! Unlike my own African adventure, he must navigate through the territory of marauding rebel militias, going by motorbike through rainforests that consumed the train tracks his own mother uneventfully rode through the Congo when it was still a Belgian colony.

Butcher devotes a great deal of his narrative to assessing the failed state of what his subtitle calls 'the World's Most Dangerous Country'--which it certainly is among! He rhetorically observes that there are surely few places in the world that are less advanced today than they were a half-century before, but that is the unfortunate case with the Congo.

Where once it had cities connected by trains and highways, and steamboat traffic plied the Congo River, the incessant civil strife and looting of its public resources by its long-time, post-independence dictator and his cronies has meant that no such roads, railways, or river boats exist anymore; it hardly has a functioning postal service or landline telecommunications.

He poignantly observes ruin after ruin, of buildings, river boats, and train cars, in settlements throughout his journey, noting for example the once-chic hotel that had hosted Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart while filming 'African Queen'--today nearly completely consumed by the forest.

Such is the fate of a country as vast as all of western Europe, a motley aggregation of numerous tribes united only by the vast river drainage of land from which the Belgian King Leopold II and his country as a colony thereafter exploited in resource extraction, to the deaths of manifold millions of people--not an exaggeration: as Butcher notes, this genocide predated that of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, and was the original impetus for human rights organizations to come into existence.

Unfortunately, the harrowing past still lives: at its writing, roughly a thousand Congolese die every single day as a corrupt system still siphons away the bountiful natural resources (once ivory and rubber, now diamonds and cobalt) to external sources, with no investments in infrastructure or the human capital of the Congo itself.

Only the UN, international aid organizations, and religious orders give any semblance of humanity to people so racked by intractable violence in their cities, such that those very entities--the sources of all his means of transport in his journey--must all travel about by air, which makes his moves overland through such hostile territory such a challenge of incredible proportions.

But as he learns and repeats as a mantra: cities are bad for their lack of safety, but open forests offer some cover of protection. Even the fauna of the wilderness aren't as big a threat: he reveals that because so many people have been driven out of unsafe settlements by armed gangs, there is nary a bird nor monkey to be heard in the rainforests, and he writes of only one massive crocodile and no hippos while on the river. All have been decimated to give protein sources to starving jungle-dwellers otherwise reliant only on nutrition-lacking cassava, which they may not have the time luxury to grow and prepare because instability keeps them on the move.

What he was able to do was nothing less than astonishing, a true frontier-blazing effort enabled by the kindness of strangers along the way with sparse preparations. Most of his trip was sheer, random luck at being able to avoid the violent pitfalls that would render it nearly impossible. Along the way, he does dodge rebels and succumbs to jungle sickness, all while playing the ongoing game of bribing urban bureaucrats to keep him on the move.

It's not a journey any reader could undertake, as eerily primitive as that of Henry Stanley, whose 19th century river voyage he re-creates, so living through the vicarious telling of his twists and turns makes for a rollicking read, especially to anyone who is beguiled and enchanted by Africa, the Mother Continent of humanity itself, an ethereal beckoning which obsesses and haunts Butcher to undertake his saga on its Blood River.

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Fuchs Joan
Hochspannend
Reviewed in Germany on November 20, 2021
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Ich weiss gar nicht, wie lange das Buch schon in meinem Regal steht, aber nun war der richtige Moment dafür gekommen. Was für eine spannende Erzählung, sicher nicht mehr up to date, da 17 Jahre alt, aber dennoch eine faszinierende Reise. Würde mich interessieren, ob sich seither viel geändert hat. Ich fand die Mischung mit den geschichtlichen Hintergründen extrem wichtig, wir sollten uns unserer Verantwortung bewusst sein. Der Schluss war mir etwas zu knapp, aber so ist es. Kaufempfehlung.

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Pi
A good insight about the Congo
Reviewed in Spain on May 10, 2016
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A book that is written more like a history book. Tim mention his crossing of the Congo River and he compares it to Stanley the first white man who revealed the Congo River all the way to the Ocean, he also compare the Congo of 2004 with the Congo of 1960s and 1940s and how life and economy degraded through these years to a state of total failure by the 2000s.

Tim crossing the Congo River must be a very nice adventure but from his explanation he is a guy with quite a good contacts and he was able to go through it using a lot of help from UN and other Care organization. Basically, it was not a wild adventure by his own, that is, if wild adventure is ever possible in this country.

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