Slow Boats and Petrified Goats

Customs are a bitch everywhere. It's amusing the first three or four times but after that—arggg! Black markets: Algeria is dangerous, Ghana wide open, Nigeria and Sudan OK, Kenya not worth your effort, Tanzania good."

Thus advised, the author disembarked in Algiers in 1976 to cross the Sahara and beyond. During this and on subsequent African journeys, he hitchhiked or took public transport: for example, riding atop a loaded Saharan truck, inside countless buses, bush taxis and trains, on a rusting barge-ferry up Sudan's White Nile toward Juba and on a tuna-fisher from Namibia to Cape Town. Government ministers, a popular Zambian town eccentric, a notorious yeti-spotting mountaineer, disco-loving South Sudanese villagers, and an ex-Rhodesian commando were just some of the people he'd meet. In 1982, he witnessed the late anti-apartheid lawyer and democracy icon George Bizos in South African courtroom action.

There'd be difficult moments. The author was accused of stealing souls in Cameroon and spying for the CIA in Niger. He was chased by Zambian soldiers after some ill-advised photography. In 1983, he hitchhiked through a southern Sudan descending into civil war and then crossed a Uganda suffering through one. Decades later, there'd be more somber encounters, as in 2008 with Rwandan genocide survivors. Minor obstacles aside, for many of us in the 1970s and 80s, there was an optimistic sense of being able to go where we wished. The Internet was years away, so detailed, on-demand and up-to-date information for parts of Africa wasn't a thing: you just had to go there and find out. To the youthful energy of his earlier wanderings, the author's added compelling historical, demographic, cultural and political contexts and reflected on his earlier actions and assumptions.

This from a critical reader of the pre-publication manuscript: "… a propulsive narrative, interesting cast of characters, eye-witness authenticity, and just the right balance of description, analysis, exposition and humor, make this an intriguing and instructive-without-being-pedagogic read."