Of the many accounts of African travels I have been recently reading, the one I have most enjoyed is Jeffrey Tayler's Facing the Congo, as it is a wonderful example of how spending time in Africa can change one's reasons for being in Africa.
Tayler's began his trip--like so many people from the U.S. do--as a sort of self-actualization/adventure trek. He was moving well into his thirties in the mid-1990s, had gotten out of the Peace Corps and found himself in Russia without a sense of direction. Reading Naipaul's A Bend in the River convinced him that he, too, should explore the Congo River. On the flight into Brazzaville, "my past fell away, as if into an abyss; ahead, for me, was only the Congo."
But it turns out that the Congo River Basin was a place where a lot of people lived, people with their own agendas who would make their own claims on Tayler. This begins to occur to him as he is traveling up the river on a crowded boat packed with desperate people, people whom he befriends and occasionally helps, even as he keeps reminding himself that he must hoard his possessions--which represent more money than most Zaire residents will earn in a year--for the float down the river. The best quote in the book, at least for me, is when a powerful friend of Tayler's tries to explain why the people on the boat believe that he must be up to something more profitable and nefarious than simply going on an expedition: "we Africans don't like adventure."
As the life of his guide and others continue to impinge on Tayler's life, the author eventually realizes that "I had exploited Zaire as a playground on which to solve my own rich-boy existential dilemmas." He goes home transformed, but not in the way he had hoped for.
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