After reading a little about Graham Greene and his life in Paul Theroux’s book Pillars of Hercules I put his name on my list of books to read and by chance found this early book of his available at the library.
Written about a trip to Africa he made as a young man in 1935, it describes his experiences traveling on foot from Freetown, Sierra Leone to Grand Bassa in Liberia. The journey took four weeks, and he was able to satisfy his curiosity about “the untouched Africa”.
As a fan of travel writing this book hit a nice balance for me between hearing about what Greene saw and what he thought about it. I was especially interested to read about the world as it was back then from the point of view of an Englishman. Kuniko and I got a taste of British colonialism when we visited Malaysia a few years ago. While reading this book it seemed like back in the 1930’s most Non-Africans (and even some Africans!) believed colonization was a right and a necessity.
It was also very interesting to consider that for someone to find something completely new and unexplored in 1935 one had to take a long journey by steamer and then spend weeks pushing through the jungles on the western coast of Africa. However just 35 years later Greene would be able to watch men walk on the moon.
As usual for books this old you find some rather shocking ways of looking at things, which always helps me to understand just how far we’ve come. Greene can’t help but mention every cute female African that he meets – the sizes and shape of their breasts are well documented in these pages for our edification. I guess these kinds of things made a big impression on the 31 year old Englishman.
It is not all boobs and jungle – learning about the customs of the tribes that he meets, the amount of money, whisky and quinine that is needed to prevent sickness and boredom, and the threat of rats, mosquitoes and cockroaches – all of it combined to make me admire his courage to undertake a journey like this.
Of course he couldn’t do it without help, and for this he relied on local African laborers – his “boys” were his personal assistants and cooks, and his carriers who lugged heavy burdens up and down mountains and through dangerous jungles so that he could sleep in (relative) comfort upon arriving at the day’s destination. Greene is at least aware of his exploitation of these workers – he knows that he is paying less than a fair rate, but in the end he is a man of limited means and pays what he can afford reasoning that at least the men believe it is fair.
I liked this book, and although I didn’t particularly care for the author himself it was a great chance to get a peek at the distant past and see how people lived a hundred years ago just as the pace of change in the world was really starting to speed up.
Next I’m reading Colton Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.
