My book of the month is Tim Butcher’s Chasing the Devil published by Chatto & Windus.
Subtitled, The Search for Africa’s Spirit, this is about a continent I rarely touched as a foreign correspondent, still less as an author. However Graham Greene, who inspired Butcher’s journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia, has formed part of my life since, as a young boy, I was introduced to him for the first time by my father at the Garrick Club. My father was one of Greene’s early editors, and a life-long friend. In WW2 they both worked in propaganda and intelligence.
In 1935, the author Graham Greene, aged 30, set out on a journey to West Africa, accompanied by his young cousin Barbara, in the first of his journeys to wild and dangerous places. These journeys were motivated partly by psychology- a need to escape from his inner demons and to search for a resolution to his life in risk-taking. This in turn provided material to fuel his literary imagination.
Greene, faced with having to support a young family, was desperately looking for ways of making more money from his writing. As Tim Butcher discovered in some long ignored Oxford University archive, Greene was lucky to have his trip sponsored by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, although he sought and failed to obtain further support from the Foreign Office who considered the author something of an oddball at the time.
Greene would have to wait for the outbreak of World War Two to be recruited by MI6 and posted to Sierra Leone from where he drew further material for The Heart of the Matter, perhaps his best ever novel.
Butcher uses Greene’s travel book Journey without Maps, and Barbara Greene’s own long out-of-print dairy of their shared journey, as his main reference point and guide when setting out on his long trek across Sierra Leone and Liberia.
After twenty years of working as a journalist for the Daily Telegraph, much of it as a foreign correspondent, Butcher is motivated by his own 21st century existentialist anxiety. Unlike the young Greene, he is well paid as a senior reporter with a major multi-platfom broadsheet, and seems happy enough with his family environment.
But he has tired of the inherent superficiality of his profession – a world of rolling, ever changing news and instant, often superficial judgements, not least in West Africa where the reporting of the bloody upheaval and civil war have left him with more questions than answers. With Chasing the Devil Butcher is now pursuing a serious career as an author with this sequel to his best-selling Blood River (in the steps of Stanley in the Congo.)
Unlike the Greenes, he is not accompanied by twenty-six porters, three servants and a chef and various clef sticks. Nor for that matter are Nazism and Revolution threatening the world as they were in the 1930’s , forcing writers to take ideological sides or seek comfort in their Faith.
Butcher has a satetellite phone and his only companions are a native guide called Johnson, and David, a young white theology graduate whose father is a military attaché and might come to their rescue if ever needed. Seventy years on it is not just the daunting climate, terrain, and tropical diseases of West Africa that remain unchanged. The main challenge is presented by the pervasive culture and customs that survive deep in the inclusive bush society.
This leitmotiv of Butcher’s latest book, as the title suggests, are the dark spirits and rituals that endure in the region he returns to as explorer. It is this world of devilry that casts a long and enduring shadow across a tortuous path. More than seven decades after Greene reported how he had found a certain virtue and purity in the primitiveness of Africa, Butcher dispenses with such romanticism and feels only horror at being confronted by the enduring cruelty fuelled by the dark forces , including ritual sacrifice and cannibalism.
Along the way Butcher finds the remnants of the mission houses that Greene encountered. The prayers of hope and human engagement shared with Butcher by a missionary brother, and, later, an African woman, provide the more positive book ends to his journey, as does a biblical encounter with Christian fishermen when Butcher finally reaches the end point of his journey, on the Atlantic coasty.
Butcher writes sympathetically about the Christians he meets but questions their capacity to win over hearts and minds as they struggle to compete with the influence Devils and their witch doctors that have dominated certain tribes for centuries. As for aid workers, they struggle, just as Butcher does, to persevere amidst the rampant official corruption that further drains Africa.
In trying to understand Africa’s failure to transform itself into a continent of productive democratic nation states, Butcher recalls Conrad’s description of a French frigate pounding the coastline, and the abandonment of a railway construction programme by a major multi-national following the 2007 banking crisis. The two episodes are separated by almost a century and symbolise the long-standing failures of colonialism.
And yet Liberia is a country once populated and governed by liberated black slaves who went on to enslave and butcher other local natives. Sierra Leone’s violence was temporary halted by a peace-keeping force sent by Tony Blair, although as Butcher recently pointed out during a public talk about Chasing the Devil, the former prime-minister fails to accurately record the various warring factions in his recent memoirs. It would seem that this region is taken less seriously by some than say Palestine or Northern Ireland even if the loss of life and scale of brutality has been far worse.
Butcher is not a Catholic and his book lacks the theological tension and finely drawn human characters one finds in Greene’s novels. What a pity that Butcher’s egocentricity does not allow for Johnson and David to be given a bigger role .The book also takes a bit too long to get going with an extended and somewhat self-indulgent prologue about how the project came into being.
Thankfully the book gets into his stride wants the trek itself gets under way. Taken as a whole, Chasing the Devil, provides us with a fascinating account of an expedition into another heart of darkness which benefits from the author’s journalistic flair and self-evident passion for the African continent. It should be required reading for Greene fanatics, students of under development, and those bored with their desk jobs and urgently in need of inspiration born from the bravery of other people’s adventures.
