After reading this book, I am thinking here of the old saw to the effect that God protects children and idiots. Having come of age during that amazing period from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, when one could hitch-hike practically anywhere safely—before the crazies and serial-killers became so common—this book brought back so many wonderful memories of what it was like during that period just to pick up stakes and go see part of the world, albeit a part that I have never seen, and somehow to survive it all.
In 1971–1972, Craig Harrison and a friend decided to travel across Africa the way locals do: by boat, bus, car, and train. He has chronicled this trip in “Dreams of a Vanishing Africa: A 1970s Transcontinental Trek.” He drafted the book in 1972, shortly after the trip ended, but did not pick up again and finish the manuscript until 2019. It was worth the wait, for he is a gifted storyteller with an ability to create a vivid and compelling impression of places he visited. Although (full disclosure) I admit that we are old friends and scientific colleagues, I enthusiastically urge anyone who wants to read a grand travel adventure to pick up this amazing story.
The book is divided into four parts: northwestern Africa (Spanish Sahara to Ghana), central Africa (Ghana to Congo to Uganda), eastern Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, an Rwanda), and northeastern Africa (Ethiopia to Egypt). There is a wealth of information on climate, vegetation, animals, and the people that they met on this trip, along with stories about the difficulties they had in traveling the way the locals did. The maps also are quite good, which is unusual for many books that require the reader to have a decent understanding of the geography of the area being discussed—a pet peeve of this map-oriented person.
To me, the most vivid part of the book is that in which they take an old steamer to Spanish Sahara from the Canary Islands and travel by land from there to Accra, Ghana, a trip that took 42 days and cost about $70/person. His description of trying to travel like a local through country after dysfunctional country on the edge of the Sahara and the Sahel was so harrowing and vivid that I swear I drank a lot of water just reading about it; when I think of this book, it is that part of the trip that I think of first. It sounds so difficult that I admit that it would have stopped me in my tracks: I simply would have given up and gone home. However, that’s not the stuff of which Craig and his friends were made, and they were young and resilient enough to forge ahead and make it.
There are many more stories here that stuck with me from this book. I encourage you to pick up a copy and be transported back to a time when it seemed as though all young Americans were on the move somewhere—anywhere—and they made it back with some incredible tales to tell.
