Africa’s excesses

There are an awful lot of prostitutes in Africa and most of them seem to pass through the pages of Richard Grant’s book at one time or another. All this puts him in a terrible lather — ‘I had been so long without a woman’, he moans at one point, this while weighing up the attractions of a woman called Felicia ‘with extraordinary skin’ in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. But Grant also has a girlfriend back home who he’s determined to remain faithful to, and a mind set on higher things.

He wants to become the first person to navigate the second longest river in Tanzania, the Malagarasi. The reason why no one has navigated the Malagarasi before soon becomes plain: it’s rumoured to be impassable, swarming with tsetse fly and renowned as a ‘river of bad spirits’. One man who tried to navigate it in 1960 was rescued after seven days and only survived by eating his clothes.

Grant, though not necessarily made of hardier stuff, wants to follow in the footsteps of his hero, the explorer Richard Burton, who travelled this way with John Speke in 1850s. His journey does not get off to a promising start. In Zanzibar, he goes to the old British consulate where Burton once stayed and finds the windows smashed and the floor littered with human turds. But eventually he casts off his gloom, valiantly turns his back on yet more imploring prostitutes and sets off downriver with a white hunter called Ryan.

Sure enough, he’s soon feverish, fed up and fearful that he’s coming down with sleeping sickness — one remedy for which turns out to be to eat a tube of women’s facial hair removal cream. The Malagarasi duly proves unnavigable and Grant has to scale down his ambitions and just go down part of it.