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Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Chilson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 1306715
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 195
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.8 x 1
ISBN: 0820320366
Dewey Decimal Number: 916.604329
EAN: 9780820320366
ASIN: 0820320366
Publication Date: January 1999
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Product Description
Without railroads or domestic airlines, Niger's roads are its lifelines. For a year, Peter Chilson travelled this desert country by automobile, detouring occasionally into Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast, in order to tell the story of West African road culture. He criss-crossed the same roads again and again with bush taxi driver Issoufou Garba in order to learn one driver's story inside and out. He hitchhiked, riding in cotton trucks, and he also travelled with other bush taxi drivers, truckers, road engineers, an anthropologist, Niger's only licensed woman commercial driver and a customs officer. The road in Africa, says Chilson, is more than a direction or a path to take. Once you've booked passage and taken your seat, the road becomes the centre of your life. Hurtling along at 80 miles an hour in a bush taxi equipped with bald tyres, no windows and sometimes no doors, travellers realize that they've surrendered everything. Soldiers collect "taxes" at checkpoints, and black-market gasoline salesmen appear mysteriously from the roadside bush. Courageous drivers - who come across in the book as rogue folk heroes - negotiate endless checkpoints; ingenious mechanics repair cars with nothing. The road is also about blood and fear, and the ecstasy of arrival. On African roads, car wrecks are as common as mile markers, and the wreckage can stand in monument for months or years: a minibus upended against a tree, as if attempting escape; a charred truck overturned in a ditch. Chilson uses the road not to reinforce Africa's worn image of decay but to reveal how people endure political and economic chaos, poverty and disease. The road has reflected the struggle for survival in Niger since the first automobile arrived there at the turn of the century, and it remains a useful metaphor for the fight for stability and prosperity across Africa.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 More Colonial Nonsense July 31, 2000
5 out of 14 found this review helpful
What most reviewers of "Riding the Demon" miss is the way in which the author metaphorizes Africa for his own "literary" ends. As non-Africans have done now for centuries, Chilson translates "Africa" into a useful tool for his own soul-searching-and pontificating. While in some respects the book may open western eyes to the complex that is "Africa," ultimately Chilson bends "Africa" to his purposes and authorial desires.
 so, so... December 3, 1999
5 out of 15 found this review helpful
This book was informative, but it is limited to "on the road". You'll hear about the bush taxis and their drivers, but will visit only a small part of the country. This book could have used a good editor -- there's some repetition -- and a better map. The map in the front of the book doesn't list all the towns, villages, etc. that were visited and doesn't name the adjacent countries. I thought it was worth reading, but disappointing.
Riding a Taxi October 21, 1999
7 out of 21 found this review helpful
This book was very disappointing indeed. Niger is a large country, but the author only rode a few short stretches on the only real highway at the Southern border. Niger is endless sand dunes with tiny water holes that are tough to find. It has ghost towns and the salt oasis of Bilma. It has small oases where the people never saw a doctor and where children will die from infections when they step on an acacia thorn. It is a land of camel caravans where natives get lost and die in the desert. And where, in the mountains, live the blue men of the desert, the Tuaregs. On the desert sands, you can find fish skeletons. And in Agadez you see the world's oldest mosque and can shake hands with the sultan. And where was the author? Nowhere in sight of the real Niger.Forget it.
 A different kind of car culture August 24, 1999
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
It's incredible that Chilson manages to convey the entire culture of Niger (as well as incidental discussions of its history during French colonialism) through his reporting of his travels with several bush taxi drivers and how they manage their lives and the lives of their passengers on the road. Americans often think that we live in a car culture and have a love/hate relationship with our overdependency on cars. I challenge anyone to read this book and not come away thinking that traffic problems and reckless driving in our country are at best inconveniences compared to the literal hell in Niger. Here is a country where a highway patrol is manned by the military and is funded almost entirely through bribes extorted at road checks; where automobiles are literally pieced together with wreckage from the hundreds of near daily, fiery crashes that seem to line the Nigerien roads the way weeds and garbage line our highways; where talismans to ward off the road demons that lurk in the night are carried by everyone - not out of superstition - but in an earnest belief that one may not make it to the end of one's journey without them. Utterly fascinating, expertly and cleanly written, this book is an eye-opening reading experience.
Inspiring storytelling. July 28, 1999
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I desperatly needed some inspiration and Chilson and his book gave it to me. He weaves an interesting story through Niger meeting just the right mixture of people (intellectual, working class types and others) and describes the country to a penetrating affect.
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