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 A fascinating ride. February 22, 1999
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is a terrific book, a marvelously detailed, nonfiction narrative of travel on the spirit-rich roads of West Africa. Chilson chronicles his journeys by "bush taxi," or freelance transport, typically manifested as a decades-old Peugeot station wagon or minibus, and takes the reader along through maddeningly frequent police checkpoints, past a seemingly unbroken line of wrecked vehicles (many of them, no doubt, bush taxis like those in which he rides), and into a number of fascinating meetings and conversations with people who call the desert regions of Niger home. Those he meets include bush taxi drivers, the commandant of Niger's highway patrol (who, like Claude Raines in "Casablanca," is just shocked at Chilson's suggestion that his troopers are corrupt and abusive of travelers), a revered holy man who provides the writer with talismans to ward off harm on the road, and Niger's only (as far as anyone seems to know) female commercial driver, who aspires to owning her own bush taxi service, with men working for her. As he travels, Chilson reflects on his own responses to the landscape, and to the harshness of life in the impoverished country. He returns often to the century-old story of Captain Paul Voulet, the French officer who led a surveying expedition along the route of what would one day be Route Nationale 1, the main highway that Chilson travels with his guide and mentor, bush taxi driver Issoufou Garba. Voulet ordered the 450 African troops under his command to slaughter thousands as he crossed the land, destroying whole villages without provocation. The highway, Chilson realizes, was born of Voulet's madness, of murder and an insane greed for power. The brutality of Voulet is incomprehensible to Chilson, a former Peace Corps worker in West Africa, yet it seems to suffuse the very atmosphere of the road, where death is always very possible and reaching your destination never guaranteed. This is, ultimately, a book about a place; as such, it succeeds admirably, offering insights into a land of which most non-Africans know nothing at all. But it is also a book about what it means to be a human being, about the web of moral, emotional and spiritual connections we each must navigate as we travel through our lives. To his credit, Chilson does not paint himself as a paragon; he has moments of true bitterness and despair, sometimes wanting nothing more than escape from Niger, from the heat and the official corruption and the inevitable suspicion directed at him, a lone white American, as he pursues knowledge of a great mystery, the road. Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa is a book worthy of Graham Greene, whom Chilson claims as an influence, in the lushness of its physical detail, the clarity of its cultural observations, and the depth of its inquiry into what makes for a truly human existence, a life lived morally and well. To call this (or any) book a "must read" would be pointless -- you could obviously continue to draw breath without it. But this is certainly a "should read," because you will gain by reading it. Splendidly written and fascinating in its subject matter, Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa deserves your attention.
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