Africa Ago

In 1968, aged 21, John Western left England, not realising that he might never bother to return. The boy who had always loved maps, trains and travel to new places was posted by Voluntary Service Overseas to a missionary school in rural Burundi, Central Africa. From the world’s longest-industrialised country, he pitches into what was probably then its least industrialised nation. For two years, Western experiences life in an ‘overwhelmingly illiterate subsistence economy of material poverty’ – realities that provide the foundation for his fourth book, An Africa Ago.

Two years after he leaves to study in the United States, Burundi’s Tutsi ruling minority massacres 100,000 Hutus after an attempted coup against the military dictatorship. In 1975, Western – by this time, living in South Africa to research a doctoral thesis about apartheid in Cape Town – revisits Burundi to assess the aftermath. What he encounters will haunt him for ever. Of the schoolboys he taught, many have vanished into mass graves – carted off in lorries, still alive, then layered face down under rocks. ‘The little mission hill,’ he finds, ‘is now a place of desolation, of widows and orphans and injustice’. Meanwhile, at the southern tip of this complex continent, Western’s inside stories of the lives of Cape Town’s ‘Coloured’ (mixed-race) residents, under the heel of 1970s apartheid, reveal an attempt to dominate, oppress and humiliate – not merely to racially segregate.

But Western’s memoir is not all darkness. There is adventure too – tales of overlanding 7,500 miles in barely two months, most by hitchhiking, Western’s route taking in Botswana, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Zambia, Tanzania, and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). And there are accounts of strong bonds forged with working-class Afrikaners utterly removed from any political or racial disputes, the unexpected point of connection being a shared love of locomotives as the era of the steam engine was drawing to its close. And it is trains with which An Africa Ago closes – a luxurious journey on a Namibian ‘sealed hotel-on-wheels’ from which the author offers us a self-conscious, 21st-century return to the era of white settler colonialism in southern Africa.