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Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction)
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About Riding The Demon: On The Road In West Africa
Product Description In Niger, where access to rail and air travel requires overcoming many obstacles, roads are the nation’s lifeline. For a year in the early 1990s, Peter Chilson traveled this desert country by automobile to experience West African road culture. He crisscrossed 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 traveled 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 center of your life. Hurtling along at eighty miles an hour in a bush taxi equipped with bald tires, no windows, and sometimes no doors, travelers realize that they've surrendered everything. Chilson uses the road not to reinforce Africa's worn image of decay and corruption 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, and it remains a useful metaphor for the fight for stability and prosperity across Africa. From Publishers Weekly In this vivid exploration of road culture in the West African nation of Niger, Chilson describes a crucial aspect of African culture as a whole: the bush taxi, or "taxi brousse." A year spent taking journeys in this most common form of transportation in Africa leads Chilson further inside modern Africa than an earnest anthropologist would get, not least because of the danger involved. The people of West Africa abhor an empty Peugeot 504. The rickety old station wagons with balding tires, no windows and engines held together by a wing and a prayer gather at chaotic motor parks where they wait until at least 10 passengers are crammed aboard before taking off. These bush taxis are the great social leveler, since people from all walks of life use them. Auto accidents, horrendous and frequent, are a leading cause of death in Africa. Stationed along all routes are "checkpoints" manned by aggressive soldiers who expect bribes, the cost of which is factored in to the passengers' fare. Little wonder that a fatalistic belief in the "demons" of the road dominates the driversAa set of beliefs that also draws in the author, whose own fear is assuaged by amulets and, on occasion, numb withdrawal. There is an unrelenting quality to the excellent descriptive writing, appropriate perhaps because of the unrelenting life, but readers will hunger for more humor and better characterizations of the people the author met. (Mar.) FYI: Riding the Demon received the Associated Writing Programs award for creative nonfiction. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal For many travelers in Africa, the experiences most often remembered are those had on the highways and back roads. Africa has always been a continent with a mobile population where transportation routes are important. As a result, many unique aspects of African culture are connected to travel. Chilson, a young writer, has written an engaging and fascinating account of his road experiences in the French West African country of Niger, north of Nigeria. This well-written book is much more than a description of Chilson's trip, also explaining the history, culture, and personality of this part of Africa. Recommended for libraries with African studies and anthropology collections.AMark L. Grover, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, UT Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews The raw cultural, political, and economic vitality of West Africa is sought by newcomer Chilson upon Niger's lawless, hair-raising, fickle, murderousin a word, insaneroads. A freelance rural transportation network props up West Africa's economies. It is overburdened
