East Along the Equator, a journey up the Congo and into Zaire by Helen Winternitz

Don't travel cross-country in Zaire if you want speed or comfort, is what we can learn from Winternitz's journey up the Congo and into Zaire. Unfortunately there is no other way to do it if you wish to learn something about the people, the culture(s) and the politics in this big forested country smack in the middle of Africa. By taking the three-hour flight between Kinshasa on the western edge and Goma on the eastern, you'll miss out on weeks of river travel with an entire floating commercial community, not to mention more weeks of intermittent progress by truck along the flooded trans-national highway.

Helen Winternitz wouldn't have it any other way, and the rest of us get to read all about it without having to suffer. She writes of her friendships with the women riverboat commercants, and of the fishermen who paddle out to meet them with alligator and hippopotamus meat for sale. She writes of the riverboat police, who mirror the authoritarian corruption of those on shore. On her journey over land she encounters pygmies - who share Zaire with the Bantu peoples, but maintain a seperate existence almost exclusively in the forest.

It's interesting stuff, written up in a clear journalistic style that demonstrates sympathy and deep regard for the subject. Winternitz's politics are definitely pro-Zaire and she descries the help her own country has given to maintain a politically repressive regime. The finale of this travelogue becomes quite dramatic when Helen and her travel partner experience Zaire's secret police up close and personal, before they are eventually allowed to catch a flight home to U.S.A. Generally speaking, East Along The Equator is an entertaining way to learn a bit about conditions in this beleaguered country in the early 1980s.

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