The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe - Hardcover

Dervla Murphy has written more than twenty books recounting her adventures all over the world on foot, mule, bicycle, and just about every other conveyance imaginable. Her books Full Tilt, Eight Feet in the Andes, The Waiting Land, Muddling Through in Madagascar, On a Shoestring to Coorg, Cameroon with Egbert, Transylvannia and Beyond, The Ukimwi Road, and South from the Limpopo are available from The Overlook Press.

A brave and thoughtful Irishwoman, 60-ish Murphy (Transylvania and Beyond) specializes in treks through remote regions. Here she recounts a 3000-mile, four-month bicycle ride through southern Africa, at first seeking a ``carefree ramble'' but soon learning that most of her planned route included the region's ukimwi (AIDS) belt. Thus, Murphy's travelogue, which mixes her reflections on colonial legacies with well-etched encounters with border bureaucrats and generous locals, is shadowed by the specter of loss: a young prostitute, her siblings' sole support after their parents died of AIDS, struggles to make her clients use condoms; an expat doctor agonizes over the dilemmas of notifying the HIV-positive. Given her encounters with troubled Africans as well as her views of ineffective Western aid workers, Murphy concludes-a bit simplistically-that it's time for the West to withdraw, to leave Africans ``to sort out their own future.'' Despite that, this book-first published in the U.K. in 1993-remains resonant.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.