e-Book The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe (Transaction Large Print Books) download

Amazing read, especially given that she was 60 and went alone on a bicycle.

Ms. Dervla Murphy, an intrepid and brave woman, takes us on a bicycle journey in Southeastern Africa (Kenya to Uganda to Tanzania to Malawi to Zambia and finally Zimbabwe). We experience these countries via her bicycle and her opinionated eyes.

I did some cycling in North America when I was much younger; Ms. Murphy is doing this at the age of sixty on roads that are far tougher than anything here in North America – many of her roads were unpaved. She definitely has an iron constitution!

The vitality of this book is the many different encounters the author has with groups of people – many of them very poor. Her trajectory, which she did in the early ‘90’s, takes her through AIDS ravaged areas. She did not know at the beginning of her journey that AIDS was to dominate every conversation she had. There are remarkable discussions which ensue revolving around the epidemic, the role of women, the use (or non-use) of condoms, polygamy, and Africa’s growing role in the world. Some of the people she meets have had their entire families lost (or in the process of) to the AIDS epidemic.

Because she is cycling and a woman, she is anomaly. The cycling puts her on an eye-level contact with everyone.

What is very reassuring is the needed and unsolicited assistance she gets, now and then, from the most destitute of people – male and female.

It is sad to think that since this book was written over twenty years ago, most of the people she met have likely died.

This is a very worthwhile book for the diversity of encounters and the energy of Ms. Murphy. She must be high octane!

Page 235-36 (my book)
Outside, the schoolboys came crowding around the window above the sink... to observe me sitting on the draining board – the only space available.
“They are amazed”, said the Chief, “because we talk together socially. Our tradition condemns this mixed-sex talking, we say it leads only to misbehaviour. Men and women have nothing in common to discuss, they live in different worlds. But we know you have another tradition.”

Since 1964 Irish writer Murphy has been traveling the world by foot and bicycle and writing about her experiences. An outspoken loner, drawn to the more remote parts of the globe, her beautiful but rugged experiences fascinate and educate the armchair traveler - without inspiring similar ambitions.
As a 60th birthday present to herself, Murphy undertakes a 3,000 mile journey through Eastern and Southern Africa on her Dawes Ascent mountain-bike, "the cyclist's equivalent of a Rolls-Royce," named Lear. The trip was a "self-described unwinding therapy.....a carefree ramble through some of the least hot areas of sub-Saharan Africa."
But "carefree" it is not, though nothing - not heat, torrential rains, hunger, illness, hostility or impassable roads - can stop her.
Murphy is greeted in Nairobi by drought and a mothers' hunger strike which rapidly degenerates into a riot when paramilitary troops arrive to disperse the women. Leaving the city as quickly as she can, Murphy contemplates the contrast between Western luxuries and construction projects alongside the shanty towns and hungry children.
From her first stop in a dusty village for a Tusker beer, AIDS predominates and a pattern is set which endures thoughout the lands and cultures she passes through during the coming months. By day she enjoys the solitude and scenery of rural Africa; by night she is embroiled in local discussions of politics and Western incursions and AIDS, often dodging individual pleas for help in getting to the land of opportunity - the West.
Ukimwi is Swahili for AIDS. In Africa, wherever she goes, it surrounds her. Some blame Western conspiracies and medical experiments; missionaries preach behavioral changes and deny condom distribution; men say they cannot survive without a variety of female partners; wives say their husbands refuse condoms; prositutes say they would have no business if they insisted on condom use.
Everywhere Murphy meets widows, orphans and more orphans.
She at first resists the pull of AIDS. For her this is a pleasure journey and she can do nothing to slow the epidemic. But it has become part of the fabric of culture, threatening traditional family life, taking the most productive and leaving behind the old and the young to fend for themselves.
In addition to the scourge of AIDS, Murphy finds much of Africa suffering from economic collapse, spurred in large part by misguided Western "development projects" that destroyed the local agrarian economy, often displacing the people and departing, leaving behind devastation and tribal strife.
She meets hospitality and hostility, and takes what comes; be it a bedbug, mosquito-infested tourist hotel, or an earthen floor, or a spontaneously offered bed in a local home. She sets out at dawn hardly knowing whether to expect a corrugated wartorn road or spectacular mountain scenery or a beguiling path that ends in a swamp (through which she is guided by a silent tribal elder). She pushes Lear up rutted mountain tracks and hurtles down, marveling at the African cyclists she meets everywhere - man cycling, two children on the cross bar, wife behind holding baby and toddler, and a heavy load balanced over all.
With a cast-iron stomach, she eats and drinks whatever is available (which is generally awful), especially enjoys her beer, cycles through bronchitis and is finally felled by malaria. Even that she comes to regard as fitting - ending her journey in Zimbabwe where "Blacks had been subjugated as nowhere else in British Africa." Murphy concludes that Westerners ought to get out of Africa once and for all - that Western systems have not "taken" and have only undermined traditional culture.
Whether you come to agree with her or not, her harrowing, thrilling, eye-opening and heartbreaking journey will stay with you when other travels are long forgotten.