IN SOUTHERN LIGHT; TREKKING THROUGH ZAIRE AND THE AMAZON.

Shoumatoff, Alex

Corgi edition, softcover.

As a travel writer, Alex Shoumatoff is drawn to places beyond the frontiers of Western civilisation.IN SOUTHERN LIGHT describes two such places - the dense, rich jungle of the Amazon and the lush, exotic rain forest of Zaire.

His fascinating journey into the Amazon describes his ascent of the Nhamundá River, a little known tributary. To go up this river is to go back in time. The fabled Amazon women are said to have lived there. Homesteaders living in the era of Daniel Boone are also to be found. In contrast, at one place, Michael Jackson is the rage with jeans and message T-shirts worn, and a passion for TV soaps and breakdancing.

In Zaire, Shoumatoff treks into the heart of the Ituri Forest, the land of the BaMbuti and Efe pygmies, visiting villages where white people have seldom, if ever, been encountered.

Here is a country that is more an anarchie collection of tribes, a land of corruption and promiscuity, but also one where warmth and joy radiate even from settings of stark deprivation.

Both journeys are fascinating, vivid and excitingly exotic.
Some of the adventures are terrifying in their potential danger of disease and natural hazards, and the social conditions described are of ten eye-opening to the pampered Westerner. Without romanticizing or patronising the people he meets, Alex Shoumatoff brings to the reader an accurate, compelling portrait of so-called primitive societies that helps us better understand our own beginnings.