From Cape to Cairo: An African Odyssey - Hardcover

A leisurely, impressionistic report of his bicycle trek from Cape Town to Cairo between April 1986 and June 1987, Duncan's travelogue portrays a continent in deep trouble. Against a background of escalating violence, a Boer farmer told the bicyclist that apartheid was immoral and was ruining South Africa. In an interview in Zambia, president Kenneth Kaunda confessed his belief that centralized socialism breeds corruption. War-torn, debt-ridden Sudan, where Arabs and blacks fought each other with U.S. jets and Russian missiles, struck Duncan as "an utter disaster." In Egypt he found crushing overpopulation, omnipresent dust, but also a knack for urban living. His serendipitous cross-section of modern Africa combines solid first-hand reporting with tactile, lyrical sketches of myriad sites and people. Duncan ( Pedaling the Ends of the Earth ) writes without preconceptions, political axes to grind or romantic expectations.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Duncan's account of a modern Cape to Cairo trip, primarily by bicycle, is a very personal report on the human condition in the countries through which he traveled. His descriptions of both the people and the environment are well crafted. The focus is on the individual men and women whom he met. These included rural Afrikaaner farmers, young men in the townships of South Africa, a white hunter in Botswana, white and black farmers and officials in Zimbabwe, a priest and the president in Zambia, a boy in a village and a paleontologist in Kenya, "reliefers" in the Sudan, and an ax maker in Egypt. Duncan avoids most of the sweeping conclusions other travelers make. His is a different viewpoint which balances those of the tourists, the scholars, and the aid experts. Recommended for general and YA readers.
- Maidel Cason, Univ. of Delaware Lib., Newark
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.