Review of African Brew Ha-Ha: A Motorcycle Quest from Lancashire to Cape Town by Alan Whelan
Review by freelance writer Pete Wolstencroft.
African Brew Ha-Ha is published by Summersdale Publishers Ltd.
This entertaining travelogue describes one man’s quest to ride from Lancashire to Cape Town on a Triumph Tiger motor bike. The Brew Ha-Ha of the title refers to the fact that the author intends to take tea with as many of the people he meets along the way as is humanly possible. His journey sees the very definition of the word tea stretched to breaking point as he shares impromptu ceremonies where the all-important brew is made with the bare minimum of equipment and sometimes even the bare minimum of tea.
The first thousand miles or so, from Blackburn to the Spanish port of Algeciras are glossed over. The author’s main concern and the meat and bones of the book, is the beating heart of Africa. Along the way he meets Arabs in the north and white people in the south, who do not for one moment, consider themselves to be African. Africa proper, for them, is that black bit in the middle from the Sahara down to the borders of Namibia and South Africa. And it is this part of the continent that most concerns our guide. He describes his adventures and mishaps with a disarming honesty, from which one can see that he has lost his heart to the centre of the Continent.
The book effectively has two hooks upon which to hang its story: the motor bike and all the opportunities for disaster it provides and the relentless quest for tea and the ceremonial aspects to its preparation and consumption.
Besides the Triumph, the undoubted stars of the book are the African people. Although, as we are continually reminded, to think of Africans as having a single cultural identity is to make a big mistake. Despite frequent problems with corrupt border guards and the continual dripping away of his scant reserves of cash to pay bribes, dubious fees and other inducements, the author never forgets that the good people far outnumber the bad. As is so often the case, those with the least to share are the most generous; offering their homes, beds, food and mechanical know-how in order to facilitate a mission which must seem capricious when set against the background of their daily struggle to put food on the table.
Despite the ground covered by the book having been well explored by many a televisual traveller, the reader can still get some fresh insights into life in some of Africa’s forgotten corners, like Western Sahara a remnant of Spanish colonialism, where a stateless population grinds out a living in what amounts to a giant refugee camp. Here, the author meets up with Scots born Carla and her Bajan partner, Keith, who ended up in Spanish Sahara on a whim: not even a fully completed whim at that – their original destination had been The Gambia.
With each change of country the people change, morphing from the chaste in the north to the sensuous and gaudily dressed women he encounters in Senegal; women who dress to attract the gaze of men rather than to deflect it. The night he spends in a night club in Senegal – punctuated by regular calls for “Deux bieres” is one of the most memorable scenes in the book.
As the journey progresses southwards it seems increasingly likely that one of his regular crashes must surely put paid to his eventual goal of taking tea in Tea Bag Designs – a cooperative in Cape Town that employs local people to create artwork from, of all things, used tea bags. Business is, by all accounts, booming.
Eventually a spectacular crash in Gabon results in a broken collar bone and sundry minor injuries. For a while the trip looks destined to end in failure, but after being air lifted to a hospital in Libreville for treatment and further glimpses of the fatalism that pervades life in Sub-Saharan Africa, he is allowed to continue. The penultimate leg, by air into Namibia seems like a bit of a cheat, but after such a long time on the road and so many dramatic partings of the way featuring man and bike, you could hardly blame him.
Eventually Alan Whelan gets to have his tea in the cooperative in Cape Town, arriving a paltry 15 minutes late according to his own self imposed schedule. I enjoyed the book immensely – mainly because of the sparse simplicity of the language the author uses and also because it seemed to me a very honest account of his trials and tribulations. Many authors, safe in the knowledge that few of their readers will ever be in a position to check the veracity of their claims, tend to over egg the pudding when recalling their many travails – 15 days living solely on walrus blubber in Siberia – why not! Having an amputated leg sewn back on by a blind nonagenarian shaman in Guatemala – all in day’s work. With the African Brew Ha-Ha, I got the impression that the author had perhaps downplayed the seriousness of the some of the scrapes he got himself into, and in so doing joins the pantheon of stiff upper lipped British explorers for whom the slings and arrows, stings and venom of outrageous fortune are but trifles along the way.
Alan Whelan is a Lancashire writer who also writes for the Lancashire Writing Hub. See his review of Hassan Blasim’s The Madman of Freedom Square here.
African Brew Ha-Ha is published by Summersdale Publishers Ltd, and is available via Summersdale or Amazon or most good bookshops.
Pete Wolstencroft is a freelance writer from Lancashire.