East Along the Equator: A Journey Up the Congo and Into Zaire

One of the first of the publisher's travel series, this vivid account details a trip the author and her boyfriendboth journaliststook four years ago on the Congo (and eventually overland to the border of Uganda). Their route by river from the capital of Kinshasa to Kisangani followed the path of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and shows that, in a sense, little has changedthe earlier colonial brutality has been replaced by the corruption and exploitation of President Mobutu. Winternitz proved to be happily gregarious, mixing with Zaireans, learning the local language, passing on wonderful impressions and quotations to the readeras when she describes the universal excitement when a hippopotamus is caught and butchered. She also illustrates the shattered state of Zaire's economy (for example, the radio station in Kisangani, one of Zaire's largest cities, no longer broadcasts because scavengers kept stealing valuable wire and cablesavailable only on the black market if at alluntil the transmitting tower collapsed). The journey ends on an appropriately bitter note: Winternitz and her boyfriend are arrested by Zairean secret police and grilled on and off for more than a weekthus experiencing firsthand Mobutu's machinery of repression. Despite a tendency to overstate an already convincing case and sometimes sloppy language, Winternitz offers an eye-opening tour of Zaire. (September)