Dan Morrison’s book, “The Black Nile: One Man’s Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World’s Longest River,” follows in the slipstream of this tradition. It’s the record of an ambitious attempt to trace the length of the Nile — a six-month odyssey that takes Morrison from the river’s source in Uganda, through Sudan and into Egypt, and all the way to the Mediterranean.
But river travel has changed on the Nile. Dams and civil wars have muddled prospects for a smooth voyage. “I don’t think anyone is traveling on the river — I think I’m twenty years too late,” is the conclusion Morrison reaches in Khartoum, capital of Sudan and situated at the convergence of the Blue and the White Niles. (Morrison is following the White, one of the Nile’s two major tributaries whose source is Lake Victoria in equatorial East Africa).
Later, Morrison visits the massive Merowe Dam in north central Sudan. He’s curious to witness the effects of the massive project, which displaced some 50,000 villagers, incited civil unrest, and buried Nubian archeological discoveries under miles of water. Afterward, he looks to take a boat from below the dam, near Karima, to Dongola farther downstream. He asks around for advice. “[N]o one remembered the last time a passenger boat had made the trip,” he writes. He resorts to planes, trains, and automobiles — along with buses and helicopters — to complete his journey.
Such epiphanies about how much travel on the Nile has changed represent poignant moments in Morrison’s determined travelogue-cum-political reportage. Through exhaustive on-the-ground research, the author demonstrates how the mix of cultures along his route — black and Arab, Christian and Muslim, tribal and urban — have strained under turmoil driven by the thirst for political and military power and for the power generated by hydroelectric dams and oil. The old rhythms of river life are endangered by so-called progress.
