Chatto £12.99 pp363

Another privileged outsider ventures into Congo’s now thoroughly clichéd “heart of darkness”, comes home, and writes a book for us about how unspeakably awful it is. Tim Butcher’s is the latest in a long line, running through Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, VS Nai-paul and Redmond O’Hanlon; and since there are still no Congolese voices telling it for themselves, such accounts must suffice. On these terms, Butcher’s account of a hair-rising trip from east to west, against all advice, by motorbike and then river boat, is gripping and harshly informative. Neither pleasure nor adventure travel, it is classified by him as “ordeal travel”.

What is so strange and daunting about Congo is that history there has ground to a halt and then started juddering backwards. Pol Pot tried to achieve the same thing in Cambodia, and Robert Mugabe is doing his spirited octogenarian best in Zimbabwe, but in Congo, the process of “undeveloping” has been going on for decades. The results are surreal. Parents struggle to explain to wide-eyed children what cars and motorbikes used to look and sound like, travelling the country’s 111,000km of roads. Today, Butcher reckons, there is all of 1,000km of road left. From west to east is further than London to Moscow.

He discovers grass-grown railway stations where the station master still comes to work each day, puts on his ancient red and blue cap, sits in his chair and waits. No train has passed through for six years. He meets a man in the heart of the jungle, pushing, in the exhausting heat, a bicycle laden with 80 litres of palm oil. He is on a 600km round trip to sell it. The journey might take two months and make him $30, if he survives.

In even the biggest towns there are no newspapers, radio or television, no land lines or internet access. Nobody knows anything. Butcher’s map dates from 1961. Leprosy and malaria are back and flourishing, along with the new kid on the block, Aids. Rebel soldiers wear dark glasses, but use bows and arrows believing they have magical properties. Congo is hugely rich in mineral resources (the Hiroshima and Nagasaki uranium was Congolese), but this only compounds its agonies. Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Chad, Angola and Namibia have all fought to grab their share. So much for pan-African solidarity.

What makes it worse is that Butcher’s own mother travelled here in the late 1950s with a school friend for a jolly adventure. They brought trunks full of pretty frocks, danced at parties, stayed in agreeable hotels and marvelled at the hippos in the river. The hippos have gone now (along with the parties and hotels), turned into bush meat by a semi-starving population. And there’s worse still: United Nations workers have been beaten to death in the past and butchered, their “body parts . . . seen for sale days later at a local market”. UN and aid workers are as rare as hippos here nowadays.

History itself must go some way to explaining Congo’s collapse back into pre-history. Belgium’s colonial cruelties were unparalleled in their viciousness, and decades of such cruelties, unsurprisingly, do not produce a nation of saints. But Butcher offers no answers, only quoting a despairing resident Malaysian: “Why are Africans so bad at running Africa?”

He ends his journey exhilarated to have survived and to be leaving “the daunting, failed giant that symbolises Africa’s triumph of disappointment over potential”. Despite the puff on the jacket from Fergal Keane (the Bono of foreign-news reporters), this really is a grim and gripping read. One day, just maybe, a Congolese voice will be heard, too.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £11.69 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy