History and travelogue combine wonderfully in this tale of colonial plunder and hubris

Sophy Roberts’ luminous new book is a journey through Africa from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika and back, retracing the steps of a long-forgotten expedition. Like her first, The Lost Pianos of Siberia, it explores a land and its history. Reflective, watchful, calm, Roberts is such a vivid travel writer that you forget what a brilliant historian she is. She has the water-diviner’s gift for stories in unlikely places. And then, through research in archives as well as on the ground, for uncovering sparky details that bring the story to life. Her conversations with everyone she meets, from hospitable nuns to a chief in a red fez, who pores over the original expedition maps with her at a Chinese restaurant in Dodoma, give her narrative a glow of sympathetic charm.

But she is telling a very grim story. The expedition she follows was dreamed up by King Leopold of Belgium, the plunderer of Central Africa at whose door the deaths of millions can be laid. Europeans at the time were preoccupied with how to get the plunder out: the French suggested flooding the Sahara. Leopold’s idea was to take Indian elephants and their handlers and use them to catch and train African elephants, then set up a supply line using these tsetse-fly resistant animals to transport Congo’s wealth out to waiting Belgian ships. Roberts’ recreation of their arduous route tells a tale “of blind ambition, violence and subjugation” which encapsulates the whole pitiless story of colonisation.