On Thursday 30th July 2009 from 11.00am to 11.30am BBC Radio 4 will broadcast “A Journey Without Maps” the third of nine programmes in its series “Crossing Continents”, as Humphrey Hawksley retraces the extraordinary journey undertaken on foot by Graham Greene from Sierra Leone across Liberia in 1935. He feasts on sardines and luncheon meat, meets the lightning makers and devil dancers and is involved in a near-fatal car crash. The reporter asks, “How has West Africa changed? Is it better or worse than it was seventy years ago?”
Humphrey Hawksley is a leading BBC foreign correspondent, author and commentator on world affairs. For more than twenty years he has reported on key trends, events and conflicts from all over the world, including Kosovo, Iraq, and Sri Lanka, from where he was expelled while covering the civil war. From 1990 he was based in Hong Kong, and in 1994 moved to Beijing to open the BBC's first television bureau in China.
He has written various novels, including Red Spirit (2001), The Third World War (2003) and Security Breach (which was first published as The History Book, and reprinted in 2008).
The photograph shows Humphrey at Pendembu Station in Sierra Leone with his copy of Greene’s novel Journey without Maps (1936), and you can learn more about his work and travels on his Blog:
http://www.humphreyhawksley.com/blog/
Still quite an arduous journey -- just saw this program on BBC America. Pretty awful to think that not much has changed since Greene made the journey.
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