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Book Review
MALAYALAM
Travelogue with a difference
NEELA PADMANABHAN
ORU AFRICAN YATRA — Travelogue: Zacharia; DC Books, DC Kizhekemuri Edam, Good Shepherd Street, Kottayam-686001. Rs. 295.
THIS IS a different travelogue in which Zacharia interestingly narrates his travelling experience about the internal landscape of modern Africa with minute geographical details as well as historical background.
He has selected more or less the same route that Malayalam’s earlier famous travel writer S.K.Pottekkad travelled 52 years ago. S.K Pottekkad started his travel in the colonial period — 1949 from Africa’s East coast. But Zacharia starts his journey through the route map, which is re-plotted by colonialism. The selected places and sites have vision of true journalism as well as artistic awareness.
One can understand from this book the brighter face of modern Africa. Even today some may be ignorant of the fact that Africa is the nearest neighbour of Europe as Zacharia points out.
From the southern promontory of Spain the coast of Morocco in Africa through the Gibraltar sea path is less than 20 km. But the distance in between the minds of people of these two continents is infinite.
Zacharia went to Johannesburg and from there to Cape Town to reach the Cape of Good hope. His stay at Holy cross convent at Umtata, the birthplace of Mandela is interestingly narrated.
Every careful reader will enthusiastically inspire Zacharia’s ultimate travel experiences in Congo Caves in George Town, Outs Hoorn, Gandhi-Luthuli Peace Park, Durban, Pretoria, Okavango Delta, Zimbabwe, Hwange National Park, Victoria waterfalls, Mozambique, Nairobi, Kenya, source of Nile, Cairo and many other places.
He aptly quotes Pottekkad from his book to get the picture of Africa in the 1950s.
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