Any first-time visitor to Africa is faced with a whirl of new experiences, but the awful roads are guaranteed to make an impression. That is true even in many cities – when I visited Douala, the commercial hub of Cameroon, I was appalled to realise that a four-wheel-drive vehicle was all but a necessity.
Cameroon’s roads also made an impression on Robert Guest, author of The Shackled Continent. Guest once hitched a ride on a Cameroonian beer truck travelling the equivalent of London to Newcastle upon Tyne – about 300 miles. The journey, detouring around a collapsed bridge on unpaved rainforest roads, took four days.
More rigorous studies have also found that the cost of transporting goods around west Africa is astonishingly high. One, albeit 15 years old, went so far as to conclude that road transport in Francophone Africa was six times more expensive even than in Pakistan.
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