LOOKING FOR LOVEDU: Days and Nights in Africa.

By Ann Jones. Knopf. 268 pp. $25

Journalist Jones and Kevin Muggleton, a photographer she has just met, hatch an impromptu plan to drive the length of Africa. The result is an epic road trip from Tangier to Cape Town—and a look at what happens when a middle-aged New Yorker and a Briton half her age and twice her size spend too much time in a Land Rover that’s disintegrating almost as fast as their friendship.

Their goal is to find the present-day descendants of the legendary Lovedu, a cooperative, peaceable tribe led by a rainmaking queen. The quest begins as "a good excuse for gallivanting," Jones writes, but it becomes the book’s defining theme in an unexpected way as she finds herself struggling over gender roles with the supermacho Muggleton. In one recurrent battle, he is hell-bent on getting into and out of countries as fast as he can; Jones, who calls herself an "inspecteur du monde," wants to go slowly enough to see what she terms "the real Africa."

Jones is at her best when they do manage to slow down. Their traverse of the Sahara is unforgettable, and her description of Zaire’s infamous roads should give pause to anyone contemplating a similar trip. At one point, the mud is so thick that it takes them five days to drive a distance that two women with heavy loads cover on foot in two.

Thanks to Muggleton, however, most of Africa remains a blur outside the window of the speeding Rover. Jones doesn’t have time to connect with many locals beyond immigration officials and customs agents, so she succumbs to generalizations: "In the United States, if you don’t like conditions, you try to change them. In Africa, you accept"—a statement that would surprise those who fought to make Africa more than just a collection of colonies. Likening her view of the continent to an astronaut’s view of Earth, Jones is reduced to providing capsule histories of each country she passes through. She relies so heavily on John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent (1998) and other sources that she could have written much of her own book without leaving home.

Jones eventually dumps Muggleton and finds more congenial traveling companions. But, suffering from a sort of Stockholm syndrome, she presses on with Muggletonian haste. By book’s end, she has found the Lovedu but lost the spirit that animated the search in the first place.

—Rebecca A. Clay