The Masked Rider

By November 1988, when Neil Peart arrived in Cameroon, he'd been expanding his own life and art through almost twenty years of travel and adventure. Concert tours of North America and Europe with his Rush bandmates, and the shared creative odyssey of lyric-writing and drumming, had only fed his insatiable curiosity and creative ambition. Through solo travels in Europe and North America, then to China and East Africa, he continued challenging himself to do more, learn more, achieve more.

Now 36, Peart was ready to attempt two of the greatest challenges of his life. The month-long bicycle tour through Cameroon would be his first trip through West Africa. Covering more than a thousand miles of primitive roads, trails, and goat paths, it was considered "the most difficult bike tour on the market."

He had chosen to travel by bicycle, at "people speed," because his other great challenge was creative. With notebooks, tape recorder, camera, and an author's transformative perspective and its awareness, Peart's goal was to inspire, "inhale," his experiences of the sub-Saharan country, its cultures and art, religions, languages, multiple ethnic and colonial histories, and especially, its people - chiefs and villagers, soldiers and schoolchildren, missionaries and prostitutes - so comprehensively and imaginatively, that in "exhaling," he could write with sufficient insight, accuracy of understanding and vividness of memory, that his story would reveal and illuminate for the Western world something of the "face" behind the mask of Africa.