africa

With a seemingly unlimited supply of money, time and patience, Paul Theroux shows us how to travel. Your bus has a broken spring in the middle of hostile bush country? No problem. Chat with the locals. You may have to stay overnight? Just bail out and hop the next vehicle that comes by. Wait three days for a visa? Who cares? Go have a beer! Ferry boat delayed two days? Go find a cargo boat!
Setting off from Cairo on an overland route to the tip of Africa, Theroux shares his joys and pains as he meets the poor and the rich, the known and unknown, the honest and the corrupt. DARK STAR SAFARI, sad commentary as it is on modern Africa, has an uplifting beat. The languages are repeated enough so the reader begins to recognize Swahili, "muzungu", "white man" or Chichewa, "mlendo" "traveler", and his renderings of African English is touching, "We are bruzzers." I especially liked his frequent quotes from other writers about Africa from Herodotus to Rimbaud to James Joyce.
Theroux is openly disdainful of narrow minded missionaries, relief workers, the Zimbabwe land invasions, tourists, touristy safaris, and even the American icon, Ernest Hemingway. But in spite of his often critical outlook, the book rises above the corruption and poverty of modern Africa and shines with the author's sense of humor and his ability to bring to the reader the good and interesting people of the now not-so-dark continent.

Africa is often couched with the extraordinarily negative term "the dark continent", a relic of the colonial days. However, this term lives on with us, as powerful as ever, for it often seems that all the news out of the continent is bad. Would it be a news cycle without a civil war, without some kind of horrible famine or plague occurring in Africa? To those who pay more attention, the reality can be described as even worse. AIDS kills millions, the governmental structure of almost all the countries is frayed and decrepit. There is little to be optimistic about. I expected this idea to be a challenged a bit by famed travel writer Paul Theroux, but this was not the case. In an amazingly well written and horribly illuminating portrait of Africa, Theroux outlines the disastrous course the continent and its people have been on for the past few decades. Again and again we are reminded of the negatives, and there are probably too many to fit in one book. However, as Theroux reminds us, hope is not dead, for the citizens of Africa have as much hope and desire for a better life then anyone else.

Theroux was a Peace Corps voluteer in the 1960's when he first came to African. An idealist, he quickly fell in love with the people and their often social customs. At the time, many Africans shared Theroux's feelings of optimism; colonialism was on the way out and new governments were forming. However, as Theroux returns and meets again with his old friends, he finds that many of these new governments were no less authoritarian or corrupt when compared to the former regimes. The stories that Theroux so artfully recounts of political and social repression are just shocking, and give the western reader a big clue about why this continent is in such dire straights. There is an almost constant aura in the book, an aura of just precipitous decline and disintegration. Nothing works, the roads are falling apart, there is famine and violence. It is a very depressing book, but Theroux is a master of writing it. He writes of the people that do survive it, that do not shy from the struggle, and that lifts the writers, and the readers, spirits immeasurably.

The most amazing part of the book, in my opinion, was Theroux himself. I was just stunned by the amount of risks and chances he took with his own life, as he avoided the "tourist" Africa route and took bus, truck, boat, canoe, and plane down through Africa. Numerous times he had the opportunity to take a quicker or easier way, but he seems genuinely dedicated to experiencing the real harshness of the trip. This makes for very good reading, and Theroux's some what cynical prose transmit the dank and horrific living conditions he had to share with others. Constantly parodied is the tourists themselves, who seemed to have a shared sense of illusion and ignorance concerning the place. There are passages connected with the dour reality that are just laugh out loud funny, as folks with no hope cling to their humor and their all around good nature.

One of the most tragic parts of the book is the light Theroux shines on the aid agencies that pour billions of dollars into Africa. While many of the staffers are honest and very hard working, a sizeable minority of them seem to do nothing but take advantage of their position and live off the money pouring in from the outside. They all have land rovers while the people they are supposed to help are living in squalor. The cycle goes on and on. To counter this image however, Theroux tells of doctors and clergy who are almost insanely dedicated to helping the people of Africa, one cannot feel anything but outright admiration for these figures as Theroux draws them.

It is a tragic journey in a sense, but it is one that is compelling in its nature. Theroux scenic and atmospheric writing style shine in this book, and it is just a joy to read. This book is unforgettable, congratulations to Mr. Theroux, as his bravery in taking the trip is an inspiration to any travel writer of adventurous inclination.

Paul Theroux draws words into colorfull, detailed portraitures of black Africans in Black Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town. His encounters along the way with natives, tourists, citizens, politicians, social workers, old friends from his past, plus many more, make this journalistic narrative a dazzling cultural disseration, and an entertaining social extravaganza revealing what the real African political, economic, cultural and social retrogression Africa has been experiencing over the past forty years.

I read half the book and put it away for one month. At first I was depressed reading it, placing too much emphasis on the HIV epidemic among all Africans, feeling sorrow for their depressed enonomy; Black Africans without jobs, with little food, wearing shredded clothing. Then Theroux explained in his comedic manners that Africans are not motivated or empowered to improve their lives, or do anything or go anywhere. They are disengaged in their own affairs. He wrote, "In a place where time seemed to matter so little, there existed a sort of nihilism that was also a form of serentiy and a survival skill."

I picked Dark Star Safari back up after one month delay and again felt priviledged enjoying reading it to its end. Engagingly written, this story was educational, entertaining and offered insight into the African community without contaminating your physical body. Enjoy!