Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

Product Information

The next best thing to going to Africa is to read (compulsively) this account by Paul Theroux of his overland expedition from Cairo to Capetown. A trip through some of the most threatened and beautiful land in the world, by train, dugout canoe, chicken bus and truck. Aid is a failure, he says, because "the only people dishing up the food and doling out the money are foreigners. These homeless people were living in the guest rooms and had cooking fires going on the balconies and had rigged up tends on the verandas. Appalled by ''the filth, the dirt, the litter,'' beset by ''fungal infections, petty extortion, mocking lepers, dreary bedrooms, bad food, exploding bowels,'' Theroux narrates a Job-like ordeal during which he is ''abused, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheated, bitten, flooded, insulted, exhausted, robbed, lied to, browbeaten, poisoned, stunk up and starved.

On the way back he learns that V S Naipaul had won the Nobel prize for fiction and travel literature. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. Brown hardback (gilt lettering to the spine, small nicks on the edges of the cover) in near fine condition, with Dj (small stain mark inside the edges of the back Dj cover, small creases and nicks on the edges of the Dj cover) in VGC. And more than that: to treat the waiting as an opportunity to really listen to Africans - like the Ethiopian journalist thrown into prison by the Derg who translated the only available book, " Gone with the Wind," into Amharic, writing on the foil in his cigarette packs.People are what this book is all about, and Theroux is thrilled to bits to be around them, any of them, so he can poke, prod, discuss, listen, love them all, begrudgingly sometimes.

Travelling between Cairo and Cape Town, Paul Theroux visits some of the most beautiful, as well as most dangerous, landscapes on earth.He's particularly disturbed by the fact that the aid workers have been unable (and/or unwilling) to involve the Africans themselves -- though he understands why that's so: if the Africans can help themselves they won't need these do-gooders, who will then have to find real jobs. But the majority of employees of international aid agencies in Africa, at almost all levels, are Africans. I wouldn’t be surprised if this book brought down upon Theroux’ swampy head a heap of anger – and, indeed, charges of out and out racism. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.

In the early 1970s Paul Theroux moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and then on to London.

darker: "I began to fantasize that the Africa I traveled through was often like a parallel universe, the dark star image in my mind, in which everyone existed as a sort of shadow counterpart of someone in the brighter world. He wonders about the aid phenomenon, and concludes (several times) "the whole push has been misguided". A genuinely unbiased book which gives a very fair and balanced view and without belittling others, just the facts. Theroux captures the places nicely -- the friendliness of the Sudanese (despite the country appearing so uninviting to outsiders) and aspects of Ethiopia's frozen-in-time poverty -- though occasionally it seems he sketches too lightly. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled first to Italy and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi, and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda.

Ultimately, though, what saves "Dark Star Safari" from being a long gasp of disillusion, is his meditations on aging. Danger dogs Theroux at every turn, from armed Somali highwaymen in Kenya to land mines in Mozambique. Secondly, and probably more importantly, while Theroux was his usual pessimistic, fault finding, negative self, he was being far more accurate with his assessment of Africa.

Bankrupt in more ways than one, then, this is a book I would recommend only as a teaching aid or to someone interested in tracking the final sub-Conradian wreckage of a genre, rusting away like the hulks of tanks that so fascinate the narrator along the roads in Angola. I doubt very much that Rae McGrath, the landmine specialist whom Theroux spoke to in Khartoum, told him this. Theroux rides an old Chinese cultural revolution railway to Zambia, a gift to free people from South African imperialism. Still, who can resist the image of Theroux nearing his 60th birthday, hitching a ride on the back of a cattle truck, wearing a cast-off red T-shirt from a plumber in America which, like the other African passengers, he bought for a few coins from a stall on the side of the road?