http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2009/02/the_agony_of_af.php
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
By Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003
472 pp.; $28
Most whites know modern Africa, if they know it all, either through
television nature programs, or through luxury vacations at exclusive
game lodges. The tourists play at going on safari and dining on
marinated gazelle, washed down with a South African Cabernet. It's all
very comfortable, and the sunsets are beautiful, but it is hardly the
real Africa. For a brutally honest depiction of the 95 percent that is
dangerous and dirty and decrepit-though often still beautiful-we turn
to Dark Star Safari, a chronicle of a journey through the heart of a
continent of failure.
Three years ago, Paul Theroux, who is known for his brilliant travel
writings, traveled overland from Cairo to Cape Town. For months, he
rode on buses that reeked of body odor, rumbled across axle-breaking
roads in the back of a truck through bandit-filled deserts, slept on
filthy mattresses in insect-infested hotel rooms, warded off packs of
beggars and thieves, turned down prostitutes and meals of rancid goat
meat, sweated under a scorching and merciless sun, and met
hard-working Africans who had long-since despaired of their continent
and whose only hope was to emigrate.
Mr. Theroux had worked as a Peace Corps teacher in Malawi from
1963-64, and as an instructor at Makerere University in Kampala,
Uganda, from 1965-68. These were the years immediately after
independence, when hopes were high, and the colonial patterns of life
had not yet succumbed to African leadership. He knew that "all news
out of Africa is bad," but this only made him want to see for himself.
Moreover, he wanted again to taste and feel Africa. This is what he
found:
"Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew
it-hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt,
and you can't tell the politicians from the witch doctors. Africans,
less esteemed than ever, seemed to me the most lied to people on
earth-manipulated by their governments, burned by foreign experts,
befooled by charities, and cheated at every turn. To be an African
leader was to be a thief, but evangelists stole people's innocence,
and self-serving aid agencies gave them false hope, which seemed
worse. In reply, Africans dragged their feet or tried to emigrate,
they begged, they pleaded, and they demanded money and gifts with a
rude, weird sense of entitlement."
Mr. Theroux does not expect things to improve. Often the only things
that seemed to work were left over from European colonists. The ferry
he took across Lake Victoria was built by the British in 1962; its
original engines, boilers, and generators were still running.
According to Mr. Theroux, the worst part of Africa is the cities.
"Whenever I arrived in an African city, I wanted to leave." "Urban
life is nasty all over the world, but it is nastiest in Africa." "None
of the African cities I had so far seen, from Cairo southward, seemed
fit for human habitation." "African cities became more awful-more
desperate and dangerous as they grew larger." "Even at their best,
African cities seemed to me miserable improvised anthills, attracting
the poor and the desperate from the bush and turning them into thieves
and devisers of cruel scams."
"In Egypt, every wall attracts dumpers, litterers...and pissers, dogs
and cats, and the noisiest children." "The heat in Khartoum, with its
sky specks of rotating hawks, left me gasping." Khartoum was so
dangerous that the American counsel general did not even live there,
but flew in from Cairo during the week. Addis Ababa was "dirty and
falling apart, stinking horribly of unwashed people and sick animals,
every wall reeking with urine, every alley blocked with garbage," the
streets "full of loud music, car horns, diesel fumes, and pestering
urchins." Hyenas stalked the streets of Harar, Ethiopia, at night, and
people howled at foreigners. Djibouti's "oppressive heat was not
relieved by the scorching breezes off the Gulf of Aden, nor was there
any terrain except the landfill look of reclaimed swamp."
"Nairobi was huge and dangerous and ugly." There was a palpable sense
of "desperation" which was "not the dark side, or a patch of urban
blight, but the mood of the place itself." He did not go out at night,
for even "the wariest people were robbed." Three FBI agents
investigating the 1998 embassy bombing were robbed of their wallets
and pistols and then mocked and jeered by a large crowd. Even the wild
birds stole from people. Kampala was an improvement by comparison but
decrepit and in decline. While there, he visited Makerere University,
where he had taught, and found it a ruin-the buildings falling apart,
the trees cut down, the library an empty shell.
"Mozambique," he writes, "was not a country in decline-this part of
it, anyway, could not fall any further." Of its capital city, "It was
hard to imagine how much worse a place had to be for a broken-down
city like Maputo to seem like an improvement." Even once prosperous
and orderly Johannesburg was crime-ridden and increasingly ringed with
teeming and angry slums. "That's what happened in Africa: things fell
apart."
Mr. Theroux tells story after story that demonstrate the hopeless
passivity of so many Africans. In the "sun-baked emptiness" of the
Wagago Plains in Tanzania, he spotted a single mango tree "of modest
size but leafy with dense boughs. There was a circle of shade beneath
it. Within that shade were thirty people, pressed against one another
to keep in the shade, watched by a miserable goat tethered in the
sunshine." He wondered why "no one in this hot, exposed place had
thought to plant more mango trees for the shade they offered. It was
simple enough to plant a tree."
Mr. Theroux rode with a cattle truck on the desert road linking
Ethiopia and Kenya. He described the road as "spectacularly bad," full
of "wheel-swallowing potholes," deep ruts, and enormous razor-sharp
boulders. One of the tires ripped open. "That was to be expected
here-by me, anyway," he writes. "Apparently not by Mustafa and the
others, for they had no spare. They shook out junk from a burlap sack
. and began amateurishly to whack the wheel, as though they had never
been in this fix before." Mr. Theroux sums up the situation: "This is
not good-a breakdown in the desert where no one cares whether I live
or die. I am stranded among the most incompetent and unresourceful
mechanics I have ever seen." Luckily, another cattle truck rumbled by
and Mr. Theroux was able to catch a ride.
In Zimbabwe, he visited a farm run by a charming hard-working white
family $22 million in debt and assailed by squatters. He spoke to one
of the latter, who was from neighboring Zambia. He was furious because
the government had not helped him. He needed seed, fertilizer, and a
tractor. He now expected the owner of the farm to give him supplies
and plow his fields. "Having invaded the land and staked his claim and
put up four big huts, he now wanted free seed, free fertilizer, and
the fields plowed at his bidding, his victim working the tractor. It
was like a thief who, having stolen a coat, insisted that his victim
have the coat dry-cleaned and tailored to fit." When Mr. Theroux asked
him what he would do if people came and squatted on his land, he
exploded in rage. He would drive them off.
While in Malawi, Mr. Theroux visited his old school, hoping it had
been modernized and improved. "The school was almost unrecognizable,"
he writes. "What had been a group of school buildings in a large grove
of trees was a compound of battered buildings in a muddy open field.
The trees had been cut down and the grass was chest high. At first
glance the place was so poorly maintained as to seem abandoned: broken
windows, doors ajar, mildewed walls, gashes in the roofs, and only a
few people standing around, empty-handed, doing nothing but gaping at
me." It seemed as if the failure of post-colonial Africa was all here,
as if deliberately staged.
Also in Malawi, he visited the old Zomba Gymkhana Club, which had once
been the social center for resident Europeans, mainly British. In the
early '60s, Mr. Theroux had heard members complain that if Africans
were let in, they would ruin the club: They would get drunk, tear up
the billiard table, women would nurse babies in the game room. At the
time, Mr. Theroux considered such thoughts "rude and racist," yet
seeing the club today he realized they were "fairly prescient, for the
rowdy teenagers at the billiard table were stabbing their cues at the
torn felt, the bar was full of drunks, and a woman was breast feeding
her baby under the dart board." Many writers would have left out this
story, as it vindicates "racist" predictions, but Mr. Theroux is too
truthful and thorough a writer for that.
He asked a Malawian official to explain why the government had chased
the Indian shopkeepers out of the country in the 1970s. The official
explained that the Africans deserved a chance to run the shops, so
they took them over; but soon the stores all failed. Twenty-seven
years later, the town still had no shops. When Mr. Theroux pointed out
that expropriation had backfired, another African interrupted and
began mocking the way the Indians did business: "They sit there, you
see, and they have these little pieces of paper, and have these
columns of numbers. And one Indian is running the calculator, and
another is counting the sacks of flour and the tins of condensed milk.
One two three. One two three."
Mr. Theroux explains: "What this educated African with his plummy
voice intended as mockery-the apparent absurdity of all this
counting-was the description of people doing a simple inventory of
goods in a shop." When he pointed this out, the African replied that
his people had neither the aptitude nor the desire to run businesses.
"What do we care about shops and counting? We have a much freer
existence. We have no interest in this-shops are not our strong
point." Mr. Theroux, growing exasperated, asked why then had they
taken over the shops. The answer was that the Africans might find a
use for them some day (most were still empty, but a few had become
beer bars).
Mr. Theroux does not say this, but the real answer to his question was
envy. The Africans could not stand to see successful small businesses
run by foreigners, so they kicked them out and took them over. Envy of
non-Africans continues to motivate Africa. The land seizures in
Zimbabwe, the murders of white farmers in South Africa, and the urban
crime wave in Johannesburg and Cape Town, are obvious examples (see
next article for a complementary view of African thinking).
Mr. Theroux fits most Westerners in Africa into one of three
categories. First, there are the tourists, usually on safari. Mr.
Theroux dismisses them as "fantasists." Then there are the "agents of
virtue"-the international aid workers, whom Mr. Theroux describes as
haughty, aloof, ineffective jerks who rarely stay in Africa long
enough to realize the extent of their failure; and the altruists,
missionaries and others, who are there to save Africa and Africans.
He met a young, attractive Finnish woman working on an AIDS project in
Zambia. She had been in Africa only a short time, but was already
disillusioned. "It is horrible. There is no sex education. No one will
talk about sex, but everyone does it. No one will talk about AIDS, and
everyone is infected. We were sent an anti-AIDS film and we showed it.
But people in the village said it was shameful-too indecent-and so it
was withdrawn." Mr. Theroux asked if she had talked to them. She had.
The result? "They wanted to have sex with me."
In Mozambique, he met a naive female missionary who was running a
shelter designed to get prostitutes and boys off the streets. One
night she was robbed by a group of boys. She recognized them as boys
she had bathed, fed, and clothed; what's worse, they recognized her.
Mr. Theroux recalled that Christian missionaries had been at work here
since 1508: "Five centuries of this!"
Mr. Theroux was victim of only one crime in Africa, and it came at the
very end. Before taking a four-day side trip to the coast, he left his
valuables (watch, wallet, cash, air tickets, African artifacts) for
safekeeping in a Johannesburg hotel strong room. He returned to find
everything stolen. "That's very Janiceburg, very Jozi," one resident
later told him.
Mr. Theroux does not absolve Africans of responsibility for their own
plight, but the only Africans he singles out for blame are the corrupt
and thieving leaders. His book makes it clear that sloth, lack of
planning, and envy are to blame for much of Africa's plight, but he
never says this directly nor does he consider the possibility Africans
may be of lower intelligence than whites.
What is to be done with the place? Mr. Theroux condemns Western
governments, international organizations, and private aid agencies for
making the continent's problems worse. He believes the only solution
is to pull out the whole apparatus of Western relief and development,
and let Africans define their problems, work out solutions, and live
according to their habits and customs. He does not doubt that by
Western standards the continent will remain undeveloped and primitive,
will perhaps become much more so, but it may be able to sustain itself
and create a life that is livable for Africans. He seems to think that
if left alone, Africans will drift slowly back to their ancestral
villages and turn once again to labor-intensive agriculture. Africa
would not revert entirely back to a pre-contact state, but it might go
halfway.
This may be an overly romantic view. The slaughter in Rwanda/Burundi,
the double amputees in Sierra Leone, the witch-burnings and black
magic common throughout black Africa, and the cannibalism that has
come to light in the Congo are chilling examples of what Africans can
do when left to themselves. Perhaps a return to old-fashioned European
colonialism is the best solution. Short of that, a policy of leaving
Africa alone, with all its potential perils, may be the best realistic
choice we have.
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003
472 pp.; $28
Most whites know modern Africa, if they know it all, either through
television nature programs, or through luxury vacations at exclusive
game lodges. The tourists play at going on safari and dining on
marinated gazelle, washed down with a South African Cabernet. It's all
very comfortable, and the sunsets are beautiful, but it is hardly the
real Africa. For a brutally honest depiction of the 95 percent that is
dangerous and dirty and decrepit-though often still beautiful-we turn
to Dark Star Safari, a chronicle of a journey through the heart of a
continent of failure.
Three years ago, Paul Theroux, who is known for his brilliant travel
writings, traveled overland from Cairo to Cape Town. For months, he
rode on buses that reeked of body odor, rumbled across axle-breaking
roads in the back of a truck through bandit-filled deserts, slept on
filthy mattresses in insect-infested hotel rooms, warded off packs of
beggars and thieves, turned down prostitutes and meals of rancid goat
meat, sweated under a scorching and merciless sun, and met
hard-working Africans who had long-since despaired of their continent
and whose only hope was to emigrate.
Mr. Theroux had worked as a Peace Corps teacher in Malawi from
1963-64, and as an instructor at Makerere University in Kampala,
Uganda, from 1965-68. These were the years immediately after
independence, when hopes were high, and the colonial patterns of life
had not yet succumbed to African leadership. He knew that "all news
out of Africa is bad," but this only made him want to see for himself.
Moreover, he wanted again to taste and feel Africa. This is what he
found:
"Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew
it-hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt,
and you can't tell the politicians from the witch doctors. Africans,
less esteemed than ever, seemed to me the most lied to people on
earth-manipulated by their governments, burned by foreign experts,
befooled by charities, and cheated at every turn. To be an African
leader was to be a thief, but evangelists stole people's innocence,
and self-serving aid agencies gave them false hope, which seemed
worse. In reply, Africans dragged their feet or tried to emigrate,
they begged, they pleaded, and they demanded money and gifts with a
rude, weird sense of entitlement."
Mr. Theroux does not expect things to improve. Often the only things
that seemed to work were left over from European colonists. The ferry
he took across Lake Victoria was built by the British in 1962; its
original engines, boilers, and generators were still running.
According to Mr. Theroux, the worst part of Africa is the cities.
"Whenever I arrived in an African city, I wanted to leave." "Urban
life is nasty all over the world, but it is nastiest in Africa." "None
of the African cities I had so far seen, from Cairo southward, seemed
fit for human habitation." "African cities became more awful-more
desperate and dangerous as they grew larger." "Even at their best,
African cities seemed to me miserable improvised anthills, attracting
the poor and the desperate from the bush and turning them into thieves
and devisers of cruel scams."
"In Egypt, every wall attracts dumpers, litterers...and pissers, dogs
and cats, and the noisiest children." "The heat in Khartoum, with its
sky specks of rotating hawks, left me gasping." Khartoum was so
dangerous that the American counsel general did not even live there,
but flew in from Cairo during the week. Addis Ababa was "dirty and
falling apart, stinking horribly of unwashed people and sick animals,
every wall reeking with urine, every alley blocked with garbage," the
streets "full of loud music, car horns, diesel fumes, and pestering
urchins." Hyenas stalked the streets of Harar, Ethiopia, at night, and
people howled at foreigners. Djibouti's "oppressive heat was not
relieved by the scorching breezes off the Gulf of Aden, nor was there
any terrain except the landfill look of reclaimed swamp."
"Nairobi was huge and dangerous and ugly." There was a palpable sense
of "desperation" which was "not the dark side, or a patch of urban
blight, but the mood of the place itself." He did not go out at night,
for even "the wariest people were robbed." Three FBI agents
investigating the 1998 embassy bombing were robbed of their wallets
and pistols and then mocked and jeered by a large crowd. Even the wild
birds stole from people. Kampala was an improvement by comparison but
decrepit and in decline. While there, he visited Makerere University,
where he had taught, and found it a ruin-the buildings falling apart,
the trees cut down, the library an empty shell.
"Mozambique," he writes, "was not a country in decline-this part of
it, anyway, could not fall any further." Of its capital city, "It was
hard to imagine how much worse a place had to be for a broken-down
city like Maputo to seem like an improvement." Even once prosperous
and orderly Johannesburg was crime-ridden and increasingly ringed with
teeming and angry slums. "That's what happened in Africa: things fell
apart."
Mr. Theroux tells story after story that demonstrate the hopeless
passivity of so many Africans. In the "sun-baked emptiness" of the
Wagago Plains in Tanzania, he spotted a single mango tree "of modest
size but leafy with dense boughs. There was a circle of shade beneath
it. Within that shade were thirty people, pressed against one another
to keep in the shade, watched by a miserable goat tethered in the
sunshine." He wondered why "no one in this hot, exposed place had
thought to plant more mango trees for the shade they offered. It was
simple enough to plant a tree."
Mr. Theroux rode with a cattle truck on the desert road linking
Ethiopia and Kenya. He described the road as "spectacularly bad," full
of "wheel-swallowing potholes," deep ruts, and enormous razor-sharp
boulders. One of the tires ripped open. "That was to be expected
here-by me, anyway," he writes. "Apparently not by Mustafa and the
others, for they had no spare. They shook out junk from a burlap sack
. and began amateurishly to whack the wheel, as though they had never
been in this fix before." Mr. Theroux sums up the situation: "This is
not good-a breakdown in the desert where no one cares whether I live
or die. I am stranded among the most incompetent and unresourceful
mechanics I have ever seen." Luckily, another cattle truck rumbled by
and Mr. Theroux was able to catch a ride.
In Zimbabwe, he visited a farm run by a charming hard-working white
family $22 million in debt and assailed by squatters. He spoke to one
of the latter, who was from neighboring Zambia. He was furious because
the government had not helped him. He needed seed, fertilizer, and a
tractor. He now expected the owner of the farm to give him supplies
and plow his fields. "Having invaded the land and staked his claim and
put up four big huts, he now wanted free seed, free fertilizer, and
the fields plowed at his bidding, his victim working the tractor. It
was like a thief who, having stolen a coat, insisted that his victim
have the coat dry-cleaned and tailored to fit." When Mr. Theroux asked
him what he would do if people came and squatted on his land, he
exploded in rage. He would drive them off.
While in Malawi, Mr. Theroux visited his old school, hoping it had
been modernized and improved. "The school was almost unrecognizable,"
he writes. "What had been a group of school buildings in a large grove
of trees was a compound of battered buildings in a muddy open field.
The trees had been cut down and the grass was chest high. At first
glance the place was so poorly maintained as to seem abandoned: broken
windows, doors ajar, mildewed walls, gashes in the roofs, and only a
few people standing around, empty-handed, doing nothing but gaping at
me." It seemed as if the failure of post-colonial Africa was all here,
as if deliberately staged.
Also in Malawi, he visited the old Zomba Gymkhana Club, which had once
been the social center for resident Europeans, mainly British. In the
early '60s, Mr. Theroux had heard members complain that if Africans
were let in, they would ruin the club: They would get drunk, tear up
the billiard table, women would nurse babies in the game room. At the
time, Mr. Theroux considered such thoughts "rude and racist," yet
seeing the club today he realized they were "fairly prescient, for the
rowdy teenagers at the billiard table were stabbing their cues at the
torn felt, the bar was full of drunks, and a woman was breast feeding
her baby under the dart board." Many writers would have left out this
story, as it vindicates "racist" predictions, but Mr. Theroux is too
truthful and thorough a writer for that.
He asked a Malawian official to explain why the government had chased
the Indian shopkeepers out of the country in the 1970s. The official
explained that the Africans deserved a chance to run the shops, so
they took them over; but soon the stores all failed. Twenty-seven
years later, the town still had no shops. When Mr. Theroux pointed out
that expropriation had backfired, another African interrupted and
began mocking the way the Indians did business: "They sit there, you
see, and they have these little pieces of paper, and have these
columns of numbers. And one Indian is running the calculator, and
another is counting the sacks of flour and the tins of condensed milk.
One two three. One two three."
Mr. Theroux explains: "What this educated African with his plummy
voice intended as mockery-the apparent absurdity of all this
counting-was the description of people doing a simple inventory of
goods in a shop." When he pointed this out, the African replied that
his people had neither the aptitude nor the desire to run businesses.
"What do we care about shops and counting? We have a much freer
existence. We have no interest in this-shops are not our strong
point." Mr. Theroux, growing exasperated, asked why then had they
taken over the shops. The answer was that the Africans might find a
use for them some day (most were still empty, but a few had become
beer bars).
Mr. Theroux does not say this, but the real answer to his question was
envy. The Africans could not stand to see successful small businesses
run by foreigners, so they kicked them out and took them over. Envy of
non-Africans continues to motivate Africa. The land seizures in
Zimbabwe, the murders of white farmers in South Africa, and the urban
crime wave in Johannesburg and Cape Town, are obvious examples (see
next article for a complementary view of African thinking).
Mr. Theroux fits most Westerners in Africa into one of three
categories. First, there are the tourists, usually on safari. Mr.
Theroux dismisses them as "fantasists." Then there are the "agents of
virtue"-the international aid workers, whom Mr. Theroux describes as
haughty, aloof, ineffective jerks who rarely stay in Africa long
enough to realize the extent of their failure; and the altruists,
missionaries and others, who are there to save Africa and Africans.
He met a young, attractive Finnish woman working on an AIDS project in
Zambia. She had been in Africa only a short time, but was already
disillusioned. "It is horrible. There is no sex education. No one will
talk about sex, but everyone does it. No one will talk about AIDS, and
everyone is infected. We were sent an anti-AIDS film and we showed it.
But people in the village said it was shameful-too indecent-and so it
was withdrawn." Mr. Theroux asked if she had talked to them. She had.
The result? "They wanted to have sex with me."
In Mozambique, he met a naive female missionary who was running a
shelter designed to get prostitutes and boys off the streets. One
night she was robbed by a group of boys. She recognized them as boys
she had bathed, fed, and clothed; what's worse, they recognized her.
Mr. Theroux recalled that Christian missionaries had been at work here
since 1508: "Five centuries of this!"
Mr. Theroux was victim of only one crime in Africa, and it came at the
very end. Before taking a four-day side trip to the coast, he left his
valuables (watch, wallet, cash, air tickets, African artifacts) for
safekeeping in a Johannesburg hotel strong room. He returned to find
everything stolen. "That's very Janiceburg, very Jozi," one resident
later told him.
Mr. Theroux does not absolve Africans of responsibility for their own
plight, but the only Africans he singles out for blame are the corrupt
and thieving leaders. His book makes it clear that sloth, lack of
planning, and envy are to blame for much of Africa's plight, but he
never says this directly nor does he consider the possibility Africans
may be of lower intelligence than whites.
What is to be done with the place? Mr. Theroux condemns Western
governments, international organizations, and private aid agencies for
making the continent's problems worse. He believes the only solution
is to pull out the whole apparatus of Western relief and development,
and let Africans define their problems, work out solutions, and live
according to their habits and customs. He does not doubt that by
Western standards the continent will remain undeveloped and primitive,
will perhaps become much more so, but it may be able to sustain itself
and create a life that is livable for Africans. He seems to think that
if left alone, Africans will drift slowly back to their ancestral
villages and turn once again to labor-intensive agriculture. Africa
would not revert entirely back to a pre-contact state, but it might go
halfway.
This may be an overly romantic view. The slaughter in Rwanda/Burundi,
the double amputees in Sierra Leone, the witch-burnings and black
magic common throughout black Africa, and the cannibalism that has
come to light in the Congo are chilling examples of what Africans can
do when left to themselves. Perhaps a return to old-fashioned European
colonialism is the best solution. Short of that, a policy of leaving
Africa alone, with all its potential perils, may be the best realistic
choice we have.
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