Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux

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Fans of Paul Theroux's witty, sharply observed travel accounts will not be disappointed with this dense tome describing the hilarity and heartbreak of a trip through Africa. Beginning in Cairo and ending in Cape Town, this renowned chronicler gleefully engages everyone he finds, from the poorest of villagers to the most corrupt bureaucrats. The mystery, sweetness, strangeness, and horror of this complicated continent filters through Theroux's trademark wryness, giving us a laugh when it gets too heavy. As he travels overland in the creakiest of vehicles on the most terrible roads, one can't help but admire this author for chasing down the stories of Africa we won't ever hear about on the evening news.

From the Publisher

In Dark Star Safari the wittily observant and endearingly irascible Paul Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train. In the course of his epic and enlightening journey, he endures danger, delay, and dismaying circumstances.
Gauging the state of affairs, he talks to Africans, aid workers, missionaries, and tourists. What results is an insightful meditation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people, and "a vivid portrayal of the secret sweetness, the hidden vitality, and the long-patient hope that lies just beneath the surface" (Rocky Mountain News). In a new postscript, Theroux recounts the dramatic events of a return to Africa to visit Zimbabwe.

The New York Times

As Emerson went on to say, a writer engages despair by writing about it; ''in calamity, he finds new materials.'' With Dark Star Safari, Theroux reports his first trip into the last leg of life's voyage, and sends back a brooding and apocalyptic report. — Rand Richards Cooper

The Washington Post

Theroux is best at shorthand dissections of trends that have already become obvious. In no other book will one find such entertaining and penetrating comments about the ironies, as well as the historic failure, of foreign aid. — Robert D. Kaplan

Book Magazine

"All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there," Theroux writes in his thirty-eighth book, which describes his yearlong journey from Cairo to Cape Town by creaky train, ferry and rattletrap bus. Back in the 1960s, Theroux worked as a teacher and Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda and Malawi. Recently, the headlines depicting war and famine there awoke in him the desire to return to the continent. "Nothing was new," Theroux writes of Africa, "except that there were many more people, grubbier buildings, more litter, fewer trees, more poachers, less game." By the end of the trip, Theroux seems more concerned with the arrogant aid workers who constantly zoom past him in glistening white Land Rovers, refusing to give him a ride.

Publishers Weekly

"You'll have a terrible time," one diplomat tells Theroux upon discovering the prolific writer's plans to hitch a ride hundreds of miles along a desolate road to Nairobi instead of taking a plane. "You'll have some great stuff for your book." That seems to be the strategy for Theroux's extended "experience of vanishing" into the African continent, where disparate incidents reveal Theroux as well as the people he meets. At times, he goes out of his way to satisfy some perverse curmudgeonly desire to pick theological disputes with Christian missionaries. But his encounters with the natives, aid workers and occasional tourists make for rollicking entertainment, even as they offer a sobering look at the social and political chaos in which much of Africa finds itself. Theroux occasionally strays into theorizing about the underlying causes for the conditions he finds, but his cogent insights are well integrated. He doesn't shy away from the literary aspects of his tale, either, frequently invoking Conrad and Rimbaud, and dropping in at the homes of Naguib Mahfouz and Nadine Gordimer at the beginning and end of his trip. He also returns to many of the places where he lived and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer and teacher in the 1960s, locations that have cropped up in earlier novels. These visits fuel the book's ongoing obsession with his approaching 60th birthday and his insistence that he isn't old yet. As a travel guide, Theroux can both rankle and beguile, but after reading this marvelous report, readers will probably agree with the priest who observes, "Wonderful people. Terrible government. The African story." (Mar.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

No mere tale of travel mishaps....Safari is Swahili for journey, and Theroux's is truly fantastic.

Foreign Affairs

Before Theroux became a popular author of novels and travelogues, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi and an instructor at Makerere University in Uganda. As his 60th birthday approached in 2001, he set out to traverse Africa north to south by road and rail, revisiting old haunts and taking the pulse of the continent. By the time he reached Malawi, he had been "abused, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheated, bitten, flooded, insulted, exhausted, robbed, lied to, brow-beaten, poisoned, stunk up, and starved," but found that he still loved Africa and Africans — or some of them, anyway. Tourists and foreign aid workers are another story; the latter get a drubbing for propping up corrupt regimes and putting Africans off the idea of solving their own problems. Some of his observations about Africa's economic decline are astute, although his quest for explanations is limited to what he can extract from the cast of characters he meets along his way. Mostly, however, this book is an intelligent, funny, and frankly sentimental account by a young-at-heart idealist who is trying to make sense of the painful disparity between what Africa is and what he once hoped it might become.

Library Journal

Legendary travel writer and novelist Theroux will probably never work for the Kenya or Malawi (or any other country between Cairo and the Cape) tourist boards after the publication of this latest book. In it, he tells of being shot at in Kenya, depressed in Malawi, pestered in Mozambique, robbed in South Africa, and invaded by intestinal parasites in Ethiopia. But this is no mere tale of travel mishaps. Theroux, who lived and worked in Malawi and Uganda in the 1960s, has a genuine affection for the continent that comes through in his tales of African friends, old and new. Among them he counts a former political prisoner in Nairobi, the prime minister of Uganda, a boat captain on Lake Victoria, a former student in Zomba (in Malawi), a besieged farmer in Zimbabwe, and writer and activist Nadine Gordimer in Johannesburg. Safari is Swahili for journey, and Theroux's is truly fantastic. Typical of Theroux's best work, which focuses on a single trip, this book is recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/02.]-Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

America's master traveler (Fresh Air Fiend, 2000, etc.) takes us along on his wanderings in tumultuous bazaars, crowded railway stations, desert oases, and the occasional nicely appointed hotel lobby. "All news of out Africa is bad," Theroux gamely begins. "It made me want to go there." Forty years after making his start as a writer while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, he returns for a journey from Cairo to Cape Town along "what was now the longest road in Africa, some of it purely theoretical." More reflective and less complaining than some of his other big-tour narratives (e.g., The Happy Isles of Oceania, 1992), Theroux's account finds him in the company of Islamic fundamentalists and dissidents, sub-Saharan rebels and would-be neocolonialists, bin Ladenites, and intransigent white landholders, almost all of them angry at America for one reason or another. The author shares their anger at many points. Of the pharmaceutical plant outside Khartoum that was flattened by a cruise missile on Bill Clinton's orders a few years back, he remarks, "Though we become hysterical at the thought that someone might bomb us, bombs that we explode elsewhere, in little countries far away, are just theater, of small consequence, another public performance of our White House, the event factory." Such sentiments are rarely expressed in post-9/11 America, and Theroux is to be commended for pointing out the consequences of our half-baked imperializing in Africa's miserable backwaters. His criticisms cut both ways, however; after an Egyptian student offends him with the remark, "Israel is America's baby," he replies, "Many countries are America's babies. Some good babies, some bad babies."Theroux is often dour, although he finds hopeful signs that Africa will endure and overcome its present misfortunes in the sight, for instance, of a young African boatman doing complex mathematical equations amid "spitting jets of steam," and in the constant, calming beauty of so many African places. Engagingly written, sharply observed: another winner from Theroux.

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

1 Lighting Out All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there, though not for the horror, the hot spots, the massacre-and-earthquake stories you read in the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure of being in Africa again. Feeling that the place was so large it contained many untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too — feeling that there was more to Africa than misery and terror — I aimed to reinsert myself in the bundu, as we used to call the bush, and to wander the antique hinterland. There I had lived and worked, happily, almost forty years ago, in the heart of the greenest continent.
To skip ahead, I am writing this a year later, just back from Africa, having taken my long safari and been reminded that all travel is a lesson in self-preservation. I was mistaken in so much — delayed, shot at, howled at, and robbed. No massacres or earthquakes, but terrific heat and the roads were terrible, the trains were derelict, forget the telephones. Exasperated white farmers said, “It all went tits-up!” 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, theypleaded, they demanded money and gifts with a rude, weird sense of entitlement. Not that Africa is one place. It is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. I got sick, I got stranded, but I was never bored. In fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation. Such a paragraph needs some explanation — at least a book. This book perhaps.
As I was saying, in those old undramatic days of my school- teaching in the bundu, folks lived their lives on bush paths at the ends of unpaved roads of red clay, in villages of grass-roofed huts. They had a new national flag to replace the Union Jack, they had just gotten the vote, some had bikes, many talked about buying their first pair of shoes. They were hopeful and so was I, a teacher living near a settlement of mud huts among dusty trees and parched fields. The children shrieked at play; the women, bent double — most with infants slung on their backs — hoed patches of corn and beans; and the men sat in the shade stupefying themselves on chibuku, the local beer, or kachasu, the local gin. That was taken for the natural order in Africa: frolicking children, laboring women, idle men.
Now and then there was trouble: someone transfixed by a spear, drunken brawls, political violence, goon squads wearing the ruling-party T- shirt and raising hell. But in general the Africa I knew was sunlit and lovely, a soft green emptiness of low, flat-topped trees and dense bush, bird squawks, giggling kids, red roads, cracked and crusty brown cliffs that looked newly baked, blue remembered hills, striped and spotted animals and ones with yellow fur and fangs, and every hue of human being, from pink- faced planters in knee socks and shorts to brown Indians to Africans with black gleaming faces, and some people so dark they were purple. The predominant sound of the African bush was not the trumpeting of elephants nor the roar of lions but the coo-cooing of the turtledove.
After I left Africa, there was an eruption of news about things going wrong, acts of God, acts of tyrants, tribal warfare and plagues, floods and starvation, bad-tempered political commissars, and little teenage soldiers who were hacking people. “Long sleeves?” they teased, cutting off hands; “short sleeves” meant lopping the whole arm. One million people died, mostly Tutsis, in the Rwanda massacres of 1994. The red African roads remained, but they were now crowded with ragged, bundle-burdened, fleeing refugees.
Journalists pursued them. Goaded by their editors to feed a public hungering for proof of savagery on earth, reporters stood near starving Africans in their last shaking fuddle and intoned on the TV news for people gobbling snacks on their sofas and watching in horror. “And these people” — tight close-up of a death rattle — “these are the lucky ones.” You always think, Who says so? Had something fundamental changed since I was there? I wanted to find out. My plan was to go from Cairo to Cape Town, top to bottom, and to see everything in between.
Now African news was as awful as the rumors. The place was said to be dessperate, unspeakable, violent, plague-ridden, starving, hopeless, dying on its feet. And these are the lucky ones. I thought, since I hhhhhad plenty of time and nothing pressing, that I might connect the dots, crossing borders and seeing the hinterland rather than flitting from capital to capital, being greeted by unctuous tour guides. I had no desire to see game parks, though I supposed at some point I would. The word “safari,” in Swahili, means “journey”; it has nothing to do with animals. Someone “on safari” is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.
Out of touch in Africa was where I wanted to be. The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party’s extension, being kept waiting all your working life — the homebound writer’s irritants.Being kept waiting is the human condition.
I thought, Let other people explain where I am. I imagined the dialogue: “When will Paul be back?” “We don’t know.” “Where is he?” “We’re not sure.” “Can we get in touch with him?” “No.” Travel in the African bush can also be a sort of revenge on cellular phones and fax machines, on telephones and the daily paper, on the creepier aspects of globalization that allow anyone who chooses to get his insinuating hands on you. I desired to be unobtainable. Kurtz, sick as he is, attempts to escape from Marlow’s riverboat, crawling on all fours like an animal, trying to flee into the jungle. I understood that.
I was going to Africa for the best reason — in a spirit of discovery; and for the pettiest — simply to disappear, to light out, with a suggestion of I dare you to try and find me.
Home had become a routine, and routines make time pass quickly. I was a sitting duck in my predictable routine: people knew when to call me; they knew when I would be at my desk. I was in such regular touch it was like having a job, a mode of life I hated. I was sick of being called up and importuned, asked for favors, hit up for money. You stick around too long and people begin to impose their own deadlines on you. “I need this by the twenty-fifth” or “Please read this by Friday” or “Try to finish this over the weekend” or “Let’s have a conference call on Wednesday.” Call me, fax me, e-mail me. You can get me anytime on my cell phone, here’s the number.
Being available at any time in the totally accessible world seemed to me pure horror. It made me want to find a place that was not accessible at all: no phones, no fax machines, not even mail delivery, the wonderful old world of being out of touch. In other words, gone away.
All I had to do was remove myself. I loved not having to ask permission, and in fact in my domestic life things had begun to get a little predictable, too — Mr. Paul at home every evening when Mrs. Paul came home from work. “I made spaghetti sauce . . . I seared some tuna . . . I’m scrubbing some potatoes . . .”The writer in his apron, perspiring over his béchamel sauce, always within earshot of the telephone. You have to pick it up because it is ringing in your ear.
I wanted to drop out. People said, “Get a cell phone, use FedEx, sign up for Hotmail, stop in at Internet cafés, visit my Web site . . .” I said no thanks. The whole point of my leaving was to escape this stuff, to be out of touch. The greatest justification for travel is not self- improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. As Huck put it, lighting out for the territory.
Africa is one of the last great places on earth a person can vanish into. I wanted that. Let them wait. I have been kept waiting far too many times for far too long.
I am outta here, I told myself. The next Web site I visit will be that of the poisonous Central African bird-eating spider.
A morbid aspect of my departure for Africa was that people began offering condolences. Say you’re leaving for a dangerous place. Your friends call sympathetically, as though you’ve caught a serious illness that might prove fatal. Yet I found these messages unexpectedly stimulating, a heartening preview of what my own demise would be like. Lots of tears! Lots of mourners! But also, undoubtedly, many people boasting solemnly, “I told him not to do it. I was one of the last people to talk to him.” I had gotten to Lower Egypt, and was heading south, in my usual traveling mood: hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable, it is a banal subject for travel. Therefore, Africa seemed perfect for a long journey.

Copyright © 2003 by Paul Theroux. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.