Africa's cities, apart from Harare, he considers terrible -- "traffic-clogged Cairo, overheated Khartoum, crumbling tin-roofed Addis, crime-ridden Nairobi, disorderly Kampala, demoralized Dar es Salaam, ragged Lilongwe, desperate Blantyre ... ." And this, you think, is only East Africa. What on earth would he have made of West?
But he loves hearing the night rain in his tent in the Sahara, being in the remote south of Malawi -- no electricity, no paved roads, no phones, no piped water -- and riding the high, gritty plateau of the Ethiopia-Kenya border. He loves the simple poor who want his empty can when he's finished eating the food from it.
Inevitably the book gets political, and as a result highly-charged. In Zimbabwe he talks to a dispossessed white farmer, then to a farm invader. The latter is clearly unable to cultivate all the land he has acquired, so Theroux asks him why another landless man shouldn't take some of it, especially as non-use was cited as one reason for invasion. The man trembles in rage and claims the former white owner should plow the land for him. Theroux compares him to a thief who steals a suit and then wants his victim to adjust it. "I didn't have the stomach for this absurdity," he writes as he walks away.
For the rest, he smokes marijuana with Rastafarians in Ethiopia (the locals think them impious and faintly ludicrous), chews qat where Rimbaud once traded guns, listens to prison stories (one man had translated Gone With the Winds on 3,000 pieces of silver foil taken from cigarette cartons), derides people on up-market safaris ("tourists yawned at the animals and the animals yawned back"), and appreciates a good joke about Singapore (on page 130).
As he travels south, he laments the death of the old Africa with its racial mix, its occasional idealism, and its successful economies. All he sees now is corruption, hypocritical pleas for aid, and a slide into hopelessness, starvation and disease. Africa's politicians, he argues, have a vested interest in things not getting any better. Aid will continue to flow in, they will take much of it for themselves, and no one will have enough education to challenge the status quo.
"In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed," is the sentiment on which he concludes this controversial, opinionated, but often excellent book.
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