Paul Theroux, now 61, states that when he set out to travel from Cairo to Cape Town what he wanted most was to get away -- from cellphones, Fedex, Internet cafes, and Web sites. The only Web site he wanted to visit was that of the poisonous Central African bird-eating spider.
Theroux tackles his project the hard way. Admittedly he has to fly in and out of Sudan because the land borders are closed. But for the rest he rides on trucks and crowded minibuses, hitches lifts with nuns, takes the train. "Most trains in Africa look as if they are on their way to Auschwitz," he comments, though later he travels on South Africa's Blue Train, one of the most luxurious on earth.
He'd been there before -- as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, as a teacher in Uganda (both in the 1960s), and researching the Zambezi river in 1999 -- and longs for the open skies and the simple life. He likes being in Africa because it's nothing like home. Instead, it's "like being on a dark star."
It is unfortunate that the strong tone of the introduction doesn't carry through into the book's opening chapters. In Egypt he accompanies mindless tourists, and his jokes at their expense are vapid and repetitive. Where's the old Theroux fire, you ask yourself, the dismissive rebuke, the sardonic encapsulation, the trademark outspokenness? Instead, tourists are endlessly quoted as saying "fronic" for "pharaonic" and commenting "How in heck did they manage to lift these things?"
In addition, he hedges. "Bush is Satan! Clinton is Satan!" someone says to him in Sudan. "I dunno," Theroux keeps replying, before noting that the man goes on to ask him how he can work in the US.
Nevertheless, the very form of the journey, traveling through one country after another, ensures a monumental structure to the book, like a series of granite blocks pushed up one against the other. But it's not until Theroux gets angry that the narrative really catches fire.
Before then, he manages to keep his cool, despite considerable provocation. He's howled at as a foreigner in Ethiopia, shot at on the roof of a truck in northern Kenya, watches a thief pursued by a murderous crowd in Nairobi.
Then in Malawi he visits the school where he taught 40 years ago and is appalled. Where there had been a library with 10,000 books, now there are empty shelves, and not even any adequate lights. The gardens are not tended, the teachers' bungalows no longer cared for. He had wanted to stay and teach a little, but instead reacts with fury. What is all this begging for aid when it is embezzled by politicians and nobody cares? Why were the Indian shopkeepers driven out when now there are no shops at all? All this aid only delays real change, he concludes, which has to come from Africans if it is to come at all.
This fighting talk does wonders for the book. Once Theroux is roused, it springs to life. As a result the second half is far better. Ill, he stumbles along a street, but still has the strength to demand that a beggar ask him for work, not money.
It's impossible not to contrast Africa with Asia. Here, energy and self-improvement are on every side. There, in the worst places Theroux describes, lassitude and dependence appear to have become a way of life.
Not surprisingly, Theroux brings in the appropriate books wherever possible. He cites Flaubert on Egypt and studies Rimbaud in preparation for Ethiopia. He feels like Huck Finn in a giant dugout on the Zambezi, and on a farm in Zimbabwe remembers that all the classic stories he's liked best have been rural ones. He finds one of his own novels still banned, and meets a backpacker reading his My Secret Life.
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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