This is a book report on Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, an account of his 2001 journey, overland by public transit, from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa. This was an interesting book for me because I’m currently planning a few trips to southern African. Theroux writes with a certain amount of authority because he worked as a teacher in Africa during the mid-1960s. The words below are summaries of Theroux’s 485-page book, not opinions of the author of this blog (who has only once visited Africa and then only to Egypt).
Black Africans are very comfortable leading a life of subsistence farming and frequent casual sex with lots of different partners starting at about age 10. They are basically quite happy and unmotivated to change this lifestyle, which makes sense because, at least in the villages, it is a great lifestyle (especially for the men, who get to spend all day every day drinking beer with their buddies while women work in the fields). Black African governments, however, are not happy watching their subjects dig potatoes in between bouts of lovemaking. This is not because they have anything against subsistence farming or sex but rather because it is difficult to tax subsistence farmers or 14-year-old working girls.
Black Africans sometimes express confusion as to how others achieve economic prosperity, particularly the Indians who operate most of the continent’s small shops. One boatman on the Zambezi relates that his people believe that “Indians [kill young African girls] and cut out their hearts. Using the fresh hearts of these African virgins as bait on large hooks, they were able to catch certain Zambezi fish that were stuffed full of diamonds.” A girl in South Africa notes “They say Indians never sleep. They just stay awake, doing business night and day. That’s why they are rich.”
Africans are basically incompetent at anything other than having a good time. They can’t drive. They can’t prepare a vehicle for a journey properly or change a tire. They can’t grow food on a large scale. The smarter Africans sometimes are able to dupe a white person into making something work and then they steal it. This has been refined to an art in Zimbabwe where the blacks got the whites to set up farms that they could subsequently take over under land reform. Sometimes a farmer would go through two cycles of buying land, improving it, and watching it get stolen by “war veterans” before giving up. The whites eventually got wise, however, and moved their operations across the river to Zambia. The blacks who took over the white farms are unable to do anything other than have sex and farm enough for subsistence. To avert famine the government buys much of its food now from their former white citizens now living across the border in Zambia. This generalized incompetence doesn’t keep villagers from having a good time but city life is a challenge because the colonialists who built the roads, sewers, etc. packed up and went home. Consequently Theroux finds the urban and infrastructure portions of Africa in every way and in every country worse than it was 40 years ago when he lived there.
Foreign aid requires the direct involvement of whites and/or Asians on the ground at every level. You can’t give aid to African officials because they will steal the money. You can’t give food to African employees in local villages because they will sell it. You can’t give food to African parents to feed their hungry children because children have almost zero value in Africa and the parents will eat it themselves. So you need (mostly) Europeans at every level of the distribution chain right down to the troughs at which the hungry kids will eat.
Foreign aid workers are the most loathsome people on the continent. They roar around in fancy new air-conditioned SUVs and won’t give rides to travelers such as Theroux. They aren’t good for conversations in bars, either. Basically the only thing that foreign aid workers are good for is sucking the initiative out of the Africans themselves. But they are necessary because no Africans are willing to do the job. Any African who gets enough training to, say, become a medical doctor, either emigrates to a rich country or refuses to leave the largest cities. The only people who are willing to work in clinics in villages are white. Theroux’s favorite stories are when earnest white Christians work for years sheltering and feeding street kids and then get set up and robbed by those very same kids.
Africa is blessed with an awe-inspiring landscape and interesting animals, which are challenging to access due to the deterioration of the road network in the years since decolonialization. Africa is a bad place for seeing African art; all of the good stuff has been looted and sold to museums and individuals in rich countries. Touring Africa on a luxury organized tour is a sham. Those people never get to see the real Africans that Theroux interacts with. Touring Africa Theroux-style involves dangerous cramped smelly transportation, waiting days for visas or buses or boats, sharing beds with vermin, getting sick, bringing home a stomach parasite that required many months of medical treatment in the U.S., etc.
Johannesburg really is the most crime-ridden place in Africa. At the very end of his trip Theroux lost all of his baggage that he’d left in care of a top-end hotel for a few days.
Well… that’s how Theroux saw it. I might post another blog entry with my reactions to Theroux’s text. Meantime it is off to sleep in my little salaryman’s hotel room in Mutsu, Japan. This town is at the very northern tip of Honshu and tomorrow I’ll be taking my rental car on the ferry to Hokkaido. Japan is, of course, a fantastic country for tourism but terribly hot and humid in the summer. I thought that I would be okay up here in the north but this has been a summer of record-breaking heat and humidity.
Interesting, I never thought of Northern Japan as being that hot. At least they have A/C everywhere, right? Also what is the % of intelligibly good English-speakers?
Theroux is a pretty grumpy guy. “Happy Isles of Oceania” is where he’s at his grumpiest, right after his divorce. He’s definitely a “glass is half empty” kindo of guy.
I recommend you read “Dogs and Demons.” It’s a cyncical look at Japan by a longtime resident–if you like Theroux, you’ll love this one.
Well, that’s certainly a very negative view. But it is not without its basis in fact. My mother works as an aid worker in africa and I’ve visited several countries (kenya, namibia, SA, Zimbabwe, even my own little stuck on the wrong side of the botswana border for a few hours not knowing if I’d be met story). There is a great deal of corruption and a sort of laziness that seems to assume someone will get the work done for you. Personally, I think its a work ethic issue, and there was never much of a reason to be a hard worker under colonial slavery/serfdom and this attitude has persisted (including a perception that no one who is successful never did much work themselves). But these are all things that can change.
I’ve gotta say that your summary of Theroux’s book is something like “Five-Minute Shakespeare” You manage to convey Theroux’s crankiness and disappointment and anger without any of the sympathy and admiration he has for many of the people he encounters or his love for Africa as a whole. What’s always made Theroux’s writing work for me is his apparent refusal to censor himself about the world he encounters or his own often unhappy relationship to it. It’s what sets him apart from, if not above, most contemporary “travel” writers.
He might be cranky, but Theroux is the best travel writer around. Apologies to the author of this blog.
The percentage of people who speak good English up here in northern Japan? So far I’ve met one guy whom I would characterize as actually speaking English. He was sitting across from me at a hotel buffet, a journalist who had lived in California for four years. At the best hotels the clerks understand simple words such as “check-in” and occasionally can give directions.
db: You’re right, Theroux does love African village life and the landscape. Maybe I will add an extra line about the scenery. But the tone of the book is basically pretty negative about Africans, foreign aid workers, and rich tourists.
Tristan, it sounds like there still isn’t much incentive to be a hard worker, since if you _do_ succeed in life there, everything will simply be taken away from you by state kleptocrats.
My uncle was the Italian ambassador to Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi for several years after the fall of the Amin government. He had a lot of respect for the people because he was very skeptical of the ultimate value of human “civilization”. Being Roman, I think that makes sense. One walk under the Arch of Titus gives you a profound Ozymandias feel. His logic being something alonmg the lines of: Perhaps, after the collapse of human civilization, the Africans who don’t hold too much to it in the first place will be the most ready to handle the Mad Max world we will end up with.
With the percentage of Africans battling AIDS these days he may be literally right. They will have the genes to prove it.
Interestingly one of his last jobs before retiring was being one of the Italian representatives in the START treaty negotiations.
Is it really so that the whites keep the blacks down? From a crazy racist Web site:
FACT #1: The White race has crossed seas, harnessed rivers, carved mountains, tamed deserts, and colonized the most barren icefields. It has been responsible for the invention of the printing press, cement, the harnessing of electricity, flight, rocketry, astronomy, the telescope, space travel, firearms, the transistor, radio, television, the telephone, the ligh tbulb, photography, motion pictures, the phonograph, the electric battery, the automobile, the steam engine, railroad transportation, the microscope, computers, and millions of other technological miracles. It has discovered countless medical advances, incredible applications, scientific progress, etc. Its members have included such greats as Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, Tacitus, Julius Caeser, Napoleon, William the Conqueror, Marco Polo, Washington, Jefferson, Hitler, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Magellan, Columbus, Cabot, Edison, Graham Bell, Pasteur, Leeuwenhoek, Mendel, Darwin, Newton, Galileo, Watt, Ford, Luther, De Vinci, Poe, Tennyson, and thousands upon thousands of other notable achievers. (37) (39)
FACT #2: Throughout 6,000 years of recorded history, the Black African Negro has invented nothing. Not a written language, weaved cloth, a calendar, a plow, a road, a bridge, a railway, a ship, a system of measurement, or even the wheel. (Note: This is in reference to the pure-blooded Negro.) He is not known to have ever cultivated a single crop or domesticated a single animal for his own use (although many powerful and docile beasts abounded around him.) His only known means of transporting goods was on the top of his hard burry head. For shelter he never progressed beyond the common mud hut, the construction of which a beaver or muskrat is capable.(21) (39)
10 years ago I spent 6 months travelling around Africa Paul Theroux style; not that I had much of a choice given my budget.
Few Africans would believe me when I declined to fund their plane ticket to Europe (I’m talking about complete strangers here, like taxi drivers) because I had barely enough money for my own. To them we’re all rich and all it takes is to become as rich as we are is to reach the western Eldorado. Mind you they could be forgiven seeing as the vision they have of westerners a part from TV is essentially those on expensive package holidays, i.e. doing nothing and yet having bucketloads of money to spend, or aid workers in top of the range SUV’s. I guess they just viewed budget travellers as plain stingy.
To be fair: I did actually meet one aid worker who was seemed to be doing great work. It might have been because he was Malian and drove a battered old pick up truck.
One story I heard from a Peace Corps was of Unicef suppyling vaccines to the region. The vaccines reached the village she was based in, complete with a fridge and a generator to power the fridge (they thought that far). The village chief decided the generator would do nicely for his house and the vaccines went to waste. One of many tales of corruption from a deperately corrupt country.
But should any of this be a surprise? Why would anyone expect a deperately poor continent, ravaged by western invaders for centuries and then left to it’s own devices, to be a place of high education, opportunity, integrity and cuddlyness. Westerners seem to have a vision of Africans as either starving innocents to be helped or people with a great sense of rythm and profounly in touch with their spiritual selves, unlike us rational When we travel to Africa we are in for a rude awakening, althogh not quite as rude that of the Africans that do make it to the west.
The “racist” site quoted above may be right about the facts, but wrong about the reasons behind them. For example, Australian aborigines were long considered to be backward, primitive, useless, etc. until people realised that they had perfected a lifestyle where about one hour’s work per day would cover their basic needs in terms of sustenance. So it wasn’t very rational for them to spend another seven hours (say) accumulating extra food that would only go to waste. From an economic standpoint, “lazing around all day” was the most rational option. You might argue that this lifestyle is superior to a 9-to-5 existence paying off a mortgage, at which point you ask yourself who’s the “primitive” one. 🙂
As for the question of domesticating animals, Jared Diamond’s Guns, germs and steel has a very good discussion of why neither Africa nor the Americas produced much in this area. He describes the number of wild mammals potentially available for domestication, crosses off some (e.g. gazelles) that go nuts in captivity, and concludes that there weren’t many options in those continents (not to mention the tsetse fly barrier to north-south migration of horses and the like – the first horses to reach South Africa were brought on ship by Europeans, even though horses had been used in nothern Africa since time immemorial). Diamond argues that Eurasia’s east-west orientation provided extensive horizontal swathes of territory with a similar climate, providing huge scope for domesticated plants and animals to spread (from China to France). In contrast, Africa and South America’s predominant north-south orientation, with the tropics in the middle, meant that any successes in domesticating plants or animals were confined to narrow latitude bands.
Geez, with radioactive steam being released and killing people, and landslides destroying lots of property, you’re lucky that the heat is the only thing bothering you!
Yeah, I second the “Guns, Germs and Steel” thing. If you want to understand *anything* about why different countries have different cultures and economic states you need to read it.
Also, I think the anthropologist Keith Hart, who studied the nascent market economies growing in Africa in the 60s, is worth reading.
Chapter from his excellent “Money in an unequal world” : http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/book/4/view (scroll down for his description of Nigeria)
Plus this, which I haven’t read yet, but I imagine will be interesting, : http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/publications/indian_business/view)
Also, contrast John Perry Barlow’s travels in Africa : http://hotwired.wired.com/collections/virtual_communities/6.01_wire_africa_pr.html
Africa is truly the Dark Continent. Have a look at Zimbabwe for only the latest example.
Not a question of “race”, just one of “culture”, in my opinion, counter to the excerpt above
. Jim Rogers, who motorcycled around the world, recounts how he came across the ruins of simply HUGE structures in Zimbabwe, last remnants of what was once a powerful, large nation. It was being reclaimed year by year by the jungle.
Theroux could be admitted through the Pearly Gates by St Peter and would still find something to gripe about. He’s a n awesome travel writer, and an entertaining lecturer (I saw him at Nat’l Geo a few years back), but he will find fault in everyplace. Africa is wonderful. Africa is wretched. I’ll be experiencing more of it in Oct if I survive Jo-Burg. It’s something to see before it becomes too civilized.
I was slightly apprehensive when I picked up Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, but it is far less negative than this summary indicates, and less so than some of his other work. The bare synopsis ignores many of the human elements which make his trip worthwhile.
Theroux is a realist, he tells it like it is, and this can be uncomfortable for some. His earlier experiences as a Peace Corps worker are contrasted with current realities. This part of the book is most personal and poignant.
You can find poverty, ignorance and greed anywhere if you really look. I third the book “Guns, Germs and Steel” in explaining broader issues. Mahatma Gandhi’s retort to “Western Civilisation” was “That would be a good idea”, and some famous Chinese thoughts on the French Revolution was “It’s too soon to tell”.
Africa is complex, is not like “The West”, and each place differs in many ways. Southern Africa has a different history from the northern half, but unfortunately Zimbabwe currently expresses the worst of both worlds.
I think you would greatly enjoy a visit to Africa, but you need to choose your destinations, and be in a frame of mind to accept what you find. I live in South Africa, which is hardly representative of the continent, but does overlap both realities.
Paul Theroux is spectacularly blinkered. He falls into exactly the same trap of ignorance that much of the world falls into about the USA, basing an understanding on surface appearances.
So for example, on the face of it the USA is one of the most renegade countries. It’s invaded numerous countries in the last 20 or 30 years…Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Somalia, Afganistan, Iraq – twice. (What have I left out?) On the surface it looks like the US is the worst kind of citizen. But when you look closer, for the most part the intentions were good, although the results were mixed. (You’d think that the US government would spend a lot of time and money understanding and preparing to occupy and hold a country with the assent of its population. But that’s another thought.) Africa is just the same – there’s much more that lies beneath the surface.
Paul Theroux, to his discredit, hasn’t any understanding of how his lifestyle and culture warp his perceptions. He paints Africa as a basket case, despite the fact that there are amazing people everywhere you look achieving incredible results with next-to-no resources.
He paints the very worst picure of African government. It’s not to the standard of Western government. But then again, the US has a President who is the son of the ex-chief of the intelligence agency, who was later elected as President, who was elected in circumstances where the fairness of voting was questioned, who won partly through the disenfanchisement of many citizens by his brother, who took the US into a war favouring his financial interests, with little or no evidence that the US was under threat. But I want to be clear – despite this appalling record, I think that the US is on balance a democratic government. Similarly, although Africa is littered with tyrants, there are also many bright spots – good people committed to building democracy, tolerance, fairness and good government.
With regard to Paul Theroux’s view on aid workers. There certainly are aid workers who abuse their status. However there are very many more who are fantastic people, bringing knowledge and assistance to people who desparately need it. What they don’t always bring is understanding of the forces acting on peasant, subsistence farming communities and people who rise to power with this background, who have had little or no opportunity for education. That’s probably natural with a background of living in affluent Western societies.
With reference to Zimbabwe.. there are many many people working to make it a democratic country, under tremendous oppression by an immensely corrupt government. Paul Theroux confuses goverment with people, but even democratic countries can be swept into a tide of oppression – witness the McCarthy purges.
He’s probably right about Johannesburg though. 😐
I don’t want to be seen as an apologist. Africa has many very serious problems. But in fairness it’s not nearly as dark a picture as Theroux imagines, and by quoting his book as if it were a sensible piece of work, I’m afraid you’ve given a platform to people who are on the low end of that bell curve, unable to see beyond appearance.
So Lobengula’s diamonds were hidden in the fish! An amazing thought!
And who knew that the horrors of Rhodesian Imperialism were only the lesser of evils? Besides the man himself, i mean?
Still, these descriptions provide an insight into the rampant spread of African AIDS, despite years of free condoms and a generally healthy distaste for sodomy. I’m reserving this book at my library right now — thanks!
Jeff Veit, I trust you actually read “Dark Star Safari”?
The “pure blooded Negro”? Now that’s funny. Is there a genetic marker somewhere? Never progressed beyond the common mud hut? This stuff is too funny yet people believe it, both blatant racists and people who should know better.
Hmmmm… Subsistance farming… Frequent sex…
Too good to be true, I guess that I’ll stick to the endless work and pointless celibacy that civilisation offers me.
Don’t worry Gary, when the celibacy and endless work hours get you down, you can always pop a prozac like the rest of the depressed Western masses.
Recommended reading: “The Shadow of the Sun”, Kapuscinski and to understand problems of aid: “Ripples from the Zambezi”.
My personal opinion is that African poverty is due to many causes. Among them are disease, geography and culture. Its hard to run a company when 60% of your workers have malaria that can re-surface and knock them on their backs for months at a time. Similarly I think African’s aren’t selfish enough – communal living makes capital accumulation almost impossible. Your cousin’s husband is sick? You need to spring for a doctor. The little that african’s have is shared with those in need.
There is a recent interesting webcast at mitworld on development: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/212/
Well, I think I’m the first African to pipe up. In short: one curious thing about Theroux’ feelings (according to Philip) is that it doesn’t translate well to “First World” Africans, who happen to be some of the most enterprising and educated people around.
It gives me a few hypotheses: first, part of why Africa is “broken” is that people can’t see a future bigger than what they already have while they are there. As soon as they leave, however, they are the quickest and most willing to take opportunities given to them.
A second hypothesis is that people don’t have any concept of a life that’s better. Many look around them and compare it to what they see on television or film and feel that the jump is too great.
Uh oh, my flight is leaving. Please, anyone who wants context, watch a film called “Journey Of Hope,” an independent film released a while ago. It’s about Kurds trying to get into Switzerland, but I think the concepts are fairly similar.
Stanford biologist M. Robert Sapolsky also has a book about adventures in Africa. Some of his observerations match Theroux’s, though Sapolsky isn’t quite as negative. The book is called, A Primate’s Memoir. I recently finished this book — it’s a good read, and contains some interesting discussions of baboon behavior, as well.
Contrary to “fact #2” above, the Maasai have had domesticated cattle for hundreds of years.
Perhaps this achievement is attributable to wasting less time on casual sex,
because (according to http://www.fact-index.com/m/ma/maasai.html ),
circumcision is practised on both sexes at adolescence. Ouch.
I second or third the recommendation that people read jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel (my review) as background to understanding the relative “achievements” of world regions.
And Western Europe really was a backwater in the 10th century, compared to either Song China or the “Middle East”.
The blog is very useful.