A wicked trip through Africa

Gregg Drinkwater, Special To The News

Friday, April 11, 2003

Fans of Paul Theroux, the celebrated novelist, essayist and travel writer, will no doubt revel in the curious mix of cynicism, hope and humor that enlivens Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, his first travel book in eight years. Neither a sensationalistic reveler in the pain of others, nor a hopeless romantic, Theroux chronicles a journey through an Africa full of decay and beauty, fear and joy, misery and perseverance.

During his trek, Theroux chats with the prime minister of Uganda, cruises the Nile with a package-tour group, gets shot at by Somali bandits, and experiences the sublime beauty of the Ethiopian highlands. He is robbed in Johannesburg, has an audience with Egyptian writer and Nobel-laureate Naguib Mahfouz, encounters ecstatic sufi dervishes near Khartoum and takes pot shots at the staff of international aid organizations. And he seems to enjoy every minute of it.

Theroux sets the tone for his 5,000-mile journey in the book's opening sentence: "All news out of Africa is bad." The stories of famine, genocide and civil war that comprise the bulk of Western news coverage of Africa contribute to an image of a continent riven by horror, cataclysm and devastation on an almost Biblical scale. Rather than dedicating himself to dispelling such pessimistic and woefully false notions, Theroux attempts to sidestep them entirely. Theroux tells us that he went to Africa not to experience it's chaos and poverty, but because he was driven by the "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 . . . "

Along the way, Theroux encounters his share of decay, corruption, and crime, but he always seems ready to move beyond the negative with a matter-of-fact shrug of "well, yes, that was rather nasty, but . . . " before rewarding the reader with a vivid portrayal of the secret sweetness, the hidden vitality and the long-patient hope that lies just beneath the surface.For Theroux, this was a highly personal journey. In the 1960s, Theroux worked as a Peace Corps volunteer, writer and teacher in Malawi and Uganda. There he met his first wife, Anne Castle, and the man who would become his mentor, V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel-prize winning writer and the subject of Sir Vidia's Shadow, Theroux's account of the rise and fall of their 30-year friendship.

If Theroux's much awaited return to the stomping ground of his youth was driven by a hopeful optimism about the place, the intervening years provided him with ample reason to react with disillusion. His surly, but insightful cynicism encourages the reader to keep turning the page, wondering what politically incorrect but wickedly direct observation he might make next.

Theroux reserves his most vitriolic opprobrium for two groups of Westerners: foreign-aid workers and middle-class tourists. The aid workers, though, come in for the brunt of his attacks because one gets the sense that Theroux feels they should know better. They went to university and studied international development, or comparative politics, or some-such noble field, only to bring to their jobs what Theroux sees as hopelessly naive and unreformedly imperial practices. He repeatedly and unfavorably compares them with characters from Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Dickens' Bleak House.

Theroux skewers Western tourists as well.On safari they are met at the airport by waiting land rovers, whisked to the "wilds" of a private game reserve, and then encouraged to luxuriate in the primal beauty of Mother Africa - a theme park populated by somnolent lions, frisky baboons and birds of every color and noticeably devoid of actual Africans (other than the smiling maids, cooks and trackers attending to their every need).

Much like the caricature of the foreign-aid workers as white devils hell-bent on domination, Theroux's stereotype of the Western tourist no doubt hits the mark on occasion, but misses the actual complexity of tourists and their motivations and experiences. Ironically, after spending a few days at a luxury game reserve himself, Theroux rather enjoys the comfort and the splendor of it all. Maybe these tourists are onto something . . .

Theroux sets the book's overall theme by invoking other Western chroniclers of Africa. He reminds us that Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th century French poet, described the continent as "the anti-Europe, the anti-West" and argued that its otherness was precisely what drew him to it - a sentiment with which Theroux wholeheartedly agrees. Theroux appreciates Africa's "hope and comedy and sweetness," but he tells us that for a Westerner there is nothing of home there. Being in Africa is for him "like being on a dark star," and that, ultimately, is the attraction.

Gregg Drinkwater is a freelance writer living in Denver.