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Product Description
Paul Theroux sets off for Cape Town from Cairo -- the hard way.
Travelling across bush and desert, down rivers and across lakes, and through country after country, Theroux visits some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, and some of the most dangerous. It is a journey of discovery and of rediscovery -- of the unknown and the unexpected, but also of people and places he knew as a young and optimistic teacher forty years before.
Safari in Swahili simply means "journey", and this is the ultimate safari. It is Theroux in his element -- a trip where chance encounter is everything, where departure and arrival times are an irrelevance, and where contentment can be found balancing on the top of a truck in the middle of nowhere.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Searching for misery ....,
By
This review is from: Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Paperback)
I began this book on a trip to Uganda ... and finished it a month later when I returned to Africa on a trip to Ethiopia and South Africa. Paul captures Africa in ways that makes the book so enjoyable. I have already been to most of the countries he covered, and was amused at how well he captured the sights, smells and dynamics of the people and places. I look at Africa as Henderson The Rain King, in search for my inner self, and perhaps this is what I missed in Paul's book; he was only in search of a book to write. I reached the end of the book also annoyed at his constant attacking of the "agents of virtue" only to find that in his last stretch he too became very much bothered with the constant nagging for change (and favours).... To me it is obvious that he selected his experiences in a way to bring out the hardship he went through (which he chose to go through) and in places where he obviously stayed at a good hotel (as in Harare) he is silent on the matter, as if it wouldn't have been correct or might have set the wrong tone. I think in a way having been shot at in Northeastern Kenya provided him with a pedestal to elevate his quest as supernatural. For Africa lovers definitely worth reading, for those that need to understand Africa there are books less biased. Karibu
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Describes Africa as it is,
By Caterkiller (Darlington, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Paperback)
I think Paul Theroux expected to find Africa had deteriorated since he last lived there in the 1960s and he is not wrong, so the book has a feeling of being a fait accompli before you have even got very far into it. Having said that, he does raise awareness of some key points regarding the interaction between trade and aid. Firstly if aid projects are a regular occurance in an area then the area becomes economically dependent and there are no incentives for the local populace to improve their own lives: if an aid project is discontinued they can be pretty certain that another will be along shortly to replace it. The "aid business" also loses sight of its aims: they know the project will fail once they have left so lose the will to come up with anything more innovative than spoon-feeding the local population. Aid projects are doomed to fail anyway if the national government doesn't act to reduce corruption and allow businesses and farms to flourish without confiscating any output they make over a subsistence level. (Tim Haford's "Undercover Economist" describes this in more detail). Throughout this book Theroux is pretty angry: he dislikes the western tourists who come on safari trips for not seeing "the real Africa", though he eventually relents and thoroughly enjoys a game-watching trip; he regards the multi-national charities as leeches and the born again Christian missionaries as dangerous and destructive to local communities. The downside is that he adopts a hectoring tone to repeatadly put the same points across; I agree with him that NGOs and churches are more interested in enriching the Mercedes dealerships of Nairobi than doing anything productive but repeating this point in every chapter reduces Theroux to the level of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. Just give us the facts Paul, and maybe a few ideas on what needs to change to improve Africa rather than just belittling others.
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery...",
By
This review is from: Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Paperback)
Forty years after being a Peace Corps worker in Malawi and a teacher in Uganda, Paul Theroux returns to Africa and finds things changed--for the worse. Now approaching his sixtieth birthday and wanting to escape from cell phones, answering machines, the daily newspaper, and being "put on hold," he is determined to travel from Cairo to Cape Town. He believes that the continent "contain[s] many untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too," and that there is "more to Africa than misery and terror." Traveling alone by cattle truck, "chicken bus," bush train, matatu, rental car, ferry, and even dugout canoe, he tries to blend in as much as possible, buying clothing at secondhand stalls in public markets, carrying only one small bag, and avoiding the tourist destinations. He is an observant and insightful writer, and his descriptions of his travails are so vivid the reader can experience them vicariously. His interviews with residents are perceptive and very revealing of the political and social climate of these places, and his character sketches of Sister Alexandra from Ethiopia (a nun who "has loved") and of two charming Ethiopian traders, a father and son, who take Theroux to the Kenyan border, are delightful. For most of the countries of Africa, however, he has no kind words. Kenya is "one of the most corrupt...countries in Africa," everything in Kampala, Uganda, has changed for the worse, and in Tanzania "there was only decline--simple linear decrepitude, and in some villages collapse." At the U.S. embassy in Malawi, he finds an "overpaid, officious, disingenuous, blame-shifting...embassy hack" and, in pique, he wonders, "Had she, like me, been abused, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheated, bitten, flooded, insulted, exhausted, robbed, browbeaten, poisoned?" Theroux has become curmudgeonly over time, and it is difficult to "travel with" a man who sees himself as a hero for making the trip at all, but who also refuses to give a half-eaten apple to a hungry child when she begs for it. He is very critical in his comments about other writers. He admires Rimbaud, who lived in Ethiopia in the 1880's, he visits Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt, and he spends his sixtieth birthday with Nadine Gordimer, an old friend. But Hemingway ("bent on proving his manhood"), Isak Dinesen ("a sentimental memoirist"), Kuki Gallman (a "mythomaniac of the present day"), and V.S. Naipaul ("an outsider who feels weak") are abruptly dismissed. When he ultimately refers to his own "safari-as-struggle," it is hard not compare his temporary and entirely voluntary struggles to those of the African people he meets along the way. "Being in Africa was like being on a dark star," he says. His book reflects this darkness. Mary Whipple
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