Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown. Paul Theroux. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.
By Esther Gutacker
Contrary to popular opinion, to go on a safari has nothing to do with seeing giraffes or elephants.This Swahili word actually means journey, and describes being away from civilization and not reachable.This is what well-known author Paul Theroux longed for as he set out to return to Africa – to get away from the irritants of technology and being at the mercy of a boss.He found it horrifying to be able to be reached and demanded of at all times, so this trip was his revenge on the cell phone.It was also his chance to find out if the rumor was true that Africa really was in worse condition then when he had lived there 40 years earlier.His conclusion was that it was.
Theroux started his vagabond journey in Cairo, Egypt, where he said the forecast was always the same: "dust", something akin to a weather report on Mars.There he was pestered by Egyptians who approached him with a familiarity and smile that represented one thing: they wanted his money or the ability to steal his wallet.As he toured the ruins and pyramids and felt small, his talks with the locals about his coming journey were always met with ominous warnings.Theroux would find throughout his trip that anything just around the bend was often described as much more dangerous or ominous then it actually was, for what people do not know or understand is always savagery to them.But Theroux relished that the "best travel was a leap in the dark." Once deeper into the heart of Africa he called himself a "classic traveler, he would arrive bewildered and alone in a remote place, trying to be hopeful, but thinking, what now?" He saw travel as a transition, not an artificial transportation from the familiar to the strange. This thick book is his detailed observation of a beautiful land, its people and their stories, and the horrors many of them faced.
When entering into the largest country in Africa, Sudan, he began to see the picture that was Africa: wonderful people and terrible government.In fact, the people disliked their governments so intensely, that they gave Theroux the benefit of the doubt despite their dislikes of his own government.He was told that in Sudan he was safe, for they were his friends.While in northern Sudan, Paul witnessed the intensity of Muslim worship as a huge red sun set over a stamping, chanting prayer meeting – with the cries of "God is great!" swirling up with the dust.As the only unbeliever in a group of thousands, he had cause to be alarmed – but this was dangerous, or a spectacle for tourists, but a weekly ritual done for the "pure joy of it."Despite the whole world telling him that travel in Sudan was very hazardous, he found himself happy as he enjoyed the "rock cliffs, the camels in the distance, the utter emptiness and silence above the level sand."Though describing places and history with surprising knowledge, most of Theroux's accounts are about the people he met and their stories, most of them devastating and bleak.
Though Theroux has pleasant things to say about many of the people he conversed with, he shows great disgust for most foreigners - especially those working in aide.His first encounter with aid workers was when they refused to give him a ride while he was stranded on a road with a broken taxi with shooting breaking out down the road.His experience became that any expensive white jeep with an aide logo on the side and a loud CD player was often the last to give him assistance.Theroux wrote bitterly: "for every agent of virtue I saw slogging his or her guts out in the field, I saw two of them joy riding."He described them as "oafish self-dramatizing prigs" and said their charity was a form of theater. The biggest accusation against aide workers was that Africans were not involved in helping themselves.From his perspective, the Africans had lost interest in helping themselves because aliens had been helping them for so long.Their methods were also faulty, for the American-like programs and buildings that were put up crumbled soon.On top of that, he perceived that the governments needed poverty in order to get foreign aide, so they made sure education did not happen.Theroux described aide as not only useless, but as serious harm that was making Africa worse.
His view of missionaries weren't much better.With a childhood background in Christianity, Theroux knew his Bible enough to be able to attack those who asked him about his faith, or speak the Christian lingo to brush them off.He found one nun's story in Ethiopia fascinating, as she had given a ring back to her fiancé and for nine years he had lamented before dying suddenly.Her personality represented the opposite of what a typical missionary was thought to be, for she was tenacious, open-minded and passionate, and didn't use the word "sin".She shared her gourmet cooking skills with him for days.Another red-cross worker, Christine, described her lifestyle and was "cheerful about her discomforts."Despite having no water, she and two other women slept together in one bed."If one person is clean and the others are dirty, it's a problem.But when we're all dirty, it's fine.If no one has washed, we all smell the same." Theroux responded to most Christians with strong descriptions for the Bible's ridiculous Old Testament commands, self-righteous sentences against gays, and a God that was over the suffering he saw on a minute-by-minute basis.
Theroux also describes poverty in Africa with a fatalistic realism.A common scene he saw in Ethiopia was a husband beating his wife as she screeched until flattened, then walked away casually, "in the manner of a husband who has just done his duty." He talked of a man who was in prison for ten years without cause and copied a smuggled edition of "Gone with the Wind" on 3,000 pieces of cigarette foil to keep him from going crazy.His emotional struggle only showed through once or twice in his notes, such as when after turning down children beggars he wrote in his journal "Is this the right thing to do?I don't know." In Kenya, the shifta, or heavily armed highway man, did not want his life, but his shoes.His watch was worth nothing (they had the sun), or his pen (they were illiterate), or his bag (they had nothing to put in it) – but his shoes were valued more then his life, because these men walked everywhere.But if he didn't give them his shoes, they would take his life.He saw children who would take their own feces and put them on a stranger to make them give them something. In Malawi and Tanzania the people had surrendered any hope of improvement, and finding this depressing, he had to get out and move on.In Zimbabwe the mindset was "my country has failed me, therefore you must help." At the end of his trip the first beggar he saw in South Africa was "an able-bodied white man." In frustration Theroux demands a man who is holding his ankles and begging for money to stand up and ask for work like a real man.
Theroux noted the passage of time when he returned to where he had lived in Uganda forty years earlier.He did not feel old in Africa, and wrote in his diary "I do not want to be young again.I am happy being what I am.This contentment is very helpful on a trip as long and difficult as this." In Uganda he hung out with an old friend who was now the prime minister of Uganda.He noted that while the Ugandans were friendly and looked you in the eye, they were like every other African, spending years just getting by, surviving – because that's what Africans did.When he returned to his previous home in Malawi an unfriendly man eating in the front yard described when Theroux had lived there as a lifetime ago.And for Africa, it was.
By the time Paul reached South Africa and the last leg of his trip, he began to procrastinate, for he did not want to leave.The greatest danger he had encountered was the shifta bandits firing their rifles, and the nighttime hookers that tried to snag him. He did not mind his hardship, and if he had endured some miseries, he had also discovered splendor, enjoyed adventures, and found friends.It was quite the opposite of the week-long animal safari he joined at the end – which was safe, with no starvation, not many Africans, and really not Africa at all.Finishing his trek in Cape Town, his bag was stolen with all of the treasures he had picked up along the way. However, he still had the notes of the erotic novel he written along the way to avoid the prostitutes, and the notes for this book.With the trip over, he felt liberated and uplifted, but missing the African bush.Once home with the book written, he reminds the reader that his narrative is not fixed, for the places he described are always changing. He would have to go back again, and see again for himself this dark land, this dark star, on safari.