Sunday, 30 November 2008
I’ve read a number of Paul Theroux’s travel books over the past twenty years, and enjoyed them enough to invariably check a new title when it appears before me. These days there are very few automatic purchases, due to the aforementioned budgetary constraints and the declining amount of space on Hughesy’s bookshelves.
Part of the enjoyment of reading about travel rather than going out doing it yourself is the opportunity to experience journeys that you wouldn’t have made yourself. There’s also the opportunity to explore the journey through eyes that have a different outlook to the one you’re familiar with.
There aren’t too many of us, I suspect, who’d be interested in travelling from Cairo to Capetown and most of us would, were we to attempt such a trip, more than likely include substantial chunks of air travel and western style tourist accommodation along the way, avoiding, in the process, too much contact with the realities of day to day life in Africa.
Then, were we to attempt the journey, almost all of us wouldn’t be able to compare the present reality with prior experiences in the same areas, and even if there are others who’ve made (and written about) the same journey I doubt that they’d be able to draw on experiences resulting from a spell teaching in Uganda, Malawi and places in between in the sixties in the middle of the process of decolonisation.
Returning to those places thirty years later, what Theroux finds isn’t going to come as a major surprise. Country by country he encounters disintegration, strife and famine while, in the background, there’s the pervasive spectre of AIDS.
The cities are, unsurprisingly, scary, and anyone inclined to venture into them would perhaps be well advised to adopt Theroux’s wardrobe of hand-me-downs from village markets as a means of avoiding difficult situations with a population that is probably largely from somewhere else.
Predictably, many of those Theroux encounters, having come from somewhere else would prefer to be somewhere else, preferably somewhere in North America.
Away from the cities things aren’t much better, and while there are only a couple of instances where the bad men out there get within shooting distance, it’s probably not much reassurance to learn from a Kenyan soldier that your assailants are likely to be more interested in taking your shoes than taking your life.
Theroux being Theroux, there are plenty of acerbic observations throughout Dark Star Safari about people and situations along the way, but the most caustic comments are directed towards the aid workers Theroux encounters and the apparent reluctance of many of the Africans in the back blocks to get out and help themselves.
In most of the countries he visits Theroux is encountering the legacy of the colonial era, and the contrast between his own experiences at the end of that era and the late-twentieth century reality is hardly surprising given the haste with which the decolonisation of Africa was carried out.