Revisiting a changed Africa

The British are thinking of imposing a stiff tax on air travel: probably no coincidence in a country where each year hordes of over-privileged secondary school graduates delay embarking on their university education to spend a so-called “gap year” tooling around exotic locales, getting bitten by snakes, devoured by crocodiles and generally making a nuisance of themselves -- in short, slumming on a global scale. The official arguments on behalf of the tax are also not without merit: Unnecessary air travel is a waste of the Earth’s dwindling supply of fossil fuel. Worse yet, this far-too-frequent flying causes the Earth’s atmosphere to deteriorate (not to mention the unsung role played by tourists in transmitting germs and viruses from one continent to another).

Although it’s claimed that travel broadens, someone who has stayed home and read one or more good books on any given country or region is likely to have a far greater understanding of its culture, history and people than the average tourist. Only rarely do travelers get beyond their own superficial impressions. The few who can -- and who can transform their experiences into vivid and memorable prose -- are our great travel writers, one of whom, assuredly, is Paul Theroux.

In the early 1960s, a time of great hope and idealism, Theroux joined the Peace Corps. He was sent to teach school in the poor Central African country Nyasaland, which a few years later would become the newly independent nation of Malawi. Subsequently, he taught at what was then one of Africa’s finest institutions of higher learning: Makerere University in pre-Idi Amin Uganda. Like many an idealistic young volunteer, he returned to his own country warmed by the hope that he had helped plant a seed that, in time, would flourish.

A lot has happened since then. Theroux went on to become a well-known novelist and one of the best travel writers we have. As for the Africa he once knew ... well, that is a long and complicated story.

Almost 40 years later, with his 60th birthday approaching, Theroux set out in “Dark Star Safari” on a sentimental journey that would take him from Cairo to Cape Town. Unlike most foreign visitors -- and well-to-do African officials -- he declined to hop from airport to airport, choosing instead to travel by ramshackle bus, rickety truck, battered boat or derelict train along terrible roads and deteriorated tracks, making it his business to experience the Africa known to ordinary Africans.

Theroux is the kind of traveler who seeks out what most of us would rather avoid: inconvenience, delay, primitive conditions and being out of touch with his family, friends and the rest of the world. One motive for his journey, he claims, was his desire to get away from phone, fax and e-mail.

But Theroux had another reason for returning to the scene of his youthful good deeds. Bombarded day after day with all the bad news out of Africa -- AIDS, famine, civil war, massacres, crime and corruption -- he felt sure there must be “more to Africa than misery and terror”: “untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too.”

Not leaving the reader in suspense, Theroux declares at the outset what he discovered in the course of his journey: “Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it, hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt.” Reading this, some may find it convenient to persuade themselves that the young, optimistic Theroux has simply become a cynical, middle-aged man. But, as Theroux’s frank and compelling narrative makes clear, the reason he feels such dismay can be found in the very passion and compassion that drew him to Africa in the first place.

As he travels from Egypt through Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe to South Africa, Theroux provides a strong impression of each place he visits. Uganda, still dazed from the horrors of Amin’s rule, nonetheless strikes him as a hopeful place: Unlike almost everywhere else in Africa, the people he meets here have been encouraging their children to stay. For elsewhere, even in places where people call President Bush and former President Clinton “Satan,” what many people hope to do is emigrate to America.

One-party rule, dictatorships, kleptocracies, fierce civil wars, false promises and misguided policies have clearly played their part in causing things to go from bad to worse. But Theroux also comes to believe that many of the current problems may stem from all of the aid that has been poured into Africa. Instead of alleviating the conditions they were designed to address, these U.N. agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other charitable enterprises strike him as part of a vast, self-perpetuating industry full of “experts” more expert at furthering their own careers than at helping the needy.

What is even more disheartening, however, is what Theroux concludes from his encounters with aid workers who are indubitably altruistic, resourceful and dedicated. In Malawi, he meets Una Brownly, a nurse who has been in Africa for 27 years, serving alongside her doctor husband as a medical missionary: “She and her husband ... were not well paid, even by Malawi standards. Many African doctors had been asked to work [in their medical mission]....They all turned the job down.” Brownly explains that the government doesn’t pay its doctors enough, so they emigrate to countries where the pay is better. “What about your pay?” Theroux asks her. Her answer: “African doctors don’t work for what we’re paid.”

“I began to understand the futility of charity in Africa,” Theroux writes. “It was generally fueled by the best of motives, but its worst aspect was that it was noninspirational. Aliens had been helping for so long and were so deeply entrenched that Africans lost interest ... in doing the same sort of work themselves.”

Sounding off to some of his old friends, now Malawian government officials, about the rundown state of the school where he used to teach, Theroux complains: “No lights. The place is falling down. They stole the books. I know what you’re going to say, but hey, why doesn’t anyone sweep the dirty floor?”

“There is a panel studying the education system,” he’s told.

Yet Theroux also encounters memorable examples of ingenuity, insight and endurance, whether it’s a Tanzanian’s astute analysis of Flemish-Walloon racial tensions in Belgium, the know-how and resourcefulness of the boatmen who ferry him across Lake Victoria, or the courage, intelligence and humanity of someone like Kenyan writer Wahome Mutahi, who suffered the tortures of the damned as a political prisoner in his own country.

Finally, Theroux finds cause for hope in the sheer resilience of village life, as epitomized in a small village in a remote part of Tanzania: “The inhabitants had worked their little plots and fed themselves, but had lain mute and overlooked through a century and a half of exploitation, colonialism, and independence.... Save them, agents of virtue said of such people, yet farmers like these had saved themselves....The people in this tiny village clearly had the skills to survive and perhaps prevail.”

Composed with passion, eloquence and insight, “Dark Star Safari” is travel writing at its most eye-opening, thought-provoking and heartfelt.