As a member of the Peace Corps in his youth, Paul Theroux taught school in Africa and this return to his roots lets him examine what has transpired to the Dark Continent in the 40 years of his absence
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown
Posted on Wednesday, July 21 @ 05:30:00 EDT by CDeliso
Book Reviews By Paul Theroux; 472 pages (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003)
Reviewed by Michael McCarthy
Love him or hate him, there’s no ignoring veteran travel writer Paul Theroux. He’s been called a misanthropic complainer and things a lot worse; now you can call him an old misanthropic complainer too, because on the verge of his 60th birthday and after writing a dozen other books of travel literature to describe his visits to far-flung regions of the planet, Theroux makes a return in Dark Star Safari to his first foreign posting, Africa.
As a member of the Peace Corps in his youth, Theroux taught school in Africa and this return to his roots lets him examine what has transpired to the Dark Continent in the 40 years of his absence. As he explains in this hefty and serious tome, it’s not a pretty sight; Africa has been raped by military thugs, tin pot dictators, do-gooders and missionaries, and international aid agencies out to save a few souls while creating new empires to replace the old colonialism. Theroux writes:
Charities were well-established. Between the Bata shoe store and the local Indian shop, you would find the office of World Vision or Save the Children – “Blurred Vision” or “Shave the Children” to the cynics. These organizations had gown out of disaster relief agencies but had become multinational institutions, permanent fixtures of welfare and services.
I wondered, I really wondered, why this was all a foreign effort, why Africans were not involved with helping themselves. And also, since I had been a volunteer teacher myself, why, after 40 years, had so little progress been made?
An entire library of worthy books describes at best the uselessness, at worst the serious harm, brought about by aid agencies. Some of the books are personal accounts, others are scientific and scholarly. The findings are the same.
“Aid is not help” and “aid does not work” are two of the conclusions reached by Graham Hancock in his Lords of Poverty; The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business, a well researched account of wasted money. Much of Hancock’s scorn is reserved for the World Bank. “Aid projects are an end in themselves,” Michael Maren writes in The Road to Hell. One of Maren’s targets is Save the Children, which he describes as a monumental boondoogle.
Theroux travels from Cairo to Capetown via chicken truck, bus, foot, thumb, and, of course, by his time-honored favorite of hopping trains. It’s astonishing that a man nearing sixty would attempt such a dangerous feat, and, as he admits in the book, it almost got him killed more than once. Law and order are not in evidence in many areas of Africa, and in fact he picked up an intestinal virus that put him in hospital for five months after his return home to America.
Many writers are afflicted with a form of guilt as they endeavor to write about ‘off the beaten track’ destinations, knowing full well that after they have written about these places that tourists and adventurers will pour into the regions described. Theroux need have no such fears about this book. Some hardy adventurers have been thrashing about Africa via chicken truck and local buses for years, but it seems hardly likely that vast hordes of tourists – least of all Theroux’s multitudinous fans – will be following in the author’s footsteps after reading this chilling account of good intentions gone horribly wrong.
While Dark Star Safari is an excellent travelogue to some of the most obscure countries on the planet and a good read too – Theroux’s writing seems to get better with each and every travel book he publishes – the real story is what international (i.e. “American”) aid agencies have done to ruin the dark continent.
Recently, on his book tour, Theroux appeared here in San Francisco to sign books of his book at stores as well as appear on a local radio station. When prompted by a caller (travel writer Brad Newsham, who taped the interview and transcribed the following remarks; surf Newsham’s site at www.bradnewsham.com) about what travelers to Africa could do in lieu of handing out charity or supporting international aid agencies, Theroux responded:
"I think there's a lot you can do. The main thing, the first thing you should do, if you're reasonably fit - doesn't matter how old you are, if you're reasonably fit - is go to the place you wish to help. Don't put money in an envelope and send it. Maybe Afghanistan ain't a great idea, but let's say you want to give money to help people in Kenya. I would say go to Kenya first, walk around.
Have your B.S. detector finely calibrated and then go to a village, go to villages, travel around, talk to people, ask questions about the government. In other words, before you do something, pre-ramble the territory and see what they need. Actually, I think what people need doesn't come from the outside, it has to come from the inside, but if it makes you feel good to give something I would say go. Be a traveler first, a reader, a traveler, an investigator. Research the whole question, and then you might say that someone needs a cow. Buy that person a cow. You might want to find a little individual and give him some money to go to school, adopt someone.
I wouldn't give money to a charity, I wouldn't give money to an NGO, I would not give money to a religious organization, I would give it person to person. I would go, find the person or the situation, and then adopt that thing to make myself feel good. I would not give money personally.
When I left Africa after this trip I stopped giving money to panhandlers, I stopped giving money to aid agencies, and I started decrying the IMF and the World Bank throwing money at problems. I thought: It's the worst thing I've ever heard of, because in 40 years nothing has improved, nothing in Africa has improved because of money. But if personally you want to make a contribution, I would say be a reader first, then a traveler, and then maybe... give something."
Savvy readers may soon notice startling similarities between Theroux’s hard comments about the worthlessness of traditional forms of charity in Africa, begging in Asian countries such as Nepal and India where trekkers have handed out candies and coins to little children, and panhandling by drug addicts throughout Europe and America. In fact, it doesn’t take much to realize that instead of the First World going to the Third World, the Third World has arrived in America and other major western cities via “street life.” It is to be found at the street level where beggars sit in the dirt waiting for handouts, at charitable missions where drunks sing for their supper, and in government programs that strip recipients of dignity while providing well-paying jobs to social workers.
You don’t need to ride chicken buses from Cairo to Capetown to realize what Theroux discovers on his epic journey overland; the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
A native of Canada, Michael McCarthy is a transplanted Northern Californian having long experience in both travel and writing, inspired from an early age by the adventures of the Beatniks and Jack London. For over a decade he has served the duties of editor, columnist and writer for a variety of magazines, radio and newspapers in Vancouver and (since 2000) the San Francisco Bay Area. Michael also coordinates the stylish Intentional Traveler website.
