The Books: “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town” (Paul Theroux)

History/Travel bookshelf:

Next book on the shelf is Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown by Paul Theroux.

I love Theroux’s “travel” books. I love his novels, too, but I have a specific affection for his many many “travel” books. I put quotations around the word travel, because really – they don’t actually qualify as your basic travelogue in any way, shape, or form. They have to be the crankiest travel books of all time. Sometimes he is outright MEAN to the countries he visits. He just does. not. care. Reminds of me Anne Tyler’s book The Accidental Tourist. Theroux has curiosity about other places, but I don’t think he really likes people all that much. His books are great reading, and I highly recommend them.

His latest travel book (came out a couple years ago) is called Dark Star Safari. He travels overland from Egypt to South Africa. At some points, the only mode of getting from one place to another is via dugout canoe. Or on foot.

He had lived in Africa for a while in the late 1960s, I believe, as a teacher, and had great affection for the place. The 1960s were a time of heady optimism in Africa, the shackles of colonialism being shrugged off – people had great hopes. Theroux returns to the place where he taught – somewhere in the Great Rift Valley, I believe – and is not only shocked at how little development there has been, but angry. It is an indictment of the entire “aid” community. A lot of the rest of the book is rather light-hearted – I love his visit to Harar, this city outside Addis Ababa where the poet Rimbaud went to live. Theroux just wants to see the place, wants to see the medieval walled town that still has a leper colony huddled outside the wall. Hyenas roam the street. Rimbaud’s house is still standing – and Theroux goes to visit it. It’s VERY interesting. But a lot of the rest of the book is breathlessly angry. I like breathlessly angry. Especially if you’re a good writer, and Theroux is fantastic.

The excerpt I’ve chosen is his journey into Zimbabwe. It’s sentences like this one that make Theroux a really special writer. He says about Mugabe: “Really, there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac.” Good Lord, the truth in that unexpected statement!

Here he is, on a bus going into Zimbabwe.

From Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown by Paul Theroux.

Sitting on the Harare bus, traveling the road through Zimbabwe’s eastern highlands, the farming country from Mutare to Marondera, I had an intimation of distress and made a note at the back of the book I was reading: Not many cars. It was a beautiful land of tilled fields and browsing cattle and farmhouses, yet it seemed oddly empty, as though a plague had struck. Much of what I saw could have been the set of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for here and there were perambulating Africans, and I got glimpses of Spam-colored settlers. Apart from these few individuals, the place seemed curiously unpeopled and inert.

The book in my lap, which I’d bought in Mutare, helped me understand a little of what was happening. It was African Tears: The Zimbabwe Land Invasions, written by Catherine Buckle, a woman who had been robbed in installments. Her Marondera farm had been snatched from her in piecemeal and violent intrusions over a six-month period.

“It’s a one-man problem,” many white Zimbabweans explained to me. Depending on whom I talked to, they said variously, “The president is out of his mind” or “He’s lost it” or “He’s off his chump.” Even the kindly winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Reverend Desmond Tutu, had said, “The man is bonkers.”

The Robert Mugabe rumors, which I dutifully collected, depicted the poor thing as demented as a result of having been tortured in a white-run prison: long periods in solitary, lots of abuse, cattle prods electrifying his privates, and the ultimate insult — his goolies had been crimped. Another rumor had him in an advanced stage of syphilis; his brain was on fire. “He was trained by the Chinese, you know,” many people said. And: “We knew something was up when he started calling himself ‘comrade’.” He had reverted, too — did not make a decision without consulting his witch doctors. His disgust with gays was well known: “They are dogs and should be treated like dogs.” He had banned the standard school exams in Zimbabwe, “to break with the colonial past.” Some rumors were fairly simple: he had a lifelong hatred of whites, and it was his ambition to drive them out of the country. Of the British prime minister he said, “I don’t want him sticking his pink nose in our affairs.” Noting all this, I kept thinking of what Gertrude Rubadiri had told me: “We called him ‘bookworm’.” Really, there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac.

Harare did not look like a ruin. Even in its bankruptcy, Harare was to my mind the most pleasant African city I had seen so far — the safest, the tidiest, the least polluted, the most orderly. After traffic-clogged Cairo, overheated Khartoum, crumbling tin-roofed Addis, crime-ridden Nairobi, disorderly Kampala, demoralized Dar es Salaam, ragged Lilongwe, desperate Blantyre, and battle-scarred and bombed-out Beira, Harare looked pretty and clean, the picture of tranquility, the countryside an Eden.

Much of Harare’s apparent peacefulness was due to the extreme tension in the city, for its order was also a sort of lifelessness, the unnatural silence of someone holding his breath. I had the premonition that something was about to happen, within months or a year perhaps, and this was a prelude of silence and inaction before an enormous collapse, a violent election, social disorder, even civil war. It was wrong to mistake this calm for obedience and belief, since it was more likely the natural reserve of people who had already been through serious upheavals. British rule had ended abruptly when a white minority proclaimed a unilateral declaration of independence in 1965. Britain imposed sanctions thereafter, and a ten-year guerrilla war ended with the black majority taking power in 1980, and then began twenty years of Comrade Bob.

Years of sanctions had made Zimbabweans resilent and self-sufficient. Zimbabwe was at its core an independent and proud place, a country that had a manufacturing industry. There was hardly any gasoline or diesel fuel for sale, but most other necessities were available. Even in these hard times, Zimbabweans were still making things — paper products, clothing, household furniture, shoes; they had dairies, bakieries, breweries, meat-processing plants, and canneries. There were many good hotels, though most of them were empty.