Dark Star Safari (Theroux)

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
Paul Theroux, 2002
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780618446872


Summary
In Dark Star Safari the wittily observant and endearingly irascible Paul Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train. In the course of his epic and enlightening journey, he endures danger, delay, and dismaying circumstances.

Gauging the state of affairs, he talks to Africans, aid workers, missionaries, and tourists. What results is an insightful meditation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people, and "a vivid portrayal of the secret sweetness, the hidden vitality, and the long-patient hope that lies just beneath the surface" (Rocky Mountain News). In a new postscript, Theroux recounts the dramatic events of a return to Africa to visit Zimbabwe. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—April 10, 1941
• Where—Medford, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—University of Massachusetts
• Awards—James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Currently—Hawaii and Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Paul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work is, perhaps, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue about a trip he made by train from Great Britain through Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, through South Asia, then South-East Asia, up through East Asia, as far east as Japan, and then back across Russia to his point of origin. Theroux has also published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast.

Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts, the son of Catholic parents, a French-Canadian father and an Italian mother. After he finished his university education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he joined the Peace Corps and taught in Malawi from 1963 to 1965. While there, he helped a political opponent of Hastings Banda escape to Uganda, for which he was expelled from Malawi and thrown out of the Peace Corps. He then moved to Uganda to teach at Makerere University, where he wrote for the magazine Transition (including the article "Nkrumah the Leninist Czar.")

While at Makerere, Theroux began his three-decade friendship with novelist V. S. Naipaul, then a visiting scholar at the university. During his time in Uganda, an angry mob at a demonstration threatened to overturn the car in which his pregnant wife was riding. This incident may have contributed to his decision to leave Africa. He moved again to Singapore. After two years of teaching at the University of Singapore, he settled in England, first in Dorset, and then in south London with his wife and two young children.

His first novel, Waldo, was published during his time in Uganda and was moderately successful. He published several more novels over the next few years, including Fong and the Indians and Jungle Lovers. On his return to Malawi many years later, he found that this latter novel, which was set in that country, was still banned, a story told in his book Dark Star Safari.

He had already moved to London, in 1972, before setting off on his epic journey by train from Great Britain to Japan and back again. His account of this journey was published as The Great Railway Bazaar, his first major success as a travel writer, and which has since become a classic in the genre. He has since written a number of other travel books, including descriptions of traveling by train from Boston to Argentina (The Old Patagonian Express), walking around the United Kingdom (the poorly-received The Kingdom By The Sea), kayaking in the South Pacific (The Happy Isles Of Oceania), visiting China (Riding the Iron Rooster), and traveling from Cairo to Cape Town (Dark Star Safari).

As a travel writer he is noted for his rich descriptions of people and places, laced with a heavy streak of irony, or even misanthropy. Other non-fiction by Theroux includes Sir Vidia's Shadow, an account of his personal and professional friendship with Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul that ended abruptly after thirty years.

Theroux currently resides in Hawaii and Cape Cod, Ma., U.S.A. He is currently married to Sheila Donnelly (since November 18, 1975). Previously, he was married to Anne Castle. He has two sons with his first wife—Marcel Theroux and Louis Theroux —both of whom are writers and television presenters. In his books, Theroux alludes to his ability to speak Italian, French, Spanish, Chinese, Chichewa, and Swahili.

Extras
• By including versions of himself, his family, and acquaintances in some of his fiction, Theroux has occasionally disconcerted his readers. "A. Burgess, Slightly Foxed: Fact and Fiction", a story originally published in The New Yorker magazine (August 7, 1995), describes a dinner at the narrator's home with author Anthony Burgess and a book-hoarding philistine lawyer who nags the narrator for an introduction to the great writer. “Burgess” arrives drunk and cruelly mocks the lawyer, who introduces himself as “a fan.” The narrator’s wife, like Theroux’s then-wife, is named Anne and she shrewishly refuses to help with the dinner. The magazine later published a letter from Anne Theroux denying that Burgess was ever a guest in her home and expressing admiration for him, having once interviewed the real Burgess for the BBC: “I was dismayed to read in your August 7th edition a story....by Paul Theroux, in which a very unpleasant character with my name said and did things that I have never said or done.” When the story was incorporated into Theroux’s novel, My Other Life (1996), the wife character is renamed Alison and reference to her work at the BBC is excised.

• Theroux's sometimes caustic portrait of Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul in his memoir Sir Vidia's Shadow (1998) is at considerable odds with his earlier, gushing portrait of the same author in V.S. Naipaul, an Introduction to His Work (1972).

• On December 15, 2005 the New York Times published an op-ed piece by Theroux called "The Rock Star's Burden" criticizing Bono, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie as "mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth." Theroux, who lived in Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer and a university teacher, adds that "the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help—not to mention celebrities and charity concerts—is a destructive and misleading conceit.

• However, in 2002, on publication of his Africa travelogue Dark Star Safari, reviewer John Ryle in the London Guardian contradicted Theroux's views on international aid, accusing him of ignorance. "I'm not an aid worker, but I was working in Kenya myself at about the time Theroux passed through ... It's not that Theroux is wrong to criticise the empire of aid. In some ways the situation is even worse than he says.... The problem is that Theroux knows next to nothing about it. Aid is a failure, he says, because 'the only people dishing up the food and doling out the money are foreigners. No Africans are involved'. But the majority of employees of international aid agencies in Africa, at almost all levels, are Africans. In some African countries it is international aid agencies that provide the most consistent source of employment.... The problem is not, as Theroux says, that Africans are not involved; it is, if anything, the opposite. How come he didn't notice this? Because, despite his hissy fits about white people in white cars who won't give him lifts, he never actually visits an aid project or the office of an aid organization." (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
That's not exactly a journey readers will want to duplicate. Actually, Theroux himself seems mostly miserable. The tricky balance that has served him so well in the past eludes him here. He doesn't just grump about people, he lets them have it, as if trying to out-Naipaul Naipaul. In Malawi, he berates a man begging in the street, demanding why he doesn't ask for work instead of a handout.... Throughout Dark Star Safari, Theroux is particularly venomous on the subject of aid workers. There's a respectable philosophical position in here somewhere: namely, that foreign aid sponsors corruption and saps local initiative. But Theroux's critique of Africa seems more like anger in search of an argument.
Rand Richards Cooper - The New York Times

Theroux is best at shorthand dissections of trends that have already become obvious. In no other book will one find such entertaining and penetrating comments about the ironies, as well as the historic failure, of foreign aid.
Robert D. Kaplan - Washington Post

"All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there," Theroux writes in his thirty-eighth book, which describes his yearlong journey from Cairo to Cape Town by creaky train, ferry and rattletrap bus.... By the end of the trip, Theroux seems more concerned with the arrogant aid workers who constantly zoom past him in glistening white Land Rovers, refusing to give him a ride.
Book Magazine

Some of [Theroux's] observations about Africa's economic decline are astute, although his quest for explanations is limited to what he can extract from the cast of characters he meets along his way. Mostly, however, this book is an intelligent, funny, and frankly sentimental account by a young-at-heart idealist who is trying to make sense of the painful disparity between what Africa is and what he once hoped it might become.
Foreign Affairs

"You'll have a terrible time," one diplomat tells Theroux upon discovering the prolific writer's plans to hitch a ride hundreds of miles along a desolate road to Nairobi instead of taking a plane. "You'll have some great stuff for your book." That seems to be the strategy for Theroux's extended "experience of vanishing" into the African continent, where disparate incidents reveal Theroux as well as the people he meets. At times, he goes out of his way to satisfy some perverse curmudgeonly desire to pick theological disputes with Christian missionaries. But his encounters with the natives, aid workers and occasional tourists make for rollicking entertainment, even as they offer a sobering look at the social and political chaos in which much of Africa finds itself. Theroux occasionally strays into theorizing about the underlying causes for the conditions he finds, but his cogent insights are well integrated. He doesn't shy away from the literary aspects of his tale, either, frequently invoking Conrad and Rimbaud, and dropping in at the homes of Naguib Mahfouz and Nadine Gordimer at the beginning and end of his trip. He also returns to many of the places where he lived and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer and teacher in the 1960s, locations that have cropped up in earlier novels. These visits fuel the book's ongoing obsession with his approaching 60th birthday and his insistence that he isn't old yet. As a travel guide, Theroux can both rankle and beguile, but after reading this marvelous report, readers will probably agree with the priest who observes, "Wonderful people. Terrible government. The African story."
Publishers Weekly

Legendary travel writer and novelist Theroux will probably never work for the Kenya or Malawi (or any other country between Cairo and the Cape) tourist boards after the publication of this latest book. In it, he tells of being shot at in Kenya, depressed in Malawi, pestered in Mozambique, robbed in South Africa, and invaded by intestinal parasites in Ethiopia. But this is no mere tale of travel mishaps. Theroux, who lived and worked in Malawi and Uganda in the 1960s, has a genuine affection for the continent that comes through in his tales of African friends, old and new. Among them he counts a former political prisoner in Nairobi, the prime minister of Uganda, a boat captain on Lake Victoria, a former student in Zomba (in Malawi), a besieged farmer in Zimbabwe, and writer and activist Nadine Gordimer in Johannesburg. Safari is Swahili for journey, and Theroux's is truly fantastic. Typical of Theroux's best work, which focuses on a single trip, this book is recommended for all libraries. —Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Library Journal

America's master traveler takes us along on his wanderings in tumultuous bazaars, crowded railway stations, desert oases, and the occasional nicely appointed hotel lobby. "All news of out Africa is bad," Theroux gamely begins. "It made me want to go there." Forty years after making his start as a writer while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, he returns for a journey from Cairo to Cape Town along "what was now the longest road in Africa, some of it purely theoretical." More reflective and less complaining than some of his other big-tour narratives (e.g., The Happy Isles of Oceania, 1992), Theroux's account finds him in the company of Islamic fundamentalists and dissidents, sub-Saharan rebels and would-be neocolonialists, bin Ladenites, and intransigent white landholders, almost all of them angry at America for one reason or another. The author shares their anger at many points. Of the pharmaceutical plant outside Khartoum that was flattened by a cruise missile on Bill Clinton's orders a few years back, he remarks, "Though we become hysterical at the thought that someone might bomb us, bombs that we explode elsewhere, in little countries far away, are just theater, of small consequence, another public performance of our White House, the event factory." Such sentiments are rarely expressed in post-9/11 America, and Theroux is to be commended for pointing out the consequences of our half-baked imperializing in Africa's miserable backwaters. His criticisms cut both ways, however; after an Egyptian student offends him with the remark, "Israel is America's baby," he replies, "Many countries are America's babies. Some good babies, some bad babies."Theroux is often dour, although he finds hopeful signs that Africa will endure and overcome its present misfortunes in the sight, for instance, of a young African boatman doing complex mathematical equations amid "spitting jets of steam," and in the constant, calming beauty of so many African places. Engagingly written, sharply observed: another winner from Theroux.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Dark Star Safari

1. Theroux sets out on his journey hoping for "the picturesque." Does he find it? Talk about his reactions, for instance, to the Sudanese pryamids or the Maltese nun who cooks him a gourmet meal. Who or what else charms him?

2. Eventually, however, the charm escapes him, and the trip becomes a nightmare. What are some of the dangers he meets along the way? Why does he continue the trip?

3. At one point Theroux confesses that he is "abused, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheaten, bitten" ... and so on. Do you think he is unnecessarily ill-humored? Or are his complaints justified?

4. Are there times his own treatment of people seems unkind and borders on nastiness? Consider the time he berates the Malawian street begger or curses the aid workers who leave him stranded on the road. Is his behavior justified or excessive?

5. Discuss the aspects of his trip that disturbed you most—the poverty, political or social chaos, physical decay, filth, or lawlessness. What parts of the trip delighted you?

6. How does Theroux present some of the countries of Africa? What does he mean when he says, for instance, that Kenya "seemed terminally ill"?

7. What are some of Theroux's theories for the underlying causes of the poverty and chaos in much of the African continent? Are his arguments convincing?

8. Why is Theroux is critical of internatinal development efforts, including many of the foreign aid workers who help the impoverished? Do you agree with his assessment?

9. What criticisms of America does Theroux encounter along the way? How does he answer the critics ... how would you answer them?

10. Have you come away from this book with new knowledge? What, if anything, have you learned? What, in particular, struck you (as surprising or fascinating)? Has the book altered any of your perspectives regarding Africa or America's relationship with the African nations?

11. Is Paul Theroux a good travel guide? Did you enjoy traveling with him in his book? Would you enjoy traveling with him in person?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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