Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

Product Information

And yet, I'll probably read another of his books because I want to actually feel like he's not as much of a schmuck as I think he is. Paul Theroux's books include Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Travel and The Lower River.

What results is an insightful meditation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people. A trip through some of the most threatened and beautiful land in the world, by train, dugout canoe, chicken bus and truck. It’s the travelogue of his overland journey — car, bus, animal — from the northern tip of Africa to the bottom.A conversation with a landmine specialist in Khartoum leads him to state that "not much has been written on the subject of landmines". What results is an insightful mediation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people.

Theroux, one suspects, could be a headache to travel with; resourceful, courageous and indefatigable, as well as crusty, opinionated and contradictory. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Seriously, I've been on an old bicycle and a begger will run up to me rather than a black guy driving a new 4x4 asking for money. He had liked Africa for being the anti-Europe, the anti-West, which it is, sometimes defiantly, sometimes lazily. I traveled this African route in the 1970’s and witnessed many of the events that the Dark Star describes.The greatest part of my satisfaction was animal pleasure: the remoteness of the site, the grandeur of the surrounding mesalike mountains and rock cliffs, the sunlight and scrub, the pale camels in the distance, the big sky, the utter emptiness and silence, for round the decay of these colossal wrecks the lone and level sands stretched far away. I agree that the current Western participation in African affairs is getting Africa nowhere, but I don't assume that makes me a genius or that I have my finger on the pulse of African issues. Tanzania is a failed socialist experiment, Zimbabwe offers at least one almost liveable (if very tense) African capital and allows him to see the consequences of Mugabe's land-grabs from white farmers, while parts of Mozambique allow for true escape from almost everything.

He spends pages raking a missionary over the proverbial coals – using his own thorough knowledge of the Bible to continually punch holes in her arguments. The dreadlocks were weird to Ethiopians, not African at all, and not the cultural statement Rastas regarded them, but just the epitome of a bad hair day.Kenya seems to him to have gone particularly downhill, the fault of the long-time (mis)ruler Danny arap Moi, but Theroux also dislikes the place for the safari-tourists that visit (and remain blissfully unaware of any sort of true Africa). and people (that is, Blacks) respond, not surprisingly, in a positive way to this bold assertion of his own rights to individuality. Time and time again he shows us how subsistence farming and subsistence living have replaced the grandiose stamp of colonial history, and he conveys both respect and disgust for these changes.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

There's a respectable philosophical position in here somewhere: namely, that foreign aid sponsors corruption and saps local initiative.