Reading Theroux in Africa

I had gotten to lower Egypt, and was heading south, in my usual traveling mood: hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable, it is a banal subject for travel. Therefore, Africa seemed perfect for a long journey.

That’s the closing paragraph to the first chapter in Paul Theroux's bestseller Dark Star Safari. It’s a book that sees him cross the continent from Cairo to Cape Town offering a glimpse into “the real Africa” – the one that tourists on their game drives and in their massive overland trucks never get to see, perhaps the one they never want to see.

It’s a return of sorts. Theroux, turning sixty on the last leg of his journey, was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi, one of the earliest in the history of the program, teaching English at a secondary school in the highlands.

The book was written in 2003, before journalists, economists, and foreign policy scholars began to note that this century would be belong to Africa. No one seems to have told Theroux this. He notes continually throughout the latter half of the book how nothing had changed in the forty-odd years since he’d last lived in Africa. If anything, the continent was worse off than it was at independence. Men sit idle. The infrastructure bequeathed to African countries by former colonial powers is cracked and broken. The weeds of time have overgrown the school where he used to teach, choking the promise of national sovereignty and smothering decades of potential growth.

The Washington Post called Theroux's book “Relentlessly engaging…Theroux demonstrates how a traveler’s finely wrought observations…sometimes offer the best political and social analysis.” In some places, this is true. Theroux is at his best when he allows other people to speak for him. In Ethiopia, he meets a former political prisoner named Nebiy Makonnen, who spent ten years in prison for being “on the wrong side” of politics. One day, a new prisoner managed to smuggle in a copy of Gone with the Wind. The men, all educated, took turns reading it, hiding it from the guards. Over the course of two years, Nebiy translated the book on foil from cigarette packages. He would finish a section and give the pieces of foil to prisoners upon their release. It took him two years after he got out to track down the three thousand pieces of foil that contained his translations. The Amharic version, the only one that’s ever been done, is his copy. It’s the one that everyone reads.

These are the tales that make his journey great. Unfortunately, Theroux doesn’t give over his book to others as often as one would like. Instead, he treats Africa much like Cecil Rhodes or Henry Morton Stanley might. Theroux is the conquering hero, whether he likes it or not, forging a path through the darkest heart of Africa. He is derisive not only to Western tourists, who he faults for treating the continent like Disneyland with animals but also to Africans themselves who he attacks for not taking part in their own development.

Symptomatic of Africans’ disconnect from their own lives is the abdication of government responsibility for education, healthcare, and poverty alleviation. Instead, Theroux notes with continual and repeated disdain the hordes of disaster tourists who have taken over whole countries. Aid workers, in their white four by fours emblazoned with various agency brandings, are, in his mind, no better than the tourists who only experience Africa from the safety of a vehicle. In this regard, he echoes a specific political gripe of economists such as Dambisa Moyo and Peter Bauer - that aid is the problem in Africa, that NGOs have developed their own parasitic relationship to African poverty. They’re forever chasing the next donor dollar, undermining host country institutions so that they may keep their place and profit from the aid-industrial complex.

There are arguments to be made for and against aid, its conditionality, and its effectiveness. However, Theroux never speaks with an aid professional. Or if he does, we never hear that voice, the words as they come out of their mouths. He never attempts to understand how specific projects impact communities or contribute to development/underdevelopment. Whereas the Washington Post praises his finely wrought observations, it is more accurate to say that he watches. He sees without seeing, without understanding. He is guilty of his own particular prejudice, which blinds him to the everyday politics of a particular place. He is subject; everyone else is object.

What is worrying is that for those who haven’t visited Africa, Theroux's voice is one of the most well-known of the continent’s travel literature. I wonder whether if I had read his work before ever visiting Africa if I would have been blinded to the complexity of the continent, if I would have found my views distorted by his. While he does offer some cogent, brilliant points of political and social analysis, he distinctly ignores other realities.

Theroux was there for the honeymoon phase of African independence in the 1960s. He returns decades later to find those promises unfulfilled, and he wonders, “What happened?” He doesn't look outside the continent for answers and cannot, therefore, comprehend the failures of neoliberal economics from the 1980s on. He doesn't attempt to grapple with structural adjustment, which saw the World Bank and IMF force African countries to open up their economies and dismember government programs designed to industrialize infant economies. There’s no mention of the global price crash in the 1980s that destroyed the market for primary commodities such as tea and coffee in Malawi, Kenya, and Ethiopia or copper in Zambia and the DRC. Instead, he looks at Africans and asks, “What have they done?” He looks at aid workers and asks, “What are they doing?” One could claim that his role, as a traveler, is to look at the present reality, to judge it based on what he sees and who he meets, but without contextual history, his understanding of the present is warped by his ignorance of the past.

Theroux doesn't recognize his own privilege, and that might be the most grating thing of all. He harbors the arrogance of privilege, the faranji who is better than all the typical faranjis. He’s focused on his unique experience as better than those of other tourists without recognizing that he is often a tourist himself. He derides the public commuter buses, “bush taxis” or “kombis” depending on where you are. After one trip in the minibus, he vows never again, calling them a “death trap.” They are, no doubt, dangerous, but they are the reality for the majority of Africans who cannot afford buses, let alone luxury trains in South Africa or a private canoe along the Zambezi.

This arrogance is actually reminiscent of another famous traveler’s diary, Graham Greene’s Journey without Maps about his time in Liberia. Greene bushwhacked his way through Liberia for four weeks in 1935 with his teenage cousin Barbara in tow. He claimed his journey was unique, through unexplored territory. He was charting his own path. It’s a claim that is frankly absurd. Along the way, he met missionaries and miners, as well as a few other Europeans, plus, you know, all those Africans. As the preface to the Vintage Classic version notes, Liberia in Greene’s time had been independent for over a century. The Liberians had to push back against the English in Sierra Leone and the French in Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire to protect their territorial integrity against the imperial powers. Well-documented maps were one of the main weapons against imperial encroachment. There were plenty of them; Graham just decided not to take one. It makes for a better story.

Greene spent most of his novel complaining, a tone that Theroux adopts quite a bit throughout his trip. (As a side note, Greene’s cousin Barbara also wrote a book about their Liberian adventure. She handled it much better than he did.) Theroux expects misery, and he finds it. One gets the sense throughout his book that the trip is a convenient way to get away from everyone he knows back home. Unfortunately, he had to go to Africa to do it. One could call it masculine escapism or just recognize that Theroux is a bit of a misanthrope. “Happiness,” he claims “is banal subject for travel.” He was searching for misery, for the appalling, and he explicitly recognizes that he’s looking for it in Africa. He attacks the ‘disaster porn’ of the nightly news coverage of Africa (and there was a lot of it in 2003 with prominent civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, DRC, and Somalia) but can’t understand that his vision is often of a slower-moving disaster, that of chronic underdevelopment and little will among the people to change it. And by doing so, he participates in a form of victim shaming little better than that he himself criticizes.

So why is this book the subject of the final blog in my two week challenge? I hated Dark Star Safari. I powered through it in part because there are some genuine gems in his narrative but also because I didn't feel I could properly judge Theroux without reading his book in its entirety. I wanted to like it. I wanted it to reflect my vision of the Africa I know.

It didn't. Ultimately, however, I came to realize that I could do better. That’s the reason this blog caps the two-week challenge set by a very special friend of mine. There are many tales that I've told over the course of this blog, and many more I could tell. There’s a book in the works, I think. It won’t be a New York Times bestseller, but then, I don’t expect it to be. I've had enough positive feedback from my writing that I hope it can provide an alternative view of Africa. There are plenty of stories waiting to be told, plenty of people I met along the way. Time to get started.