Dark Star Safari

It took me forever to plod through Dark Star Safari (#38) by Paul Theroux.  I can't remember the last time it took me more than a week to finish a book.  Of course, I was on a safari of my own to New Orleans, so that didn't help.  I've never read any of Mr. Theroux's work before.  Kingdom By the Sea has been sitting on my shelf for years, but somehow, I've never gotten around to it.  I'm not sure I ever will now.  In Dark Star Safari he travels through Africa from Cairo to Capetown overland, sticking to ground transportation and only traveling by air once when a border was closed and it was the only way to continue on. 

I had always thought I would like to visit Africa; to see the pyramids, visit a game camp perhaps in Kenya, see the Botswana that Alexander McCall Smith brings so vividly to life, and admire Table Mountain in Capetown.  Reading this book has cured me of any romantic longings for that.  Paul Theroux's intention was to return to the scenes of his Peace Corp and teaching experiences in Uganda and Malawi while seeing the rest of the continent.  The changes he encountered were so profound and devastating that he states he may never return.  All the work he and his colleagues had done had been so utterly destroyed; the pleasant shady college campus with the best library in Africa he remembered had been totally denuded of trees, books and any kind of spirit among the students to help themselves.  As he makes the point over and over again throughout the book, why should they?  The aid workers and "agents of virtue" are there to do it all for them.  The local economies depend on foreign aid money, so why bother to make anything themselves, or grow food, or keep things in repair?  Begging and theivery work just as well.

His anecdotes about the people he met and the situations he found himself in kept me reading to see what happened next, but I didn't like the author much by the end of the book.  He manages to be simultaneously irritating, condescending, righteous, deliberately annoying to those he meets if he disapproves of them (an awful lot of people fell into this category!) and hail-fellow-well-met to others, including along the way a Prime Minister and two Nobel Prize winners.  While he scorns those who visit the game camps, he has a very enjoyable time for himself in a luxury game reserve.  He delights in buying and wearing second hand clothes (donated by US charities!) to make himself less conspicuous, traveling by crowded buses and vans packed with people and animals.  He visits a squatters' settlement outside Capetown to see what life is like, but has a 5 star lunch at a hilltop winery overlooking that same squatters' village.  He thorougly enjoys his ride on the legendary Blue Train in South Africa, and his luxury cruise on the Nile, but heaps many paragraphs of scorn on the tourists who do so.  He apparently thinks you can have it both ways.

I can't say that Mr. Theroux is someone I'd care to spend any more time with; just chalk up this safari as an interesting experience.