Beyond Darkness

It is a little bit of a surprise to discover that, really speaking, this is Paul Theroux’s first book on travels in Africa. Surprising,...

It is a little bit of a surprise to discover that, really speaking, this is Paul Theroux’s first book on travels in Africa. Surprising, because one thought that aside from the two poles, there was no place left on earth untouched by Theroux’s pen. And also because Theroux had spent time in Malawi in the mid-sixties as a teacher, which not only inspired his earliest fiction, but provided its locale too.

Two factors are responsible for the uncommon readability of Theroux’s travel writing — his ability to evoke not only the spirit of a place, but also to bring alive the people who inhabit it, not as caricatures, but as complex human beings, with a culture and history of their own, with just a few strokes of the pen. Moreover, he does not permit any cultural baggage that he might have to overshadow his intelligence as a writer.

What made Theroux take off and go to Africa? The feeling that he was too tied to his home, and the wish to see the continent that had been his home. The journey begins in Cairo, where nobody — foreigners and Egyptians — thinks that Egypt is a part of Africa, and Theroux is told, not too subtly, that Africa is reverting to savagery. There is a wonderful description of a dinner at the home of the Nobel winner Naguib Mahfouz, followed by a visit to the Sudanese embassy in search of a visa. But as he wends his way down through, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Malawi to South Africa, infrequently meeting people reading his African stories, Theroux’s tone changes. The buoyancy slowly gives way to puzzlement. Chillingly, he finds out how untrue it is to say that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo
to Capetown
By Paul Theroux
Hamish Hamilton
Price: £ 11.99

At places it may hold, but at other places, he finds that matters have changed for the worse from what he remembers. This is especially true, he discovers, for his old home. The school at which he taught in Malawi is in terrible shape, the spectre of AIDS haunts the country — these few pages make for searing reading. And in South Africa, he meets Nadine Gordimer, who takes him through the changes that have taken place there.

Story continues below this ad

Theroux has reached a new level in his travel writing with Dark Star Safari. The book has all the qualities that one expects of a typical Theroux. But, at the same time, it is different from the others. This is a far more thoughtful and grim man than the one we have glimpsed in his earlier books. And this grimness permeates Dark Star. It starkly paints the ways in which Africa has become a victim of its history, politicians, the West.

But Theroux, writing in his London home, still finds hope. And that hope is the people that Theroux met in his travels, some of whom, like Una in Malawi, are fighting against all the odds. Theroux concludes that in despair, there is still hope: “The most civilized Africans I met never used the word civilization. The wickedest believed themselves to be anointed leaders for life, and wouldn’t let go of their delusion. The kindest ones had not changed at all.”