BOOK REVIEW Theroux illustrates real-life African experience in book

'Dark Star Safari' describes author's African travels in great detail.
By MARCUS ELIASON
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
"Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town," by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin, $28.)
Paul Theroux first captivated lovers of travel literature 30 years ago with "The Great Railway Bazaar," a rollicking starburst of a book recounting his journey halfway around the world from London across Asia and back again.
He continued to breathe new life into the genre from Latin America, the Mediterranean and British coastlines, China and the islands of Oceania. Now, with his supple prose and eye for the revelatory detail, the American author has tackled the Big One in "Dark Star Safari."
"All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there," says the opening sentence, "though not for the horror, the hot spots, the massacre and earthquake stories you read in the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure of being in Africa again."
Pleasure? Near the end he sums up the experience: "... abused, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheated, bitten, flooded, insulted, exhausted, robbed, lied to, browbeaten, poisoned, stunk up and starved."
But that's only part of it. For this is the most passionate and exciting of Theroux's half-dozen major travel books. Bracketed by fascinating encounters with two of Africa's Nobel literature laureates, Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt and Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, "Dark Star Safari" is the author's autumn-of-life return to the continent where he was a Peace Corps teacher in the 1960s.
It is a rich, hilarious and deeply moving description of nations surviving in the most awful adversity.
Theroux's conclusion from his 5,000-mile journey from Cairo to Cape Town down the eastern side of the continent is that the Africa he knew as a young man living in Uganda and Malawi has in most respects become much worse. When it comes to Western aid agencies, his bile overflows.
But the book is studded with idyllic moments, from his sojourn among the little-known pyramids of Nubia to his canoe voyage down the Zambezi. And there are uplifting moments too, like his discovery, in the bowels of a ferry's engine room, of a young African studying a textbook about diesel engines -- endeavoring, amid hellish heat, deafening noise and steam-spitting pipes, to make a better life for himself rather than take a handout from a Western aid agency.
Never too old
By ferry, bus, train, even airliner -- his most hated form of transport but unavoidable when the Sudan-Ethiopia border is closed -- Africa poses the toughest challenge Theroux has faced. "Aren't you a little old for this?" his children ask, now that he is approaching 60.
And indeed, even this most famous of train buffs finds himself gritting his teeth as he tries to sleep on a wooden bench in an Ethiopian train, "hating this trip and wishing it were over."
Still, this "dusty note-taking fugitive" takes pride in seeking out precisely those places he has been warned to avoid: crime-ridden city streets, border towns with their "riffraff and refugees and people sleeping rough" and a farm invaded by squatters under Zimbabwe's often violent land redistribution program.
In northern Kenya, the cattle truck he is riding in comes under fire from bandits. "I don't want to die," he tells a soldier riding with him. "They do not want your life, bwana," the soldier assures him. "They want your shoes."
That sums it up for Theroux:
"An epitaph of underdevelopment, desperation in a single sentence. What use is your life to them? It is nothing. But your shoes -- ah, they are a different matter. They are worth something, much more than your watch (they had the sun) or your pen (they were illiterate) or your bag (they had nothing to put in it). These were men who needed footwear, for they were forever walking."
The bete noire he keeps returning to is foreign aid agencies, which he believes have done nothing but corrupt Africans' work ethic and destroy their ambitions. "Charities and aid programs," he writes, "seemed to turn African problems into permanent conditions that were bigger and messier."
In Mozambique he sees flood-stricken areas whose inhabitants have been rehoused elsewhere. Now squatters are moving in, and hoping for more floods so they too can get free housing.
"Africans praying for a disaster so that they would be noticed seemed to me a sorry consequence of the way charities had concentrated people's minds on misfortune."
Agents of virtue
Sometimes his critique of the aid community feels a little overheated: "Oafish self-dramatizing prigs," "a new breed of priesthood," "agents of virtue." He likens them to rangers throwing food to animals in a game park.
But he's honest enough to recognize his own lapses. An American diplomat shows little interest in the author's offer to teach a few classes in Malawi. Angry at first, he realizes that he too has taken to behaving like an "agent of virtue," that the diplomat "was probably right in saying, 'Take a number, sonny. Get in line. There's plenty of people like you.'"
But while his feud with the "agents of virtue" makes for entertaining spectacle, the real reward is in Theroux's love of the African bush; the musicality of African speech patterns; the meetings with old friends and the making of new ones; the constant insights, enriched by his knowledge of the local languages, into a world largely obscured by the daily headlines about AIDS, famine and war.
Near the end, Theroux expresses the hope that we will come away feeling that reading "Dark Star Safari" is the next best thing to having been there.
This reader, a son of Africa, can assure him he has succeeded.