Dark Star Safari

(Cross-post)

The book chronicles Theroux's grueling journey through Africa in the early Gregorian millenium (like 2002 or something, not sure I ever quite figured out what year). Traveling overland almost the whole way, he begins in Cairo, Egypt and concludes his trip in Capetown, South Africa. It is, no doubt, an awe-inspiring undertaking, Theroux even risking his life at one point as he and the rest of the disinclined passengers on a beat-up cattle truck are shot at by shifta as they travel from the Ethiopian border through the Kenyan outskirts via the Bandit Road.

Although sizeably shorter than the passages on some of the other many countries like Malawi and South Africa, I was obviously most interested in his time in Ethiopia. He splits his time there between Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa, Harar and Rastaland, finally exiting Ethiopia courtesy of endearing new friends, Tadelle from Tigre (who calls people he doesn't like "termites" in English) and a young man named Wolde who weeps at their parting. He probably spends less time in Addis, but does meet a few interesting characters and says upon landing there, "Ethiopia had just ended its border war with Eritrea. Because of the rumors of that war, Ethiopia's neighbors of low repute - Somalia and Sudan - and the paranoia of travelers, Addis had no foreign tourists. Empty hotels were wonderful for me to behold because I never made any forward plans. I just showed up and hoped." The manner in which he further describes the city is not entirely flattering.

Of Dire Dawa, it "looked like the sort of French colonial railway town I had seen in rural Vietnam, the sort of town on any railway line built a hundred years ago by Europeans." There he speaks Spanish to a woman hawking herbs, her explaining she learned it from the Cuban soldiers living in Dire Dawa around 1974 at the time of the Derg.

In Harar he babbles on about Arthur Rimbaud living out his eccentricities there, he visits the hyena man and also visits the house that Haile Selassie occupied as governor of Harar "before becoming Ras Tafari, Makonnen, Lion of Judah, Elect of God, in a word - emperor."
In Rastaland (Shashemene), he meets Gladstone Robinson and a young, quasi-militant Rastafarian named Patrick who says to him, "The millenium hasn't come yet... The Ethiopian calendar is behind seven years and eight months, so the millenium is coming in about six years. You will see. The earth destroyed by water. It will be fire next time. The Rift Valley will be spared - and it will be the safest place in the world when the fire comes. You can come and be a refugee here. Bring your family."

Generally speaking, he offers few if any compliments about Africa. (The interested should know that decades before the book was written Theroux lived in Africa for a long time; Malawi and Uganda. Originally posted in Nyasaland as he refers to it (former name of Malawi) by the Peace Corps, Theroux was deported for helping a friend deemed anti-Banda by the Banda regime. He landed in Uganda where he became a professor at a University, then seemingly abruptly left there a short time later under political duress.) Throughout the book, Theroux is decidedly negative, largely condescending and scathingly pessimistic about Africa. One thing he has a particular low tolerance, if not a healthy disdain, for are aid organizations. A reader ignorant, much like myself, to the macro realities and consequences of aid and it's many shapes and forms in Africa is much at a loss to ascertain whether Thoreaux even in part rightly or wrongly blames aid agencies for 'wrecking the continent' and effectively acting as "agents of subversion". Although he indicates at one point that he places the onus of change (read "development") on Africans themselves, as to describe the sinister acts of foreign aid workers driving about in their effervescent "landrovers" he even cites to Henry David Thoreau quoting,

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve."

I found the giant over-looming irony of the book to be that Theroux was in love with Africa and ostensibly that's why he even went back in the first place. Certainly, the reader comes away thinking his reunion with the so-called "Dark Star" is anything but whimsical and romantic. Perhaps his charmed remembrance was soured by some of the reality he forgot? Who knows. If you take the book at it's word, Africa has been on a steady and quite steep downhill jaunt since the 1960s. But, make no mistake, however inflammatory or agitated his attitude progressively becomes as he rustles his way through the greenest continent, his writing is fall-over incredible. If you read it with a grain of salt (and I think you have to if you want to enjoy the book for more than it's amazing writing style, his opinion is only one of many afterall), you can relish the book's content rife with juicy history and details you possibly didn't know before about some of the unique countries in Africa he travels to. And he truly, truly takes you on the impressive journey with him, you see what he sees, you smell what he smells, you bask in his travel triumphs, and you even (or I did) laugh at some of his caustic humor. As far as his writing goes, he is a total master even if a snarky, self-important one.