Paul Theroux’s African Safari
Part 1

2,276 words

In 2023, blacks murdered 602 whites in America according to a site called National Conservative. In return, whites murdered one-sixth of that number, despite outnumbering blacks around five-to-one. The link between black populations and high rates of violent crime is well established, with American whites being far and away the most frequent victims of interracial crimes. The links between blacks and poverty, blacks and corruption, and blacks and low academic achievement are also well established. When compared to other groups, blacks are a dangerous and expensive burden for any civilized society. And when they make up the majority, you will likely cease having a civilization altogether.

It’s a wonder why any sane person not involved in the three things blacks do well—namely, sports, music, and show biz—would want anything to do with them as a group. Yet, many do. Despite the obvious limitations of blacks and their associated dangers, many whites have an unrequited fascination with them. I’ve always wondered why, and was asking myself this question once again when reading Paul Theroux’s pair of African travelogues: Dark Star Safari, published in 2002, and The Last Train to Zona Verde, published in 2013.

In the former work, Theroux travels from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa, mostly by bus or train, sometimes by car, and once by boat. In the latter, it’s mostly by car from Cape Town to Luanda, Angola. He had spent much time in Africa in his youth during the 1960s, in the heady days of African independence, and so a recurring theme in these works is how dramatically Africa had changed since then. In Last Train, Theroux had intended to reach Timbuktu in Mali, but got so disgusted and heartbroken with his journey he decided that traipsing through the path of Islamic terrorists in Nigeria and a civil war in Mali wouldn’t have been worth the risk. He was “neither so committed to discomfort, nor so noble-hearted” to continue into the heart of darkness.

But why would it be “noble-hearted” to solo travel through Africa to begin with? Since there is so much obviously and terribly wrong with Africa, Theroux simply assumes that it is and never really questions it. It’s as if it is incumbent upon the white man to do something about African travails—even if only to write bestselling travelogues. Theroux does offer a clue however: fear.

Perhaps whites fear the primeval nature of blacks, especially when found in the inapt urban environs conferred to them by whites? “[I]t is human nature to worship what we fear,” he writes.

It should be noted that Paul Theroux loves to travel. He embraces the hardship, peers longingly into the unknown, and seems fascinated by the elemental conditions of exotic locales—as evidenced by his famous 1982 novel The Mosquito Coast. He certainly writes like it, making the 850 pages of his African adventures an engrossing and sometimes riveting read.

In Dark Star Safari, as he trawls the slums of a seedy, impoverished, yet culturally self-respecting and historically meaningful Cairo, he hears rumor of what awaits him to the south: “starving people in a blighted land governed by tyrants, rumors of unspeakable atrocities, despair and darkness.” And lo and behold! That is exactly what he finds. Much of the suspense in Dark Star resides not in what Theroux runs into, but in revealing how appallingly bad it all is. Throughout, he strains not to give up hope that things might get better for black Africa, all the while keeping a close eye on the truth as much as possible. A reader well-versed race realism will recognize what a waste of time this effort really is.

The primary value of the these two travelogues lies in the sheer depravity, prurience, laziness, incompetence, violence, and corruption of black Africans, which Theroux uncovers in nearly every chapter. Beyond this, we have Theroux’s evocative descriptions of Africa (from beautiful landscapes to urban hellscapes), his conversations with friends and strangers (some of whom are quite prominent, such as the Egyptian Nobel-Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz and the Ugandan Prime Minister Apolo Nsibambi), his plethora of literary and historical references (covered in part three of this series), his never-ending polemics against international aid (also in part three), as well as a handful of fascinating details about human existence that one can only find in Africa. For instance, in Zimbabwe he discusses the isolated Va-doma tribe, whose people have only two toes on each foot.

The first things we encounter in Africa as Theroux rambles down its eastern coast are the deplorable roads. It’s hard to imagine worse roads in Hell based on how Theroux describes them—the shin-deep mud, the cruel ruts, the treacherous bumps, the truck-toppling boulders, the “wheel swallowing” potholes, the stalled or abandoned vehicles, the multitude of “twisted wrecks of car crashes.” In Last Train, Theroux counts over 40 such crashes on his way to Luanda. He also encounters blown-up tanks and overturned trucks still uglifying the Angolan roadside decades after the wars of independence had concluded.

Not that African drivers are any better. Theroux never mentions anything about speed limits or traffic laws in Africa, and neither do any of the crazy drivers who take him on his journey. Reckless driving is such a problem in Kenya, apparently, that “MANY DEAD IN BUS PLUNGE HORROR” is a common headline over there. In Angola, his hired driver gets drunk on beer, and starts swerving madly as he sang along to the radio. Seemingly the only reason why the police would pull you over is to either shake you down for bribes or rob you outright. In Tanzania, Theroux missed a catastrophe by one week in which two speeding buses collided head on, killing 32. He relates how a local healer had claimed to have caused the accident by casting a spell so he could pick up body parts for his magical treatments. Upon hearing this, people from his village beat him to death.

Unemployment is huge problem in black Africa as well. Almost everywhere he goes, Theroux finds men lolling about, uselessly drunk in the middle of the day—or out looking for trouble. Children pester him relentlessly for whatever change or scraps he cares to toss at them. One of their strategies is to wipe feces onto their victims until they cough up food or valuables. Dark Star contains an appalling scene in Ethiopia, in which Theroux encounters a hideous parade of beggars worthy of a zombie movie:

They were old and young, blind, crippled, limbless women and children, war-wounded, fingerless lepers, screeching for alms like a procession of tax collectors making their way through the narrow passageways of the town exacting a duty from everyone they met. I started to count them but when I got to a hundred I gave up.

Of course, violence and crime is everywhere in Africa. Theroux is constantly being warned to keep his hands on his belongings and his head down. He’s told not to talk to or trust anyone, and not to go where there are “bad people”—which is quite a few places in Africa, actually. From lethal Somali bandits known as the Shifta, to car hijackers, to armed robbers, to rowdy hooligans, to pickpockets, to common muggings, one cannot escape it—and less one can fight it without the highly likely possibility of being killed. If you’re lucky, you’ll simply be robbed without realizing it. This happens twice to Theroux. At the end of Dark Star he discovers that the bag he had kept in his hotel’s padlocked strongroom had been filched. And then halfway through Last Train he has his identity stolen while in Namibia. The thieves had made $48,000 worth of purchases with his credit card number before Theroux became wise to their scheme.

Murder is rampant, with stories of abject cruelty making up much of what constitutes current events in sub-Saharan Africa. In Dark Star, Theroux describes the crime stories in one South African newspaper:

In the worst one four tied up and blindfolded people, two men and two women, were found ‘shot execution-style’ in a van outside Johannesburg. No clues, no identities, no leads. ‘The motive is thought to be robbery.’ In a second story, ‘another witness’ in an upcoming murder trial was found dead—eight witnesses altogether have been killed, leaving no one to testify. And there were assorted instances of racial vendettas, road rage, car hijackings, farm invasions, poisonings, maimings, and robberies with gratuitous violence. In the quaintest story a man had been assaulted, had one eye poked out, this throat slashed and his penis chopped off. ‘Police suspect that his genitals—which are still missing—will be used for muti [medicine] by an inganga [witch-doctor].’

Yes, Africa is a deadly place—and not just because of humans. At the end of Last Train Theroux regrets to inform his readers that three men he had befriended in his west-African travels had died before the book was published. One suffered a heart attack, one was gored by an elephant, and one had his skull smashed in during a home invasion. Further, a black woman he had met briefly in South Africa ended up getting stabbed to death by her husband.

In Dark Star, Theroux dutifully explores black-on-white crime, including murder. In one livid example, he speaks with an unhinged black in Zimbabwe who was squatting on a white farmer’s land. The man saw no contradiction in demanding that the farmer give him his equipment and slave for him, while becoming indignant that someone should ever do that to him on his land. Theroux speaks with several white victims of crimes, such as a man and wife who were pistol whipped during a carjacking. He runs through the horror of violence perpetrated against white farmers in Zimbabwe, many of which resulted in rape, murder, and disembowelings. One white claims angrily that “these bloody people are making us suffer. Nine hundred and fifty farmers have been murdered since ’94!” Theroux reports in Last Train that that number had grown beyond 3,000.

Towards the end of Dark Star, Theroux meets a Boer named Swanepoel, or “Swanie,” and if there is one person in this book I would like to meet one day, it is him. Theroux describes him thusly:

A big pale fleshy-faced Boer with angry blue eyes, a jaw like a back hoe, thick farmer’s hands and tight suspenders stretched across his huge gut and bursting shirt, hooked to his slipping trousers. Everything about him, his voice, his eyes, even his jowls and the way he crooked his fat fingers emphasized his sense of grievance.

Although Theroux remains skeptical, this red-pilled South African lights the air on fire as he speaks truth to power. When showing Theroux a book of photography called Volksmoord/Genocide, which highlights the thousands of grisly white deaths at the hands of blacks, he says, “The world doesn’t care! I say to Jews, ‘This is our holocaust! This is our genocide!’ They say, ‘You deserve it.’ You have seen this?”

Swanie doesn’t just rave. He says he knew Nelson Mandela personally, and claims that Mandela’s time in the Victor Verster prison was actually quite easy. He also claimed that whites were unfairly maligned during Apartheid when Indians, Jews, and Muslims fully cooperated with it. Further, he knows his history quite well:

“I fought in the war—how many of these other bloody people fought in the war?” he howled. “It’s the same as always, like when we were invited to sit at Dingaan’s Kraal. “Leave your weapons—we won’t hurt you.” The Boers thought the Zulus were being honest, so they went along. That’s what it is now. It is Dingaan’s Kraal. The Boer’s went along and they were slaughtered!”

Every one of us should look up Dingaan’s Kraal if we don’t already know.

Finally, Amy Biehl deserves her own paragraph since Theroux says quite a lot about her in both volumes. Biehl was a 26-year-old American white woman who was volunteering in Africa in 1993, just as the country was about to be handed over to the blacks. As she was driving three black, female friends home, a mob of young black men descended upon her car, pulled her out of it, smashed her head with a brick, and stabbed her in the heart. At the scene of Biehl’s murder a few years later, Theroux notes that the crude sign commemorating her had misspelled her name. In a shocking twist, however, Biehl’s parents later forgave her murderers, allowing them to be released early from prison. They even hired two of them to work for the Amy Biehl Foundation, which, according to Theroux, “received almost $2 million from USAID in 1997, for being ‘dedicated to empowering people who are oppressed.’”

Paul Theroux does go to great lengths in Dark Star Safari and The Last Train to Zona Verde to explain away the multitude of sins and failures of black Africans. If there is an external reason—such as corrupt governments, vainglorious humanitarianism, the horrors of war, or the legacy of colonialism, he will at least mention it. Often he romanticizes them, even in the face of their bad behavior. But he does nothing of the sort with Amy Biehl’s killers. He can barely hide his contempt for them and professes no sympathy for her parents’ misguided compassion. In Last Train he argues with his guide about the nature of the murder. The guide justifies it by claiming that the killers had thought she was a settler and not a volunteer. “Africa for Africans” was the murderers’ perfectly reasonable philosophy, according to the guide.

But Theroux, to his credit, was having none of it. “They killed her because she was white.”