Paul Theroux’s African Safari
Part 2

2,238 words

Since Paul Theroux never stayed for long in one place while writing his African travelogues, the act of traveling itself takes up much ink in Dark Star Safari (2002) and The Last Train to Zona Verde (2013). Thus, the train becomes the leitmotif which connects both works. Theroux treats it as a symbol of the swollen, arthritic nexus between the West and modern Africa—magnificent in design, ambitious in scope, and but now timeworn, barely relevant, and poorly maintained by the indigenous population. In Dark Star, Theroux visits the grand and still-functioning railway station in Maputo, Mozambique, which was designed by the Portuguese in 1910. From here he decides to take the Limpopo Line simply because he likes the name:

The Limpopo Line, running northeast out of the capital to the town of Chokwe, was the embodiment of all that I loved as well as all that I despaired of in the Africa I had seen so far. The train was a solid and usable artifact, almost indestructible in its simplicity, as well as atmospheric; but it was badly maintained, disappointingly grubby, and poorly patronized. This working relic had been retained because the country was too poor to replace it or modernize it. At the height of its working life this line had carried many people comfortably into the remote bush. Such were the ambitions of Portuguese colonialism that the line had once continued through Gaza Province into Central Africa, linking Mozambique with Rhodesia and Nyasaland. These places were now Zimbabwe and Malawi, and a hundred times harder to get to by any land route than they had been forty years ago and more. One of the epiphanies of my trip was the realization that where the mode of life had changed significantly in the Africa I had known, it had changed for the worse.

Likewise, the Tazara Railway in Dar es Salaam—built as a gift by the Chinese to the newly independent socialist nation of Tanzania in the 1960s and 70s—fell into decline as soon as the blacks took over to maintain it. Funnily enough, when the railway was being built, the Tanzanians cargo-culted Chi-Com slogans and Maoist modes of dress and called each other “comrade,” and then cluelessly clung to these tropes long after the Chinese themselves had abandoned all the accoutrements of their communist past.

Another theme is how the remnants of colonialism remain almost everywhere in Africa, both prominent and decrepit. They emerge as creepy backdrops and strongly imply that blacks simply don’t build anything. In Last Train, Theroux reports how most of the buildings still in use in Namibia and Angola had been built over a century ago by German and Portuguese colonists, respectively. Mozambique still possesses many plantations which were built by the Portuguese. “They had the melancholy look of ruins in remote places,” Theroux writes, “mute but solid signs of a lost world.” Interestingly, Theroux often compares notes with famous explorers from the colonial period, and remarks how little Africa has changed since then. In Dark Star, Theroux describes how the black leadership in many African countries simply moved into colonial homes after independence and still lived in these crumbling abodes decades later. His Egyptian cabbie complains that the old Nile Bridge had been built by the British, and that “No one ever fixes anything here.” Of Kamapala, Uganda, Theroux writes:

This seemed a pattern in the African city, the unnecessary obsolescence of buildings. Nothing was fixed or kept in good repair, the concept of stewardship or maintenance hardly existed. In Kampala, the big elegant Grindlay’s Bank had become a horror, the National Theater had become a seedy monstrosity, the railway station was uncared for. Lacking a center, the city seemed to lack a purpose.

One would think that the Africans would notice this themselves and wish to rectify it. If so, one would be wrong, especially about the second part. In Dark Star, Theroux confronts a former African ambassador in Malawi with the embarrassing fact that when Indians run shops in Africa, they succeed; but when blacks try—especially after forcibly evicting the Indians—they invariably fail. Lacking any self-awareness, the African responded by smugly mocking the Indians:

 “They sit there, you see, and they have these little pieces of paper, and have these columns of numbers.” He spoke pompously about the Indians as though describing demented obsessional children with broken toys. “And one Indian is running the calculator, and another is counting the sacks of flour and the tins of condensed milk. One-two-three. One-two-three.”

What this educated African in his plummy voice intended as mockery—the apparent absurdity of all this counting—was the description of people doing a simple inventory of goods in a shop.

This African didn’t seem to realize that he was making light of the very thing which ensures poverty for millions of his people: the black African’s obstinate inability produce anything of lasting value.

Apparently, such slovenly thinking contributes to the overall slovenly nature of black Africans, on which Theroux take copious notes. In Last Train, while still in South Africa, Theroux notices how the roads of a village were littered with beer cans, plastic, and waste paper. His guide explains that it is up to the municipality to clean it up, but it never does. When Theroux asks why the residents themselves don’t do it, he gets no answer. Are they too poor to buy a broom? In Dark Star, he notices how Nairobian food sellers make such a mess in the streets that scavenging storks became permanent residents of the city, utterly unafraid of humans. He also relays that on trains black men often use sinks as toilets, perhaps because the real toilets there are so vile. He encounters this kind of slovenliness almost everywhere he goes in Africa outside of South African cities, spots in Zimbabwe, and oddly enough, Swakopmund, Namibia, which has apparently retained much of the strict orderliness of its German colonists.

This sloppiness extends to hygiene as well. From the mouth of a proud African woman who had once been the classmate of the murderous Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe:

“We have become so dirty—in throwing garbage on the street. Also, personally. People are less clean in their personal habits. You notice it on buses. The smell.”

Theroux attests to this: “But the strong human reek on African buses was a smell of mortality that seemed to me like a whiff of death.” It’s not for nothing that Theroux claims that traveling the squalid cities of Africa requires “all the skill and the temperament of a proctologist.”

Sloppy is as sloppy does in Africa, especially when it comes to sex, which is constant and everywhere. Prostitution is a booming business in many places, especially where one would find foreigners, such as United Nations personnel or international aid workers. Newspapers in major South African cities like Johannesburg are filled with ads for whoring services. Rape is a common occurrence, of course, with around 52,000 cases reported per year in South Africa—nearly a quarter of which victimizes children, even infants.

The sex obsession of black Africans which Theroux relates is frankly stupid. After conversing with Malawian men about the prevalence of AIDS in their country, he asks if they would have unprotected sex with a prostitute. They laughed and said they would since they liked it “skeen to skeen.”

Theroux interviews two young white female aid workers at different times in Dark Star. Both reveal how repulsive all this sex really is. Here is one astonishing exchange with a Finnish girl named Ursula and her friend Kelli:

“What did you find out in Zambia that you didn’t know before” I asked.

“The behavior,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “There is so much sex. It is all sex. And so young!”

“How young?”

“As if you don’t know,” Kelli said, teasing me.

“Ten years old is common,” Ursula said.

Later, Ursula explains:

“It is horrible. There is no sex education. No one will talk about sex, but everyone does it. No one will talk about AIDS, but everyone is infected. We were sent an anti-AIDS film and we showed it. But people in the villages said it was shameful—too indecent—and so it was withdrawn. What could we do?”

“Did you talk to them about it?”

“I tried to.”

“And what happened?”

“They wanted to have sex with me.”

While on the train to South Africa, Theroux meets Susanna, a devote Christian from Ohio. After (rudely, in my opinion) chiding her for some of her Christian beliefs, she explains that

“. . . the sex is terrible. People here have sex all the time.”

“Africans tend to have sex with their own age group,” I said, quoting the Samburu elder I had met in Kenya.

“No,” Susanna said. “Boys sleep with grannies. Girls go with men. Women commit adultery. They start having sex when they’re six or eight years old.”

“Maybe playing at it,” I suggested. And I thought, really, if you were looking for graphic illustrations it was more satisfying to discuss sex with a Christian like Susanna than with a jaded libertine.

“No—doing it,” Susanna said, her face clouding over. “I was up in Nampula, and we talked to a chief about condoms. He said, ‘You don’t eat sweets with the wrapper on. You don’t eat candy that’s in the paper. You don’t carry an umbrella if it’s not raining.’ He just laughed at us.”

The squalor in Africa is what one would expect. Aside from the ubiquitous trash, Theroux describes open drains alongside buildings disgorging an effluvia of mud, shit, and bilge into the streets. Common are six or more people living in shacks fit for two. Also common are people living in rusty steel boxes with doorways and windows burned through by blow torches, as well as open-sided latrines, homeless sleeping “as though mummified in gauzy ragged blankets,” slender dogs chewing on trash, hyenas and baboons prowling around shanties, the dreadful list goes on. It’s poverty—absolute, desperate, and rock bottom. People in such places have “an air of temporariness,” according to Theroux, “as if they do not belong on the Earth, and are merely passing through.”

In one of the most unforgettable passages in Last Train, Theroux relates how an old Angolan woman comes to him with a bucket of chicken, optimistically asking him, “Qual?” (meaning, “Which one?”). Theroux peers into the bucket while she jostled the victuals with rusty tongs and sees three skinless legs, charred black and absolutely covered in flies. Despite being ravenously hungry after a long trek, he declines, only to see her persist, encouraged by his friendliness. Eventually he relents and buys one of the disgusting things, which he must then re-cook over a fire before he can force down. During his brief stay in that area, the same woman came back to him twice more, and he indulged her twice more, noticing each time how the number of flies on the chicken had grown.

Early in Last Train, Theroux notices something peculiar—that much of this poverty and squalor, especially in the townships of South Africa, is for show. Certainly, it is real, but the Africans themselves make no effort to hide it from foreigners. This is because slum tourism, or “poverty porn” is a thing. For a price, Westerners can discover how the other half lives. Apparently there is money to be made through this perverse enterprise.

Theroux himself was fooled by a similar ruse while living briefly among the Ju/’Hoansi tribe in Namibia. Translated to mean “the real people,” the Ju/’Hoansi are an elusive, traditional people living as their ancestors did tens of thousands of years ago. Theroux waxes romantically about their harmless nature, their half-naked ways, and their Pleistocene innocence for several pages, describing them as “a timeless people, as eternal as the features of the landscape,” only to later admit that he had fallen for a Tasaday-styled hoax. When Westerners aren’t watching, these blacks wear modern clothes, make use of modern technology, listen to rap music, and blow something like a third of their income on alcohol. They also avoid hunting and gathering like the plague and rely almost entirely on welfare from the Namibian government for their food supply.

Paul Theroux sees this as a travesty, partially because he wants to believe in the myth of the noble savage. He thinks it would be better for these people to live in the bush in the traditional manner than endure the endemic crime, corruption, and poverty found in African cities—which has, in effect, been foisted upon them by whites, whether with good intentions or not. Maybe he is correct about that. On the other hand, one cannot promote primitivism for primitives without first admitting that these primitives are primitive by nature—that is, genetically, racially, irreparably. Race realism must become a central factor in this argument in order for it to be persuasive.

Although Paul Theroux takes a few timid steps in this direction, he doesn’t go there entirely. It seems that for him risking death, physical harm, theft, and illness across thousands of miles of the poorest, most corrupt and crime-ridden places on the planet is less dangerous than actually telling the truth about race.

Either that, or he understood that if he told the truth about race, he would have no chance of publishing Dark Star Safari and The Last Train to Zona Verde.