Paul Theroux’s African Safari
Part 3

2,678 words

Paul Theroux

Part 1, Part 2

There is more to recommend in Paul Theroux’s African travelogues Dark Star Safari (2002) and The Last Train to Zona Verde (2013) than their comprehensive yet tacit uncovering of racial truths. Yes, race realism is both everywhere and nowhere in these books. Yes, these works will ward off any sane, openminded individual from absurd ideas such as racial egalitarianism, negrophilia, and affirmative action. Yes, these are good things, despite Theroux’s increasingly strident hopes for the contrary.

Also good in a completely different sense, however, are the literary and historical references Theroux consistently drops, mostly in Dark Star. He seemed to have studied ravenously before embarking on his travels, and if there had been a African-themed volume published in the past, fiction or non-, he made sure to read it. I found it quite enlightening how Theroux links himself to previous and current writers—and compares notes, so to speak.

Of course, being a travel writer in this instance, Theroux runs the gamut of writers from the past who had gone to Africa, starting with Herodotus. He presents the A-list of English colonial explorers, such as Francis Galton, H.M. Stanley, Samuel Baker, Richard Burton, and David Livingstone. We’re also treated to historical tidbits, such as the Italian adventurer and soldier of fortune Giuseppe Ferlini, who raided ancient sites in the Sudan in 1834, and then sold his treasure we know not where.

From the world of fiction, we get a lot of Joseph Conrad. Theroux invokes Kurtz from Heart of Darkness quite often, as he should. Mrs. Jellyby of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House also gets mentioned since Africa was the focal point of her hypocritical “telescopic philanthropy”—and reflects much of Theroux’s own cynicism regarding humanitarian aid. Theroux vents his displeasure at Ernest Hemingway for viewing Africa as little more than a place to hunt big game. In one of his happier moments, he likens himself to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as he paddles down a river on a hollow log. I also suspect the workings of a search engine, given that Theroux produces a quote on the Abyssinian Church by Vladimir Nabokov in the appendix of his four-volume translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. (I wonder how many of us have that dusty gem sitting in our libraries!) Most charmingly, Theroux reminds us of how the Sudanese to this day still take pride in a victory over the colonial British Army as commemorated in “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” a poem by Rudyard Kipling.

So ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ‘ome in the Soudan;
You’re a pore benighted ‘eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;
An’ ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ‘ayrick ‘ead of ‘air—
You big black boundin’ beggar—for you broke a British square!

With contemporary authors, however, Theroux’s literary allusions are not always so nice. He digs into V.S. Naipaul with some homespun psychoanalysis for allegedly turning on Africa in his work A Bend in the River. It seems that Naipaul had drifted into race realism and lost the faith in blacks that Theroux still held while writing Dark Star—not because Naipaul was correct according to the data, but because he was afraid and insecure. Tellingly, in rebuking Naipaul, Theroux insists that “the bush is benign.” I think he means in the Rousseauian “noble savage” sense, in that the bush is better suited for blacks since it is their native habitat, as rough and dangerous as it is. However, on the very next page, Theroux recounts how he wanted to go into the Ugandan bush, but chose not to since armed men kept appearing from it “committing acts of mayhem.”

Benign, huh? This embarrassing error should have been caught by an editor.

Equally dissatisfying is Theroux’s visit with South African author Nadine Gordimer, a friend and committed anti-white leftist for whom Theroux cannot stop issuing fulsome praise. It’s pretty amazing how people like Theroux and Gordimer cannot shake their distaste for Apartheid even while witnessing the sheer disaster that anti-Apartheid has turned out to be. Can either of them honestly say that things have turned out better—for blacks or for whites? In their fairly bland conversation, neither of them dares. Theroux dishonestly introduces Gordimer as being of “Latvian descent” only to later hint at the woman’s Jewish heritage.

Unsurprisingly, he recommends Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost and, unlike Ryan Faulk, holds it up uncritically as evidence for the horrors of colonialism. Of course, he leaves it to the reader to determine if such horrors were indeed worse than what superseded them. Regardless, in his many historical references, Theroux eagerly presents the downside to colonialism in Africa, such as when the Germans and the Portuguese enlisted thousands of black Africans to slaughter each other in the Battle of Quionga in Mozambique during the First World War. According to the Portuguese, 130,000 Africans died in the war fighting for Portugal.

By far, Theroux’s best literary reference, however, is his conjuring up of troubled, nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud—whom Theroux sees as an inspiration. As is well known, the young poet abandoned his career in France at the height of his powers to ultimately become a trader in Harar, Ethiopia. Theroux provides a brief biographical sketch of Rimbaud’s time in Africa, including the episode in which he became the first European to explore the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, as well as when he became an arms dealer for King Menelik II of the Shewa province.

Despite claiming how happy Rimbaud was in Africa, Theroux shares with us this based quote from a letter Rimbaud had written home, which I am sure all of us will enjoy:

I still get very bored. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who gets as bored as I do. It’s a very wretched life anyway, don’t you think—no family, no intellectual activity, lost among negroes who try to exploit you and make it impossible to settle business quickly. Forced to speak their gibberish, to eat their filthy food and suffer a thousand aggravations caused by their idleness, treachery, and stupidity!

And there’s something even sadder than that—it’s the fear of gradually turning into an idiot oneself, stranded as one is, far from intelligent company.

The only glaring literary omission I could find was Theroux’s failure to reference mid-twentieth century author and huntsman Robert Ruark, who also traveled widely in Africa and wrote about it. His Horn of the Hunter memoir was so popular it started an African safari craze among Americans. His 1955 novel about the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, Something of Value, was a bestseller and inspired a movie starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier. His 1962 novel Uhuru, about white farmers on the eve of Kenyan independence, is one of my all-time favorite novels. It also was a bestseller.

If Paul Theroux was able to dredge up an obscure quote about an African feast from Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, as he does in chapter six of Dark Star Safari, I think he could have spared a little ink for Robert Ruark.

Another common theme of Theroux’s African adventures must be mentioned: his vehement skepticism of international aid. In both volumes, Theroux never shies away from railing against aid, and almost without exception claims that it does more harm than good. He sneeringly refers to narcissistic white philanthropists as “agents of virtue,” dismisses their aid as “pure theater” and “photo ops with destitute children,” and points out how the urbanization of Africa has become a blight on the humanity over there. Despite my qualms with his wishy-washy treatment of racial differences, I believe he is spot on about this.

As we all know, political corruption in Africa is too rampant to expect black leaders to responsibly handle aid funds. Almost invariably, such funds line their pockets or are used to fight wars or oppress their perceived enemies—and Theroux meets quite a few of those. Theroux has contempt for black leaders in Africa—as he should—and exhibits almost as much contempt for the white donors who are stupid enough to trust them. As he points out in Last Train, Angola is rich in oil, and its leadership contains many billionaires—yet poverty is everywhere. Blacks clearly don’t care very much about other blacks. So why give them money? As Theroux asks in Last Train, “What’s the use?”

Early in Dark Star, Theroux writes:

But this was the era of charity in Africa, where the business of philanthropy was paramount, studied as closely as the coffee harvest or a hydroelectric scheme. Now a complex infrastructure was devoted to what had become ineradicable miseries: famine, displacement, poverty, illiteracy, AIDs, the ravages of war. Name an African problem and there was an agency or a charity to deal with it, but that did not mean a solution was produced. Charities and aid programs seemed to turn African problems into permanent conditions that were bigger and messier.

Here is one hilarious paragraph from Last Train which highlights the futility of humanitarianism in Africa as well as the naiveté of blockheaded whites who still believe in it:

The great irony, if not outright farce, of human rights in Angola was that one of the first prisoners of conscience selected by Amnesty International, at its founding in 1961, was Dr. Agostinho Neto, who was named “political prisoner of the year” because he’d been locked up by the Portuguese. After he was released from prison, Neto went on to become the first president of Angola, and soon he began jailing his opponents, who themselves became prisoners of conscience. So Amnesty was in the paradoxical position of appealing for justice for the victims of the very man they had successfully championed.

In Dark Star he even starts dishing ad hominems against aid workers, whom he refers to as “oafish, self-dramatizing prigs and often complete bastards.” Is he being harsh? Not when describing those in Malawi who dispense food parcels to famine victims only in exchange for sex. But this is nothing compared to his treatment of bubble-headed celebrity millionaires who use Africans to show off how enlightened they are. In Last Train he spotlights how Bono of the rock band U2 praised South African politician Julius Malema and his campaign song “Shoot the Boer,” while appearing completely ignorant of the thousands of Boer farmers who had been murdered by blacks since the fall of Apartheid. But the way in which Theroux dispenses with the high-minded yet silly behavior George Clooney, Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie is simply savage.

It goes deeper than this, though. White benefactors simply do not understand the minds and exigencies of blacks in Africa. In Dark Star, for example, Theroux describes how German philanthropists had built a series of sturdy duplexes in Ethiopia so that the people could have something better to live in than mud huts. By the time Theroux arrives, however, he finds them empty, rundown, and vandalized. A local explains that the people hated those structures because they were too tall and made it difficult for them to bring their donkeys and goats inside to protect them from hyenas.

Sadly, poor blacks are as much to blame for the failure of international aid as their kleptocratic leaders. At one point in Dark Star Theroux meets a pair of white female aid workers who were feeding malnourished children in Kenya. They called it a “wet feeding,” and it amounted to pouring vitamin-enriched porridge into a trough and supervising the children as they ate. When asked by Theroux why they couldn’t just deliver the food to the village, and one girl responds with one of the most harrowing lines in the book: “Their parents would steal it and let the kids die.”

Of course, not all aid is futile, and not all aid workers are venal creeps or deluded do-gooders. Theroux does present a few highlights, such as with one aid organization whose policy is to become quite (cough!) niggardly with its largesse whenever blacks misbehave. In Last Train, one of the most unimpeachable efforts Theroux uncovers is the HALO Trust, which had removed 68,000 landmines in war-torn Angola by the time of the book’s writing. HALO’s Our People page reveals that 100% of its top leadership is white. Racially aware whites should share this site extensively across social media whenever non-whites try to race shame them, and then ask how many landmines have non-white aid organizations removed from Africa. That a sense of volunteerism is almost completely absent among blacks when it comes to assisting their own is not lost on Theroux, and he writes about it often. If it weren’t for white people, blacks in Africa would have no aid, as well as no history, no understanding of their languages, and no restoration of their ancient sites.

One last thing to mention about international aid: Theroux clearly did his homework and brings to the table the research of number of authors, including, surprisingly enough, one Graham Hancock. In 1989, this Mr. Hancock had written a book called The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business and came to many of the same conclusions Theroux draws. And since this book seemingly was not about Egyptian Pyramids, ancient technology, or lost civilizations, I simply assumed that there was a second author named Graham Hancock running around. But no! It was the same guy before he decided to branch out into the field of alternate- (some would say pseudo-) archeology.

Despite my many issues with Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari and The Last Train to Zona Verde, these two magisterial travelogues remain crucial works for the race realist—as well as for anyone wishing to find the diaphanous line between theory and truth regarding the minds of black Africans. We have much to be grateful to Theroux for. He eschews the superficial and is no mere tourist, gawker, or safari enthusiast. He does Africa the hard way—traveling alone in dangerous places, eating repulsive food, staying in decrepit hotels, enduring public transportation, associating with sketchy individuals, asking all the right questions, and staying as close to the truth as his conscience will allow—all because he honestly cares about his subject matter. Not only this, but with Theroux’s personal history in Africa, he is exceedingly qualified to write such a travelogue. To be fair, he does meet with black Africans who are good people. And many of these are the intelligent, free thinking blacks who’ve either gone to prison for trying to make a difference in their countries, or use their intelligence to get out and come to places like America. Just about everybody Theroux meets hungers for a chance to come to America.

Despite people like this, however, Theroux seems to lose something towards the end of his journey. He’s old and he’s tired, yes. But that’s not it. He began with such abundant hope for Africa, both for its nations and its peoples. But over a decade later, after being beaten down by reality and feeling his heart break over and over, he didn’t seem to have it anymore. He began to see the futility of it all. Why bother, when it will just all be the same? The same poverty, the same corruption, the same unspeakable violence. In the parlance of today’s dissidents: It happens every single time.

At the end of The Last Train to Zona Verde, Paul Theroux cites all of the above—as well as the Islamic terrorists waiting for him in Nigeria and the civil war raging in Mali—as reasons for abandoning his journey. But I think there was an additional reason, perhaps the most persuasive one of all for a writer of his caliber: he simply got bored with Africa. He got bored.

Of course, I could put my head down and travel farther, but I knew what I would find: decaying cities, hungry crowds, predatory youths, and people abandoned by their governments, people who saw every foreigner as someone they could hit up for money, since it was apparent that only foreigners seemed to care about the welfare of Africans.