Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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Dark Star Safari In his first new travel book in eight years, the endearingly irascible Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry and train. This was my first Theroux and, on finishing it, I couldn’t fully judge of the tone of a book that was written near what will likely be the end of his career, after a certain cynicism has taken root. Indian merchants who had come in the days of the British empire were driven away after independence. Danger dogs Theroux at every turn, from armed Somali highwaymen in Kenya to land mines in Mozambique.

In Addis Ababa he meets a founder of the Rastafarian movement who had pioneered repatriation of the African diaspora.

I do strongly agree with this statement: Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. I can admit that the book has some insightful or well written passages, but in general I think it's another white person thinking he's got Africa down. He cites books like The Lords of Poverty and The Road to Hell, as well the opinions of many Africans (black and white) who confirm this bias (he may be right in this; I’m in no position to judge).

Also everywhere are the aid workers, many affiliated with religious groups, and Theroux has his fun with the proselytisers. Note: Simon although bitched about his African ventured was bitter after arriving by freighter in South America. I know and have traveled in Africa, so I can proclaim with admiration that Theroux, the disheveled, often grumpy, sometimes euphoric sojourner who shares his latest adventures in Dark Star Safari, is an intrepid traveler worthy of the reputation that precedes him.Oh, right, he does get shot at, but even that doesn't sound quite as horrific as it probably should. Aid workers are ''oafish self-dramatizing prigs'' who ''turn African problems into permanent conditions. A common thread across almost all of Africa is the many people he meets who have spent much of their lives in jail under oppressive regimes.

It is currently my bed-time book and it has been total pleasure to have what feels like a chin-wag with this interesting man, who is opening my eyes in such a well written way. He describes Africa as another planet, where, like the literary ancestor he claims in Arthur Rimbaud, he can vanish without a trace. Theroux's peevish passages on aid set the tone of Dark Star Safari, but they are not its main drift. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.In some African countries it is international aid agencies that provide the most consistent source of employment. Secondly, and probably more importantly, while Theroux was his usual pessimistic, fault finding, negative self, he was being far more accurate with his assessment of Africa. In addition Ted Simon wrote Jupiter Travels of his sponsored BSA (Triump) motorcycle trip through Africa in the ‘70s same route that Dark Star took -with the repair challenges and navigation of the route without the civil war. Makerere University, where he taught in the late 1960s, is run down and hardly seems the site of such promise as when he was there.

By bidding on, or purchasing this item, you are agreeing to us sharing your name and address details with that 3rd party supplier to allow us to fulfil our contractual obligations to you. Paul does not just report on what he sees but he is always asking the question 'why' which is one of the key aspects of any good travel writing. At one stage he visits the school where he used to teach when young and in the Peace Corps, castigating it's demise - the loss of teachers, the stolen library books and the falling-down buildings. Calendar arrived safely in plastic-free packaging - which I've not seen before with a calendar, so kudos for that. Ruinous because of the effects of colonialization; because of the effects of freedom, and corruption, and the profound and dire incompetence of the Africans themselves; because of the AID agencies who build Dams and projects that no one will ever use, instead of helping the Africans thatch their roofs; because of the stupidity both of modernity AND of those who will not be so easily modernized.

This, it may be argued, is itself a problem, creating a comprador class dependent on foreign patronage. In Zanzibar, earlier Arab slave trading island, Theroux says missionary doles and micro loans replaced mismanaged grants. This passage manages simultaneously to patronise Ethiopians, insult Picts and get the date of the introduction of animal husbandry and wheeled transport to Europe wrong by several millennia. Additional recordings at Punkt Studio Kristiansand, The Green Room and home-studios in Oslo and Berlin during Spring/Summer 2018.