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Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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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. The older traveler knows it best: in our hearts we are youthful, and we are insulted to be treated as old men and burdens, for we have come to know that the years have made us more powerful and streetwise. If Africans can find a way to rid themselves of the entrenched dependence on handouts and the apparently complete lack of motivation that is engendered by the self-serving approach of first world Western institutionalized charities such as UNICEF, SAVE THE CHILDREN and WORLD VISION, then there is also a hope that Africans can find the political maturity and the will to develop themselves into something beyond what Theroux saw in his extended tour.

While Kenya is famous for its safaris and wild animals,and has been romantacised by the likes of Hemingway and Isak Dinesen,Theroux's impressions are very different. In Zanzibar, earlier an Arab slave trading island, Theroux tells how the missionary doles and microloans replaced mismanaged grants. The working of society was in the hands of charities, running orphanages, staffing hospitals, doing triage in the pathetic education system. Ultimately, though, what saves "Dark Star Safari" from being a long gasp of disillusion, is his meditations on aging.

As to humor: Bill Bryson (thankfully) looks for the punch line, Theroux’s humor is of the curmudgeonly sort – here, for example, pointing out the contradictory nature of the work of missionaries and aid workers. Theroux has a skeptic's instinct for deflating myths, bringing irony to an essentially romantic form.

What results is an insightful meditation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people. It made me want to go there, though not for the horror, the hot spots, the massacre-and-earthquake stories you read in the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure. Danger dogs Theroux at every turn, from armed Somali highwaymen in Kenya to land mines in Mozambique. In ''The Great Railway Bazaar,'' for instance, we board the fabled Orient Express to the sound of Theroux's cabinmate filling the chamber pot at midnight. And here is Theroux's coup de grâce: "Aid workers in rural Africa are in general, oafish selfdramatising prigs and, often, complete bastards.They were saving lives - you couldn't fault them - but in general I despaired at the very sight of aid workers, as no more than a maintenance crew on a power trip, who had turned Malawians into beggers and whiners, and development into a study in futility.

Theroux has what often appears to be an open and unapologetic contempt for many of the black Africans he meets and describes -- certainly a contempt for what they’ve made of themselves and of their societies. There's little of southern Sudan (where most of the fighting is going on) or, for example, even much mention of Eritrea (which he also by-passed) beyond some war-talk, and while it is understandable that Theroux focusses on what he does see it would have been interesting to hear more, for example, about why he avoids certain areas. They did not realize that for forty years people had been saying the same things, and the result after four decades was a lower standard of living, a higher rate of illiteracy, overpopulation, and much more disease. During the last leg of the journey (Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa), his heart doesn't really seem in it.

There were problems when Theroux first entered Africa but what he found today was more of the same but worse - more corruption, more poverty, more violence and crime, more hunger, more racism and bigotry, less education, more decrepitude, less infrastructure and, sadly, more apathy and indifference.

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