Books on my nightstand: I

I’m about two-thirds through Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, by Paul Theroux. It’s a thought-provoking travelogue by a prolific writer who’s put off returning to Africa for 30+ years, when he was a Peace Corps volunteer and then a university instructor in East Africa. As he sees it, the Africa he returns to is more cynical, disease-ridden, chaotic, tree-less, and barely hanging on, compared to what he remembers in the hope-filled days of new independence, but it still holds an almost mystical magic for him. His run-ins and observations of the do-gooders in the aid community are particularly interesting to me.

He is bitterly critical of those well-funded aid workers who keep their distance from what’s going on through their shiny white Land Rovers with signage of their international organizations blazoned on their sides. He points out that with so much money poured into African economies through various grandiose programs, why haven’t the Africans (in places like Malawi and Zambia) stepped in and taken matters into their own hands to sustain the projects? Where is the positive benefit from all these programs and funds? Would it be better in the long-term if they just leave? It seemed that almost every aid worker refused to give Mr. Theroux a ride in their comfortable vehicles – even when he most desperately needed it – so his disdain toward them and their detached form of charity only increases.

He records many social and cultural observations that resemble what we’re seeing, from the double-edged sword of the tourism industry to markets flooded with well-intentioned second-hand clothing that was meant as a donation to the needy but ended up in a trader’s hands, for sale in piles at local markets (this is the clothing he chose to wear on the trip to stay inconspicuous).

His reunions with old friends and colleagues from his time in Africa in the 1960’s, as well as with other sincere Africans he randomly meets, are the most heartening. These encounters are the most authentic, sometimes humorous, and also, tragic. They seem to tell the flip-side of the African story. The one where the hope lies.