Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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But his image of Africa as a "dark star" waiting to swallow up the Western traveler is a 19th-century holdover - albeit one he tries to cure by reading "Heart of Darkness" 12 times on his trip from Cairo to Cape Town. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back. Knowing her work is useless, that in the era of AIDS, she cannot stem the tide of patients, she still continues, without complaint. He seems (albeit in his wholly curmudgeonly way) to be motivated not by race-hatred, but more by an absence of white guilt – quite a different thing. His encounters with the natives, aid workers and occasional tourists make for rollicking entertainment, even as they offer a sobering look at the social and political chaos in which much of Africa finds itself.

Travelling across bush and desert, down rivers and across lakes, and through country after country, he visits some of the most beautiful and dangerous landscapes on earth. Lastly the Author mentioned how Africa has became a welfare Continent enabled by NGO’s dependent — insisting upon reinforcing dependency reinforced by romantic notions of “Out of Africa” , clueless Safari visitors and short term hands off Diplomats. On the way back he learns V S Naipaul had won the Nobel prize for his fiction and travel literature. in 2002) that Theroux is someone who seems to have grown, and to have grown better and deeper, and more urgent…, which is not often the case with men (women, perhaps, are different), who are more frequently diminished by success and by aging.

This is not a sanitised view of Africa or a hatchet job, this is writing from an author who clearly loves the continent and its people but who is horrified by how far life has regressed for the ordinary people since he first lived there.

He, also journeys on boats of variable size – from old boats left over from colonial days to canoes. DARK STAR SAFARI is not a travel guide or, for that matter, a travel journal of the form that many potential readers might expect. Among these were Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers, all of which appear in one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift (Penguin, 1996).

Theroux's] witty observations and obvious love and curiosity for Africa should help make this entertaining epic a yardstick for future travel writing.

Indeed, Kenya strikes him as ''a country that seemed terminally ill,'' and Mozambique has ''the haunted look of a desperate distant future, an intimation of how the world would end. Can he live a life so removed from the world that he has completely missed the international campaign against antipersonnel mines, a campaign that has produced acres of reportage and dozens of books and which culminated in the Landmine Ban Treaty of 1998, the best-known piece of international legislation of recent times?

It's obvious to him, wherever he goes, that it's done little good, except in promoting reliance on outside help rather than trying to help (or force) the Africans to become self-reliant. A genuinely unbiased book which gives a very fair and balanced view and without belittling others, just the facts. 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. Paul Theroux's books include Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Travel and The Lower River. In Zanzibar, earlier an Arab slave trading island, Theroux tells how the missionary doles and microloans replaced mismanaged grants.

This exceeds even Eritrean government rhetoric; the war, which left tens of thousands dead and no discernible gain for either side, was a disaster for both countries. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. That seems to be the strategy for Theroux's extended "experience of vanishing" into the African continent, where disparate incidents reveal Theroux as well as the people he meets. An Ethiopian, once a political prisoner, recounts how in his cell he translated ''Gone With the Wind'' on tiny sheets of cigarette-pack foil -- 3,000 in all -- and later published the translation.Mostly, however, this book is an intelligent, funny, and frankly sentimental account by a young-at-heart idealist who is trying to make sense of the painful disparity between what Africa is and what he once hoped it might become. In some African countries it is international aid agencies that provide the most consistent source of employment. The dangers of road travel are also amusingly recounted, with Theroux frequently mentioning the newspaper headlines of yet another senseless mass-death in some overcrowded vehicle (and occasionally, as he careens down some road or considers whether or not to risk life and limb on a bus again, he pictures himself figuring in such a headline too).