A Lament for Africa

Paul Theroux’s classic 2002 book detailing his journey across Africa entitled Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town is required reading before any trip into deepest Africa. It was a stark reminder of my own travels in Africa over more than three decades from the 80s.

The title to Theroux’s masterpiece (“Dark Star Safari”) uses the analogy of a failed star in our solar system, a “dark star”. The Egyptians maintained that a so-called brown dwarf star spins round our sun beyond the known planets, affecting all in its path. It brings disaster to whosoever or whatsoever encounters it. This was a mild analogy that Theroux used to describe “Africa”. The other part of the title (“Safari”) has nothing to do with animals. It is in fact the Swahili word for ‘journey’.  Someone ‘on safari’ is just away, unobtainable, and out of touch.

As Theroux points out, when someone from the West says they are going to Africa, friends start offering condolences. Will he ever return? And in what condition after the trip?

Theroux’s lengthy trip concluded in the manner that many before and after Theroux can verify when travelling in Africa: sick and robbed.

But going to dangerous places is also exhilarating, and offers new opportunities for development for the mind, body and soul. It’s why people travel. It releases us from the ‘triviality of everydayness’.

Africa, as Theroux observes, continues to deteriorate. It has become hungrier, poorer, less educated, more delays, and more corrupt. Anyone who has travelled there regularly over several decades can verify this.

Predators in the West are largely unseen, but they are on display everywhere in Africa. Simple rules need to be followed: don’t go out after dark, don’t carry any valuables, stay alert, don’t attract attention by looking well-dressed, walk fast.

Garbage everywhere, open drains, ragged children pleading for money or food and trying to put their hands through half-open windows, pickpockets everywhere, walls reeking with urine, unwashed people, homeless people sleeping rough, collapsing unmaintained buildings, the decrepitude and stink of crime-ridden, citified Africa. As Rimbaud wrote during his African travels, and Chatwin used as a book title: What am I doing here?

Africans have endured years of famine, bankruptcy, mass murder, terror, arbitrary imprisonment, and then life simply resumes, as before. The war is gone, people died, nothing changed. The African story is a lesson for the West, and the coming economic collapse.

Africans have one quality largely absent in the West: patience. Theroux observed that sometimes it seems as though Africa is a place you go to wait. Outsiders see Africa as a ‘continent delayed’, economies in suspension, projects on hold, human rights on hold. “Soon come” is a phrase often heard, exclaimed by the uncomplaining, patient African waiting for trains, appointments, events, arrivals and so on.

But perhaps the African is in it for the long haul, a different philosophy to the West, where everything is done at an insane speed, with modern technology that will lead nowhere in the end. Theroux describes this philosophy as “Africa is going its own way at its own pace for its own reasons”. For most Africans, it is not about accumulation of wealth, it is about survival, how to get a meal, the lowest ladder on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Wherever we go however, there is little doubt that travel changes us. Travel is the encountering of the different, the new. We go away for a long period of time and return a different person, we never go entirely back. We become something new, and that is why we are here.

28 October 2022

[Book review: Paul Theroux – “Dark Star Safari: From Cairo to Cape Town”;]