It seems like I’ve been voluntarily grounded for a long time. People who are used to snooping into this column to find out where I’ve been recently have a pained, disappointed look on their faces. “It seems like you haven’t been anywhere recently,” they say. I tell them I have: I’ve been home, going around inside my own head. Quite a journey of exploration, if you come to think of it.
Last week, I was roused to make a long plane journey for the first time in months. I’m not about to talk about that journey now, but rather about what kept me company during those long hours in the air, and later, irresistibly, on the ground.
On an impulse at Jo’burg International, I bought a book I’d been meaning to read for years. Life seems to get too packed to find time to read these days. Getting on a plane becomes a good excuse to be selfish and sink into a good book without distractions — although in-flight entertainment, notably the latest video releases at the flick of a switch at eye-level in front of you, can get in the way and persuade you to numb your brain instead with inane action movies and Channel O. Sometimes even good movies.
Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari had caught my eye — showcased among all the other books by white people about Africa — African Jewellery, African Style, African Elephants, African Mythology, African Heartbeat, African Birds of Prey, African Drums, The African Miracle, African Africans … I tell you, it takes a strong stomach to walk through the list of gaudy covers and see what kind of blatant exploitation is still going on in the name of Africa, as recounted by white folks, foreign or local, specially packaged for the international traveller who has no other point of reference.
But in Paul Theroux I trust. His early novels sprang out of his experience as a young Peace Corps teacher in Malawi — perceptive, intrigued by the human condition, bawdy when necessary, cutting through the crap of racist assumptions. He went on to become one of the greatest writers of our times — dogged hard work and an unswerving bead on humanity and humanness. Plus a sense of the ridiculous. Plus rigorous research and a probing intelligence.
I was pretty sure I was going to be in good company with Dark Star Safari and I was not wrong — to such an extent that when the plane landed at my far-off destination I was annoyed that I had to stop in the middle of a chapter. I hoped, for once, that there would be the usual delay while the squabbling Africans down on the ground tried unsuccessfully to find the steps that were supposed to be wheeled over so that we could get off the aircraft, so that I could stay in my seat and carry on reading for as long as possible.
Needless to say, they got it right, for once the doors were flung open, the steps thudded against the side of the plane and I had to put off the rest of the book for snatched moments during the days that were to come and for the long flight back home again. (It’s a fat book — not an overnight thing, as Percy Sledge would have said.)
I have no way of knowing how other people have received this book — who reads it or why. It has glowing snatches of reviews on the front and back: “Marvellous,” Spectator, “Brilliant,” Independent on Sunday, “Masterful,” Sunday Times.
These superlatives help to sell the book, I suppose. But who reads it and what do they get out of it, except the expected confirmation that Africa is a basket case, a self-trashed and continually self-trashing continent of helpless, myth-fired clowns, dark-skinned people from a parallel universe with hands outstretched in supplication and suffering, begging for hand-outs?
This is indeed the Africa that comes across in Theroux’s extraordinary journey, almost entirely by land and water, from Cairo to Cape Town. It sounds like a doddle when you put it like that — Cairo to Cape Town: a walk in the park. But the wonder of Dark Star Safari is that its author spares neither himself nor the reader the harsh, informative, irritating and often beautiful experiences of the adventure. Nor its perils and the possibility that the whole thing could end in failure at any second.
Unlike all those other “Out of Africa” books staring at you from the shelves of the airport bookstore, Theroux’s meticulous account of finding ingenious ways of moving at ground level from the land of the pharaohs to the land of Mandela tells you something penetrating about the continent itself — which is to say it gives you a running account of the changing and unchanging atmosphere, the scent of history which makes people what they are, and the scent of the people themselves.
Battling to get into Sudan from Egypt is a lesson in history and current affairs at the same time. Then there is indefinable Ethiopia, the one African country which was never colonised, but where everyone nevertheless still seems to want to emigrate to America. And on into the rest of the down-at-heel continent in which we all place so much hope in, but which disappoints at every turn.
Dark Star Safari doesn’t give you a sense of hopefulness about the “Mother of all Continents”. It is humane and depressing at the same time. But it is not patronising, like all those other books about “African Beadwork” and “Rituals of the Samburu (Specially Adapted for the Tourist Trade)”.
Above all, it is real. It allowed me to share the journey — while indulging in a parallel African journey of my own.
I got out of the plane. I looked forward to finishing and digesting it. I felt like I was on the edge of something old, something new. I felt like I was falling over the edge.