Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town [Hardcover]

Paul Theroux (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2003

In the travel-writing tradition that made Paul Theroux’s reputation, Dark Star Safari is a rich and insightful book whose itinerary is Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town: down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda, and ultimately to the tip of South Africa. Going by train, dugout canoe, “chicken bus,” and cattle truck, Theroux passes through some of the most beautiful — and often life-threatening — landscapes on earth.
This is travel as discovery and also, in part, a sentimental journey. Almost forty years ago, Theroux first went to Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush. Now he stops at his old school, sees former students, revisits his African friends. He finds astonishing, devastating changes wherever he goes. “Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it,” he writes, “hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can’t tell the politicians from the witch doctors. Not that Africa is one place. It is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. I got sick, I got stranded, but I was never bored. In fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation.” Seeing firsthand what is happening across Africa, Theroux is as obsessively curious and wittily observant as always, and his readers will find themselves on an epic and enlightening journey. Dark Star Safari is one of his bravest and best books.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"You'll have a terrible time," one diplomat tells Theroux upon discovering the prolific writer's plans to hitch a ride hundreds of miles along a desolate road to Nairobi instead of taking a plane. "You'll have some great stuff for your book." 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. At times, he goes out of his way to satisfy some perverse curmudgeonly desire to pick theological disputes with Christian missionaries. But 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. Theroux occasionally strays into theorizing about the underlying causes for the conditions he finds, but his cogent insights are well integrated. He doesn't shy away from the literary aspects of his tale, either, frequently invoking Conrad and Rimbaud, and dropping in at the homes of Naguib Mahfouz and Nadine Gordimer at the beginning and end of his trip. He also returns to many of the places where he lived and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer and teacher in the 1960s, locations that have cropped up in earlier novels. These visits fuel the book's ongoing obsession with his approaching 60th birthday and his insistence that he isn't old yet. As a travel guide, Theroux can both rankle and beguile, but after reading this marvelous report, readers will probably agree with the priest who observes, "Wonderful people. Terrible government. The African story."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Theroux groans his way through Africa; the first single trip since The Pillars of Hercules.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618134247
• ISBN-13: 978-0618134243
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #615,081 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Theroux's highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a hard, smart trip, March 17, 2003

By 

Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Hardcover)

To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke, anyone who think it's one world haven't had to use a foreign bathroom recently. It's that same spirit that I like about Paul Theroux: he hitchhikes, he paddles, he takes the train, he hangs off the side of a bus, he goes to all sorts of rare places and tells us exactly what they are like. In "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town," he returns to Africa for the first time since leaving in the late 1960s, and his journey is as riveting and his reportage as merciless as any writing he has done.

Paul Theroux was in the Peace Corps in Africa in the early 1960s until he was ejected from the Corps for giving a member of an opposition political party a ride to neighboring Uganda. That same friend--who later became Malawi's ambassador to the United Nations--got Theroux a job at the college where he had become headmaster. Theroux stayed there as a professor until leaving Africa in the late '60's.

Having left so much of Africa hopefully poised for independence and rebirth, he returns to travel through one ravaged kleptocracy after the next; countries where the most common greeting to foreigners has become "give me money." And why shouldn't they expect another handout? Aid programs abound, pouring billions of dollars, or francs, or marks into countries where the people seem unable to lift a finger to help themselves. Everything, everywhere, is filthy. Foreign doctors work in hospitals for low salaries that African doctors refuse to accept. Theroux is approaching 60 years old on this trip, a milestone that so few Africans reach that many people cannot conceive of the number being connected with age. What happened here?

The saddest chapter in "Dark Star Safari" is when he visits the college where he taught in Malawi. Once a beautiful place that educated many of the country's shining lights, it is now broken-down and filthy. The books in the library that was once a pride of the nation have been stolen or torn apart. The old students Theroux meets admit that it a tragedy, but none of them have done anything to change it.

And that is his revelation on this trip--only Africans can help Africa. Why they are not is fodder for another book altogether.

This book is hard-hitting good reading. And as always with Theroux, you will find yourself hitchhiking and hanging off the side of the bus in his excellent, tough-minded company.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Theroux isn't politically correct but he knows Africa, April 10, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Hardcover)

It may be hard for readers today to understand the Africa of hope and promise that Paul Therous knew in the 1960s and the Africa he finds so painfully unadvanced today. I lived in Africa in that period, and to me, this is not a "dismal" book but one that is clear eyed and realistic about what Africa is and isn't today. It is written by someone who loves not the fancy life of an expat but the ordinary life of small African towns and rural countryside, who knows how to travel in a lowkey way through obscure places, for which I truly admire him. I know some of the areas he describes and he has the detail and the nuance just right. I found it hard to put down, for the adventure and description but also for reflections on times past and present. He's an odd duck in many ways, but to do what he does, travelling for weeks by yourself in order to fit into the background of the story, you would have to be. A really good book.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A large look at a huge continent, March 8, 2003

By 

Bonnie - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Hardcover)

"All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there . . " Most of us will never have the opportunity to start at the top of an immense continent such as Africa and make our way to the other end, chatting with everyone we meet and recording our impressions along the way, interwoven with a vast knowledge of local history and literary references. We are lucky to have Theroux do it for us. Approaching his sixtieth birthday, he still prefers to travel close to the ground, engaging those around him in both light banter and discussions of tough issues - in this case, whether or not government policies have brought about any progress since he was last there as a teacher in the Peace Corps in the 1960's.

Dark Star Safari begins in Cairo, but really takes off when he leaves the city behind and roams from town to town describing the sights, the pleasures and hazards of travel and forming his own opinions about such topics as subsistence farming and international aid efforts. Those unfamiliar with Theroux's writing should know that it is these personal reactions and the immediacy of his narrative that provide the pleasure in reading one of his books. He speaks some of the local language and makes himself comfortable in a broad variety of settings.

If you are seeking an in-depth look at the political scene to the exclusion of everything else, then Dark Star Safari might not be the book for you. It covers a lot of ground fast (if 500 pages can be said to be fast), yet provides enough lingering looks at such a variety of residents and lifestyles that you feel as though you know a lot more about Africa than when you started.