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Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town | 
 enlarge | Author: Paul Theroux
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $28.00
Buy Used: $3.63
You Save: $24.37 (87%)
New (5) from $12.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  67 reviews
Sales Rank: 462102
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 496
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.5
ISBN: 0618134247
Dewey Decimal Number: 916.04329
UPC: 046442134248
EAN: 9780618134243
ASIN: 0618134247
Publication Date: March 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: minor cover wear, Used - Good Default Text
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 62 more reviews...
 Get to Know Africa August 31, 2008
An amazing story of a journey from the top to bottom of Africa. Very little joy here but it sounds sadly real. An extraordinary description of apartment building with people dumping their waste onto the road, young prostitutes, and goals not met.
Engrossing ... May 5, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have always liked travelers who like traveling on a whim and who can spontaneously react to a travel urges. And, if the traveler is as erudite, well-traveled and hypercritical as Paul, then the resulting sojourn will enthrall readers with delectable prose that covers a wide spectrum of topics ranging from spiritual journeys, solitude, despair, sublime happiness, humor to socio-politics. Very few travelers seem to have some many facets.
His epic journey takes him through Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. The chapter covering his visit to the Dervishes in Omdurman and highlands of Harar are particularly noteworthy. His prose takes on a surreal quality and you won't be able to avoid the vivid imagery from flashing in your mind. Then, suddenly he survives an attack from Shifta bandits on the notoriously-named Bandit Road. Equally hilarious are his interactions with (what he calls) agents of virtues missionaries and aid-workers. One of the best interactions is with a Portuguese-speaking agent of virtue from Ohio who is serving in Mozambique and exacerbating the poor people's (already miserable) lives by making them believe that they are sinners and only the Almighty can absolve (?) them. Amidst all the challenging travel he finds time to pen his erotic novella (wonder if it is out already) while warding of kids teasing him "Muzungu Muzungu"
A couple of years ago, I had written a very critical review of Patagonia Express expressing regret over Paul's critical (bordering harsh) comments and the seemingly missing spiritual side. However, since that review I have undertaken many long & dangerous journeys myself and can relate to his experiences much better. Travel is like exploring unknown realms within the self. It is a journey into the past and also into the future whilst enjoying the present. Travel will dissolve all impurities, break the deceptive veneer and will rejuvenate your mind.
He is up amongst the best travel writers of all times. Kudos!!!
Another Paul Theroux adventure June 10, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Being in Africa was like being on a dark star."
Paul Theroux isn't a "travel writer." He is a "traveler who writes." The nature of this beast is that Theroux is totally uninhibited about discussing smells, ugly people, dirty rooms, and sad situations. He is very real in a... Paul Theroux way. Others would have a different approach to describing their travels, and adventures.
On African cities:
"Even at their best, African cities seemed to me miserable improvised anthills, attracting the poor and the desperate from the bush and turning them into thieves and devisers of cruel scams. Scamming is the survival mode in a city where tribal niceties do not apply and there are no sanctions except those of the police, a class of people who in Africa generally are little more than licensed thieves" (p. 93).
"I was in no hurry, I wasn't due anywhere, yet whenever I arrived in an African city, I wanted to leave" (p. 255).
On international aid workers:
"That was to be fairly typical of my experience with aid workers in rural Africa: they were, in general, oafish self-dramatizing prigs, and often complete bastards" (p. 146).
This is Theroux's reputation: a critical and cynical observer of people [I wonder what he really thinks!]. This book should be titled Dark Star Safari for the Thick-Skinned.
A wonderful travelogue February 13, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I read "Dark Star Safari" on a long plane ride from Asia. It was fitting because SE Asia holds a place in my life somewhat akin to Africa in Theroux's, although unlike him, I get back to Asia on a fairly regular basis.
Theroux's observations and point of view will be familiar to anyone who has lived abroad at a key time in their life and made an effort to get beyond the usual expat and tourist destinations. Like me, Theroux encounters people who have risen in their countries, with varying outcomes. He is clearly dismayed by much of what he sees and gets cranky and, at times, paternalistic. He also reflects on his crankiness and paternalism, which tends to be rare in travel writing. Still, the book is his funniest since "Kingdom by the Sea". He is at his best lampooning foreigners, esp. aid workers, evangelical missionaries and high-end tourists (not to mention Germans and Brits), all suitable targets, in my opinion. The only missionaries who come off well are the Catholic nuns--dedicated people doing difficult work in unglamorous places and clearly enjoying their independence and distance from anything resembling authority. I've known similar Catholic clergy in SE Asia. For the places in Africa I've visited, his portraits of locals and locales are dead-on. He perfectly captures the annoying "my friend, come into my shop" world of tourist Cairo, as well as the oddly depressing sunshine of Hurghada, and the many sides of life in post-apartheid South Africa.
The book is illuuminating because Theroux toured the continent on largely local transportation, with local people, and yet, can draw on the observations of acquaintances like Nadile Goldimer. Readers unused to Theroux's crankiness or his disdain for sliminess on the part of locals or foreigners will not enjoy this book, nor will fans of the NGO movement. Hard ideological partisans of the Left & Right won't like it either. Theroux is able to be blunt, as well as sentimental in his observations, because of his knowledge and affection for the place. A sightseer's travelogue this isn't. For people who truly love the adventure of a journey and those who know what it's like to live some place and know it well enough to love it, the book will be very rewarding.
Most educational travel book I've seen to date May 6, 2005
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Dark Star Safari is a journey through the REAL Africa. From Cairo to Cape Town Paul travels along the worst roads and through the toughest villages that you won't see on a tourist safari, talking with and learning from everyone he meets along the way. From that perspective this was the most educational travel book to date that I've seen.
One of the consistent observations throughout the book is that wherever Paul traveled the detriment brought to Africa by aid workers is quite clear. Aid is not helping, and it never did. It only contributes to the under-development in Africa and only serves to keep the local despots and corrupt, stagnated governments in power. In Malawi, as in the much of the rest of Africa, the NGOs (Non-governmental Organizations) and virtue activists hire away the local teachers (who only make $27 to $67 dollars a month) offering them better pay and conditions to become food distributors. Few of the villages even have teachers any more.
The author speaks with a knowledge and history of Africa that few others possess since he had lived and worked as a teacher in Africa during the 1960s. As Paul states, foreign aid workers "&didn't realize that for forty years people had been saying the same things, and the result, after four decades, was a lower standard of living, a higher rate of illiteracy, over population, and much more disease. Foreigners working for development agencies didn't stand long. So they never discovered the full extent of their failure. Africans saw them come and go."
Labor-intensive projects are extremely rare in Africa because of self-serving foreign "aid" that require "purchases of machinery have to be made in the donor country, or that bids be restricted to firms in the donor country, or that a time limit be placed on the scheme which encourages the tendency towards large contracts and heavy spending on equipment." Paul also verifies what I had first read about in Jim Roger's Adventure Capitalist. All of the used clothing donated to churches to be distributed to "poor Africa" becomes merchandise the second the cargo ship leaves the port. When it reaches its destination it's purchased in large blocks by merchants who resell them. The author picks up some "new" clothes himself in order to avoid looking like a tourist. His T-shirt read "Top-Notch Plumbing". Of course, all this "good-well aid" does nothing but to hurt Africa's economy. There was a time, not too long ago, when some of the best tailors in the world were in Africa. But how can you be a tailor when the West sends clothes over for practically free? Why be a farmer when the West wants to feed you for free? What's the best industry in Kenya? Coffins. Coffin-making is a booming industry. In one area of Malawi the people are growing their own Maize crops but are using hybrid seeds resulting in big plants but sterile seeds. The farmers can't set aside plants as seed corn because they are all sterile! As Theroux says, "Without free seeds each year these people would starve."
What angers me the most though is what I have seen verified in other reports, namely aid workers "were no more than a maintenance crew on a power trip". Other than a Nun or two who had moved to Africa on their own accord, none of the aid workers, in other words the NGO aid workers, were happy to be there or in the slightest bit helpful to the author. They're all too busy driving around in their air-conditioned Land Rovers to get out and actually help people.
The happiest and most self-sufficient villages that Theroux encountered were, in a very consistent pattern, all out-of-the-way such that the government and aid workers ignored then and didn't mess with them.
There is much more to the book though than state of Africa's corruption. The author's adventures are incredible. It's incredible that he actually lived to tell the tale actually. If you want a romantic story of big-game hunters in Africa, ready Hemingway. If you want reality, read Theroux.
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