“Dark Star Safari Overland from Cairo To Cape Town”

Providing further proof, should anyone need it, that you can't go home again, Paul Theroux returns to Africa, forty years after being a Peace Corps worker in Malawi and a teacher in Uganda. Expelled from both Malawi and the Peace Corps for driving the car of a political exile from Malawi to Uganda, he was hired as a teacher at Makerere University there, leaving just as Idi Amin was coming to power. Despite the political upheavals of the 1960's, his memories of Africa during this time are good ones. Now, approaching his sixtieth birthday and wanting to escape from cell phones, answering machines, faxes, the daily newspaper, and being "put on hold," he has returned to Africa, determined to travel from Cairo to Cape Town. He believes that the continent "contain[s] many untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too," and that there is "more to Africa than misery and terror," something he aims to discover as he "wander[s] the antique hinterland."

Traveling alone and using the same sort of transportation as that used by the typical resident of each country he is visiting, Theroux makes the five thousand mile journey by taxi, cattle truck, "chicken bus," bush train, matatu, rental car, ferry, and even dugout canoe. Wanting to blend in as much as possible wherever he is, he buys clothing at secondhand stalls in public markets, carries only one small bag, and avoids the tourist destinations which give most westerners their only visions of Africa. But being a "common man" has its problems. Despite some pleasant moments and some fascinating encounters with unusual people, the trip is not one Theroux will ever repeat, and it will certainly not inspire many imitators among the readers of this book.

Theroux's trip incorporates vivid descriptions of his visit to the Sphinx ("one of the epiphanies of my traveling life") in Egypt, and whirling dervishes in Sudan; a delightful character sketch of Sister Alexandra from Ethiopia, a nun who has loved; and two Ethiopian traders, a father and son, who take Theroux to the Kenyan border, becoming so fond of him that the son bursts into tears when Theroux must decline their invitation to accompany them to Uganda. For Kenya, Theroux has no kind words, however. A cattle truck driver takes him through the bandit-infested northern area of Kenya to Marsabit, the northernmost city, and when the driver expresses surprise that there is a war in Ethiopia, Theroux regards him as an "ignorant inhabitant, traveling on a hideous road in an over-heated desert, in a neglected province of one of the most corrupt and distressed and crime-ridden countries in Africa," in contrast to "threadbare, but dignified Ethiopia."

Theroux finds Uganda, even after Idi Amin, to be a "tidier, better-governed place than Kenya," though that is really no praise: everything in Kampala has changed for the worse. Tanzania is no better: "there was only decline-simple linear decrepitude, and in some villages collapse." Upon his arrival in Lilongwe, capital ...