Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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This, it may be argued, is itself a problem, creating a comprador class dependent on foreign patronage. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. There's little of southern Sudan (where most of the fighting is going on) or, for example, even much mention of Eritrea (which he also by-passed) beyond some war-talk, and while it is understandable that Theroux focusses on what he does see it would have been interesting to hear more, for example, about why he avoids certain areas. Having worked in some of Eastern and Southern Africa in his younger days he is in a superb position to answer that question both from his own experiences and from the comments of the people that he meets, ranging from simple, near naked, fishermen to the Prime Minister of Uganda. Theroux rides a Chinese cultural revolution era railway to Malawi, a gift to free people from South African imperialism.

Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Danger dogs Theroux at every turn, from armed Somali highwaymen in Kenya to land mines in Mozambique. It's a nation that thinks the rest of the world is obliged to support it, doesn't believe poverty exists elsewhere, and doesn't look towards the rich and politicians in its own country to help. For all his flaws, in other words, Theroux has increasing been willing to look the beast… the beast of his personal weaknesses, of his mortality, and of his love… nay, his lust for life… a love ultimately doomed by the facts of nature… directly in the eye. The whites, teachers, diplomats, and agents of virtue I met at dinner parties had pretty much the same things on their minds as their counterparts had in the 1960s.Theroux appears to think, furthermore, that the descendants of Picts are his only readers (having graduated, presumably, from woad to white Land Rovers).

Dark Star Safari is, however, a very enjoyable read, and it does present a good picture of aspects of Africa. He wanders war-torn Sudan with a guide who sleeps in the sand, looking for pyramids; watches a man feeding hyenas mouth-to-mouth outside the ancient walls of an Ethiopian city; explores the hot engine room of a ferry crossing Lake Victoria, and meets an engineer doing complex algorithms in only his underpants and earplugs. Among these were Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers, all of which appear in one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift (Penguin, 1996). In Addis Ababa he meets a founder of the Rastafarian movement who had pioneered repatriation of the African diaspora. A few pages later we are told - with no acknowledgment of the contradiction - that landmine specialists say that stories about minefields moving are a myth.But Theroux also offers a sobering, contemporary look at the social and political morass in which much of Africa is mired. Theroux has what often appears to be an open and unapologetic contempt for many of the black Africans he meets and describes -- certainly a contempt for what they’ve made of themselves and of their societies. In ''The Great Railway Bazaar,'' for instance, we board the fabled Orient Express to the sound of Theroux's cabinmate filling the chamber pot at midnight. The diminutive matriarch of a large Catholic family is the powerful center of Theroux’s engaging novel. He manages to procure a Sudanese visa,with considerable difficulty and thus begins his trip to the real Africa.

This was my first Theroux and, on finishing it, I couldn’t fully judge of the tone of a book that was written near what will likely be the end of his career, after a certain cynicism has taken root. Makerere University, where he taught in the late 1960s, is run down and hardly seems the site of such promise as when he was there. M Godding Books Ltd is an internet book business running from Wiltshire and sending books all over the world every working day. It is clear to him that these charity workers' lack of charity towards him is a déformation professionelle, the arrogance of the rich and powerful.Tanzania is a failed socialist experiment, Zimbabwe offers at least one almost liveable (if very tense) African capital and allows him to see the consequences of Mugabe's land-grabs from white farmers, while parts of Mozambique allow for true escape from almost everything. There were problems when Theroux first entered Africa but what he found today was more of the same but worse - more corruption, more poverty, more violence and crime, more hunger, more racism and bigotry, less education, more decrepitude, less infrastructure and, sadly, more apathy and indifference. He also reconnected with people he knew from his previous time in Africa, including the President of Uganda! What results is an insightful meditation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people.

But Theroux works hard not to be your average tourist -- indeed, to give the impression of not being a tourist at all, but a more classical sort of traveller, not in it for the sights but rather driven by the travel itself. At one stage he visits the school where he used to teach when young and in the Peace Corps, castigating it's demise - the loss of teachers, the stolen library books and the falling-down buildings. They did not 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, overpopulation, and much more disease. Surely the heritage of that school would seem to lie with its pupils - the people that Theroux taught in younger and perhaps more idealistic days.In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Paul Theroux's many books include Picture Palace, which won the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Pillars of Hercules, shortlisted for the 1996 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; My Other Life: A Novel, Kowloon Tong, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Fresh-air Fiend and Hotel Honolulu.