Paul Theroux knows Africa well. He spent six years teaching there in the
1960s and has since travelled extensively across the length of the continent.
Several of his best selling books through the decades were based on or inspired
by his African experience. `The Last Train to Zona Verde:
Overland from Cape Town to Angola` (ISBN
978-0-241-14367-4 Hamish Hamilton h/b © Paul Theroux 2013) is his latest and may
well be his last in the classic travel literature genre as far as Africa is
concerned. It is best described as a lament for a place that he had come to
love and feel at home in, now turned into a `futureless, dystopian,
world-gone-wrong, Mad Max Africa of child soldiers, street gangs,
reeking slums, refuse heaps, utter despair`! But how did he come to that
conclusion?
As he explains, ten years previously, at the dawn of the 21st century, he
had travelled `overland from Cairo to Cape Town down the right-hand side of
Africa` by road and rail, the result of which was his Dark Star Safari
(2002). So this time, `liking the symmetry of the enterprise`, he wanted to
continue from Cape Town and `travel north in a new direction, up the left-hand
side until ... the end of the line`! Even at the outset though he had some
misgivings: `Africa had changed`, and so had he. He had kept reading about
troubles further up in Niger and Chad and in Nigeria. `So I left on this trip
with a sense of foreboding`, because a man of his age, travelling alone in
Africa, dressed in faded clothes and with minimal cheap luggage was `an easy
mark`, vulnerable. Everything pointed to it as a farewell trip. Inevitably
therefore, along the way he was to notice and reflect on the changes that have
happened in the last few years, mostly for the worse, and to question his own
motivation and value judgments. The most overwhelming sentiment that he
wrestled with all through the trip was `What Am I Doing Here`?
More about that later but let`s start at the beginning. He recalls that ten years previously, a mixed-race clerk at Cape Town`s central station had refused to
sell him a ticket to Khayletisha, a notorious African township, telling him not
to go to a squatter camp because he would get robbed or worse - (the incident is described in graphic
detail in Dark Star Safari)! This time, he
takes a taxi to the surrounding shantytowns, reproaching himself that in doing
so he was no different from the many American and European visitors for whom
`slum tourism` has become a fashionable feature of their South African safaris:
gaping at the substandard dwellings of the natives, `unfit for human
habitations` in overcrowded, `dirty, disorderly and crime-ridden` streets – even
more so now than `in the days of apartheid`- and sampling the local cuisine and
beer in the many shebeens and gourmet restaurants that had sprung up in the
notorious township of Guguletu to cater for them, as also for `Cape Town foodies
... not just for the meal but [also] for the novelty of the filth and menace of
their surroundings`!
At the end of the day`s wanderings however he
insists on taking a train back to Cape Town from Khayletisha. His driver/guide reluctantly agrees, thinking that it will be safe as he is
heading back to the city centre against the flow of the rush hour traffic in the
opposite direction, and so it turns out, just about. He ruminates on the transition to majority rule and the ensuing transformation that has taken place in the country, but to him post-apartheid South Africa is a disappointment,
largely because of its continuing socio-economic inequalities along the old racial fault-lines.
From Cape Town, then, he starts on his journey proper, by taking `The Night
Bus to Windhoek`, on a one-way ticket, covering a distance of nearly a thousand
kilometres. It was `a leap in the dark, northerly, in the direction of the
Congo`, with a motley collection of fellow travellers, representing the `whole
colour spectrum, of South African racial identities ... black, Indian, Cape
Malay, "colored", Chinese and some beefy Boers, all of us headed to Springbok
and the border, and perhaps across it`. Along the way, he muses over all that
he sees and the people he interacts with, and the book is peppered with
descriptions, conversations and critiques in the Theroux/Naipaul
travelogue tradition - indeed there are strong resonances
with Naipaul`s The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of
African Belief (see My review of 2012, entry no. 13 under Books, below). He crosses the border into Namibia, on foot: `There`s an
equality in pedestrian border crossings ... no first class, no fast lane, no
preferential treatment`.
He finds Windhoek to be a delightful, civilised, uncrowded city in the
German mode (with wide streets, orderly traffic, neat houses) and Namibia a vast country as a whole with a sparse population and a pleasant environment. He
likes the rugged landscape and the laid-back lifestyle of its varied people. He
feels least troubled here. But things turn ugly when he reaches Angola at what
he calls `The Frontier of Bad Karma`!
His guides had been full of warnings but had assured him that if he
followed their advice, he would get over the border without a problem. If the
formal requirements for a foreigner to enter Angola were strict, the actual
entry was far worse: rough, undignified, humiliating. As an old man on foot
with minimal luggage, he was `treated with the casual abuse reserved for the
contemptible souls who walked across the remote border`, shoved by the crowd
around him and shouted at brusquely by the immigration official who kept him
waiting for hours, so different from the more seasoned and valued travellers
(diplomats, businessmen, oil company executives) who would `breeze through the
international airport on the red carpet and praised the country`s manners and
modernity`.
From the border, then, it was really a series of hair-raising rides and
near misses from disaster of one kind or another. He had to entrust his life
and limb to men like Camillo, who drove with drunken rage and recklessness along
unmade roads. `The look of Angola was not just the ugly little town[s] and the
slum[s] of shacks but also the ruin of landscape, of the stumps of deforestation
and the fields littered with burned-out tanks, of rivers and streams that seemed
poisoned, black and toxic .....(a)nd not the slightest glimpse of any animal but
a cow or a cringing dog`. The old land mines from the decades-long civil war
had wiped out even the remaining wild life not eaten up by starving
people!
Ever since setting out from Cape Town, he had been nagged by a morbid
thought that he `might not return, not just to Cape Town, but home; that I was
setting off to suffer and die`! This feeling deepened as he struggled along.
`In a life of travel, I had been in awful places and taken foolish risks, and I
had survived ... as the Fortunate Traveler` but he feared that at some point
his luck would run out! On this trip, there was just a steady accumulation of
bad karma, even though he did have some positive encounters, as with
Akisha Pearman, an American expatriate teacher of English who had been living on
her own in Luanda for two years, and another American, `Nancy Gottlieb, who had
lived in Angola, mostly in Benguela, for seventeen years, and ... (o)ne of
[whose] several projects was running an English language school`. These and
other dedicated people did try to make a contribution to the betterment of the
local people, but to Theroux it all seemed futile in the face of everything, of
overwhelming odds, of a culture of want and neglect.
All through his journey across Angola, Theroux is conscious of the
chequered history of the country: its past of slavery and the forced labour
regime that replaced it under Portuguese colonialism, the civil war that
followed; and the continuum of economic exploitation, the rise of a ruling elite
and the dire state of the country`s dispossessed and its failing infrastructure
fuelled by rampant corruption and misappropriation and the siphoning off of the
`oil, diamond and gold` revenues. The country`s wealth was being squandered,
while the ordinary folk eked out a starvation level existence. In his most
damning indictment of African dictators, he likens Angola`s Jose dos Santos to
`(t)he murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of
a fruit fly, with his decades in power, along with his vain, flitting shopaholic
wife, his hangers–on, and his goon squad`, a la Robert Mugabe!
Rolling north along the coast towards Luanda, he observes that while `as a
fleeting bird of passage`, he had `nothing to complain about`, he could not but
be struck by `the misery of Africa, the awful, poisoned, populous Africa; the
Africa of cheated, despised, unaccommodated people, of seemingly unfixable
blight: so hideous ... the new Africa`! The book is replete with passages like
this, based on personal observation and study of books, academic literature and
other documented material. He also noted the increasing Chinese presence at all
levels of the economy, even `Chinese children with Angolan nationality`!
In Luanda, then, he takes a reality check. Enough is enough. `In Cape
Town at the start of my journey ... I had dreamt of ending it in Timbuktu. I
was headed in that general direction. I had traced a provisional itinerary on
my Africa map that led me northerly, zigzagging from Cape Town to Angola, and
(somehow) from there, via the Congo and Gabon and Cameroon, through Nigeria and
onward to the fabled city in Mali`. What lay before him however was a
relentless string of West African shantytowns where the locals lived `the dog`s
life, where gardening was impossible, water was scarce and fuel – firewood or
charcoal – usually unavailable` and where they `muddled through by menial jobs,
casual labour or whoring or handouts, or crime ... so bereft of hope`!
So he asks himself: `Why would I wish to travel through blight and disorder
only to report on the same ugliness and misery?`. In pondering this, he does
acknowledge that the `blight is not peculiar to Africa`. While `Luanda ... and
Cape Town and Jo`burg and Nairobi` may `greatly resemble, in their desperation,
their counterparts in the rest of the world`, he did not want to get drawn into
thinking about those other places in the midst of the hell-hole he was in. He
had `spent a life of travel sleeping in strange beds and dining on sinister
food` and `only mildly objected`, because it is in the nature of travel to be
uncomfortable`. But he did object to insult. `You can stay at home and be
insulted; you don`t need to go ten thousand miles to be jeered at ... yelled at,
heckled, cursed, or pestered, as began to happen with greater frequency on my
trip`. It was undignified, even though the `pushing and being shoved and biffed
by impatient oafs (was) not the worst of it`. He found it increasingly
distasteful to have to fight both his way in and out of and to travel for hours
on end in miserable buses, `with piss stops and children with the squitters and
chickens dying in baskets and shouting passengers` being driven by inept
drivers. `Like the single woman ... the weak-looking or undersized stranger,
the loner or wanderer at night` he too, as an older traveller, was prey to being
bullied or fleeced. He did not feel safe and wondered `What am I doing
here?`.
But ever so mindful of balance and fairness, he reminds himself that he was
often asked: `You didn`t see the wealthy areas ... the great houses!`. But he
did. He `peeped through the perimeter walls and saw the sentry boxes, the
private clubs and the gated communities` and was even `welcomed in some of these
... tiny enclaves, mere precious islands in a sea of wreckage`!
For half a century, he had travelled the world and been in the unlikeliest
of places and survived all kinds of near disasters. But Africa had defeated
him. Perhaps it was the notion of travel itself. But it was more than that.
He was conscious of time wasting, the clock ticking insistently, of `travel as
deja vu`. Maybe that was the conundrum: he was after `something new, something
different, something changed, something wonderful, something weird!`. Not even the temptation to board `the brand-new Chinese-made train ... that
could bear me in relative comfort east .. 265 miles into zona verde –
the green zone of Angola`s bush` would do for a lifelong rail enthusiast
like himself. `Not this time`.
He had found the answer to `What am I doing here?`: leave. And so
Theroux cuts short his planned northward jaunt across to the Sahara. African
poverty had often reminded him of what lay in his own country`s backyard: `the
poor in America, living in just the same way, precariously, on the red roads of
the Deep South, on low farms, poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills –
people I knew only from books, as I`d first known Africans – and I felt beckoned
home`!
RAMNIK SHAH
©2013
Surrey, England
