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
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