First timers in Africa – even those ordinarily impatient with words and books - can be forgiven for hoping to spin out an interesting yarn or two from their travels. But such aspirations are unlikely to find encouragement from “Dark Star Safari” (2002), the fruit of Paul Theroux’s laborious journey across the Dark Continent (“from Cairo to Cape Town” goes the blurb). While the author specifically trains his guns on safari tourists, business visitors – in which category I found myself on my maiden African voyage - are, I’m certain, still less worthy of his regard.
The “traveller” on the other hand – at least of the sort that might meet with the Mr. Theroux’s approval – is a paragon of peregrinatory virtue that combines literary flair, cultural sensibility and intellectual prowess with an unlikely appetite for daredevilry. A Superman flitting about the globe with his tortoise shells firmly in place.
But even such a worthy would need more than the few hours I’d snatched from a conference, to make sense of our least understood continent and, truth be told, my credentials for the task are dodgy even if I were temporally unconstrained.
What follows, therefore, is the distillate of a lazy afternoon ride – in Nairobi’s historic Stanley Hotel and over a few bottles of Tusker - on the shoulders of men who’d told their African tales in the years since the bowels of the continent woke up to the mzungu’s torch.
The Horror, the horror!
The horror of that awakening was, perhaps, most tellingly documented in The Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad, that extraordinary Pole who picked up English – his third language – only in his twenties. Conrad realized his dream of exploring the Congo in 1889, not long after Henry Morton Stanley, whose pioneering exploits in the region inspired the writer to create Kurtz, the demoniacal anti-hero of his novel. The brooding symbolism that flows through the book is best represented by the title itself – yielding varying but equally compelling allusions to the inscrutability of the African heart and the darkness of the white man’s assaults on it.
Conrad has been criticized – most famously by Chinua Achebe – for depersonalizing Africans and magnifying their strangeness. Achebe, in turn, could be accused of taking political correctness to a particularly thin-skinned extreme but even he concedes that the novel is “penetrating and full of insight”. Just how much can be gauged from the fact that a transposition of its plot yielded one of the most acclaimed films of all time - Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s take on the Vietnam War.
Nevertheless, the emotional leap from guilt to empathy eluded Conrad. His narrative is a white man’s lens on the white man’s soul. The suffering black hide is little more than a metaphorical receptacle of all that is not pristine in the Christian character. It might as well be that of a beast but for a remote sense of kinship, the recognition of which is tainted by a deep rumbling of disturbance.
Never the Twain shall meet
Hopes that half a century of cultural and mercenary exchange might yield a better-rounded portrait of the native met with disappointment Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935).
The Africans’ fate in this tasteless hunting memoir is even worse than that of the Kudus and Elands mowed down by the author’s shikar party – for they hardly merit any attention at all. Hemingway chronicles one laborious hunt after another, with the only relief coming in the form of literary declamations handed down from his bully pulpit. So we learn about his high regard for Mark Twain - Huckleberry Fin in particular, calling it “the best book we've had”.
His flattery clearly stopped short of imitation, however – Green Hills..was written in the mid-30s, rife with the sort of racial tensions that Twain made excellent material of, in his antebellum southern epic. But Hemingway is too drunk on ungulate blood to notice. His other African book – The Snows of Kilimanjaro – similarly deems the continent unfit for social commentary.
Such cultural condescension is not exactly typical of the author. Novels such as A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises are sometimes tiresomely lyrical about the places they inhabit. Sample this from Death in the Afternoon – “Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor”. The American protagonist in For Whom the Bell Tolls falls for a Spanish woman. None of the white (what else?) heroes in his African novels are in the remotest danger of being similarly seduced by Shebas or Cleopatras.
Hemingway ends up caricaturing himself as the prototypical safari tourist who has since exchanged his gun for a Canon. Fly into Nairobi, transit to Wilson airport and hop into a little Beechcraft that will fly you right into the heart of the Mara. Bond with the big 5 and, in the evening, allow some South African wine to work away your inhibitions until that dorky tribal dance starts to look like fun. But try to shake your ungainly legs to the complex syncopation of African rhythms, and you’ll find that you’re hopelessly out of step –and that the Merlot is not entirely to blame…
The view from the other side
Naipaul digs a little deeper, geographically and psychologically, in A Bend in the River (1979). The Congolese backdrop is essentially loaned from Conrad but the journey couldn’t be more different, even if one makes concessions for the hundred odd years between the two works. For one, it starts from the eastern edge of the continent as opposed to Conrad’s journey upriver from the South Atlantic. For another, it features the distinctly oriental pair of eyes of an Indian protagonist – Salim - who is aware that Indian trading relationships and Arabic religious influence in Africa far predate the continent’s descent upon western consciousness.
This is not necessarily a logical viewpoint for Naipaul – mindful of his alien roots but essentially a Westerner trapped in brown skin. Nevertheless, the font of dislocation, which supplies many of his novels, provides a particularly heady brew in this case.
The book barely lives up to its “fiction” tag - the storyline is humored just enough to accommodate a bunch of stereotypes through which Mobutu’s morbid misrule of the Congo can be documented. Thus we have an Indian trader, a Western confidante, a tribal bumpkin who is absorbed by the post-colonial power vacuum and, of course, “Big Man” himself.
Laxity in plotting is overcome by attention to characterization - the natives finally emerge from the cutouts they hitherto inhabited even though Naipaul’s admixture of flesh and blood yields a rather Frankensteinian outcome. Apart from the menacing shadow of Mobutu, there’s Ferdinand, who symbolizes the upwardly mobile African – that tiny intersection of military, demographic and tribal interests that sits at the apex of the post-Colonial power pyramid.
Africa finally asserts itself but the book does not exactly celebrate the event. Salim eventually flees, tormented by the dark, impenetrable channels from the bosom of civilization, discharging their pagan load into the great river. Conrad’s yet to make peace with his ghosts.
One World
A journey from Cairo to Cape Town – discursive as it might sound – can yet comfortably bypass the Congo. Theroux does undertake the odd river journey and that’s cheating, really - the cover promises an “overland” trip. But considering that the defaulting stretches contribute a mere 100 KM to his odyssey, it would seem petty to complain.
Besides, Dark Star Safari offers much else to take aim at. There is, to start with, an all-pervading superciliousness about which my plaint has already been registered. And an undercurrent of rage that is not quite sure what it’s after – a motif that is probably unintended, yet very apt as far as Africa is concerned.
Theroux rounds up, among others tourists, politicians, missionaries, NGOs and aid workers. The last group attracts the shrillest tones (“oafish, self-dramatizing prigs and, often, complete bastards”). Never been an aid-worker and have only met a few – but I can’t help feeling that Paulie was being a little…errr….uncharitable?
And while Oxfam and the UNHCR may ferry their employees in swanky SUVs, Theroux is not above the odd brush with luxury himself. Indeed, the cynic cannot help wondering whether the rides in dilapidated trains and the traverses across terror-infested border were carefully selected to give the impression of a more adventurous journey than the one that may actually have been undertaken. Theroux hobnobs with the likes of Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer and the Prime Minister of Uganda and lets slip details about dalliances with luxurious jungle resorts (Mala Mala) and train rides (Premiere class on the Trans-Karoo Express). Harmless enough, except that all his tirades against the little pleasures granted to aid workers, struggling in a depressing environment, brings to mind something about pots and kettles.
But beyond the hypocrisy and churlishness, this is a book that tries hard to understand the Africa beyond the pyramids, pygmies and pachyderms (is that any worse than Cairo to Cape Town?). Theroux is a seeker like his friend-turned-foe (and I understand recently-turned-friend-again) Naipaul, but while latter buries his fear and incomprehension in the obfuscatory possibilities of the fictional narrative, Dark Star Safari has to bear the cross of no-nonsense documentation and interpretation. Here, Theroux is well served by his literary arsenal – invoking Rimbaud’s memoirs on Ethiopia while travelling in that country, for example. At the same time, he has enough concrete at hand to slap on ivory towers that might spring from his erudition - a battery of interviews, the plebian, sometimes reckless, travel arrangements and an aggressive collaring of opportunities that hold the allure of authenticity. And for someone who has succumbed to the charms of a trans-African voyage, Theroux does well to avoid romanticizing the desperation he sees around him. After Conrad’s strictly zoological viewpoint, Hemmingway’s supreme indifference and Naipaul’s despairing write-off, the white man finally tries to get under the African’s skin.
In a sense, the book is a small milestone in the journey of the travelogue. And western attitudes towards race. Over a century after the Heart of Darkness and six years before Obama’s presidency, it was about time. So yeah, a lot has changed…but then again, how much for the better?
