I’ve read most of the travel books of Paul Theroux. My favorite is Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Houghton Mifflin 2003). Africa was not a place Theroux was seeing for the first time, but a former home he was revisiting. He could compare what he saw with what he remembered. And in this case, it made all the difference. My review ran in Liberty, February 2004.
A good travel book mixes together place, people and a central idea. The place should be somewhere no ordinary person would go. Finding the people is a matter of enterprise and odds — and a good travel writer, like Paul Theroux, knows how to set up the odds. Stay out of airplanes. Get off the tourist circuit. Cross borders on land. Arrange your travel as you go.
Lacking a plot, a travel book yearns for a unifying idea. In several of Theroux’s books it was trains. In a train one can leave one’s seat, find an interesting person and have time to know him. Trains are often colorful relics. I saw the Guatemalan train he took for The Old Patagonian Express, and it was a rolling ruin.
His latest book, Dark Star Safari, crosses Africa by air (one short leg), trains, buses, taxis, a lake steamer and a dugout canoe. It has the same dialogs as his other books, and the same longing for the unspoiled and distaste for ugliness. But this one has a theme: disgust at the do-gooders who infest Africa.
Theroux began his career in the 1960s as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi. Later he was an academic in Uganda, where he got to know some of the Ugandans who now run the country. He wrote Fong and the Indians, a story of an emigre Chinese living in East Africa. He loves Africa, but at 60 — the Africans considered him an old man — he prides himself as a “bullshit detector.”
He finds heaps of bullshit. The deepest is around the question of why Africa is poor. It is not colonialism. Theroux was there right after the colonial powers left, and though Africa was poor, it was on the way up. Things were orderly: The school where he taught in Malawi was well maintained and its library had books.
Theroux finds the school a shambles. The books are mostly looted. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Malawi are in decline, and Mozambique is worst of all. So what has happened to all the gifts these countries have been presented with for 40 years?
“A road, a dorm, a school, a bank, a bridge, a cultural center, a dispensary — all were accepted,” he writes. “But acceptance did not mean the things were needed, nor that they would be used or kept in repair.” Instead, he writes, “They were like inspired Christmas presents, the things that stop running when the batteries die… The projects would become wrecks, every one of them… And when they stopped running no one would be sorry.”
Running it all were the NGOs, the non-governmental organizations whose people tool around in new white Land Rovers listening to music on the CD players. The reader first meets these jeepsters at the Kenya-Ethiopia frontier, where Theroux asks for a lift across no man’s land.
“This isn’t a taxi,” the driver says.
Theroux says just wants to get across the border and find a guesthouse.
“We don’t run a guesthouse.”
Theroux writes, “They drove away, leaving me by the side of the road. That was to be fairly typical of my experience with aid workers in rural Africa: they were, in general, oafish, self-dramatizing prigs, and often complete bastards.”
And where there are aid workers, he observes, there are prostitutes. Follow the money.
Later he has a dialog with an aid worker on a “feeding program,” a term that reminds him of farm animals. He says to her, “We used to say, ‘Give people seeds and let them grow their own food.’”
“The rains have been unreliable,” she says. Indeed: in some places it hasn’t rained in three years.
“Maybe they should relocate,” he replies. “If they relocate, they might find work, and they might plant gardens if you weren’t feeding them.”
“We save lives, not livelihoods,” she says.
Theroux’s observation is confirmed by a quite different travel book, Adventure Capitalist, by investor Jim Rogers. In Ethiopia, Rogers says, “An entire generation of Ethiopians has grown up without learning how to farm. Instead…they go to town every month, park the donkey, and collect grain. Some recipients, the day we were in Lalibela, carried their ration of wheat directly over to the town market and started selling it. And so…there is a generation of farmers who have simply stopped farming because…there is no way to compete with free grain.”
I expected a report like that from Rogers, the capitalist investor. But it is coming even louder from Theroux, the journalist. He refers to the aid workers as “a maintenance crew on a power trip, who had turned Malawians into beggars and whiners.”
An old friend remarks how well Theroux’s sons are doing in the West, and suggests that one of them come to Africa as Theroux did.
But you’ve had plenty of Westerners, Theroux says. “Years and years.”
“I want your son,” the man says.
And Theroux thinks: What would that accomplish? Nothing.
The most fascinating dialog is over the subject of Indian merchants, a class of people kicked out of Uganda, Malawi and other places for “monopolizing” retail business. After a quarter-century, a few of their shops have been made into bars, but most of them are empty. Some have African women squatting outside selling vegetables on the ground.
Theroux speaks to a group of educated Africans about this. One mocks the Indian shopkeepers, who were everlastingly writing down lists of merchandise and adding up the figures, one, two three, one, two, three.
“But that’s how a shop is run,” Theroux says. “That’s normal business. You make a list of what you’ve sold, so you know what stuff to reorder.”
“Indians know no other life!” the African replies. “Just this rather secluded life — all numbers and money and goods on shelves. One, two, three.”
They have to count the inventory, Theroux says. “The profit margins are so small.”
“But we Africans are not raised in this way,” the African says. “What do we care about shops and counting?… Selling is not our heritage. We are not business people.”
Another African, a former ambassador who had been listening in, says: “When Africans run businesses, their families come in and stay with them and eat all their food — just live off them. As soon as an African succeeds in something, he has his family cadging off him. Not so?”
“That is true, brother,” one says.
“And we are not cut out for this shopkeeping and bookkkeeping and” — the former ambassador winks at Theroux — “this number crunching.”
“I had never heard such bullshit,” Theroux writes. “Well, perhaps I had and not recognized it. The man was saying: This is all too much for us. We cannot learn how to do business. We must be given money, we must be given sinecures, because we don’t know how to make a profit.”
I have heard similar things myself. Once I had a Tibetan tour guide who complained about all the Chinese who had moved to the Tibetan capital city, Lhasa. The Chinese had started little businesses — karaoke bars, beauty shops and the like — all over the city. They were business-oriented. If you gave a Chinese 100 yuan, my guide said, he would put it in the bank and invest it in his business. “If I had 100 yuan,” he said, “I would go drinking with my friends, and by morning the 100 yuan would be gone. But we would have fellowship.”
The locust plague of relatives reminded me of my first Filipino maid in Hong Kong. She had arrived with only a satchel, but when she went home a year later she packed a box the size of a washing machine. The box was full of gifts. Why? Because when Filipinos went on a foreign job and came back with nice things, and their relative or neighbor admired one of those things, they had to give it to him.
“I have to,” my maid said.
I thought, this woman, who earns one-fourteenth of what I do, is facing an enormous and informal tax to which I am not subject at all. But at least it was one-time tax. Think if she had brought her neighborhood with her, and had had to feed them the entire year. That would be the better comparison to Africa.
We wonder why some peoples succeed and some do not. It is not always about whether they have a free market. It can be whether they have the values that the market requires. Values are passed down in a culture, but they can change. Giving people aid allows them to survive without changing.
Theroux’s epiphany came after he visited his ruined school in Malawi. He decided, “Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. Everyone else, donors and volunteers and bankers however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.”
© 2004 Bruce Ramsey