PAUL THEROUX
Dark Star Safari
Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
PENGUIN BOOKS
Large-leaved and many-footed shadowing,
What god rules over Africa, what shape
What avuncular cloud-man beamier than spears?
Wallace Stevens, ‘The Greenest Continent’
Contents
1. Lighting Out
2. The Mother of the World
3. Up and Down the Nile
4. The Dervishes of Omdurman
5. The Osama Road to Nubia
6. The Djibouti Line to Harar
7. The Longest Road in Africa
8. Figawi Safari on the Bandit Road
9. Rift Valley Days
10. Old Friends in Bat Valley
11. The MV Umoja Across Lake Victoria
12. The Bush Train to Dar es Salaam
13. The Kilimanjaro Express to Mbeya
14. Through the Outposts of the Plateau
15. The Back Road to Soche Hill School
16. River Safari to the Coast
17. Invading Drummond’s Farm
18. The Bush Border Bus to South Africa
19. The Hominids of Johannesburg
20. The Wild Things at Mala Mala
21. Faith, Hope and Charity on the Limpopo Line
22. The Trans-Karoo Express to Cape Town
23. Blue Train Blues
PENGUIN BOOKS
Dark Star Safari
Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled to Italy and then Africa, where he worked as a teacher in Malawi and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels, including Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers. In the early 1970s he moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and went on to live in London. During his seventeen years’ residence in Britain he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books. He has since returned to the United States, but continues to travel widely.
Paul Theroux’s many books include Waldo; Saint Jack; The Family Arsenal; Picture Palace, winner of the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year, joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; My Secret History; Millroy the Magician; Kowloon Tong; The Great Railway Bazaar; The Old Patagonian Express; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Happy Isles of Oceania; Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a memoir of his friendship with Sir Vidia Naipaul; Fresh-Air Fiend: Travel Writings 1985–2000; Hotel Honolulu; and Dark Star Safari. Most of his books are published by Penguin.
For my mother, Anne Dittami Theroux on her ninety-first birthday
1 Lighting Out
All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there, though not for the horror, the hot spots, the massacre-and-earthquake stories you read in the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure of being in Africa again. Feeling that the place was so large it contained many untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too – feeling that there was more to Africa than misery and terror – I aimed to reinsert myself in the bundu, as we used to call the bush, and to wander the antique hinterland. There I had lived and worked, happily, almost forty years ago, in the heart of the greenest continent.
To skip ahead, I am writing this a year later, just back from Africa, having taken my long safari. I was mistaken in so much – delayed, shot at, howled at, and robbed. No massacres or earthquakes, but terrific heat and the roads were terrible, the trains were derelict, forget the telephones. Exasperated white farmers said, ‘It all went tits up!’ Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it – hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can’t tell the politicians from the witch-doctors. Africans, less esteemed than ever, seemed to me the most lied-to people on earth – manipulated by their governments, burned by foreign experts, befooled by charities, and cheated at every turn. To be an African leader was to be a thief, but evangelists stole people’s innocence and self-serving aid agencies gave them false hope, which seemed worse. In reply, Africans dragged their feet or tried to emigrate, they begged, they pleaded, they demanded money and gifts with a rude, weird sense of entitlement. Not that Africa is one place. It is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. I got sick, I got stranded but I was never bored: in fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation. Such a paragraph needs some explanation – at least a book; this book perhaps.
As I was saying, in those old undramatic days of my school teaching in the bundu, folks lived their lives on bush paths at the end of unpaved roads of red clay, in villages of grass-roofed huts. They had a new national flag to replace the Union Jack, they had just gotten the vote, some had bikes, many talked about buying their first pair of shoes. They were hopeful, and so was I, a schoolteacher living near a settlement of mud huts among dusty trees and parched fields: children shrieking at play; and women bent double – most with infants slung on their backs – hoeing the corn and beans; and the men sitting in the shade stupefying themselves on chibuku, the local beer, or kachasu, the local gin. That was taken for the natural order in Africa: frolicking children, laboring women, idle men.
Now and then there was trouble, someone transfixed by a spear, drunken brawls, or political violence – goon squads wearing the ruling party T-shirt and raising hell, But in general the Africa I knew was sunlit and lovely, a soft green emptiness of low flat-topped trees and dense bush, bird-squawks, giggling kids, red roads, cracked and crusty brown cliffs that looked newly baked, blue remembered hills, striped and spotted animals, and ones with yellow fur and fangs, and every hue of human being, from pink-faced planters in knee socks and shorts to brown Indians and Africans with black gleaming faces and at the far end of the spectrum some people so dark they were purple. Not the trumpeting of elephants nor the roar of lions, the predominant sound of the African bush was the coo-cooing of the turtle dove.
After I left Africa, there was an eruption of news about things going wrong: Acts of God, Acts of Tyrants, tribal warfare and plagues, floods and starvation, bad-tempered political commissars, and little teenaged soldiers who were hacking people – ‘Long sleeves?’ they teased, cutting hands off; ‘Short sleeves’ meant lopping the whole arm. One million people died, mostly Tutsis, in the Rwanda massacres of 1994. The red African roads remained but they were now crowded with ragged bundle-burdened fleeing refugees.
Journalists pursued them. Goaded by editors to feed a public hungering for proof of savagery on earth, reporters stood near starving Africans in their last shaking fuddle, and intoned on the TV news for people gobbling snacks on their sofas and watching in horror, ‘And these people’ – cue a close-up of a death rattle – ‘these are the lucky ones.’
You always think, Who says so? But perhaps something had changed since I was there? I wanted to find out. My plan was to go from Cairo to Cape Town, top to bottom, and to see everything in between.
Now African news was as awful as the rumors: the place was said to be desperate – unspeakable, violent, plague-ridden, starving, hopeless, dying on its feet. And these are the lucky ones! But I thought – since I had plenty of time and nothing pressing – that I might connect the dots, crossing borders and seeing the hinterland rather than flitting from capital to capital, being greeted by unctuous tour guides. I had no desire at the moment to see game parks, though I supposed that at some point I would. The Swahili word safari means journey, it has n
othing to do with animals, someone ‘on safari’ is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.
Out of touch in Africa was where I wanted to be. The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party’s extension, being kept waiting all your working life – the homebound writer’s irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human condition.
I thought: Let other people explain where I am, and I imagined the dialogue.
‘When will Paul be back?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘Where is he?’
‘We’re not sure.’
‘Can we get in touch with him?’
‘No.’
Travel in the African bush can also be a sort of revenge on mobile phones and fax machines, on telephones and the daily paper, on the creepier aspects of globalization that allow anyone who chooses to get their insinuating hands on you. I desired to be unobtainable. Mr Kurtz, sick as he is, attempts to escape from Marlow’s riverboat, crawling on all fours like an animal, trying to flee into the jungle. I understood that.
I was going to Africa for the best reasons – in a spirit of discovery; and for the pettiest – simply to disappear, to light out, with a suggestion of I dare you to try and find me.
Home had become a routine, and routines make time pass quickly. I was a sitting duck in this predictable routine: people knew when to call me, they knew when I would be at my desk. I was in such regular touch it was like having a job, a mode of life I hated. I was sick of being called up and importuned, asked for favors, hit up for money. You stick around too long and people begin to impose their own deadlines on you. ‘I need this by the 25th…’ or ‘Please read this by Friday …’ or ‘Try to finish this over the weekend …’ or ‘Let’s have a conference call on Wednesday …’ Call me… fax me … email me … You can get me any time on my mobile phone – here’s the number.
Everyone always available at any time in the totally accessible world seemed to me pure horror. It made me want to find a place that was not accessible at all … no phones, no fax machines, not even mail delivery, the wonderful old world of being out of touch; in short, of being far away.
All I had to do was remove myself. I loved not having to ask permission, and in fact in my domestic life things had begun to get a little predictable, too – Mr Paul at home every evening when Mrs Paul came home from work. ‘I made spaghetti sauce … I seared some tuna … I’m scrubbing some potatoes …’ The writer in his apron, perspiring over his béchamel sauce, always within earshot of the telephone. You have to pick it up because it is ringing in your ear.
I wanted to drop out. People said, ‘Get a mobile phone … Use FedEx … Sign up for Hotmail … Stop in at Internet cafes … Visit my website …’
I said no thanks. The whole point of my leaving was to escape this stuff – to be out of touch. The greatest justification for travel was not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. As Huck put it, lighting out for the territory.
Africa is one of the last great places on earth a person can vanish into. I wanted that. Let them wait. I have been kept waiting far too many times for far too long.
I am outta here, I thought. The next website I visit will be that of the poisonous Central African bird-eating spider.
A morbid aspect of my departure for Africa was that people began offering condolences. Say you’re leaving for a dangerous place and your friends call sympathetically, as though you’ve caught a serious illness that might prove fatal. Yet I found these messages unexpectedly stimulating, a heartening preview of what my own demise would be like. Lots of tears! Lots of mourners! But also, undoubtedly, many people boasting solemnly, ‘I told him not to do it. I was one of the last people to talk to him.’
I had gotten to Lower Egypt, and was heading south, in my usual traveling mood – hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable it is a banal subject for travel; therefore, Africa seemed perfect for a long journey.
2 The Mother of the World
The weather forecast printed in a box in the Cairo newspaper was Dust, on the cold day in February that I arrived, a day of gritty wind and dust-browned sky. The weather forecast for the next day was the same – no temperature prediction, nothing about sunshine or clouds or rain; just the one word, Dust. It was the sort of weather report you might expect on the planet Mars. Nevertheless, Cairo (population 16 million), a city of bad air and hideous traffic, was made habitable, even pleasant, by its genial populace and its big placid river, brown under a brown sky.
Tourists have been visiting Egypt for 2500 years – Herodotus (roughly 480–420 BC) was the first methodical sightseer. He was fascinated by Egyptian geography and ruins – and was also collecting information for his History, of which the whole of Volume Two is Egyptiana. Herodotus traveled as far as the First Cataract, that is Aswan. Later Greeks and Romans were tourists in Egypt, raiding tombs, stealing whatever they could carry, and leaving graffiti which is still visible today. The grander structures were also pilfered and for two thousand years such things – obelisks mainly – were dragged away and set up elsewhere and goggled at. Though obelisks were sacred to the sun god, no one had any idea of their meaning. The Egyptians called them tekhenu; the Greeks named them obeliskos, because they looked like small spits for kebabs.
The first stolen obelisk was set up in Rome in 10 BC, and a dozen more followed. Felix Fabri of Ulm, a German friar, went to Egypt in 1480, taking notes throughout his trip. An obelisk he sketched in Alexandria now stands in New York’s Central Park. In the same spirit of plunder and trophy hunting, Mussolini looted a fourth-century obelisk from Ethiopia, the Obelisk of Axum. This treasure now stands in front of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, near Caracalla. Because the scattered wars in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made travel difficult, Egypt was regarded as a safe and colorful destination. Egypt stood for the Orient, for the exotic, for sensuality and paganism. Egyptology did not start in earnest until the early nineteenth century, when the Rosetta stone was deciphered and at last the ruins disclosed the secrets of their script. This discovery unleashed a rage for Egyptiana and travelers, writers and painters flocked to the Nile Valley in search of the exotic.
Even then, Egyptian ruins had been ruins for thousands of years. The Egyptians themselves had never left and, though Arabized and Islamized, and nominally conquered by the French, the British, the Turks, their homeland the battleground of European wars, Egyptians went on farming, fishing, and living at the edges of their broken temples and tombs. They were blessed with the Nile. The ruins they regarded as a sort of quarry, a great stockpile of building materials to cannibalize for new houses and walls. But foreign soldiers had done the same, customarily garrisoning themselves in the ancient shrines – any temple unsuitable for French or British cavalrymen was commandeered for their animals.
Throughout, as Egypt was looted and trampled and gaped at, Egyptians remained Egyptian. In pharaonic times Egyptians made a habit of repelling, or subverting or enslaving anyone who ventured into their kingdom. But ever since Herodotus they have been welcoming foreigners, with a mixture of banter, hearty browbeating, teasing humor, effusiveness, and the sort of insincere familiarity I associate with people trying to become intimate enough with me to pick my pocket.
‘Meesta, meesta! My fren,’ what country you come from? America Number One! My fren’, you come with me … my house. You come. Meesta!’
In Cairo, there was a thin line between pestering and hospitality – indeed, they often amounted to the same thing, and although there were plenty of beggars there was little thievery. Egyptians seemed amazingly agreeable. You think they have been briefed to make
jokes, by some government bureau but no, they are just hungry, desperation making them genial and innovative. It was obvious they were hoping to make a buck but at least they had the grace to do it with a smile.
‘You don’t speak Arabic today,’ Amir the cab driver said, ‘but you speak Arabic very good tomorrow.’
Everyone in this vast much-visited city had the patter. Amir then taught me the Arabic for please, thank you and sorry. I already knew inshallah, which means ‘God willing.’
‘Now teach me “No, thank you – I have no need.” ’
Amir did so, and before he dropped me he insisted that I hire him the next day.
‘No, thank you – I have no need,’ I said in Arabic.
He laughed but of course kept pestering.
‘My name Guda. Like the Dutch cheese,’ the cab driver said. ‘This is not limousine – not cost a hundred pounds. Just car, black and white taxi only. But clean. Fast. Handsome driver.’
And he spent the entire ride nagging me to hire him for the whole day. That was the theme in Cairo. Once someone had your attention they didn’t want to let go, for if they did you would slip away, forcing them to spend the day prowling for a fare. Business was terrible. But I saw this patter as another age-old artifact, like the plaster sphinxes and the chess sets and the camel saddles they sold to the tourists, the patter was another home-made curio, polished over the centuries.
Nearer the ruins and the pyramids and the sights they just gabbled, aiming to nail you, and they were expert, like Mohammed Kaburia, chubby, greasy-faced, wearing a made-in-China nylon jacket. It was sunset in Gizeh. I wanted to see the pyramids and the Sphinx in this weird dusty light.
‘Only twenty for the horse – you come, my fren’. You see Safinkees! I take you into a pyramid and you see the rooms and touch the moomiya.’