No massacres or earthquakes, but terrific heat and the roads were terrible, the trains were derelict, forget the telephones. I was mistaken in so much delayed, shot at, howled at, and robbed. To skip ahead, I am writing this a year later, just back from Africa, having taken my long safari and been reminded that all travel is a lesson in self-preservation. There I had lived and worked, happily, almost forty years ago, in the heart of the greenest continent. 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. 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. Dark Star Safari is one of his bravest and best books.21 Faith, Hope, and Charity on the Limpopo LineĪll news out of Africa is bad. In fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation.' Seeing firsthand what is happening across Africa, Theroux is as obsessively curious and wittily observant as always, and his readers will find themselves on an epic and enlightening journey.

I got sick, I got stranded, but I was never bored. It is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. 'Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it,' he writes, 'hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you cant tell the politicians from the witch doctors. He finds astonishing, devastating changes wherever he goes. Now he stops at his old school, sees former students, revisits his African friends.

Almost forty years ago, Theroux first went to Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush.

This is travel as discovery and also, in part, a sentimental journey. Going by train, dugout canoe, 'chicken bus,' and cattle truck, Theroux passes through some of the most beautiful and often life-threatening landscapes on earth. In the travel-writing tradition that made Paul Therouxs reputation, Dark Star Safari is a rich and insightful book whose itinerary is Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town: down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda, and ultimately to the tip of South Africa.

Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux