Paul Theroux's crusty look at an interrupted return trip to Africa
Skift Take
Did Paul Theroux miss the forest for the trees in his Africa revisit? Surely the continent has its gargantuan problems, but the author was ill-advised to just write it off in such a one-sided manner. Ya, there is artistic license, but really.
Paul Theroux wrote his last great travel book, Dark Star Safari, an account of his overland journey down the eastern edge of Africa from Cairo to Cape Town, in 2002. It was a bleakly typical work of an irascible writer obsessed with the grimmer aspects of his destinations and revealed a land that was simply disintegrating, a place of "fungal infections, petty extortion, mocking lepers, dreary bedrooms, bad food, and exploding bowels".
Not surprisingly, Theroux has not rushed back to Africa. Indeed, it has taken him a decade to arrange this return, in which he sets off to mirror his original journey with one that instead heads north from Cape Town up the continent's western edge. The purpose is to take a valedictory trip "to the violated Eden of our origins", he says, and to assess just what the 21st century has done to Africa, a land that the author has loved since he was a young peace corps teacher in Malawi.
Theroux's aim is to travel from South Africa
