Dark Star Safari

I have very mixed feelings about this book. For starters, I wasn’t able to complete it; I got about halfway through it, with detailed notes in the margins, but unfortunately I left the book in my apartment the day that I left to return back to the United States. So for the purposes of this short reflection, I will try to recall the highlights of what stood out to me from my reading of this novel.

One thing that I can definitely say about this book is that it is a page-turner. I found it to be a lot more interesting to read than the other two travel writing novels I read while in Italy - Perseus in the Wind by Freya Stark and certainly more than Italian Hours by Henry James. Paul Theroux gives a riveting personal tale of his journey from Cairo to Cape Town with a dry, sometimes cynical, humor. I laughed at some accounts and shook my head at others.

This book is a bit controversial and maybe even problematic for some to read, which is expected to be the case when you have a white American or European author describing his experiences of traveling throughout the countries in Africa, especially with the tone of being an “authority” without having actual lived experience. No matter what he encountered while there, he speaks from the vantage point of a privileged older white male and cannot separate himself from that nor could his reader. I recall a classmate saying “I would like to read a book like this that had been written by someone else.” (In other words, not a privileged white male.) I couldn’t help but think to myself “If someone else had written this book word-for-word, verbatim, even in the exact style that Paul Theroux wrote it, your reader-response would likely be different and maybe even more accepting.”

This novel is a great text for critical analysis using reader-response or even deconstruction theory. I feel almost certain that the people who felt a negative response to Theroux’s text, to the point that they found it problematic, were influenced more by the fact that they could not separate Theroux himself from his text rather than his writing delivery. But that is my reader-response on the people themselves who read this book, which is why my thoughts are subjective and neither right nor wrong, just like Theroux himself and others who read his accounts.

All of the above having been said, here are some of the things that I did question about Theroux’s judgements on what he and others may find problematic about Africa. One of the issues Theroux brings up frequently throughout his book is that of the aid programs in Africa which are monuments to European and American failure. (I did not put that phrase in quotes, because I cannot remember if those are his words or mine, but that is the implication that I got from Theroux when I read his accounts.) He rants and makes sardonic comments about aid workers in “white cars playing loud music” who don’t offer to give him rides. (He mentions this a couple of times when encountering other white travelers from Europe or America.) Theroux talks about the failure of aid programs as though he is an authority; however, unless he brings it up later in the book, which I only got through half, I don’t believe he ever mentions even visiting one of the aid projects or program offices.

Another thing that stood out to me was the text Theroux uses to try to convey the tone and pronunciation of the way someone from Egypt or the Sudan would talk to him. For instance, if someone said “There is no work here,” the text Theroux would provide to the reader would be something like this: Dey eez nuh wuk heah. (That is my best attempt to give an example since I do not have the book here in front of me to transcribe exactly as it is written; that is just my recall.) I made a connection to how Europeans and Americans perceive people from Africa based on the communication delivery and grasp of English language when I met a young man from Ghana who is living in Siena to finish earning his master’s degree. He specializes currently in the study of the trend of using Pidgin English in Ghana and how he believes it is compromising the official standard English among students there. He expressed to me that he feels it is lowering the intellectual potential of Ghanian students who use Pidgin English shortcuts to avoid the grammatical constructions of standard English.

I wish I could have gotten further with the book, and I may continue to read it and maybe finish it at a later time, but one quote that stood out to me was the expression “not yet” which I came across while reading. It made me think of a scene in the film Gladiator when the supporting character, played by Djimon Hounsou who portrays a hunter from Africa, tells the main protagonist, played by Russell Crowe, that Crowe’s character will see his family again in the afterlife but “not yet.” I feel like this has been a running theme for Africa, in general, for the centuries of colonization and imperialism it has endured. It has so much potential with the mineral resources, the vastness of the continent, and the intelligent minds that have emerged from there, such as the young man I met while in Siena. Perhaps one day Africa will have its time to flip the script on the western civilizations that have colonized it for centuries and emerge as a superpower in its own right but not yet, it seems...not yet.