Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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But Theroux works hard not to be your average tourist -- indeed, to give the impression of not being a tourist at all, but a more classical sort of traveller, not in it for the sights but rather driven by the travel itself. He does it on the cheap: he reports from wretched-smelling train cars, rat infested hotel rooms, and dusty, poor villages where clean water is nowhere to be found.

Uganda almost counts as a success story in Africa, but even here Theroux finds "everything was on the wane". A genius of the witty insult -- ''At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom'' -- Theroux regales us with the humor of ill humor, maintaining a tricky balance of crankiness, curiosity and charm.Having worked in some of Eastern and Southern Africa in his younger days he is in a superb position to answer that question both from his own experiences and from the comments of the people that he meets, ranging from simple, near naked, fishermen to the Prime Minister of Uganda. In Addis Ababa he meets a founder of the Rastafarian movement who had pioneered repatriation of the African diaspora.

But the problem is not, as Theroux says, that Africans are not involved; it is, if anything, the opposite. Some of the writing in Safari is particularly cheesy, and his best works, his travel writings (I’ve never read the novels), are largely based on a formula and gimmick. He visits old friends (he was in the Peace Corp), makes new friends, hangs out with hookers, and generally appreciates the pace, beauty and “otherness” that is Africa. There were problems when Theroux first entered Africa but what he found today was more of the same but worse - more corruption, more poverty, more violence and crime, more hunger, more racism and bigotry, less education, more decrepitude, less infrastructure and, sadly, more apathy and indifference.

A genuinely unbiased book which gives a very fair and balanced view and without belittling others, just the facts.

There's a respectable philosophical position in here somewhere: namely, that foreign aid sponsors corruption and saps local initiative. At times, he goes out of his way to satisfy some perverse curmudgeonly desire to pick theological disputes with Christian missionaries. In Malawi we hear of "a white person driving one-handed in his white Save the Children vehicle, talking on a cellphone with music playing loudly - the happiest person in the country". Charities and aid programs seemed to turn African problems into permanent conditions that were bigger and messier. The greatest part of my satisfaction was animal pleasure: the remoteness of the site, the grandeur of the surrounding mesalike mountains and rock cliffs, the sunlight and scrub, the pale camels in the distance, the big sky, the utter emptiness and silence, for round the decay of these colossal wrecks the lone and level sands stretched far away.In Malawi, he berates a man begging in the street, demanding why he doesn't ask for work instead of a handout. Neither a sensationalistic reveler in the pain of others, nor a hopeless romantic, Theroux chronicles a journey through an Africa full of decay and beauty, fear and joy, misery and perseverance. In some African countries it is international aid agencies that provide the most consistent source of employment. A conversation with a landmine specialist in Khartoum leads him to state that "not much has been written on the subject of landmines".