Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

£6.495
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Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

RRP: £12.99
Price: £6.495
£6.495 FREE Shipping

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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". Appalled by ''the filth, the dirt, the litter,'' beset by ''fungal infections, petty extortion, mocking lepers, dreary bedrooms, bad food, exploding bowels,'' Theroux narrates a Job-like ordeal during which he is ''abused, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheated, bitten, flooded, insulted, exhausted, robbed, lied to, browbeaten, poisoned, stunk up and starved.

If Africans can find a way to rid themselves of the entrenched dependence on handouts and the apparently complete lack of motivation that is engendered by the self-serving approach of first world Western institutionalized charities such as UNICEF, SAVE THE CHILDREN and WORLD VISION, then there is also a hope that Africans can find the political maturity and the will to develop themselves into something beyond what Theroux saw in his extended tour. In the travel-writing tradition that made Paul Theroux’s 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. Still, who can resist the image of Theroux nearing his 60th birthday, hitching a ride on the back of a cattle truck, wearing a cast-off red T-shirt from a plumber in America which, like the other African passengers, he bought for a few coins from a stall on the side of the road?

Or the story of the Wagogo, living in the hot, dusted, ruined plains of Tanzania, 30 of them huddled under the shade of a single tree to escape from the blasted rays of the midday sun – but who never thought, to escape from this, simply to plant a few extra trees.

What results is an insightful meditation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people. These homeless people were living in the guest rooms and had cooking fires going on the balconies and had rigged up tends on the verandas.

Readers grew tired of Theroux partly because he was always such a shatteringly miserable travelling companion. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. While traveling to Africa a few weeks ago, I read Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux. After that comes South Africa,and despite being the most prosperous country in Africa,it is still crime infested. Yet, in another way, traveling through Africa's vastness - desert, savannah, sea-like lakes - does clear the mind, like sweeping your arm across a cluttered desk.

In this time he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books, from which a selection of writings were taken to compile his book Travelling the World (Penguin, 1992).To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
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