Along the way, he makes literary references - some involving people he knows and meets, others purely by reference. He also reconnected with people he knew from his previous time in Africa, including the President of Uganda! This is a difficult journey and Theroux, traveling alone, might not have emerged from it alive. His advantages were years of travel and previous acquaintance with the continent. urn:lcp:darkstarsafariov00ther:lcpdf:cd63c6de-b778-4ff5-ad56-4734db840e81 Extramarc University of Alberta Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier darkstarsafariov00ther Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t00z8c387 Isbn 9780618446872 This is probably for the best -- much of travel is quite boring (and repetitive -- one bus ride much like the next) -- but it's surprising how little sense of the actual hardship of travel Theroux is able to convey. Sudan and Ethiopia offer a different sort of exoticism -- impoverished, war-torn, removed from most of modernity.

For all its carelessness, Dark Star Safari is free of many of the routine faults of travel books about Africa. There is none of the authorial self-mythologisation or romantic primitivism of Ryszard Kapuscinski or Laurens van der Post. There's nothing dishonest in Theroux's account. It is frequently diverting and sometimes moving. His journey through the continent was long and hard and one can admire him for it. No one could accuse him of not doing the footwork. But he should have done a lot more homework. Neither of these statements is correct. Although Mengistu killed a large number of government ministers, some of whom were related to Haile Selassie, and imprisoned his daughter, most of the royal family survived. (They were much in evidence at the emperor's long-delayed funeral in November 2000, soon after Theroux's visit.) And the present Ethiopian government, which has conducted a lengthy trial - in absentia - of the former dictator, on charges that include responsibility for the death of the emperor, has never claimed that he killed him with his own hands.

There's probably a good case to be made that Dark Star has a negative or pessimistic (insufficient positive thinking!) outlook. In fact, I would not be surprised to encounter some readers of Dark Star Safari who would like to dismiss the book entirely. Theroux is not very charitable with the charity workers he encounters, though I will admit that I was also surprised by the way they treated fellow travelers, even travelers in danger of being stranded in a desert full of bandits. He meets and is disgusted by missionaries who offer help to the desperate on the condition that they accept Jesus as their personal savior. He also reads Conrad's Heart of Darkness twelve times during the trip, which is not a very sunny novel. Every country seems to be introduced from the perspective of a famous westerner (Rimbaud, Mr. Livingston I presume, Mr. Kurtz...). Even the title "Dark Star Safari" is meant to suggest that for Theroux, Africa is a dangerous wilderness that he will use to escape the center (the West).

Life Stand Still is the single release of the new album WALK THROUGH LIGHTLY by Dark Star Safari, which will be out on September 24 2021. After that comes South Africa,and despite being the most prosperous country in Africa,it is still crime infested.A look at the newspaper scares Theroux,it is full of crime of the most vicious sort. Some of [Theroux's] observations about Africa's economic decline are astute, although his quest for explanations is limited to what he can extract from the cast of characters he meets along his way. Mostly, however, this book is an intelligent, funny, and frankly sentimental account by a young-at-heart idealist who is trying to make sense of the painful disparity between what Africa is and what he once hoped it might become. Theroux's peevish passages on aid set the tone of Dark Star Safari, but they are not its main drift. The book is an extensive account of an overland journey from Egypt to South Africa, taking in Uganda and Malawi, countries where Theroux lived and worked in his youth. The picture that emerges is sombre. War, famine, Aids, collapsing states: everything is falling to pieces. The cities are terrifying; the rural areas depressing. Africa has become a sad place, and not a little dangerous. Anyone with imagination wants to emigrate to America. The birdlife is the only compensation.

As a travel writer he is noted for his rich descriptions of people and places, laced with a heavy streak of irony, or even misanthropy. Other non-fiction by Theroux includes Sir Vidia's Shadow, an account of his personal and professional friendship with Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul that ended abruptly after thirty years. The dangers of road travel are also amusingly recounted, with Theroux frequently mentioning the newspaper headlines of yet another senseless mass-death in some overcrowded vehicle (and occasionally, as he careens down some road or considers whether or not to risk life and limb on a bus again, he pictures himself figuring in such a headline too). With each mile he takes northwards, the poverty and corruption worsens and Theroux's spirits sink even further. Eventually he reaches Angola, a nation of immense mineral and oil wealth, which is run by a government that is simply "predatory, tyrannical, unjust, utterly uninterested in its people … and indifferent to their destitution and inhuman living conditions". The recent civil war that blighted the country for a decade has denuded it of all its wildlife, infrastructure and hope, Theroux discovers. Foreshadowing book spoiler: He quotes and draws comparisons from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A lot. Paul Theroux was a Peace Corps volunteer, and he taught for four years at a school in Uganda. He returned to these places while taking notes for Dark Star Safari. Things are not better, he found. The situation was worse, and yet the aid workers continued to harp on the same things: