Dark Star Sarfari

I have recently been reading Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux, which is not only excellent, but has also had the effect of making me change my thought process about being here. I recommend it highly and wanted to include a few of his passages because I think they accurately describe many of the things I have encountered here.

You go to the ends of the earth to begin a new life, and think you have succeeded, and then the past breaks in, as it does to the fugitive in disguise spotted by an old enemy.

He had liked Africa for being the anti-Europe, the anti-west, which it is, sometimes defiantly, sometimes lazily. I liked it for those reasons too, for there was nothing of home here. Being in Africa was like being on a dark star.

I thanked him, and walking out to the main road I reflected on how Africa, being incomplete and so empty, was a place for people to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength- binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, driving expensive Land Rovers, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction, rewriting the Bible as an African epic of survival.

Tadelle said, “There was a war here in 1983”- no sign of it, though, except for some wrecked vehicles on the low bare hills, The war had come and gone, people had died, life resumed, nothing had changed, still the plow and the herd of goats and the cooking fire and the bare buttocks- the African story.

I was reassured by the fact that the trucks were full of cattle and not people, for in these parts cattle were valuable and people’s lives not worth much at all. Even when tribesman were shot here on this border, no one troubled to file a report. They only said, “The Borena are fighting,” or the Oromo, or the Somalis, or the Shifta. No one knew the body count. If cattle had been slaughtered or rustled, the exact number would have been know and lamented.

He said in English, “They do not want your life, bwana. They want your shoes.” Many times after that, in my meandering through Africa, I mumbled these words, an epitaph of under development, desperation in a single sentence. What use is your life to them? It is nothing. But your shoes- ah they are a different matter. They are worth something, much more than your watch (they had the sun) or your pen (they were illiterate) or your bag (they had nothing to put in it). These were men who needed footwear, for they were forever walking.

“If you do go out at night, you will definitely be robbed,” I was assured. “There is a one hundred percent chance of it. I am one hundred percent sure. Don’t resist, give them what they want, and you will live.”

Women confident enough to walk down the street wearing jewelry was one test of an African city’s safety.

“So what was the answer?” I asked.

He smiled. “Maybe no answer.”

Maybe no answer. The whites, teachers, diplomats, and agents of virtue I met at dinner parties had pretty much the same things on their minds as their counterparts had in the 1960s. They discussed relief projects and scholarships and agricultural schemes, refugee camps, emergency food programs, technical assistance. They were newcomers. They did not realize that for forty years people had been saying the same things, and the result after four decades was a lower standard of living, a higher rate of illiteracy, overpopulation, and much more disease.

Foreigners working for development agencies did not stay long, so they never discovered the full extent of their failure. Africans saw them come and go, which is why Africans were so fatalistic. Maybe no answer, as my friend had said with a rueful smile.

And a feature of every settlement was the sight of African men standing under trees, congregating in the shade. They were not waiting for buses; they were killing time because they had no jobs. [ ] In Kenya, whenever I saw a well formed tree near a village or town, I saw men under it, doing nothing, looking phlegmatic and abstracted.

Leaving Kisumu on the afternoon bus to the border, I saw a booming Kenyan industry: just outside town, shop after shop of woodworkers, all of them making coffins- the freshly cut raw wood, reddish in the dampness, the men sawing it and nailing together the long boxes, everyone hard at work. The finished coffins were stacked or standing upright, lots of them. This was the busiest local industry I had seen in the whole of Kenya: the coffin makers and their lugubrious product, a perfect image for a country that seemed terminally ill.

People on the outside just write bad news- the disasters, Ebola virus, AIDS, bombs. And they ask the wrong questions.

“What should they ask?”

“The questions should be: How did anyone survive?”

“I think I know the answer,” I said. “Because it’s a subsistence economy, and survival is something that Africans have learned.”

Africa was full of skinny energetic children, and their game usually involved kicking a ball. The children did not have a round rubber ball but rather a misshapen cloth ball stuffed with rags. The field was not flat and smooth- it was a succession of dirt piles and lumps, very stony. The children played barefoot, probably twenty or more, not teams but a free-for-all.

Watching them play and call to each other on this hot night, raising dust in the lights of the station yard, I was impressed by their exertion and heartened by their high spirits. They playing field was a wasteland and part of it lay in darkness. The children ran in and out of the shadows screeching. The dark didn’t matter, the bumpy field didn’t matter, nor did the squashed ball. By any reckoning, these children were playing and laughing in one of the more desperate provinces of a semi derelict country.

“It is horrible. There is no sex education. No one will talk about sex, but everyone does it. No one will talk about AIDS and everyone is infected. We were sent an anti-AIDS film and we showed it. But people in the villages said it was shameful-too indecent-and so it was withdrawn. What could we do?”

“Did you talk to them about it?”

“I tried to.”

“And what happened?”

“They wanted to have sex with me.”

“They ask me for money all the time. ‘You give me money’-just me, because I am white.”

In Africa for the first time, I got a glimpse of the pattern my life would take- that it would be dominated by writing and solitariness and risk, and already in my early twenties I tasted those ambiguous pleasures. I had learned what many others had discovered before me- that Africa, for all its perils, represented wilderness and possibility. Not only did I have the freedom to write in Africa, I had something new to write about.

Some of the same people who praised South Africa as the richest and most successful country on the continent said it was also a jungle.

This was the ultimate white South African nightmare, becoming totally dependent on your black servants, reduced to living in a simple remote village.

Nadine had been ruminating. She said, “I didn’t leave. I stayed. I saw everything. The people who left-well, you can’t blame the Africans. Life was awful for them. But the others- the whites, the writers” –she shook her head- “after they left, what did they write?”

Maureen said, “I feel sorry for anyone who left, who missed it. All those years. And it went on for so long- beyond Mandela’s release.”

I said, “Isn’t it still going on?”

“Yes it is. You can write about it,” Nadine said.