Paul Theroux: Dark Star Safari

Nothing was weirder to me than the seated baboon, also a manifestation of Thoth (as well as ‘god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned’), this one mummified but coming apart, the wrapping over its head falling loose, its unwrapped paw extended, still furry and a little dusty, like an ape stirring in a haunted house, shedding its bandages, peeping through its blindfold, looking hairy and vindictive.

And if you were planning to worship anything it might as well be the three-thousand-year-old stone carving, towering over me, of the goddess Taweret, ‘The Great One’ — a pregnant hippo standing upright with its big belly ballooning out, with human arms and a lion’s hind legs, associated with fertility and childbirth.

These marvels were within walking distance of the Sudanese Embassy, and my desire to see others like them on the Nile and in Nubia kept me pestering Ambassador Mashamoun for a visa.

‘Nothing yet but maybe soon, inshallah,’ his excellency said. ‘Will you take tea?’

He was more upbeat than many others. I went to a party given by a hospitable family in the salubrious suburb of El Maadi and at dinner an American woman on my left, hearing of my proposed trip said, ‘I have never been to Africa.’

‘I’ve never been to Africa either,’ an American man said across the table.

‘But this is Africa,’ I said.

‘No, no. Africa is …’ The woman made a gesture, like Mohammed’s gesture at the Nubian boy, meaning down there somewhere.

Without perhaps intending to be negative the partygoers conveyed to me nothing but discouragements.

‘I was in the Sudan,’ a man said. ‘Lovely people. But the roads are awful. I wonder how you’ll manage?’

‘When were you in the Sudan?’

‘Oh, this was’ — and he wagged his head — ‘this was years ago.’

An Irish diplomat said, ‘Your man in Kenya met with six members of the opposition in Khartoum last week and after he left every single one of them was arrested.’

The American man who had claimed Egypt wasn’t Africa said: ‘Zambia’s the place you want to avoid. Zambia’s a mess. People have high walls around their houses. You can’t walk the streets.’

‘Ethiopia — now there’s a place you want to stay away from. It’s still at war with Eritrea.’

A Ugandan man said, ‘Don’t go anywhere near Uganda until after the eighth of March. There’s an election that day and it will be violent.’

‘You heard the AIDS statistics in Kenya? AIDS is wiping out whole communities.’

‘Kenya’s kind of funny. They hired a guy to look at corruption — Richard Leakey. He found lots of it, but when he turned in his report he was sacked.’

‘The thing about the roads in Tanzania is that there aren’t any.’

‘There are no roads in the Congo either. That’s why it’s ungovernable. Anyway it’s really about six countries.’

‘The Sudan is two countries. The Muslim north. The Christian south.’

‘Those land seizures in Zimbabwe are horrendous. White farmers wake up in the morning and find hundreds of Africans camped in their fields saying, “This is ours now.” ’

‘Did anyone read that book about the massacres in Rwanda? I tell you, I got so depressed I couldn’t finish it.’

‘Somalia’s not even a country. It has no government, just these so-called war lords, about fifty of them all fighting it out, like street gangs.’

‘You know about the drought in the Ogaden? Three years without rain.’

Dessert was served and there were more pronouncements of this sort, gesturing south at the big hopeless heart of the continent.

A man with a Slavic accent claimed that he had met me many years ago. He became very friendly, though he could not remember where or when we had met — Uganda perhaps, he said, in the 1960s. At his matiest he confided in me, saying, ‘Colonialism just slowed down a process that was inevitable. These countries are like the Africa of hundreds of years ago.’

This was a crudely coded way of saying Africans were reverting to savagery. But in another respect what he was saying was true. After a spell of being familiar and promising, Africa had slipped into a stereotype of itself: starving people in a blighted land governed by tyrants, rumors of unspeakable atrocities, despair and darkness.

Not a darkness, in fact, but it was all a blankness so blank and so distant you could ascribe almost anything to it — theft, anarchy, cannibalism, rebellion, massacre, starvation, violence, disease, division. No one could dispute what you said; in fact, the literature that existed, the news, the documentation, seemed to support the notion that it was all a savage jungle. To these party guests Africa was the blank space that it had been in the nineteenth century, the sort of white space on a map that Marlow mentions at the beginning of Heart of Darkness. For Marlow, only the blank spaces on the map hold any attraction, and it was Africa, ‘the biggest, the most blank, so to speak — that I had a hankering after.’ Young Marlow exactly resembles young Conrad (little Jozef Korzeniowski) in this respect, in his love for ‘exciting spaces of white paper.’

I was not dismayed by the apparent ignorance in what these people said. Their pessimism made Africa seem contradictory, unknown, worth visiting. They were saying what everyone said all the time: Ain’t Africa awful! But really they were proving that the features in the African map had dimmed and faded so utterly that it had gone blank. Marlow goes on to say that about the time he set off for the Congo Africa ‘had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery — a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.’

Blind whiteness and crepuscular darkness amount to pretty much the same thing: terra incognita. There was a sort of poetic logic, too. In Moby Dick whiteness stands for wickedness. So the image I carried with me on my trip was of a burned-out wilderness, empty of significant life, of no promise, a land of despair, full of predators, that I was tumbling down the side of a dark star.

I was not dismayed. The traveler’s conceit is that he is heading into the unknown. The best travel is a leap in the dark. If the destination were familiar and friendly what would be the point in going there?

Still in Lower Egypt, in the opposite Arabesque corner of Africa from Cape Town, I had all sorts of chance encounters with Black Africa, the tantalizing suggestions of the bewitchment of the larger continent, the African faces that are sometimes identical to African masks.

Traipsing between my hotel in the shadow of the Sphinx and the Sudanese Embassy, in the middle of Cairo; the museum, the coffee shops, the university where I was buying books and checking facts; the party in El Maadi, the literary gatherings — I encountered the tall slender Sudanese, the mute watchfulness of Nubians, the big beautiful animals — lions, elephants, cheetahs — carved in bold relief on coffins and bedsteads; sometimes it was drumming, a syncopation in the night air, or the aroma of Zanzibari cloves, or Kenyan coffee, or a splintered tea-chest in a rubbish heap stenciled Tea — Uganda . Ethiopians and West Africans hawked tourist carvings in the markets of Cairo, and as the Haj was soon to start, and Cairo was a gateway to Jeddah and the holy places of Saudi Arabia, I got used to seeing the sneering small-boned people of Djibouti and Somalia, robed Muslims from Mali and Chad and Niger, Nigerian Hausas, Fang people and Dogons and Malian mullahs from Timbuktu, all robed in white, for their pilgrimage. Representations of the whole of Africa gathered here, as though this was the polyglot capital of a vast black empire and I was seeing examples of every animal and every sort of food and every human face.