Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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It’s the travelogue of his overland journey — car, bus, animal — from the northern tip of Africa to the bottom. It's the foreigners that make for the quirkiest stories: the aid workers, especially (encountered almost everywhere), or the odd Rastafarian exiles in Ethiopia. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.

Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We shared an office at the Extra Mural Department at Makerere, and then I got a promotion - became Acting Director - and I was his boss!We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. The rhetoric is so offensive and plain bizarre to anyone making her or his life in “Africa” that I had no option but to pretend that we were in a different genre, to keep imagining the book as a comic novel with a deliberately unlikeable narrator. He mints generalisations and insults at such a clip that they soon begin to outstrip even the most gifted parodist.

Ruinous because of the effects of colonialization; because of the effects of freedom, and corruption, and the profound and dire incompetence of the Africans themselves; because of the AID agencies who build Dams and projects that no one will ever use, instead of helping the Africans thatch their roofs; because of the stupidity both of modernity AND of those who will not be so easily modernized.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. It's an ambitious trip, all overland, including areas not much visited by tourists (notably Sudan, and parts of Ethiopia and Mozambique -- though even Theroux doesn't make it to Somalia). It is Theroux in his element — a trip where chance encounter is everything, where departure and arrival times are an irrelevance, and where contentment can be found balancing on the top of a truck in the middle of nowhere. darker: "I began to fantasize that the Africa I traveled through was often like a parallel universe, the dark star image in my mind, in which everyone existed as a sort of shadow counterpart of someone in the brighter world.

Catching a flight to Khartoum, Theroux watches indigenous dervishes and rides Osama bin Laden's highway to Sudan's pyramids.

Uganda almost counts as a success story in Africa, but even here Theroux finds "everything was on the wane". Indian merchants who had come in the days of the British empire were driven away after independence. Along the way, he makes literary references - some involving people he knows and meets, others purely by reference.