Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, by Paul Theroux. Houghton Mifflin, 2003, 472 pages.

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NGO Way to Help Africa

by Bruce Ramsey

Lacking a plot, a travel book yearns for a unifying idea. In several of Paul Theroux's books it was trains. Trains are good places to meet people, and it is the people who enliven the account. And trains are often colorful relics. I saw the Guatemalan train Theroux took for "The Old Patagonian Express," and it was a rolling ruin. But "trains" is not a theme; it is a kind of gimmick.

In his latest book, "Dark Star Safari," Theroux descends into Africa by trains, buses, taxis, a lake steamer, and a dugout canoe, always trying to cross borders by land and stay away from tourists. It is an episodic account much like his other books, with Theroux's Huck-Finn longing for the outland, his distaste for ugliness, and his knack for finding smart conversation. But this book also has a theme, an attack on the do-gooders who infest Africa.

Theroux knows Africa. He began his career in the 1960s as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi. Later he was an academic in Uganda, where he got to know some of the Ugandans who now run the country. He wrote "Fong and the Indians," a none-too-serious novel of a Chinese man in East Africa. Theroux loves the continent, but at 60 — Africans consider him an old man — he is unwilling to accept any more soft-headed thinking about it.

One example is the common assumptions of why Africa is poor. Many say it is colonialism. Theroux lived there right after the colonial powers left, and though Africa was poor, it was on the way up. Things were orderly: the school where he taught in Malawi was well maintained. Its library had books.

That was then. Now the school is a shambles; the books have been looted. In his view Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Malawi have suffered much the same general decline. Mozambique has fallen to the absolute bottom.

So what has happened to billions of dollars of gifts these countries have been presented with for 40 years?

"A road, a dorm, a school, a bank, a bridge, a cultural center, a dispensary — all were accepted," he writes. "But acceptance did not mean the things were needed, nor that they would be used or kept in repair." Instead, he writes, "They were like inspired Christmas presents, the things that stop running when the batteries die. . . . The projects would become wrecks, every one of them. . . . And when they stopped running no one would be sorry."

Running it all were the NGOs, the non-governmental organizations whose people tool around in new white Land Rovers playing CD music. The reader first meets these virtuecrats at the Kenya-Ethiopia frontier, where Theroux asks for a lift across no man's land.

"This isn't a taxi," the driver says.

Theroux says he just wants to get across the border and find a guesthouse.

"We don't run a guesthouse."

Theroux writes, "They drove away, leaving me by the side of the road. That was to be fairly typical of my experience with aid workers in rural Africa: they were, in general, oafish, self-dramatizing prigs, and often complete bastards."

And where there are aid workers, he observes, there are prostitutes.

Later he has a dialog with an aid worker on a "feeding program," a term that reminds him of farm animals. He says to her, "We used to say, 'Give people seeds and let them grow their own food.'"

"The rains have been unreliable," she says. Indeed: in some places it hasn't rained in three years.

"Maybe they should relocate," he replies. "If they relocate, they might find work, and they might plant gardens if you weren't feeding them."

"We save lives, not livelihoods," she says.

Theroux's observation is confirmed by another travel book published in 2003, "Adventure Capitalist," by global investor Jim Rogers. In Ethiopia, Rogers says, "An entire generation of Ethiopians has grown up without learning how to farm. Instead . . . they go to town every month, park the donkey, and collect grain. Some recipients, the day we were in Lalibela, carried their ration of wheat directly over to the town market and started selling it. And so . . . there is a generation of farmers who have simply stopped farming because . . . there is no way to compete with free grain."

I expected that message from Rogers, the capitalist. But it is coming also from Theroux, the literary figure. Theroux refers to the aid workers as "a maintenance crew on a power trip, who had turned Malawians into beggars and whiners."

An old friend remarks how well Theroux's sons are doing in the West, and suggests that one of them come to work in Africa as Theroux did.

But you've had plenty of Westerners, Theroux says. "Years and years."

"I want your son," the man says.

And Theroux thinks, in effect: why waste my son?

The most fascinating dialog is over the subject of Indian merchants, who were kicked out of Uganda, Malawi, and other places for dominating retail business. After a quarter-century, a few of their shops have been made into bars, but most are empty. Some have African women squatting outside selling vegetables on the ground.

Theroux speaks to a group of educated Africans about this. One mocks the Indian shopkeepers. He says they were everlastingly writing down lists of merchandise and adding up the figures, one, two, three, one, two, three.

"But that's how a shop is run," Theroux says. "That's normal business. You make a list of what you've sold, so you know what stuff to reorder."

"Indians know no other life!" the African replies. "Just this rather secluded life — all numbers and money and goods on shelves. One, two, three."

They have to count the inventory, Theroux says. "The profit margins are so small."

"But we Africans are not raised in this way," the African says. "What do we care about shops and counting? . . . Selling is not our heritage. We are not business people."

Another African, a former ambassador who had been listening in, says: "When Africans run businesses, their families come in and stay with them and eat all their food — just live off them. As soon as an African succeeds in something, he has his family cadging off him. Not so?"

"That is true, brother," one says.

"And we are not cut out for this shopkeeping and bookkeeping and" — the former ambassador winks at Theroux — "this number crunching."

"I had never heard such bullshit," Theroux writes. "Well, perhaps I had and not recognized it. The man was saying: This is all too much for us. We cannot learn how to do business. We must be given money, we must be given sinecures, because we don't know how to make a profit."

I have heard similar things myself. Once I had a Tibetan tour guide who complained about all the Chinese who had moved to the Tibetan capital city, Lhasa. The Chinese had started little businesses — karaoke bars, beauty shops, and the like. They were business-oriented. If you gave a Chinese 100 yuan, my guide said, the Chinese would put it in the bank and invest it in his business. "If I had 100 yuan," he said, "I would go drinking with my friends, and by morning the 100 yuan would be gone. But we would have good fellowship."

The African's observation about sponging relatives reminded me of my Filipino maid when I lived in Hong Kong. She had arrived in Hong Kong with a small bag, but to go home a year later she packed a one cubic meter box full of gifts. When Filipinos came back from a foreign job they had to bring nice things, and if someone admired one of those things, they had to give it to him.

"I have to," my maid said.

This 22-year-old woman was essentially doing the same thing in Hong Kong that I was, earning a nest egg abroad. She had saved several thousands of dollars that she might use to start a business or to pay for education. This box of gifts amounted to a substantial tax on that, in addition to the other taxes she would have to pay. But think if she had brought her extended family with her, and had had to feed them the entire year. That is what the African described.

We wonder why some peoples succeed and some do not. Part of it is whether they have a free market — but not all of it. It is also whether they have the values that the market requires. The dominant values in a culture can change if it pays to change them. Giving people aid allows them to keep certain values that ought to be changed — and to change certain others that ought to be kept.

Theroux's epiphany came after he visited his ruined school in Malawi. He decided, "Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. Everyone else, donors and volunteers and bankers however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion."

Here is a travel book worth reading.

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