A review by bobbo49
The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari by Paul Theroux
4.0
Ten years ago I read Dark Star Safari, and loved how it captured the essence of both Egypt and South Africa as I understood them from my own travels, as well as the accurate descriptions of east Africa as I had understood it from other readings. This is a much more difficult read, though written with all of the passion that Theroux always seems to capture. Theroux is never a typical traveler or observer, nor does he have any desire to be.
He starts a planned overland trip north on the west coast from South Africa to Mali by exploring the (somewhat improving) mass slum camps of Capetown (which we briefly explored in 2003), then traveling to the coast and north of Namibia, where he begins to experience the breadth and depth of true rural poverty, and the depredation and crime that mark its boundaries. Finally, Theroux enters Angola, where civilization as he (and most of us, even experienced travlers) believe to know it is almost nonexistent. He is blunt in his criticism of the colonial and slave and capitalist systems that created the present societies, and equally so in his angry words for the current corrupt governmental and economic systems (including overwhelming Chinese investment and worker intrusion that is now common throughout the third world) that are destroying native populations and ways of life but offering no viable or sustainable replacements. In the end, he cuts his planned trip short after Angola, deciding that to travel further into the Congo, Namibia, Mali as he intended (particularly with Boko Haram everywhere) would serve no further purpose: he has experienced too much of eastern Africa's reality already. In all, a very grim portrait of a significant part of the African continent in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
He starts a planned overland trip north on the west coast from South Africa to Mali by exploring the (somewhat improving) mass slum camps of Capetown (which we briefly explored in 2003), then traveling to the coast and north of Namibia, where he begins to experience the breadth and depth of true rural poverty, and the depredation and crime that mark its boundaries. Finally, Theroux enters Angola, where civilization as he (and most of us, even experienced travlers) believe to know it is almost nonexistent. He is blunt in his criticism of the colonial and slave and capitalist systems that created the present societies, and equally so in his angry words for the current corrupt governmental and economic systems (including overwhelming Chinese investment and worker intrusion that is now common throughout the third world) that are destroying native populations and ways of life but offering no viable or sustainable replacements. In the end, he cuts his planned trip short after Angola, deciding that to travel further into the Congo, Namibia, Mali as he intended (particularly with Boko Haram everywhere) would serve no further purpose: he has experienced too much of eastern Africa's reality already. In all, a very grim portrait of a significant part of the African continent in the second decade of the twenty-first century.