Africa in Chaos
Marian Evans, American Renaissance, July 12, 2013
The continent sinks further into degeneracy.
Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013, $27.00, 353 pp.
The last time AR readers met Paul Theroux he was traveling south across the eastern part of African continent from Cairo to Cape Town. His journey was by land, sometimes by boat, never by plane. He told the story in Dark Star Safari. Since then, he has traveled across Asia and Russia, a journey he recounted inGhost Train to the Eastern Star (2008). For his latest, and probably his last long journey, he decided to see the other half of Africa. He would start in Cape Town and travel north along the Atlantic side of Africa all the way to the Sahara Desert. As in all his previous journeys, he would travel alone.
In South Africa, Mr. Theroux spent his evenings in the green and comfortable Cape, with its northern Mediterranean climate, and his days touring the nearby black townships in the hot interior. While he found some black middle-class enclaves—well-kept houses and new schools—he found them surrounded by squatter camps stretching seemingly forever and constantly growing:
"There was no end to this township: the hostels led to the shacks, the shacks to the hovels, the hovels to the roadside and the bungalows, and beyond the bungalows and shebeens were the newcomers in the twig and plastic lean-tos, straggling across the flatland.” . . .
. . . remembering the words of another white Angolan. As they contemplated the reeking, swarming slums of Luanda, this man said, “This is what the world will look like when it ends.” With that doomsday vision seeming all too real, Mr. Theroux decided to head home. . . .
Google Images
Posts
