Those pesky agents of virtue

Week beginning 7 August 2005

I think that next to biography, travel writing has become one of my favourite genres. If it is not possible to visit exotic parts of the world, then, if only by proxy, one can read the stories of those who have.

For reasons apparent to readers of last week's column, I've been doing a bit of reading -- quite a lot, in fact -- on Africa, and those who have travelled there. Geldof on Africa (minus expletives) is a fascinating story of discovery and revelation. So too is Bryson's Africa Diary, and (though not strictly in the travel writing league), Christina Lamb's The Africa House, telling the story of an attempt to perpetuate the British Empire in a small corner of Northern Rhodesia.

Now I've just finished Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town. Theroux is a writer of international renown, who lived and taught in Malawi and Uganda in the 1960s. A few years ago he decided to cover the continent from north to south, beginning in Egypt and ending in South Africa.

The result -- a 500 page paperback which really was rivetting. Following Theroux through Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa was a breathtaking tour de force. If it did anything, it reminded me that the one word 'Africa' is inadequate to convey the breadth of culture and of history and of need spread throughout the various countries of this vast continent.

Theroux opted to make the journey the hard way -- by land. No air travel at all. One of the reasons for this was that he reckons that as points of entry, airports are false frontiers. To enter a country and get a real feel for all that is involved in doing so, one needs to cross perimeter boundaries, haggle with local officials over visa requirements, and step over the dividing line on foot.

Theroux puts it like this: 'I reflected that a person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country's central reality.' Trouble is, most of us have no option.

Of course, notwithstanding the real difficulties and dangers involved in such a trip, Theroux does not hide the self-indulgent nature of the safari. He is now living in the West, where, like most of us, he is at the constant mercy of the telephone and the computer, required to meet deadlines constantly, and to be within contactable range at all times.

So this particular safari was, for Theroux, the ultimate getaway: 'out of touch in Africa was where I wanted to be'. It's an understandable feeling, particularly if, like the average Free Church minister (is there an average Free Church minister?) one works from home. Yet such escapism is a questionable motive for disappearing on friends and family for months on end; however, it produced a great book.

Theroux is an expert at describing people. His picture of American tourists cruising the Nile, discussing their hip replacements and not believing they were in Africa (they were in Egypt, after all!), seemed very true to life. But so too were the stories he heard in his various encounters: stories of brutality and torture in some of the worst regimes of Africa's history, stories of atrocity in the genocides of Rwanda, stories of illegal eviction of Zimbabwe's white farmers. The stories flitted past our Western eyes in the newspaper headlines we read long ago; but it takes a book to perpetuate them.

I was glad to read that Uganda, where Theroux had lectured in Makerere University, he found to be relatively safe, if chaotic. In a magnificent retrospective sentence, in which Theroux talks about 'Traffic-clogged Cairo, overheated Khartoum, crumbling tin-roofed Addis, crime-ridden Nairobi', and so on, Kampala he describes as 'disorderly'. (And I thought, number one son can live with 'disorderly').

However, there was a strand running through Dark Star Safari which left me uncomfortable. Theroux obviously had little time for those whom he describes throughout his book as 'agents of virtue'. He speaks with understanding and empathy about most people, from political activists to Kampalan prostitutes, but agents of virtue he despises.

So who are they? Well, most aid-workers, for one thing. Theroux has a problem with the whole machinery of international aid for Africa, and perhaps he has good reason for doing so. He speaks, for example, of donations of clothing ending up in the hands of unscrupulous traders who flog them on the market. He speaks of Red Cross workers running around in their four-wheeled drive jeeps, keeping in touch with HQ by cell-phone and refusing to give anyone a lift.

He speaks of countries, like North Kenya, 'run by foreigners -- they manage everything, the schools, hospitals, churches. They are run by charities, and aid agencies and NGOs, not by us' (he is quoting an African companion).

All of which, of course, begs the obvious question: where would the schools, hospitals and churches be without the work of the aid agencies? It's a complex problem; obviously, as Geldof argues so powerfully, Africa needs to be raised to the point of self-development. But for all the rotten apples Theroux came across, it is difficult to see any other solution in either the short-term or the long that does not involve international aid.

However Theroux is at his most vitriolic when it comes to the missionaries. Of all the agents of virtue, he says, they are the worst. Especially fundamentalist types, who insist on taking the Bible literally, and are thereby duping the Africans with unscientific and unhistorical religious nonsense. In addition to which, in offering the Gospel, these missionaries tell the Africans they are sinners, loading them with guilt, as if they didn't have enough to worry about.

Theroux's tirade against missionaries grows out of the chance encounters he had with some of them on his 'dark star safari'. What they did on him I have no idea. But is it not ironic that in a nation devastated by AIDS -- where to be forty is to be old -- the best that politicians can come up with is 'use condoms'? Is it not ironic that in countries in the grip of corruption and treachery, the West finds it impossible to give a lead? Ironic because these symptoms of a world gone wrong are the very things for which the Gospel alone provides answers; indeed, only the Gospel provides explanations for them.

There are angels of virtue in Theroux's book too (including one from South Uist, interestingly), but most of the self-proclaimed helpers of Africa are people for whom Theroux has only contempt. I wonder if he ever visited one of Africa's thriving churches, where thousands have responded to the claims of Jesus Christ, and where ordinary people have discovered just how empty the rich West actually is.

iaind@backfreechurch.co.uk