The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux

The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari, Paul Theroux.  New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.  e-book, 338 pps.

Paul Theroux travels from Capetown up through Namibia and Angola in this latest book.  I really like Theroux's writing because he ties history and literature into his travelogues.  The Last Train to Zona Verde also exemplifies the best of Paul Theroux-- a bit grouchy but amiable and clearly aging.  There are some intimations about age and the winding down that accompanies it.  I can only hope that he is wrong about this in his own case.  I want him [and Oliver Sacks and Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig and Sir Terry Pratchett] to live on forever-- or at least several more decades.

Besides the gloominess of advancing age, there is the hopelessness of the urban sprawl.  The cities are not clean.  They are crime-ridden, hopeless, and poverty-stricken.  A few shantytowns have become respectable neighborhoods but that is the exception rather than the rule.  The small towns and cities are full of despair.  That much is clear from this account.

I knew in a general way that Angola was a bit torn up by wars.  I didn't realize to what extent until reading about Theroux's journey through it.  The government of Angola itself is rich.  Many of the citizens of Angola are poor.  There are schoolchildren in Angola who do not even have a pencil to write with.  Angola itself is rich with oil.  Angola is a case of the politicos getting rich off the backs of the common people.  

Zona Verde, green zone, is another word for the Bush.  Theroux gets to meet some San tribal people, hangs out with them, goes on a walk through the Bush with them, only to discover that he's been trolled.  The whole glimpse into traditional life of a tribal people thing is staged for tourists.  After discovering his folly, Theroux bravely asks a question that I would not have thought to ask, "Who says they or other tribal people necessarily want to continue to live in hardship of the old ways?"  Having to walk several miles daily for water certainly is far less convenient than having running water available either in one's home or in a communal building.

Also in the Bush, Theroux meets up with a friend of a friend who has an elaborate safari camp for rich people.  Folks pay 4000 dollars or more a day to spend nights in little cabins overlooking a local watering hole.  They get to ride African elephants [something that the natives never ever do] and eat fancy foods [something else that the natives never ever do].  I think myself, I'd rather head upriver in a canoe or raft with a guide and camp out at night than spend time in the lap of luxury at that rich peoples' safari.  The safari is owned by an outsider.  The profits are not benefiting any local people.  The elephants themselves are problematic.  There is a reason why African elephants are not ridden around by the natives.

The train rides and bus rides, once they get underway, are descriptive and made me long to be on the road again.  There's something to be said for taking local transportation and mingling with the locals.  The border crossing that Theroux describes really sucked.  So does the food available to him after hiring out a car [with several other passengers] to get somewhere that there was no buses or trains.  In the end, Theroux decides that it is time to go home.  African Bush is beautiful if trecherous.  Urban sprawl in Angola-- a place of no trees and few animals-- is indistinguishable from city to city.

sapphoq reviews says:  Paul Theroux's book The Last Train to Zona Verde is certainly worth a read by anyone who wants the real deal-- or as real a deal as a white privileged traveler can experience in foreign places-- about what traveling through parts of Africa is like.  If you are satisfied with standard template traveling fare, you really do owe it to yourself to read a real travel book such as the ones that Theroux writes.  Fans of Theroux of course will not be disappointed.  Absolutely highly recommended.    

Cocktail Hour Unter the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Alexandra Fuller.  New York: The Penguin Press, 2011.  e-book, 197 pps.

Alexandra Fuller is now grown up and married.  Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness tells more of her mother's history, a bit of her dad's, and pieces of what happened in Africa with the various wars and civil unrest.  Mom continues to have a full-fledged drinking problem.  She has also been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition as well and treated with meds and a stay in the hospital. 

Alexandra Fuller's narrative of her mother's history and family background is very well put together and also very interesting.  There are a few old time pictures which aid in setting the mood for this tome.  Mom refers to Alexandra's writing as "Awful books."  Her complaints are reminiscent of a very few accusations that I have received along the lines of, "So, you're going to use our conversation/ my most excellent untarnished personality/ my experiences for one of your characters..." implying that I can write fiction that folks will want to pay to read and that my acquaintances are so interesting that they can't help but wind up in some book that I haven't written yet.  The thing is, Tub Fuller is actually interesting and a natural subject to wind up in one of her daughter's Awful books.

sapphoq reviews says: More of the author's mom's history and background are revealed in this later book about living in Africa.  Alexandra Fuller has grown up, became a naturalized citizen of the United States.  Her sister is residing in London during the book's time period.  Mom and Dad are in Africa and in Africa to stay.  There is indeed a tree of forgetfulness.  Made me wish for my own.  Worth a read for anyone who enjoyed Alexandra Fuller's first book of memoirs Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. 

Don't Let'sGo to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller, New York: Random House, 2001.  ebook, 256 pps.

When I was a kid, I briefly knew a girl and her mother who invited me to a museum with them.  Where there, they fawned over the sculptures and pottery that was from what was then called Rhodesia.  "The best stuff isn't here," the mother sniffed.  I didn't understand really.  Turned out both had lived there together when the girl was even younger.  Girl might have been born there, I don't actually recall.  I grew up in an openly prejudiced family.  These two had an Irish surname and freckles.  I knew next to nothing about Africa.  I was a kid as I have stated.  Too young to know that the "Social Studies" books we were given were woefully inadequate.  Neither one of them said anything else about this Rhodesia which I knew was located on the continent of Africa but nothing else.  I have no idea now of where they had lived, what they done there, or why they had left.  They didn't offer any information.  I wasn't prone to asking.  As a matter of fact, I could not even detect an accent.  To me, they sounded like everyone else in my mixed up neighborhood.  At any rate, they both disappeared shortly afterwards.  Perhaps mother and young daughter had gone back to Africa, maybe to a safer place than Rhodesia.  At any rate, I never saw them again.  Alexandra Fuller's book is about a childhood in Africa.  It is the book that I wish I'd had as a child.  Certainly more accurate than our "Social Studies" books.

The family hailed from England but when Alexandra Fuller was a toddler went back to Africa.  There was a farm, a series of farms.  Mom and dad were a bit taken up with the drink.  Especially Mom.  She got a bit maudlin at times, was prone to belting out songs at random.  There were two surviving sibs.  The author-- called BoBo in the book-- was one of them.  Her older sister Vanessa-- called Van-- was the other one.  There was a war and guns and the hazards of living in places where the wild things had been first.

sapphoq reviews says:  A very likeable memoir.  Worth a read for anyone who is an armchair traveler into other peoples' yesterdays living in faraway lands. 

Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa, Richard Grant

Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa, Richard Grant.  New York: Free Press, 2011.  paperback, 336 pps., incl. index.

     I first encountered Richard Grant through an earlier book of his called God's Middle Finger which narrated his trip through the Sierra Madres.  I was delighted to find Crazy River on the shelves of my local bookstore.  Although different in tone from his earlier work, Crazy River immediately drew me in.  I haven't been to Africa (yet) but this book transported me to a very different world.

     The Malagarasi River, dotted with small fishing villages between the wild places, is full of pissed off hippos and crocodiles and bandits.  Grant skillfully interweaves the stories that the river has for him into the histories of other adventurers, politicians, and the East African peoples.  The crew that Grant hires in Tanzania is composed of men who each have their own story to tell.  Crazy River carried me away from my reading chair to a place I had never been.  I was there as Grant made his way through checkpoints and red tape, as prostitutes tried to pick him up, as children demanded money.  I was also there on the river itself with the tsetse flies and passages of choking weeds.  And there as Grant actually got to view the source of  the Nile itself. 

     By the end of Crazy River, I had a visceral sense of the horror of genocide and specifically the genocide that took place in Rwanda.  Grant tells the story of some two thousand people that took refuge in a Catholic Church in Nyange.  The priest there, one "Reverend" Athanase Seromba, was more than compliant in the slaughter of those seeking sanctuary in his church building.  He arranged to have his church building bulldozed.  He let the drunken militia in with their grenades.  He then pointed out any survivors who were then killed off with bayonets.  The priest did this because the folks hiding in his church building were the wrong tribe.  The priest himself belonged to the other tribe. 

     Crazy River is a most excellent book eluding a real sense of place.  This book is a definite keeper and the finest example of the modern travel essay.

sapphoq reviews says: Highly Recommended.