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Friday,
December 9, 2005
At last! I have official permission to photograph
‘most’ parts of Ethiopia, but – don’t worry --
I will continue to bring you taxi interiors.
I recently finished reading Paul Theroux’s
Dark Star Safari. It’s a travel book
about Theroux’s trip ‘mostly’ overland from Cairo to
Cape Town around the year 2000. Theroux’s aim is to show the reader
the everyday Africa, the Africa off the beaten path, away from the tourist
routes and the airports. He does so fairly successfully, and I do like
many of the personal stories of individuals he meets along the way. However,
I disliked the book overall, in large part because I didn’t like
Theroux’s point of view - or personality (see
other Reviews).
For one, I found him too much of a self-promoter.
He frequently talks about the past books he’s published and brings
up his famous friends. He shows himself virtuously resisting the temptations
of easy sex, while still sexualizing almost every woman he meets. He is
disdainful of the weaknesses and foibles of many of the other Western
travelers he meets along the way, yet by the end of the book it’s
obvious that he succumbs to the same weaknesses and foibles. The inclusion
of his own dysfunction would be redeeming except that he never mocks himself
nearly as much as other people. (A much much much better example of first
person travel journalism is Joe Sacco’s comic Palestine.
Sacco draws himself in a rather unflattering light that can only make
the reader wince, even as it allows us to recognize ourselves in his weaknesses.)
Even more serious, not all of Theroux’s facts
are correct, and he frequently comes to conclusions that (for anyone who
has traveled a bit in Africa) are obviously based on insufficient evidence…
It’s this last point I want to address, in
particular. I’m in the midst of reading Edward Said’s
Orientalism, a dry but interesting study
of the West’s treatment of the ‘Orient’ in politics,
literature, history, linguistics, ect, ect… I don’t agree
with everything Said writes, though many of his points are worthy. The
most worthy one I’ve come across so far is the point that gross
generalization is characteristic of Orientalism. Indeed Oriental was a
term used to talk about not only the Middle East, but also most of Africa
and Asia: an enormous number of individual and distinct languages, cultures,
religions and histories.
Unfortunately, Said falls into the very trap he
disparages and often seems to orientalize Orientalism. He frequently generalizes
about the texts he discusses without placing them in an appropriate historical
and cultural context. So too does Theroux. His book seems to want to break
the reader’s stereotypes about Africa only to replace the old stereotypes
with new ones.
Over and over again Theroux tries to draw big conclusions
about “Africa” and “Africans,” when he’s
really talking about at least eleven individual nations…each with
their own cultures, own histories, and own languages. I have never visited
most of the countries he writes about, but if Uganda is as different from
Tanzania as Mali is different from Ethiopia…I would want to think
pretty carefully before drawing the type of conclusions Theroux does about
politics, development aid and religion…among other subjects.
I think Said is correct when he points out that
one of our (and here I’m talking about myself as an American) greatest
weaknesses is our desire to understand and solve problems – especially
problems of a foreign nature -- by neatly defining them and putting them
into precise categories and orderly columns. But, life is seldom so simple.
The solution to reducing AIDS in San Francisco may or may not work in
South Africa. Factors that have lifted millions of people in India out
of poverty may or may not work the same way in Mali. Or, perhaps they
would work in southern Mali, but not Northern Mali, or, perhaps in the
cities, but not in the country…
Niger’s food crisis is distinct in the north
and in the south of the country. It’s distinct from the food crisis
in Malawi and distinct from malnutrition in India. I find it frustrating
that someone like Theroux (more or less) argues that Africa should stop
getting aid, while someone like Jeffrey Sachs argues that all Africa needs
is lots more money, and the World Bank seems to think poverty will be
greatly reduced by simply canceling government debt in Africa: each has
their own silver bullet that I fear will only go astray... Who is arguing
that country A needs more aid money in this particular area, in this particular
way, but country B needs stronger political institutions, country C needs
more access to markets in Asia, country D should be forced to pay its
teachers instead of pay its debt to the World Bank, country E should develop
a national health care program, and I havn't a clue what country F needs
because I don't know enough about it?
Maybe it's fine the way it is. I guess it's harder to advertise complexity.
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