The Last Train to Zona Verde

by Paul Theroux

  It takes a certain specialist’s dedication to travel in squalid cities and fetid slums, among the utterly dependent poor, who have lost nearly all their traditions and most of their habitat. You need first of all the skill and the temperament of a proctologist. Such a person, deft in rectal exams, is as essential to medicine as any other specialist, yet it is only the resolute few who opt to examine the condition of the human body by staring solemnly — fitted out like spelunkers, with scopes and tubes and gloves — up its fundament and trawling through its intestines, making the grand colonic tour. Some travel has its parallels, and some travelers might fit the description as rectal specialists of topography, joylessly wandering the guts and entrails of the earth and reporting on their decrepitude. I am not one of them.

  Forty years ago, when I planned my Great Railway Bazaar trip, I had considered taking the train from Turkey into Iraq, traveling south from Mosul to Baghdad and onward to Basra, where I would cross into Iran. “What’s Basra like?” I asked a friend who’d been there. “It’s not the asshole of the world,” he said, “it’s eighty miles up it.” So I went to Iran by a different route, and I have spent my traveling life avoiding such places. What had I learned? That proctology pretty much describes the experience of traveling from one African city to another, especially the horror cities of urbanized West Africa.

  But the scientific inclination is not enough. Some artfulness is required. To chronicle this anguish, you need to be a traveler with a taste for ruins, someone who takes pleasure in them, as Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778) did in eighteenth-century Rome. He was the inspired artist whose wayward brilliance lay in depicting the cracked remains of an ancient civilization, meticulous etchings of ruination, down to the last decayed detail. His dark etchings of crumbled, toppled-over, and scattered Rome were sold as souvenirs for visitors to the city. Travelers at the time, making the Grand Tour — English aristocrats, and writers such as Smollett and Goethe — seized on them, because Piranesi had found a way of bringing a vision of lost glory, even of splendor, to these scenes of antique devastation.

  That was what was needed, proctologist and Piranesi, science and art — a strong stomach and a fascination with decay, and disorder, and hopelessness, and township anarchy.

  There is something constricting and claustrophobic about the traveler’s being limited to cloacal ruins and urban dead ends. I had become a traveler to be free to wander, and on some of my most difficult trips I had felt liberated by the space and light. I have seldom been a traveler in cities. I have generally avoided them — all cities, not just in Africa, but also in Asia and Latin America. I am by nature a city hater, finding urban life nasty, hidden, and hard to penetrate. To me, even the greatest cities are places of loneliness and confinement where people are strangers to each other.

  Why would I wish to travel through blight and disorder only to report on the same ugliness and misery? The blight is not peculiar to Africa. The squalid slum in Luanda is not only identical to the squalid slum in Cape Town and Jo’burg and Nairobi; they all greatly resemble, in their desperation, their counterparts in the rest of the world. A squatter camp in California is in every detail a duplication of a squatter camp in Africa, and worthy of close examination by a traveling writer for that reason. But I am not that writer, neither so committed to discomfort nor so noble-hearted.

  The earth is becoming intensely citified. “The megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first-century geography,” Robert D. Kaplan writes in The Revenge of Geography. But the world I grew up in was not a world of big cities, and I began my traveling life hoping to find differences in landscapes and people, not repeated versions of the metropolitan experience. I don’t mock the effort. I am not equal to the task. The traveler in cities needs to understand cities better than I do and not be disgusted by their chronic deficits; that traveler needs to care more, to be more expert in some areas, more innocent in others, more hopeful. Anyway, the successful city dweller is gifted in coping with the horrors, the stalkers, the foul smells, the loud music, the casual rudeness, the foxy habits of taxi drivers, the absence of trees, the menacing faces, the noise, the squawk of voices — many of them screams; the rumble and whine that is unceasing — the night drone too, along with the nighttime light; the physicality of it all, especially the closeness of the crowds, the lack of elbow room, the daily experience of bumping against other people, which is a constant violation of your space and your body, the physical rubbing against strangers that amounts to frottage, known colloquially in New York as “subway grinding.”

  That life is not for me, either to travel in or write about. It has nothing to do with my age. Now Africa is a continent of huge, unsustainable cities, and the majority of Africans are themselves city dwellers, having forfeited their poor villages for much poorer slums. It is impossible to travel overland in Africa by public transport — as I did from Cairo to Cape Town, and now from Cape Town to Luanda — and not make a circuit of the cities, awful places where there is nothing to learn except what you knew already from the worst neighborhoods of your own country.

  One remedy for the revulsion in such travel is that of the French aphorist Nicolas Chamfort, who wrote, “Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.” I have spent a life of travel sleeping in strange beds and dining on sinister food, and I have only mildly objected, because it is in the nature of travel to be uncomfortable, if not scared silly. But insult is another matter, and gratuitous insult is objectionable for being unrewarding. You can stay home and be insulted; you don’t need to go ten thousand miles to be jeered at. There is no revelation in being yelled at, heckled, cursed, or pestered, as began to happen with greater frequency on my trip. I think this harassment is the fate of many women traveling alone in male-dominated countries — most countries, that is — and I sympathize with women, usually burdened with a child or a backpack, for having to endure it.

  It is undignified and tedious for anyone to have to battle his way onto a dirty bus. Yet I pitched in and found that pushing and being shoved and biffed by impatient oafs is not the worst of it. If, at the end of the journey, after nine or ten hours of travel on the miserable bus, with its piss stops and children with the squitters and chickens dying in baskets and shouting passengers and its inept driver — finally needing to elbow your way off the bus — if, then, the traveler sees nothing new, it is a pointless journey too, and no one would want to read about it. I found more and more, in these cheated places with diminished resources, that I had to fight for a seat, and I became less and less willing to do so. The single woman, the older traveler, the weak-looking or undersized stranger, the loner, the wanderer at night — all are taken for easy prey, and bullied or fleeced. The only lesson is: caveat viator, traveler beware, and perhaps ask again, “What am I doing here?”

  My answer did not amount to a manifesto for staying home but rather an essay on other directions, since there are so many places on earth worthy of a traveler’s effort and more likely to evoke a traveler’s bliss. I am not too old for this, I am more patient than ever, but I am temperamentally unsuited to chronicling the gutter life of the African slum that necessitates my swallowing a toad every morning. There is nothing to write about it that I have not written already, and at length. Such places are transit camps filled with people who have been abandoned by their fattened and corrupt governments. Such places might, as Kalunga Lima predicted, one day explode in a blaze of fury, the spontaneous combustion of enraged, cheated people. I know enough of the score-settling and fickleness of uprisings to avoid them.

  But I have no idea what will happen to these sprawling cities and slum areas. My feeling has always been that the truth is prophetic, and if I write accurately about the present, seeing things as they are, aspects of the future will be suggested. I was somewhat heartened by the progress made in ten years in the townships of Cape Town, how the shantytowns and squatter camps had been upgraded to habitable settlements. This was largely due to th
e efforts of sympathetic and innovative well-wishers, both South African and foreign agencies: the installation of water and electricity, the improvement of houses and roads, the novelty of indoor plumbing, the building of schools.

  I was enlightened. So this is how a city grows, how cities — something of a rarity in the early life of the populated world — have grown through history. It is impossible to say when the first city appeared on earth, and it is probably true, as the historian J. M. Roberts wrote, that “more than any other institution the city has provided the critical mass which produces civilization and that it has fostered innovation better than any other environment so far.” Africa is a showcase of cities in their messy infancy — dangerous, unhealthy, corrupt, lawless, improvisational, and still growing. Modernity is conspicuous in Africa nearly always as blight, the disfigurement of cities and landscapes, a great and overwhelming ugliness.

  Yet the upgrading of a shantytown to a place of tidy huts is not the end of the story. There is no end. I knew that when, after my visits to Khayelitsha and Guguletu, I saw the new, exhausted, and wide-eyed arrivals from the provinces. In an unregulated country, mismanaged and badly governed, there is no limit to the growth of a slum. Every improved slum area attracts a new shantytown, every new shantytown attracts a squatter camp, every squatter camp attracts more people leaving their traditional homelands for an uncertain life in the city, among the multitudes of unemployed. There is a point beyond which squalor cannot sink any lower, or get any worse, and that is the point these African cities have reached. People live in them in a spirit of renunciation. An African city of this sort is an agglomeration of desperate people, a static mob that feels safer in its dense numbers.

  “You didn’t see the wealthy areas!” I will be told. “You didn’t see the great houses!” But I did see them. I peeped through the perimeter walls and saw the sentry boxes, the private clubs, and the gated communities. I was welcomed in some of them, ate and drank in their delightful rooms — “Do have some more kudu carpaccio” — and I found that really these were tiny enclaves, mere precious islands in a sea of wreckage.

  My horror interest in the futureless, dystopian, world-gone-wrong, Mad Max Africa of child soldiers, street gangs, reeking slums, refuse heaps, utter despair, misplaced belief, new-age cargo cults, and bungled rescue attempts — this horror interest is rooted in detachment. It is unworthy, no more than idle, slightly sickening curiosity over modernity in its most odious form, the sort that technology worsens by making people lazier and greedier, tantalizing them with visions of the unattainable, driving many of them to be refugees and bludgers in Europe and America. We have bestowed on Africa just enough of the disposable junk of the modern world to create in African cities a junkyard replica of the West, a mirror image of our own failures — but no better than that. Writing about it, choosing the urban landscape and urban misery as a subject, is something for an obituarist. Such a vision, or a visit, represents everything in travel I have always wished to escape.

  I am not an Afro-pessimist, though. Apart from the obvious unchecked proliferation of people and the inevitable disappearance or extinction of wild animals, it is not certain what Africa’s future will be. But what is happening in Africa now is also happening with greater subtlety in the rest of the world: the diminution of resources, the vanishing of work, the growth of urban areas. The difference is that Africa’s population is growing much faster than that of any other continent. There are estimated to be a billion Africans now. Within four decades it will be two billion people — most of them living in cities, in countries without industry, without sufficient food or water or energy, countries that are poorly governed and insecure. It is projected that in a few years Nigeria will grow to a population of three hundred million, in an area the size of Arizona and New Mexico. Donor aid can take some credit for what little infrastructure exists. But donor aid and self-interested foreign governments and “rogue aid” from China and North Korea — money proffered with no questions about human rights — all these are largely responsible for the persistence of bad governments, too.

  The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly, with his decades in power, along with his vain, flitting shopaholic wife, his hangers-on, and his goon squad, is an obscene feature of African life that is not likely to disappear. When I complained to a bureaucrat from Burkina Faso (because that country, too, was on my proposed route) about the persistence of tyrants, she raised her voice and said in a froggy accent, “It is the réalité!” — because her own country was governed by a longstanding (twenty-five years and counting) clinger to office. It is not a reality at all, but a fantasy of power promoted by the tyrant.

  Most politicians believe their own lies, but the foreign-aid givers make them worse. Take the corrupting forms of foreign aid away and popular desperation might become productive, rebellion leading to elections that might improve matters in the long term. A better alternative to the endless gift-giving is investment. Yet investment is more trouble than the grandstanding presentation of donor aid, requiring more accountability, more humility, more patience, and greater risks — and, of course, less colorful mythologizing of the effort, the photo ops with destitute children.

  Colonialism oppressed and subverted Africans and remade them as scavengers, pleaders, and servants — and turned some of them into rebels. The colonial-mimicry of post-independence Africa has been a continuation of this — more scavengers, more pleaders and panhandlers. And the consequence of each new civil war or outbreak of religious strife or warlordism is that there is more willful damage to repair — more land mines left behind, more burned-out villages, more amputees, refugees, and orphans.

  There will always be lions and elephants and impalas in Africa, because there will always be one sort of game park or another. If many animals are eaten or their habitats destroyed — or if, like the rhino, the wild dog, the quagga, and the giant sable antelope, they face extinction — there will be private reserves and fenced-off game farms where other large animals can be viewed. This is the case today in South Africa, where for a price you are guaranteed an African experience, even if it is no more than the commercial thrill of a glorified theme park that offers the illusion of what Africa once was — if not an Eden filled with animals and people living in relative harmony, then a still-forested land of market towns and viable cities and mud-walled villages, with its soul intact.

  But the giraffe on the game farm and the ridable elephant on the bush concession are not for me either. Once you have seen animals in the wild, it is impossible to enjoy the sight of them behind an enclosure, no matter how vast the enclosure. “What’s the difference between this and a zoo?” Trevor shrewdly inquired in Etosha, in Namibia, as we sat behind the fence at Okaukuejo with the hundreds of German tourists watching the floodlit eland drinking at the waterhole. And Trevor knew: We had seen all of this before. Nothing to report.

  Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial, though it didn’t matter when I first started traveling as a youth, and later as a middle-aged man: I believed I had all the time in the world then. My travel was open-ended. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back,” I used to say to my family. I vanished into countries and was so far out of touch I seemed to evaporate. I had no idea where I was going, but it was a joy to be on the move, and I kept finding places where I wanted to live — a great incentive in travel, the sense that I would discover a new home.

  I recall traveling through Afghanistan and down the Khyber Pass to the lovely town of Peshawar, thinking: I could live here! How wrong I was. Peshawar became a city of refugees, fanatics, mujahideen, suicide bombers, and a bazaar of the Central Asian drug and arms trade. But I was tempted to drop out in other places in the world — dropping out seemed to be one of the temptations in travel, that I would remain in Bali or Costa Rica or Thailand and never come back. I had not yet discovered what Camus wrote in his Notebooks, 1942–1951: “When a man has learned — and not on paper — how to rema
in alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, the illusion that others may share, then he has little left to learn.”

  Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of writing — a groping in the dark, wandering into the unknown, coming to understand the condition of strangeness. In travel, as Philip Larkin says in his poem “The Importance of Elsewhere,” strangeness makes sense. Yet the more I traveled, the greater my homing instinct. As I grow older, the consolations of home take on a deeper meaning.

  Although I lived for more than six continuous years in Africa, and kept returning, I resisted the temptation to stay for an extended period. I never met anyone who said, as the Dutch missionaries in long-ago Malawi often did, “I plan to be buried here.” I once played with the idea of founding a school in the Malawi bush, until I realized that it was not for me to patronize Africans by running a school for them, but for Africans themselves to take on that responsibility. There are still outsiders who are prospectors, adventurers, and entrepreneurs in Africa, and I know some of them, but none are in it for the long haul, and all have an exit strategy. It concentrates the mind to be in a place where you know you have no future.

  Time means so much more to me now than it did. These days, keenly aware of wasted time, I hear the clock ticking more insistently. I hate the idea of travel as déjà vu. Show me something new, something different, something changed, something wonderful, something weird! There has to be revelation in spending long periods of time in travel, otherwise it is more waste. Another effect of the deaths of Nathan and Rui da Câmara and Kalunga was this very insight. Was I where I wanted to be, doing what I loved? The answer was sometimes Yes, sometimes Where am I? But more often it was What am I doing here?