http://www.a2review.net/2013/06/05/paul-theroux-and-the-african-stereotype/
Paul Theroux and the African Stereotype:
One would expect that with old age Paul Theroux would see Africa differently, but he doesn't. An excerpt from his latest novel The Last Train to Zona Verde, on The New York Times titled In Angola, a Dollar and a Meal, shows that Theroux is one of the last bastions of those who insouciantly stereotype Africa without restraint. Having ended his entertaining 15-year feud with V S Naipaul at the Telegraph Hay Festival in 2011, Paul Theroux is to open a new one, with the rock singer Bono, who he criticized over his views on Africa. According to The Telegraph, "Paul makes a long, very personal, attack on Bono, among other things, for comparing the anti-apartheid song that includes the line 'Shoot the Boer' to an Irish protest anthem," one of Theroux's friends tells Mandrake. "He thinks Bono is an ignorant, meddlesome fool." Paul Theroux is not well placed to talk about Bono's ignorance given that he [Theroux] is ignorant about many things in Africa (or he simply refuses to see them) and goes on spewing the type of prose that has been described by Hedley Twidle in the New Statesman as "a welter of Afro-pessimism so intense that it out-Naipauls both Naipauls and makes even Conrad's Marlow seem fairly chipper". Hedley Twidle further says that "He wants to re-enter the zona verde, the green, brooding landscapes and immemorial rurality of "l'Afrique profonde", where a narrator-hero descended from Herodotus, Haggard, Thesiger, Hemingway, Blixen, van der Post et al can commune with his subconscious and have big thoughts in an Africa uncomplicated by 21st-century African people." An excerpt from Theroux's novel in the New York Times speaks for itself:
The old woman made directly for me. "Old" is probably inaccurate: she was undoubtedly much younger than me, 60 or less, but had the aged face of a kindly crone. I was standing apart from the others, who were drinking, and perhaps drunk. I looked for a log to rest on, but saw nowhere to sit, and the car seemed cursed.
Holding the bucket up so I could examine its contents, the woman smiled at me and worked the jaws of her rusty tongs.
"Boa tarde," she said, but it seemed more like evening to me.
At the bottom of the bucket were three pieces of chicken — legs attached to thighs. They were skinless, shiny-sinewed and dark as kippers, as if they'd been smoked. Each one was covered with busy black flies, and flies darted around the hollow of the bucket. It was more a bucket of flies than a bucket of chicken.
Squeezing her rusty tongs again, the woman asked, "Qual?" ("Which one?") Though I was hungry, I waved her away, retching at the thought of eating any of those chicken legs. Yet I had not eaten all day, and it had been a long and tiring journey, of harassment, of the border crossing, of the sight of misery and naked children playing in dust, flies crawling on their eyes and in the sores on their bodies. The off-road detours had been especially exhausting from the bucking and bumping of the vehicle. And the checkpoints, the shakedowns, the roadblock dictators.
The woman was smiling because I was smiling. The absurdity of "Which one?" had just struck me — three identical pieces of chicken in the dirty bucket, each of them specked by skittering flies; an existential question to the stranger in a strange land.
"Não," I said. "Obrigado." ("Thank you.") Something in my smile encouraged her and kept her there, rocking a little, flexing her bruised toes, running her tongue against her lips to show patience. She was gaunt, and she herself looked hungry. But I said no again and, shoulders slackening in resignation, she turned away, making for the others, who were standing in a group still drinking bottles of Cuca beer.
A muscle twisted sharply in my stomach and yanked at my throat: the whip of hunger.
A further reading of Theroux's other books reveal that he achieves stereotyping without much stress to the point that one wonders if he's read Binyavanga Wainaina's satirical easy How to Write about Africa on Granta, which begins with the following words: "Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans".
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-The Art of Living and Impermanence
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