The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

17. What Am I Doing Here?

ALL ITS LAMPS BLAZING, its windows alight, its larval contours illuminated, the last train to Malanje had a glowworm’s gleam, trembling in the dusty half-dark and heat of Luanda’s Viana station, when Kalunga Lima had gestured to it and said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

He was teasing, because since I’d met him he had pegged me as a procrastinator. Normally I am anything but: a leap in the dark is my usual mode of travel, and by the time I met him I had been on the road for many weeks. He was the procrastinator, in my opinion, an Angolan and longtime resident of Luanda who’d moved with his family to the provinces. Angola was doomed, he said, because of the few cheating the many. Kalunga had relocated to distant Lubango, the easier to escape the country by the simpler southern route when the chaos he expected arrived. And it occurred to me that many people shared his fears, that the slums of Luanda, like many in African cities I’d seen, were no more than transit camps for people wishing to flee.

My hesitation was much more of a reversal than he knew. I was the man bewitched by the Chattanooga Choo Choo and the Patagonian Express and the Trans-Siberian, who had written, “Ever since childhood, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it” — yet here was the brand-new Chinese-made train, lit up, on a recently restored line that could bear me in relative comfort east on a safari for 265 miles into zona verde — the green zone of Angola’s bush, the site of the last few wild animals in the country and of the sort of village life that always seemed a consolation. My lifelong idea of supreme happiness was being a passenger on a train rattling through the night to a distant place unknown to me.

But I thought, Not this time. I had no desire to board the train. And, thinking it, I was joyous — a great relief to conclude that this was the end of my trip. No more. The same joy I had always felt on setting off on a long trip now visited me on this decision not to go any farther. Not here, not now.

It was then that Kalunga had taken me to the desperate musseque beyond Viana and, frowning at the loud music and squinting at the scuffling crowds and the shacks — the poverty, the twitching excitement bordering on frenzy, the hopelessness of it — had uttered the devastating pronouncement that stayed with me: “This is what the world will look like when it ends.”

Struck by this doomsday vision, and saddened by his own doom so soon after that, I was left to ponder my next move. I knew that Malanje, the last stop on the railway line, was a dead end: no road led north from there. I’d have to return to hateful Luanda and take the coast road to a place called N’zeto. From the map I could not discern any onward road. I probably could not travel north at all except by air, and even if I spent weeks struggling by back roads to the border, my prize would be the Congolese river town of Matadi, a well-known hellhole. Then I would board a bus to Kinshasa, a rotting city much like Luanda — and rotting for the same reasons: a corrupt government rich on diamonds, gold, and mineral wealth, and on rarefied techniques of embezzlement and trade mispricing.

Rigged elections at this time had provoked rioting in Kinshasa’s streets and a fierce police presence. After that, Brazzaville, Pointe-Noire, and a transit of the squalid cities of the coast, because the Congolese interior was largely made up of no-go areas. Of course, I could put my head down and travel farther, but I knew what I would find: decaying cities, hungry crowds, predatory youths, and people abandoned by their governments, people who saw every foreigner as someone they could hit up for money, since it was apparent that only foreigners seemed to care about the welfare of Africans.

Because I was traveling overland, what lay before me was a grubby and unrewarding itinerary of West African cities — that is, West African shantytowns. No poverty on earth could match the poverty in an African shantytown, and no other place was so bereft of hope. In an African village, poverty was a relative term. I knew that from the humble villages I’d seen in Botswana and Namibia and the Angolan interior, places where people survived, as they always had, in a subsistence economy, growing what they needed, bartering extra food for what they couldn’t grow or buy, living in mud huts, using a slit-trench latrine, practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. It was a life of fetching and carrying and making do: walking an hour for water, washing in the river, scavenging for firewood, killing the occasional chicken, living hand to mouth — not flourishing but eking out an existence in meagerly productive routines.

This hard life in a rural area could not compare with the dog’s life in a shantytown, where gardening was impossible, water was scarce, and fuel — firewood or charcoal — usually unavailable; where there was no muddling through except by a menial job, casual labor, or whoring, or handouts, or crime. But, this being Angola, it was the rich, and only the rich, who appeared to me sluttish and criminal. In the bush there existed the possibility of renewal: a new season, a new crop, a new water source. This extreme rural poverty could be relieved by modes of survival, many of them traditional strategies. But in a city slum, survival was not guaranteed, traditions did not apply, and a cash economy made people peculiarly deprived and rapacious.

The thieving was a tendency that some Marxist economists forgave (Eric Hobsbawm for one, in his book Bandits), by explaining it as the reflex of wronged or oppressed peasants practicing “social banditry,” the politicized poor redressing inequality by stealing from the rich. My experience of credit card fraud in Namibia might have been construed as the act of a social bandit using high technology instead of a machete, but that did not make me feel any better. It left me nearly broke and somewhat demoralized.

Yet the loss of money was nothing compared to the loss of friends. Three people I had gotten to know pretty well, three men I had admired in their passion for Africa, had died — young Nathan violently crushed by an elephant, Kalunga way before his time from a heart attack, and Rui da Câmara, whose skull had been smashed by an intruder. The deaths of others in a time and a landscape you yourself inhabited cannot but remind you of your own mortality.

Travel, especially solitary travel, is a morbid business. “In traveling one is always accompanied by the retinue of Death or his batman,” Henry Miller writes in Remember to Remember. It is a passage well suited to a road trip through Africa. “The quiet village where the river flows so peacefully, the very spot where you choose to dream in, is usually the seat of ancient carnage. What stirs one to reverie is the blood that was spilled more copiously than wine … the historical recitative whistles through the whitened bones of somnolent ruins.”

During my last few long trips I often thought that I might die. I was not alone in that fear; it is the rational conjecture of most travelers I know, especially the ones about my age. The fears of some of my traveling friends were justified: a number of them had died on the road or become terribly ill. “He died doing what he loved” is a sentiment that might console a survivor, but if the victim had been offered a choice beforehand, what would he or she have done? I sometimes imagined myself dismembered in a car crash in the bush. Often, in an overcrowded bus in Africa, I thought of nothing but death, and hating the trip I let out a ghastly laugh when I thought of anyone saying over my battered corpse, “He died doing what he loved.”

In Cape Town at the start of my journey — though I superstitiously avoided mentioning it to anyone — I had dreamed of ending it in Timbuktu. I was headed in that general direction. I had traced a provisional itinerary on my Africa map that led me northerly, zigzagging from Cape Town to Angola, and (somehow) from there, via the Congo and Gabon and Cameroon, through Nigeria and onward to the fabled city in Mali.

All maps are misleading, and Africa maps are more misleading than most. At one time they were alarming for the great empty areas labeled Cannibals, but these days they were inaccurate for the roads crisscrossing them. Many of the wide multicolored thoroughfares boldly shown on the map of Angola did not exist, and the H symbol designating a hotel was a fiction. It is well known that the Congo has very few usable roads; in spite of its wealth, it is a trackless country, and because of that an insecure one. Yet I had always held to the belief that with enough time you can go anywhere. You just travel slowly, picking your way along, taking detours, walking where necessary, bumming rides, living the stop-and-go life of a vagrant.

This method works in most places. It does not work in Africa — though it did once. The followers in the footsteps of H. M. Stanley through the Congo, of David Livingstone through Angola, and of Samuel Baker through Sudan quickly discover that the trip is impossible in the Africa of today. The hinterlands are now controlled by heavily armed warlords, mercenaries, rebel armies, hostile tribes, secessionists, and religious fanatics — hard-line Islamists (Boko Haram, Ansar Dine) or crazed Christians (the Lord’s Resistance Army). Tim Butcher, who in Blood River recounts trying to re-create Stanley’s overland trans-Africa trip, from east to west, ended up flying.

I could have flown, but what’s the point? You don’t see anything from thirty thousand feet. And now I had an inkling of what I would find — cities that were indistinguishable from one another in their squalor and decrepitude. In the broken unspeakable cities of sub-Saharan Africa, the poor — the millions, the majority — ignored by their governments, live a scavenging existence in nearly identical conditions, in shacks, amid a litter of Chinese-manufactured household junk — plastic basins and buckets — and wearing Chinese-made clothes. They might have a cell phone, but in most cases it is little more than a maddening toy. They all suffer from the same inadequacies — food shortages, no plumbing, no clinics, no schools, no security — and the same illnesses — cholera, malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS. They wait without much hope for deliverance, if not transformation. Even small, sedate, house-proud Windhoek had Katutura and its squatter camps; lovely Cape Town had Langa, Lwandle, Gugs, and other townships, equally bleak.

Though I was discouraged by the obstacles and appalled by the deaths of Nathan, Kalunga, and Rui, I had clung to my secret dream of traveling onward from Angola and ending up in Timbuktu. But soon two events shattered that dream. A secessionist coup by a faction of low-level army officers in Mali, fueled by rants from Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, meant that Mali was divided into two countries. Timbuktu in the north (a region as large as France) was now a stronghold of Islamic indignation and threats. Foreign travelers were being kidnapped and held for ransom. One had been killed. In time, this power struggle might be sorted out, I was told, but at the moment the fabled city was closed to the outside world.

Nigeria posed a more serious problem, but also a north-south divide. The Muslim-dominated states in the north — directly on my route — were tormented by the Boko Haram movement. The name in the Hausa language means “Western education is sinful.” The group’s official name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, which in Arabic means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” In these northern states in Nigeria, ruled by Sharia law, the Boko Haram jihadis attacked Christians, Christian churches, non-Islamic schools, and just about anyone wearing Western clothes — trouser-wearing Nigerians and foreigners too.

I first heard about this hostile organization during my stay in Lubango, and had made notes to myself on its looming threat on the Day of the Dead, when I began seriously to wonder whether my trip was worth the trouble. Ever since I’d crossed the Angolan border, the question “What am I doing here?” had flashed in my mind. It was not a lament; it was a puzzled inquiry — most thoughtful people on earth ask themselves this question on a regular basis.^* I had kept going, as this narrative shows, hoping for an answer. But around the time I was making my decision to put my head down and take the road north, Boko Haram became active again.

A tortuously argued op-ed in the New York Times by the historian and Africanist Jean Herskovits, “In Nigeria, Boko Haram Is Not the Problem,” explained that Boko Haram was “a peaceful Islamic splinter group” that had been exploited “for electoral purposes.” Video footage of the violent death in Nigerian police custody in 2009 of a Muslim cleric had radicalized the movement, though Herskovits pointed out that the “root cause of violence and anger in both the north and south of Nigeria is endemic poverty and hopelessness.”

She warned that, not mullahs and zealots, but criminal syndicates claiming to represent Boko Haram were terrorizing Christians, setting fire to their homes, and bombing hotels and markets, all to destabilize the country. We should not be too quick to label this Islamic terrorism, she wrote, or to hasten into “a rush to judgment that obscures Nigeria’s complex reality.” The complex reality was a narrow-minded president named Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner and a Christian, his corrupt politicians, and the Nigerian people, growing poorer and more numerous daily.

A rush to judgment was the last thing on my mind. But what about the reported violence? After I read the piece, which smacked of special pleading, I kept close track of Boko Haram outrages. Six days after the op-ed piece appeared, 20 people were killed by jihadis claiming to be Boko Haram — related. A week later, 174 murders, and two weeks after that a dozen more, all sectarian. Nigerian troops became involved, killing 20 Boko Haramists. And then, at weekly intervals for the next three months, there were suicide bombs, arson attacks on schools and churches, and targeted killings — the murder of Christians in Maiduguri and Jos. Thousands of deaths by now in the cities and on the bus routes of my proposed trip.

Professor Herskovits had argued for patience but perhaps had not anticipated the multiple massacres that followed her strangely mollifying piece. More recently, a number of scholars have warned the U.S. government against branding Boko Haram a terrorist organization because doing so would “internationalize the sect” and raise its profile, making it bolder. As a Nigerian terrorist group (or a collection of criminal gangs), the thinking went, it was dangerous only to Nigerians.

But, it seemed, dangerous to Western travelers too. The scholars’ line of reasoning (they wanted, among other things, to be in close touch with the Boko Haramists) seemed to me tendentious, self-serving, and unhelpful. If the root cause of the killings was not Islamic jihadism but “poverty and hopelessness,” there would be many more murders, because Nigeria was poor and hopeless. And for a traveler like me who had no choice but to pass overland through northern Nigeria, it hardly mattered whether I was threatened by a Western-hating jihadi or the armed members of a criminal syndicate, both of whom used the name Boko Haram.

Travelers often become celebrated for risking trips through dangerous places. I had taken risks in my time, and endured my own version of the anthropophagi, and the men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. And so I was faced with the ruined Congolese cities and the fanaticism of northern Nigeria. It struck me that if I proceeded on my way, it would have been a travel stunt, like riding a pogo stick through the desert. A daredevil effort, and to what end?

“Is it worth it?” Apsley Cherry-Garrard asks at the end of The Worst Journey in the World, in talking about the doomed polar trek by Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic. Is life worth risking for a feat, or losing for your country? To face a thing because it was a feat, and only a feat, was not very attractive to Scott; it had to contain an additional object — knowledge.

Traveling north through chaos — what would I find that I had not already learned? As an oil state, Nigeria much resembled Angola in its corruption and destitution. Lagos and Kinshasa were larger versions of Luanda. The rural areas on my route were blighted: idle youths, ailing villagers, beggars, rappers. The lessons I had learned so far were that an itinerary of urban squalor is unrewarding; travel is difficult, and sometimes impossible; a foreign traveler represents wealth, an opportunity for the thief or “social bandit”; and the repetition of squalor is ultimately so futile in its frightfulness as to be banal in the retelling. I imagined my onward journey to be no more than spirited slumming, the usual ordeal of rank smells and bad food, but without a redeeming feature, a toxic tour through the bowels of West Africa, along the Côte d’Ordure.

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 the 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 remain 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?

Because all cities are possessed by an incapacity to be known, and so must be invented or imagined, these were questions I asked in cities. I never questioned being on safari in the zona verde. The bush was Africa’s salvation, and mine. Camus exhorted himself in his Notebooks: “Write the story of a contemporary cured of his heartbreaks solely by long contemplation of a landscape.”

It is the natural landscape that I have always yearned for — and human figures in that landscape. I cannot stand the thought of traveling from city to city, and cities were mainly what awaited me on the last leg of this ultimate safari. Long contemplation of a landscape was once the very definition of a trip through Africa. No longer.

Nor was my old passion to get away at any cost still driving me. “Starting in a hollow log of wood — some thousand miles up a river, with only an infinitesimal prospect of returning — I ask myself, ‘Why?’ ” So Richard Burton wrote in the Congo, in a letter to a friend. He answered himself, as I once did in my way, “And the only echo is ‘damned fool! … The Devil drives.’ ” But Burton was forty-two at the time. I was once a forty-two-year-old hearty in a dugout canoe on a river to nowhere. When he was nearer my age (Burton died in Trieste, at sixty-nine) he was more cautious, no longer a risk taker, but gouty and bronchitic, and happiest at home, indulged by his wife, his days spent fossicking among the books of erotica in his library.

“A question is commonly put to explorers: ‘Why could you not go further when you had already succeeded in going so far?’ ” Francis Galton wrote this in the preface to his Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, because he headed home somewhat abruptly. “And the answer to this is, that several independent circumstances concur in stopping a man after he has been travelling for a certain time and distance.”

Galton then reviews these circumstances: the refitting of the expedition, finding more money, learning another language, studying customs, finding helpful information, making new plans. “But [the traveler’s] energies are reduced, and his means become inadequate to the task, and therefore no alternative is left him but to return [home] while it is still possible for him to do so. It is therefore not to be expected that any large part of the vast unexplored region before us will yield its secrets to a single traveller, but, rather, that they will become known step by step through various successive discoveries … It is probable that for years to come there will still remain ample room in Africa for men inclined for adventure to carry out in them, if nowhere else, the metier of explorers.”

That was also how I felt. Let someone else (proctologist, Piranesi, foolhardy wanderer, someone with time to kill) continue where I left off, and the rest of Africa might yield its secrets to this traveler. In my rigorous experiences with space and time I had just one guinea pig to torture — myself. And now, self-reprieved, back in Cape Town, revisiting some of the places I’d seen earlier, ending my trip, I was happy.

On my last day I woke as usual, meditated a little, took my gout pills, and wrote some notes over breakfast. Then I gathered my clothes, everything except what I stood up in. I was sick of the clothes I had worn every day of my trip. I made a bundle of them, with my silly hat on top, took the train to Khayelitsha, and, randomly stopping a woman at a market stall, asked her if she wanted them. She wasn’t surprised at the sudden offer, a perfect stranger hoisting an armload of old clothes at her. She reacted as if this sort of thing happened all the time and accepted them gratefully, saying, “These will fit my husband.” With a kindly smile she advised me to be careful in the township, to keep my hand on my wallet, and to leave as quickly as possible.

Not the end of travel, or of reckless essaying — there is no end to those for me — but the end of this trip and this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage, where the only possible narrative I see (and am unwilling to write) is an anatomy of melancholy. There is a world elsewhere.

What am I doing here? I knew at last. I am preparing to leave. On the red clay roads of the African bush among poor and overlooked people, I often thought of the poor in America, living in just the same way, precariously, on the red roads of the Deep South, on low farms, poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills — people I knew only from books, as I’d first known Africans — and I felt beckoned home.

* It was Arthur Rimbaud’s in Aden, in 1884, unemployed, writing home and lamenting in the heat. “What a deplorable existence I lead in this absurd climate and under what frightful conditions! How boring! How stupid life is! What am I doing here?” (quoted in Jean Marie Carré, A Season in Hell, 1931).