Paul Theroux · 2002 · overland

Paul Theroux's account of travelling overland from Cairo to Cape Town, refusing to fly. Forty years after teaching in Malawi as a young man, he went back the hard way - by train, cattle truck, dugout and armed convoy - and found much of the continent poorer than he had left it, and the aid industry a large part of the reason.

1. 1
   Cairo

   Theroux sets out from Cairo intending to reach Cape Town without once boarding an aircraft - a route he had thought about for forty years, taken at sixty, through countries the guidebooks advise against.

2. 2
   Khartoum

   Up the Nile and across the Nubian desert into Sudan, by train and truck through country where the road is a suggestion - and where he finds a courtesy toward strangers that he will keep encountering in the poorest places.

3. 3
   Addis Ababa

   Into Ethiopia over the highlands, and then the worst leg of the journey: a cattle truck south through the Rift with the border closed behind him and bandits reported on the road, which turns out to be accurate.

4. 4
   Nairobi

   Kenya is where the aid business is headquartered, and Theroux is at his most acid about it - white Land Cruisers, compounds and salaries, in a country he knew when it was optimistic and finds now mostly resigned.

5. 5
   Dar es Salaam

   Down through Tanzania by the old railway, revisiting the schools and towns where he taught in the sixties - and finding the buildings standing, the libraries empty, and the teachers gone.

6. 6
   Harare

   Zimbabwe under Mugabe in 2001 is a country coming apart in real time, with farm seizures under way and the currency going - and Theroux crosses it watching people manage with a competence their government does not deserve.

7. 7
   Cape Town

   He reaches Cape Town after the better part of a year, having gone the whole length of the continent on the ground - and ends unsentimental about Africa's prospects and entirely unrepentant about having come.