Dark Star Safari

by Paul Theroux

  ‘I guess they haven’t heard that he’s Elmer Gantry,’ I said but didn’t get a rise – maybe she hadn’t read Sinclair Lewis? – and so I added, ‘A fake, a snake-oil seller, an old hypocrite.’

  ‘He’s a sinner saved by grace,’ she said making the phrase sound like one word. ‘Like me. Like you.’

  ‘Thanks, but not like me. I have my faults but being like Jimmy Swaggart is not one of them.’

  ‘We’re all sinners saved by grace.’

  Her calling me a sinner was not quite so offensive as it could have been, because all the while she was smiling and looking like Peter Pan. And of course the insinuation had a teasing, almost coquettish implication of naughtiness, as though she was saying You wicked man! So I let it pass. As far as I was concerned this was just small talk on the Limpopo Line.

  ‘How long do you figure you’ll be on your mission?’

  ‘The Lord guides me. The Lord sent me here. I’ll stay as long as the Lord wants me.’

  ‘What does the Lord want you to do in Mozambique?’

  ‘He wants me to tell people about Him so that they can be saved.’

  ‘What about homosexuals? Do you have any views on them?’

  ‘Homosexuality is an abomination. It says so in Leviticus.’

  A Christian childhood, a lifetime of travel, of sleeping alone in hotel rooms with nothing but the Gideon Bible to read, and many years of close textual analysis to flesh out the preachers in my novels The Mosquito Coast and Millroy the Magician, had given me enough experience in scripture to reply to evangelists like this, who seldom expected a rebuttal. And anyway we were on the Limpopo Line in Mozambique, with nothing else to do.

  ‘Leviticus says a lot of things that no reasonable person can agree with,’ I said. ‘The Mosaic law is full of weird prejudices. Chapter fifteen is all about a woman being an unclean abomination when she’s menstruating and how she has to sleep alone then. I wonder how many Christians obey that one? Chapter eleven says fish without scales like tuna fish are an abomination. By the way, if you follow that logic so are calamari and shrimp. That makes marinara sauce an abomination. Leviticus eleven six says that rabbits are cud chewers and that’s why you can’t eat them. Ever hear of a rabbit chewing its cud? Later on, Leviticus says that a man can’t marry a non-virgin or a divorced woman, and that priests can’t cut their beards.’

  Susanna was undaunted and stubborn. She said, ‘Not just Leviticus. In Romans, Paul says that homosexuality is a sin.’

  ‘You’re wearing pants,’ I said. ‘What does Deuteronomy say about that?’

  She smiled, looking gamine, perhaps knowing what was coming.

  ‘The Bible says that women are forbidden to wear men’s clothes.’

  ‘Sometimes you have to interpret scripture,’ Susanna said.

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that. Deuteronomy, twenty-two five, condemns a woman who wears an article of man’s clothing as an abomination,’ I said. ‘You are wearing trousers. I don’t have a problem with them. Moses says that the Lord does.’

  ‘I guess I just interpreted it.’

  ‘That’s fine. Why don’t you interpret Paul on gays?’

  ‘I don’t hate homosexuals, but they’re committing a sin.’

  ‘Then why not kill them? Leviticus twenty thirteen says that sodomites must be put to death,’ I said. ‘And if you eat tuna fish and wear men’s clothes you are committing a sin, too, aren’t you?’

  ‘I know I’m a sinner,’ she said cheerfully. ‘We’re all sinners saved by grace.’

  ‘Do you believe in evolution?’

  ‘I believe in the Bible.’

  The happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance is not the works of Shakespeare (as Buck Mulligan says) but the Holy Bible.

  ‘Adam and Eve? Garden of Eden?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long have humans been on earth?’ I asked. ‘You would say, what, something like four thousand years?’

  ‘Between four thousand and six thousand years,’ she said.

  ‘You know this as a scientific fact?’

  ‘It’s in the Bible.’

  Such people had one book in their library, containing all history, all science, all geography, all nutrition. She was not alone. She would have agreed with the absurd notion propounded by the conflicted Philip Gosse, fanatic Christian and avid scientist, ‘that when the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented, instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed’ in other words (the words are those of his son Edmund in his chronicle of a weird childhood, Father and Son) ‘that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity’.

  You just wanted to weep, not for her smug, pig-headed ignorance, but what made it all worse was that Susanna was here in Mozambique spreading disinformation and fear.

  ‘Call this a feeble rational quibble,’ I said, ‘but humans have been on earth for two million years. And Mesopotamia was settled at the date you give for the Creation.’

  And in the year 1498, Vasco da Gama landed on Ilha de Mozambique, on the north coast of the Portuguese territory. Ten years later, priests were sent out from Lisbon and a vigorous trading center and missionary enterprise was started: Susanna’s antecedents in proselytizing – five centuries of this! But from experience I knew that there was no way that I could dissuade her from her belief, no light that I could shed.

  I said, ‘I don’t want to argue. I know I will never change your mind. I simply want to tell you that I don’t agree with you and that you’re inconsistent. Tell me what you’re doing in Mozambique.’

  ‘Teaching scripture and also trying to set up a center to get prostitutes off the street,’ Susanna said, an answer that also echoed over 500 years on this coast. ‘Their families send girls out to make money. And people come here from Europe looking for them – Germans on sex tours get child prostitutes in Mozambique.’

  ‘How do you stop that happening?’

  ‘We have a street mission. We pray. We help the prostitutes.’

  ‘Don’t you find that men try to pick you up?’

  ‘All the time,’ she said. ‘They say horrible things to me. But I say, “Christ is my husband – I’m married to the Lord.” ’ She shrugged. ‘They just laugh.’

  ‘I take it your mission is mainly concerned with prostitutes, then?’

  ‘Quite a lot,’ she said.

  I told her what I had read in The Road to Hell, that men encouraging child prostitution were criminals, but from an economic point of view a woman choosing to go into prostitution was making a rational decision. It was one of the rare chances for a woman to make real money. Susanna was not impressed with this argument.

  I had a job in a factory, sitting at a machine, and then I realized I was sitting on a gold mine, the prostitute says, summing up her calling. The snag with trying to persuade prostitutes of the wrongness of their profession was the crystal logic of this. Leviticus also had a great deal to say about harlotry – the ones that could and couldn’t be temple harlots, how it was forbidden to marry them, how the Lord said to Moses: Go, take yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry.

  Susanna said, ‘Not just prostitutes. I mean, the sex is terrible. People here have sex all the time.’

  ‘Africans tend to have sex within their own age group,’ I said, quoting the Samburu elder I had met in Kenya.

  ‘No,’ Susanna said. ‘Boys sleep with grannies. Girls go with men. Women commit adultery. They start having sex when they’re six or eight years old.’

  ‘Maybe playing at it,’ I suggested. And I thought, really if you were looking for graphic illustrations it was more satisfying to discuss sex with a Christian like Susanna than with a jaded libertine.

  ‘No – doing it,’ Susanna said, her face clouding over. ‘I was up in Nampula, and we talked to a chief about condoms. He said, “You don’t eat sweets with the wrapper on. You don’t eat candy that’s in paper. You don�
�t carry an umbrella if it’s not raining.” He just laughed at us.’

  ‘I don’t understand the part about the umbrella.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘But AIDS is a problem because no one does anything about it. Lots of people in our church have AIDS. Three of my co-workers have AIDS. It’s terrible. They have sex with four-year-olds, thinking it’s a cure. They pray to their ancestors!’

  ‘I think it’s good that you’re concerned with AIDS, but really when you condemn people for praying to their ancestors you sound like you’re condemning them as pagans. “Destroy your heathen idols.” Isn’t that what the Taliban say?’

  Mozambicans were not sufficiently unhappy, not poor enough, not sick enough, not adequately deluded: they needed to feel worse, more blameworthy, more sinful, abused for merely having been born, for Original Sin was inescapable. And like all the other missionaries, Susanna was determined to bully Africans into abandoning their ancient pantheism that had been inspired by the animals and flowers of the bush; by the seasons, by their home-grown hopes and fears.

  So this Christ-bitten nag and everyone like her sought Africans out in remote fastnesses such as Nampula to abuse them with the notion that they were sinners, to browbeat them into arcane forms of atonement, such as screeching hymns, and the dues-paying routine of tithes and the destruction of their ancient artifacts of veneration.

  But speaking softly, I suggested these arguments to her and wanted to add, as Henry James had said in a letter to a do-gooding friend, ‘Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses – remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.’

  She held her ground but later let slip the fact that she had once had a husband. She reluctantly disclosed that she had been married for three years and was now divorced. This I found wonderful.

  ‘The Bible says that divorce is not an option,’ I said in the sort of scolding tone I imagined she would have used on a gay person. ‘Aren’t you afraid of incurring the wrath of God?’

  ‘My husband was abusive. I prayed. He beat me. “I want you to worship me!” he said. He hated that I loved the Lord.’ She looked tormented. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I just prayed.’

  ‘I think you did the right thing by leaving this man, if he was horrible,’ I said. ‘But a pious Christian would disagree with me. A Christian might say, “Be a martyr for your faith! He beats you – he kills you for loving the Lord, and you go to Heaven. You can’t lose. The sinner will see his crime and feel remorse, and repent. So you both end up in Heaven.” I’m not saying I agree, but isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?’

  ‘I still don’t know if I did the right thing,’ she said.

  ‘You definitely did the right thing, but it wasn’t by the book,’ I said. ‘All I’m saying is that you should be as open-minded when you’re dealing with gays.’

  She said nothing. I thought of changing my seat. But she was a compellingly decorous bigot with sex on the brain, and we still had not reached Manhiça. I stayed put and was glad I did, for with time to kill Susanna told me how she ran a shelter in Maputo – another admirable effort. Street kids were invited to stay there, where they were given baths and food and clean clothes. She had been doing this for two years and over that length of time she had gotten to know the street kids – boys mostly. One night when she was getting out of a car, some boys accosted her and begged for money, and then seeing that she was alone slashed her bag and stole all her money. She recognized the boys as ones she had bathed, fed and clothed at the shelter, and what’s more, they recognized her as an easy target.

  The shelter, too, seemed like another duff scheme, like rescuing prostitutes from the lucrative streets of Maputo, one of the few ways of making a living in Mozambique that was unconnected with weeding maize. Not for the first time I was reminded of Mrs Jellyby and her obsessive busybody philanthropy.

  We came to Manhiça. Susanna said, ‘I’m going to pray for you. For your happiness, and health, and your family, and your safe travels.’

  ‘I’m going to pray that you stop using the word “abomination” for gay people,’ I said. ‘Also, I’m going to pray that you read a history book and a book of paleoanthropology and that you stop calling these poor people sinners. As if they haven’t got enough to worry about!’

  We had arrived late, I had missed the bus to Xai-Xai, and there was no other way to go there, except by matatu or by chapa, as these overcrowded minivans were called here. Now that I was reading the South African newspapers regularly I kept seeing items about minivan crashes and multiple deaths, so I had sworn off them, as death traps. I had made it safely, so far; I did not want to press my luck by imperiling myself any further. I ate lunch in Manhiça – caldo verde, soup of mashed potatoes and greens and garlic, the dubious culinary legacy of the colonial masters. Obscurely irritated by my to-and-fro with the missionary, who believed herself to be in sole possession of the truth, I decided to take a taxi back to Maputo.

  The next day was a national holiday, Samora Machel Day. Machel had been Mozambique’s president from independence in 1975 until his death in a plane crash, an event that looked like part of a sinister plot, in 1986. The holiday was the fifteenth anniversary of the crash. No one seemed to mind that Machel had been the leader of a chaotic and bankrupt country. The political and economic failure was not entirely of his own making, but he had presided over it. On the posters he was depicted as a benevolent bearded figure in combat fatigues and a Fidel cap, over the slogan Samora – Nossa Inspiração – Our Inspiration.

  ‘Machel was nobody,’ a sour Portuguese named Da Silva said to me at the Polana. ‘He was just a hospital worker. His job was to carry out corpses from the wards. I know! My wife worked in the hospital.’

  Da Silva could hardly be blamed for being bitter. His house in Maputo had been confiscated. He had returned to Maputo from his home in Johannesburg to try to obtain some compensation. His forcible exit from the country in 1974 had been undignified.

  ‘They said my wife was a prostitute. They made us into refugees. We had nothing. We had to run away. I am here but you know what? I want to cry. They have destroyed this country. The only people here are opportunists and thieves. Angola is better.’

  That was news to me. I had been under the impression that Angola, still divided by a civil war, was an impossible and dangerous place. Chaotic Mozambique was at least peaceful.

  Da Silva said, ‘My son is there,’ and winked at me and made a finger-rubbing gesture to indicate his son was raking in the bucks.

  I used the two-day Samora Machel holiday to sit on the bluff by the Indian Ocean to write. I was nearly done with my erotic story, now novella-length, well over 100 pages. It was a pleasant task, like whittling a block of wood into a discernible shape. Then I put it aside and looked at the Indian Ocean and thought about my trip, how far I had come; and what remained, the train trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town.

  The last leg of my safari I contemplated with mixed feelings. I was eager to take this train, I was sorry my trip was ending. I was not travel-weary. This mode of travel suited my disposition. I had kept the promises I had made for my peace of mind: no deadlines, no serious appointments, no planning ahead, no business, no mobile phone, no email. If anyone inquired, I was unobtainable. I had remained unobtainable. No one knew I was in Mozambique. This sort of disappearance made me feel wraithlike and insubstantial, as though I had become a ghost without the inconvenience of dying in order to achieve it.

  For the exercise, I walked to the Samora Machel celebration at the Praça da Independencia, which was at the top end of Samora Machel Avenue, near the Botanical Garden. I passed the Iron House, the ‘Casa de Ferro,’ and admired it as another of Eiffel’s designs. Children were running and jumping under the statue of Machel. The plaque on the statue’s base had been vandalized, making the inscription indecipherable. In the plaza, soldiers were dancing
with each other, men and women dressed the same, bopping clumsily in combat boots, laughing as they stumbled.

  I left Maputo the following morning early on the good bus, hummed across the savanna, swayed into the low hills, the usual snags and odd looks at the border posts, then the perverse miracle of South African freeways and beautiful houses and dismal orderly squatter settlements. I was in Johannesburg before dark.

  22 The Trans-Karoo Express to Cape Town

  After even a short spell in the warped fourth dimension of Mozambican ruin and reconstruction it seemed odd to be back so soon in the bustle of urban South Africa. I was disconcerted by the sight of smooth streets and stoplights, even of mature roadside trees, and undefiled parks, and of such a novelty as a stylish babe in a new convertible, gabbing on a mobile phone in Rosebank, a diamond-dealer perhaps or someone cornering the market in tanzanites. It was even stranger to hear the Johannesburgers’ constant grumbling, black and white obliquities about their lack of prosperity, their sagging economy, how the buying power of their money had halved in just a few years.

  The frequent South African remark ‘This is a First World country with a Third World mentality’ could easily have been applied to so many countries in the world that I had seen, I did not take it seriously. The statement brought to mind not just Northern Ireland but some of the more picturesque and sullen parts of the United States and Europe – irreconcilable, like parts of South Africa.

  For me, South Africa was a place where almost everything worked, even the political system. The whole huge place was accessible by train and bus. One of the consequences of the decades of white government paranoia was the ambitious road-building program, for military purposes, to keep order. This road network meant that the army could go anywhere; and now civilians could do the same. The universities were excellent, the level of public debate was impressive, and the newspapers were embattled, following crime stories and impartially assessing government policy and political scandals which, in South Africa, were sometimes steamily related. Even the education system was praised for its high-mindedness.