Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux's account of his big adventure through Africa is full of easy generalisations and lacks a genuine understanding of the people, says Margaret Busby

Travel books about Africa by foreigners make me wary. I speak as an African. The first sentence of Dark Star Safari, "All news out of Africa is bad," did not augur well. The book would undoubtedly be engaging – for Theroux is a master storyteller – promising travellers' tales of "Surviving the Dark Continent": things that failed to work as they did in the West, trains that didn't run, quaint accents, exotic customs, insidious diseases, corrupt leaders. But Theroux is a provocateur, irony his stock-in-trade. It could, surely, not be as simple as that?

After reading an extract from this book, a Malawian friend bemoaned: "Why do white liberals write so patronisingly about us?" The truth is that such books are not addressed to us. Unsurprising, then, if we feel we are eavesdropping on some cultivated dinner-table banter featuring anecdotes about the uncivilised ways of black folks.

My defensiveness is personal: the closing of ranks that happens when a well-meaning outsider tries to intervene in a family quarrel. My response is emotional, irrational even, knowing some criticism is justified. But you don't understand, I want to say, objecting as much to the superior tone as any misconceptions. I should know, I protest, these are my people. Sometimes literally so, as when V S Naipaul, in Finding the Centre, wrote in terms that struck no chords of recognition about my own siblings, whom he met in Côte d'Ivoire.

Theroux's indelible first contact with Africa was as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s; he was a village teacher in Malawi, and lectured at Uganda's Makerere University (encouraged in his writing by his erstwhile friend Naipaul). Some 40 years later he launched on this ambitious and foolhardy journey from top to toe of Africa, "one of the last great places on earth a person can vanish into".

More than anything, this is an exercise in nostalgia, the pursuit of a fantasy, a yearning for a time and place of former happiness and hope. Old Africa hand that he is, however, there are too many casually negative generalisations to excuse in someone who surely knows that the continent comprises some 47 countries, and enough square mileage to encompass Europe, the US, India, China and Argentina (despite those tricksy maps suggesting otherwise).

Theroux unflinchingly asserts that "even at best African cities seemed to me miserable, impoverished ant-hills, attracting the poor and the desperate from the bush, and turning them into thieves and devisers of cruel scams". We are told that "African children seldom cry". Hmm. Elsewhere are paraded mind-boggling assumptions: "The notion of longevity hardly existed. No one lived long and so age didn't matter, and perhaps that accounted for the casual way Africans regard time. In Africa no one's lifetime was long enough to accomplish anything substantial, or to see any task of value completed." My unlettered but wise African grandmother could have deconstructed that passage had she not died 25 years ago, in her hundredth year.

The literary associations with other (mostly European male) writers on Africa – Conrad, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Saki, Waugh – are illuminating; the capsule history lessons well placed. Still, the certainty of an author avoiding eye-contact with me is reinforced by sentences such as the following: "When your barbarian ancestors were running around Europe bare-assed with bellies painted with blue woad, elaborately clothed Ethiopians were breeding livestock and using the wheel and defending their civilisation against the onslaught of Islam." Whose ancestors would they be?

Even granting that his heart is in the right place, I wonder what Theroux is trying to convey, to whom, and why. Later, his attention is caught by second-hand clothes sold in a Kenyan market: "Most of them used to belong to you ... " – Who? Me? – " ... the old dresses and T-shirts and shorts and neckties and ragged sweaters and blankets you put in a box and handed in at the church for collection." Ironically, in Ghana, the term for second-hand clothing translates as "dead white man".

A resonant incident for Theroux occurs when he is on a truck that is threatened by bandits. A fellow passenger offers our terrified hero reassurance: " 'They do not want your life, bwana. They want your shoes.' Many times after that, in my meandering through Africa, I mumbled these words, an epitaph of underdevelopment, desperation in a single sentence ... These were men who needed footwear, for they were forever walking."

Aptly, the book I was reading immediately prior to Theroux's was Maureen Stone's refreshingly original Black Woman Walking – A Different Experience of World Travel (BeaGay Publications, £14.95). Her observations as a black woman travelling in Europe are a match for Theroux's generic white man in Africa: "I have not yet been exposed to a European view of Africa that is – how can I put it? – more humanistic? Multi-dimensional? Balanced? Complete? In my experience, Europe either glorifies or demonises Africa."

It's a choice between the noble savage and the simply savage. Stone sees Africa and Europe as two sides of the same coin: "The problems of Africa are the problems of humanity – writ large. Africa always seems to get the worst of everything – the worst famines, wars, and diseases. Europe takes the best of everything, including the best of Africa. As Walter Rodney so eloquently argues, Africa was 'underdeveloped' by Europe in order to achieve European development." Theroux has one African say, "I am black, you are red, but we are bruzzers": a sentiment that seems inadequate without addressing the root issue of how Europe underdeveloped Africa.

In Malawi, Theroux berates his old friend David Rubadiri for not encouraging his overseas-educated children to return home to "make a difference" in their own country. I wanted to join in the argument, and tell of the young Africans I know who intend to do just that.

Theroux's "Malawian epiphany" is his realisation that only Africans are capable of making a difference in Africa. Yet, with erudition and wit aplenty, he ultimately seems to argue for stasis: "The kindest Africans had not changed at all and even after all these years the best of them are bare-assed."

Margaret Busby edited 'Daughters of Africa' (Vintage)