Theroux on Africa

That "Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit," writes Paul Theroux in a much circulated but utterly self-regarding piece in the New York Times.

Ostensibly an attack on celebrity-led efforts to "save" Africa by more money, Theroux manages both to accuse and congratulate himself for his work there during the 1960s.

"Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago," he writes of himself, "are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions." By proposed solutions he means not only massive monetary donations but also aid in the form of foreign doctors, nurses, and teachers of the kind that he himself was back in the day:

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated.

Volunteers like Theroux himself, in other words, prohibited or at any rate stunted the development of a native professoriat. But now we have pale-skinned Brad and Angelina "cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity" while African leaders such as Bingu wa Mutharika inaugurate their regimes by the purchase of a fleet of Maybachs.

Theroux reserves the brunt of his attacks for the man known as Bono. The Irish rock star/humanitarian/wine snob "not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers."

The problem, concludes Theroux, is that because Africa is "a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth." All this in a piece in which the writer himself, who showed his true colours in the Naipaul affair some years ago, tries to convince the world of his own moral superiority.