But where Theroux has traveled before - 40 years ago, as first a Peace Corps teacher, then a lecturer at Uganda's Makerere University in the golden years just after the country's independence - he sees Africa not for what it is, but for what it might have been.

The rhetoric is so offensive and plain bizarre to anyone making her or his life in “Africa” that I had no option but to pretend that we were in a different genre, to keep imagining the book as a comic novel with a deliberately unlikeable narrator.But his image of Africa as a "dark star" waiting to swallow up the Western traveler is a 19th-century holdover - albeit one he tries to cure by reading "Heart of Darkness" 12 times on his trip from Cairo to Cape Town.

Reflecting on Mugabe's reputation as an intellectual, he remarks that there is "no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac - the crazed condition of many novelists and travellers". Few recent books provide such a litany of Africa's ills, even as they make one fall in love with the continent. There's a respectable philosophical position in here somewhere: namely, that foreign aid sponsors corruption and saps local initiative. What results is an insightful mediation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people.Yet, in another way, traveling through Africa's vastness - desert, savannah, sea-like lakes - does clear the mind, like sweeping your arm across a cluttered desk. Theroux, one suspects, could be a headache to travel with; resourceful, courageous and indefatigable, as well as crusty, opinionated and contradictory. Travelling in a distinctly non-tourist mode - chicken buses, overland train, feluccas, rental car, ferry, dugout canoes, cattle trucks, trains but avoiding planes at all costs - Theroux travels overland from Cairo to Cape Town and discovers an ailing Africa. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.