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I just finished reading Paul Theroux's The Last Train to Zona Verde. He's a long-time travel writer who lived in Uganda for many years as a young man, and has visited various countries in Africa many times. This book is about his recent (2012 ?) journey from South Africa up the west coast through Namibia and Angola.
Boy, what a depressing book!
Here were some of his points and statements:
- That foreign aid has done, and continues to do, more harm than good
- Although a huge amount of American tax payer money goes to these countries to help with projects such as the growth of Namibia's tourist industry
- While corrupt government officials in all of those countries keep all the money generated from natural resources such as oil and diamonds for themselves, and don't spread the wealth on improvements for their country or for their people.
- That China is using Angola as a penal colony - exporting prisoners to work on construction projects there.
- That in Namibia and Angola the Chinese are staying and becomming small business owners and the Chinese population is growing because the Chinese companies employ imported Chinese workers instead of employing the local people.
- That there are so many unemployed young men in dire poverty that something awful is bound to happen soon - more of the violence of the past, and possibly worse, and it may be directed against the Chinese.
- Most of the residents of those countries have been migrating to urban slums, where they live in the worst conditions he's ever seen anywhere in the world. "This is what the world will look like when it ends" (p. 334)
- Although he did see a positive change over time in the slums of Johannesburg, where an emphasis has been placed on installing infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, permanent houses) in the locations where slums were built.
-That tourists see only the artificial, especially on safaris and journeys to "traditional villages", and even when they are taking the "slum tours" in Johannesburg.
- That traditional life in the Zona Verde - a term used in Angola for the rural areas with limited population (the "bush") - is gone, and has been gone for decades, although some traditions still remain.
-That the future of these countries seems to be a move of population from the bush to urban slums, although the possible redemption of the future may be found in the traditional ways of life once found in the Zona Verde.
"In the broken unspeakable cities of sub-Sharan Africa, the poor - the millions, the majority - ignored by their governments, live a scavenging existence in nearly identical conditions, in shacks, amid a litter of Chinese manufactured household junk . . . They all suffer from the same inadequacies - food shortages, no plumbing, no clinics, no schools, no security - and the same illnesses - cholera, maleria, TB, and HIV/AIDS. They wait without much hope for deliverence, if not transformation." (p. 338)
Yow!
What do you think of this?
And if you've read the book, did you see other points or ideas that I missed or misunderstood?
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