The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux

hoaxes, and the world-weariness itself was an affectation.
    “Yes, there are still those endless jungles and deserts down in Africa,” a European socialite tells the author. “But what do we care about Africa? Nothing that matters happens in Africa.”
    This was still the ignorant opinion of many people in Europe and the United States. I had copied it into my notebook and given
Voices
away, but I was reminded of “nothing happens” in this long stretch of emptiness that was taking us up the winding, narrow road to Springbok.
    We were in the Namaqualand interior, in a stony immensity of low hills and gullies, a desolate grandeur I associated with dinosaur bones. The patches of white I took to be rocks were sheep, in the far distance as small, immobile, round, and mute as stones.
    I was thinking — and wrote this in the notebook that bounced on my knee — how I often questioned what I was doing when I happened to be so far away in a parched climate like this. Way past retirement age and alone, I rode among bald hills and scrub, headed to Namibia. If it seemed purely self-indulgent to be here, what perverse aspect of my personality was I indulging?
    I argued myself into thinking that physical experience is the only true reality. I didn’t want to be told about this, nor did I wish to read about this at second hand. I didn’t want to look at pictures or study it on a small computer screen. I didn’t want to be lectured about it. I wanted to be traveling in the middle of it, and for it to be washingover me, as it was today, in the emphatic weather, very hot, the glissades of light and heat that gave it a visible lifelessness — now very bright, and all the vitality burned away.
    Under the aqueous, utterly cloudless, late afternoon sky and the setting sun lay a landscape of broken and piled-up stones, tortured into sharp valleys and flinty cliffs. The place looked ancient and as if no one had ever lived here, and it matched the profile of an old woman on the bus who stared at the African stones like Karen Blixen, and had the same iguana face.
    Sundown at Springbok was an unexpected and eerie arrival at a twilit town surrounded by rock, with smallish, stucco-walled houses embedded in the slopes of a valley of broken granite. As a settlement it seemed an absurdity. What was the point of such a place, glowing in the middle of the descending darkness, not another town for miles?
    The answer was that copper had been found near here, the first mineshafts sunk in the seventeenth century by the earliest Dutch settlers. Copper and zinc were still mined in the area, but Springbok was best known today for the profusion of wildflowers that appeared in August and September, the South African spring. The darker history was that of the massacre of the Nama people — the Namaqua — by the Germans who’d come south from Windhoek, heavily armed. The indigenous Nama had lived hereabouts since the dawn of humanity and had flourished because of their proximity to the Orange River. But the discovery of copper and diamonds by the Dutch, and farther north the German imperative to have a whole colony to itself, meant that the native population had to be dealt with mercilessly. In a war that took place between 1904 and 1907, most of the Nama and Herero people were exterminated and the rest driven away or enslaved.
    This is the brutal sort of history that produces shock in the tourist, but since it has its parallels all over the Americas, where genocide and slavery were routine, it is sanctimonious to tut-tut.Anyone in Springbok could point out that the Wampanoag Indians captured in King Philip’s War by the embattled Pilgrim fathers were sent wholesale on ships and worked to death as slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations. The curious experience of African history is that it so often throws up images of one’s own country’s past. But in South Africa it is all so awful and so recent it is a happier diversion to concentrate on the