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Zanzibar to Timbuktu
'Africans, I discovered, have a unique talent for finding happiness where others would find only misery.'
While working in Tanzania in the 1980s, British doctor Theodore Dalrymple hatched a plan to cross Africa using only public transport. Avoiding planes, his journey took him by bus, lorry, train, boat and canoe. Along the way he encountered corruption, poverty and oppression as well as pragmatic and cheerful travelling companions and the result is this humorous, beautifully-written and sharply-observed travelogue.
Theodore Dalrymple is the author of many books including: If Symptoms Persist, Second Opinion and The Policeman and the Brothel.
While working in Tanzania in the 1980s, British doctor Theodore Dalrymple hatched a plan to cross Africa using only public transport. Avoiding planes, his journey took him by bus, lorry, train, boat and canoe. Along the way he encountered corruption, poverty and oppression as well as pragmatic and cheerful travelling companions and the result is this humorous, beautifully-written and sharply-observed travelogue.
Theodore Dalrymple is the author of many books including: If Symptoms Persist, Second Opinion and The Policeman and the Brothel.
287 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1988
66 people are currently reading
284 people want to read
About the author
Theodore Dalrymple
98 books624 followersAnthony Malcolm Daniels, who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.
Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.
In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.
Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.
In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 21, 2021
"He had visited the pygmies of the forest and found them, to his surprise, heavily guarded by Zairean troops. This was not to protect them, but to prevent them from leaving their ancestral lands: for when they did so, they ate a better diet and their children grew. It could do a lot of harm to a potential tourist attraction. ‘After all, no-one’s going to come thousands of miles to see a big pygmy.’"
February 24, 2018
Written in the late 1980s, the author documents his travels across Africa from East to West. He is a funny guy with a sarcastic tongue. He travels like a local but seemed to spend a lot of time in bars, with ex-pats, getting visas, paying bribes and describing the various canoes, boats, trains, cars, trucks, motor bikes and aircraft he travelled on. It's entertaining enough but not one of the better travel books.
July 15, 2015
As always highly amusing and very witty, the doc goes to strange places, although not always exactly recommending them. One country I definitely don't feel like visiting now (if I ever did) is Equatorial Guinea. But I'm glad Dalrymple did.
April 16, 2024
Modestly interesting, but quite outdated. Worst of all the author praises Rwanda for resolving its tribal and religious differences. Just eight years later came the Rwandan genocide. Might have been a better read when first published. Also found the humor rather listless.
July 28, 2025
British travel writers come in two varieties. Type A has casually insane levels of erudition, is excited about everything (Fermor, William Dalrymple.) Type B is dyspeptic and makes a show of finding nothing impressive (Theroux, Naipaul.)
I expected Theodore D. to be a Type B here, given the tenor of his writing about the UK. Really, however, he's a closeted Type A. This is a beautifully written account of his journey from Tanzania to Mali in the eighties. Most of it is bad food, corrupt border guards, and interminable hitchhikes. The prose, and the sympathy and curiosity he has for Africans, keep it from ever being dull.
I expected Theodore D. to be a Type B here, given the tenor of his writing about the UK. Really, however, he's a closeted Type A. This is a beautifully written account of his journey from Tanzania to Mali in the eighties. Most of it is bad food, corrupt border guards, and interminable hitchhikes. The prose, and the sympathy and curiosity he has for Africans, keep it from ever being dull.
June 1, 2020
After working as a doctor in Africa for several years, Theodore Dalrymple was once again gripped by wanderlust. This is his 1988 travelogue of his journeys across the continent, largely by bus, train, boat, taxi and motorbike. The only optimistic observation in it is, "Yet despite the oppression, the corruption, the ever-worsening economies, the ignorance and disease, the poverty, the dirt and the disorientating change, Africa is not a continent of misery. There is more general gloom in Europe. For Africans, I discovered, have a unique talent for finding happiness where others would find only misery". But this observation is really closer to "damning with faint praise" than genuine optimism.
The conditions in all the countries are universally appalling, varying only from awful to horrific. Dalrymple convincingly identifies this with the stupefying levels of corruption, incompetence and tribalism. The Africans he meets concede that conditions everywhere are bad and getting worse. But they doubt that it could be otherwise and disbelieve Dalrymple when he points out that conditions in other countries have improved over recent decades. Some long for a return to Western rule, having despaired of African rule, every attempt at which has been an abject failure - "But he, who had been born five years after Ghana’s independence, was unshakeably of the opinion there was no hope for Ghana (or the rest of Africa) until the white man returned to rule".
Dalrymple admits that he is sick of the journey and the book project by halfway through, not an auspicious sign for readers, many of whom will be sick of it too. I have read more than a dozen of Dalrymple’s books, but I think this is his weakest, the only 3-star rating I have given to any of his books.
The conditions in all the countries are universally appalling, varying only from awful to horrific. Dalrymple convincingly identifies this with the stupefying levels of corruption, incompetence and tribalism. The Africans he meets concede that conditions everywhere are bad and getting worse. But they doubt that it could be otherwise and disbelieve Dalrymple when he points out that conditions in other countries have improved over recent decades. Some long for a return to Western rule, having despaired of African rule, every attempt at which has been an abject failure - "But he, who had been born five years after Ghana’s independence, was unshakeably of the opinion there was no hope for Ghana (or the rest of Africa) until the white man returned to rule".
Dalrymple admits that he is sick of the journey and the book project by halfway through, not an auspicious sign for readers, many of whom will be sick of it too. I have read more than a dozen of Dalrymple’s books, but I think this is his weakest, the only 3-star rating I have given to any of his books.
December 28, 2014
The author travels through several African countries. Book is full of great details. Dalrymple (his real name is Anthony Daniels) observes great details and describes many funny scenes. The basic message of the book: many people in Africa are poor but not miserable. They make the best of it and most are in good spirits even with meager means. Many Brits, though (Anthony Daniels is British) are not poor but miserable. Highly recommended.
October 31, 2016
Fascinating and entertaining
A joy to read.
Daniel's humour, wit and eloquence enliven this tour of a seemingly broken continent.
After reading this I now believe that author Jack Vance must have traveled in Africa, his alien landscapes have never seemed more familiar.
Highly recommended.
A joy to read.
Daniel's humour, wit and eloquence enliven this tour of a seemingly broken continent.
After reading this I now believe that author Jack Vance must have traveled in Africa, his alien landscapes have never seemed more familiar.
Highly recommended.
June 7, 2019
Every story the Dr told was interesting.
October 1, 2022
“What will become of Africa?” That is the most common question asked by anybody who has spent any meaningful time on the continent. It is realism, not racism – that facile solution which is so common today in the minds of the know-nothings, a scapegoat that offers no real answers but only interrupts any questions, leaving them stuck like a jagged pill in the throats of people like me who have lived for so long in Africa, and who have the right to ask the questions. For we have suffered with Africans.
So too Anthony Daniels. “From Zanzibar to Timbuktu” is a travel book by Daniels, written in the late 80s as his sort of ‘farewell’ after serving for several years as a village doctor in Tanzania. Back then a lot of people, Peace Corps or aid worker or missionary alike finished up a season in Africa by making the treks across the continent. A former boss of mine went from Zimbabwe up to Khartoum. Anthony Daniels went from Zanzibar to Timbuktu.
The extraordinary thing about Daniels’s travel book – for me – is that I’ve been to most of the places he writes about. Zanzibar and Bujumbura and Gisenyi and Kigali and Goma and Butembo and Beni and Kisangani and Kinshasa and Maiduguri and on to Timbuktu. I’ve been to all of them. The thing that strikes me is how little they have changed. Daniels’s descriptions of the environmental degradation, the poverty, the ignorance, the corruption, the ragged dirty decay of everything – that is the same. Outside a few 5 star hotels and luxury condos existing at the inverse side of African entropy, the continent has not changed.
Except in one way – the violence.
Anthony Daniels could never make his cross-continental trek today. He would have been abducted perhaps a dozen times. He would have been murdered in his sleep for his shoes. The bribes he paid to get through, $3 here and $.25 there become five-and-six-figure ransoms. He might have been blown up by a jihadi bomb. Perhaps he would have strayed into the line of fire in one of the civil wars that rage now out of control.
Yes, I too have walked where Daniels walked. Zanzibar, on R&R from Uganda, much as it always was; there, at the beginning at least the entropy has not yet taken over. Stone town and Livingston’s cross and the caves under the church where the slaves were held. In Bujumbura I sheltered in a hallway surrounded by other aid workers as tracer bullets and mortars and RPGs flew over my house, a gun battle raging between the rebellion and the Tutsi army. I served in Goma, feeding centers filled to bursting with starving children. Bullet holes in the vehicles I sent from village to village on errands of mercy. Pulling a local woman off a Rwandan army truck before they had a chance to drive her into the forest to rape her. Running from a rebel attack on a market one step ahead of the bullets. I have driven the road between Goma and Butembo under the protection of two Canadian mercenaries driving a UN APC. Beni, under siege now by the Allied Defense Front (ADF), a Ugandan jihadi group linked to ISIS. You cannot ride the Congo river; my trip to Kisangani in a UN airplane, into Kinshasa where an ICRC woman had recently been pulled from her vehicle, raped and murdered.
Maidurugi where I also have been under the protection of three US Embassy security vehicles and 6 personal SSS bodyguards; body armor and modern weapons at the ready. Abuja, hostile surveillance and concertina wire. I flew into Timbuktu on a charter plane a few times, the first American back in after the French military chased Al Qaida away. A personal bodyguard beside me, an advance car with 12 UN soldiers from Burkina Faso and a BearCat as my chaser. In Bamako, sheltering in place with my 3 year old as terrorists attacked my neighborhood.
Robert Kaplan wrote about the coming anarchy, only a few years after Daniels took public transportation across Africa. He recognized that after the great power competition fell away, Africa would be left to its own – to flap in the wind, fraying as the weather and neglect tears away at the fibers that might one time have held things together.
Now Africa is in real trouble; the violence is spreading along with population growth and environmental degradation. I spent 10 years on the continent so I, at least, have earned the right to my observations. I have many friends there and have extraordinary memories laced with tremendous significance. I raised my little boy there, and I am grateful to Africa.
But I am not optimistic about what the future holds.
Incidentally, I also wrote about my wars in Africa, in a novel – “I, Charles, From the Camps”. It is by far my best work, but it is not an easy read. how could it be?
So too Anthony Daniels. “From Zanzibar to Timbuktu” is a travel book by Daniels, written in the late 80s as his sort of ‘farewell’ after serving for several years as a village doctor in Tanzania. Back then a lot of people, Peace Corps or aid worker or missionary alike finished up a season in Africa by making the treks across the continent. A former boss of mine went from Zimbabwe up to Khartoum. Anthony Daniels went from Zanzibar to Timbuktu.
The extraordinary thing about Daniels’s travel book – for me – is that I’ve been to most of the places he writes about. Zanzibar and Bujumbura and Gisenyi and Kigali and Goma and Butembo and Beni and Kisangani and Kinshasa and Maiduguri and on to Timbuktu. I’ve been to all of them. The thing that strikes me is how little they have changed. Daniels’s descriptions of the environmental degradation, the poverty, the ignorance, the corruption, the ragged dirty decay of everything – that is the same. Outside a few 5 star hotels and luxury condos existing at the inverse side of African entropy, the continent has not changed.
Except in one way – the violence.
Anthony Daniels could never make his cross-continental trek today. He would have been abducted perhaps a dozen times. He would have been murdered in his sleep for his shoes. The bribes he paid to get through, $3 here and $.25 there become five-and-six-figure ransoms. He might have been blown up by a jihadi bomb. Perhaps he would have strayed into the line of fire in one of the civil wars that rage now out of control.
Yes, I too have walked where Daniels walked. Zanzibar, on R&R from Uganda, much as it always was; there, at the beginning at least the entropy has not yet taken over. Stone town and Livingston’s cross and the caves under the church where the slaves were held. In Bujumbura I sheltered in a hallway surrounded by other aid workers as tracer bullets and mortars and RPGs flew over my house, a gun battle raging between the rebellion and the Tutsi army. I served in Goma, feeding centers filled to bursting with starving children. Bullet holes in the vehicles I sent from village to village on errands of mercy. Pulling a local woman off a Rwandan army truck before they had a chance to drive her into the forest to rape her. Running from a rebel attack on a market one step ahead of the bullets. I have driven the road between Goma and Butembo under the protection of two Canadian mercenaries driving a UN APC. Beni, under siege now by the Allied Defense Front (ADF), a Ugandan jihadi group linked to ISIS. You cannot ride the Congo river; my trip to Kisangani in a UN airplane, into Kinshasa where an ICRC woman had recently been pulled from her vehicle, raped and murdered.
Maidurugi where I also have been under the protection of three US Embassy security vehicles and 6 personal SSS bodyguards; body armor and modern weapons at the ready. Abuja, hostile surveillance and concertina wire. I flew into Timbuktu on a charter plane a few times, the first American back in after the French military chased Al Qaida away. A personal bodyguard beside me, an advance car with 12 UN soldiers from Burkina Faso and a BearCat as my chaser. In Bamako, sheltering in place with my 3 year old as terrorists attacked my neighborhood.
Robert Kaplan wrote about the coming anarchy, only a few years after Daniels took public transportation across Africa. He recognized that after the great power competition fell away, Africa would be left to its own – to flap in the wind, fraying as the weather and neglect tears away at the fibers that might one time have held things together.
Now Africa is in real trouble; the violence is spreading along with population growth and environmental degradation. I spent 10 years on the continent so I, at least, have earned the right to my observations. I have many friends there and have extraordinary memories laced with tremendous significance. I raised my little boy there, and I am grateful to Africa.
But I am not optimistic about what the future holds.
Incidentally, I also wrote about my wars in Africa, in a novel – “I, Charles, From the Camps”. It is by far my best work, but it is not an easy read. how could it be?
November 1, 2025
My favorite of his travel books. Totally unexpected details. Always shocking how much risk the author takes. He departed Zanzibar with no real plan but to get to Timbuktu. Hitchhiking, etc with total strangers.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 26, 2014
I recently discovered the writings of Anthony Daniels, aka Theodore Dalrymple, through an essay published in an English paper. This is the first of his many book length works I have finished. I am currently reading his lengthy essay "In Praise of Prejudice, The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas", and am finding in it the same duty to objectivity which is the hallmark of his classical travelogue describing his mid-1980's journey across the width of Africa in search of hope for for that continent. From his work as a doctor in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Tanzania he seeks an answer to the future of Africa other than the grimmest possible conclusion those experiences evoked.
January 31, 2016
This is the story of the author's trip through Africa in the 80s, mostly by the way most Africans would have travelled. It's an interesting description of daily life there, the dangers, the petty officialdom, the bullying, the extortion, the lack of future for so many people. The author has a very clear writing style and a satirical eye.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews