The problem with the traveller’s gaze: Images of the Dark Continent in Paul Theroux’s The Lower River

Abstract

This paper interrogates the image of Africa presented by Paul Theroux in his travel novel, The Lower River. In the analysis of the novel, I argue that Theroux’s narrative is a reconstruction of the Western colonizing discourse in contemporary literature. His narrative seeks to construct an image of Africa for the consumption of Western audiences who already exist in an ideological space that has distorted perspectives of Africa as a primitive space. By presenting Africa as a trap for white people and as a place of death, suffering, and superstition, The Lower Riverreinvents the stereotypical image of Africa as the Dark Continent, typical of early colonial travel narratives as well as fiction. Arguing from a theoretical base of Orientalism, the paper asserts that the distorted information relayed through the narrative serves the Occident in its endeavour to construct and dominate Orientals in the process of knowing them. The knowledge that the white protagonist, Ellis Hock, gathers about Africa, in general, and Malawi in particular, becomes crucial in justifying the authority and control that the West enjoys over Africa. The paper questions the persistence of such presentations of Africa and the West in contemporary literature and treats Theroux’s narrative as an endeavour in perpetuating Western dominance over Africa in a neo-colonial fashion.

Keywords: Travel writing, otherness, Orientalism, Dark Continent, imperialism