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Being somewhere else
Reading and Use of English | 1BSU
1 Before starting Reading and Use of English Part 5,
do the exercise in the Exam round-up box.
Exam round-up
Say if the following statements are true (T) or false (F). If a
statement is false, rewrite it to make it true.
In Reading and Use of English Part 5
there are six questions and you have to choose the
best option: A, B, C or D
you should read the questions before reading the text
the questions are answered in random order in the
text
you should read the options after reading the section
of text that is relevant to each question.
2 Work in pairs. You will read an extract from a book
by Paul Theroux about a journey he made through
Africa. Before you read, look at the photos here and
on the next page.
Which aspects of your daily life and routine would you
like to escape from by making a journey?
What things do you think a man in his 60s would want
to escape from? Why? Do you think they are the same
or different from the things young people want to
escape from when they travel?
3 Read the text quickly. Why did the writer choose to
travel in Africa again?
122
Disappearing
into
Africa
I wanted the pleasure of being in Africa again. Feeling
that the place was so large it contained many untold
tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness too,
I aimed to reinsert myself in the bundu, as we used to
call the bush, and to wander the antique hinterland.
There I had lived and worked, happily, almost forty years
ago, in the heart of the greenest continent.
In those old undramatic days of my school teaching in
the bundu, folks lived their lives on bush paths at the
10 end of unpaved roads of red clay, in villages of grass-
roofed huts. They had a new national fl ag, they had just
gotten the vote, some had bikes, many talked about
buying their fi rst pair of shoes. They were hopeful,
and so was I, a schoolteacher living near a settlement
of mud huts among dusty trees and parched fi elds –
children shrieking at play; and women bent double –
most with infants slung on their backs – hoeing the corn
and beans; and the men sitting in the shade.
The Swahili word safari means ‘journey’, it has nothing
20 to do with animals, someone ‘on safari’ is just away
and unobtainable and out of touch. Out of touch in
Africa was where I wanted to be. The wish to disappear
sends many travellers away. If you are thoroughly sick of
being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect:
let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of
revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave
messages on answering machines, not knowing your
party’s extension, being kept waiting all your working life
– the homebound writer’s irritants. But also being kept
30 waiting is the human condition.
Travel in the African bush can also be a sort of revenge
on mobile phones and email, on telephones and the
daily paper, on the creepier aspects of globalisation that
allow anyone who chooses to get their insinuating hands
on you. I desired to be unobtainable. I was going to
Africa for the best of reasons – in a spirit of discovery;
and for the pettiest – simply to disappear, to light out,
with a suggestion of I dare you to try to fi nd me.