How not to write about Africa

A decade after his last African travelogue, Dark Star Safari, which took him from Cairo to Cape Town, Paul Theroux picks up where he left off. He starts at the southern tip, intending to journey up 'the left-hand side of Africa' until he finds 'the end of the line, either on the road or in my mind'. He begins with a flash-forward to an experience with the !Kung people of north-east Namibia:

I then resumed kicking behind a file of small-bodied, mostly naked men and women who were quick-stepping under a sky fretted with golden fire through the dry scrub of what was once coarsely known in Afrikaans as Boesmanland (Bushmanland) - pouch-breasted women laughing among themselves, an infant with a head like a fuzzy fruit bobbing in one woman's sling, men in leather clouts clutching spears and bows, nine of us altogether - and I was thinking, as I'd thought for years travelling the earth among humankind: the best of them are bare-assed.