I think I'm going to like this book, a few excerpts from the first chapter:

All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there...

I was mistaken in so much - delayed, shot at, howled at, and robbed. No massacres or earthquakes, but terrific heat and the roads were terrible, the trains were derelict, forget the telephones. Exasperated white farmers said, "It all went t---up!"
Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it-hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can't ever tell the politicians from the witch doctors. Africans, less esteemed than ever, seemed to be the most lied-to people on earth - manipulated by their governments, burned by foreign experts, befooled by charities, and cheated at every turn. To be an African was to be a thief, but evaneglists stole people's innocence, and self-serving aid agencies gave them false hope, which seemed worse. In reply, Africans dragged their feet or tried to emigrate, they begged, they pleaded, they demanded money and gifts with a rude, weird sense of entitlement...

A morbid aspect of my departure for Africa was that people began offering condolences. Say you're leaving for a dangerous place. Your friends call sympathetically, as though you've caught a serious illness that might prove fatal. Yet I also found these messages unexpectedly stimulating, a heartening preview of what my own demise would be like. Lots of tears! Lots of mourners! But also, undoubtedly, many people boasting solemnly, "I told him not to do it. I was one of the last people to talk to him."
-Taken from Paul Theroux's "Dark Star Safari"

Too true, too true!