Travel in Africa can be a pain. There are oases of comfort in the bigger capitals, but once off the beaten track the hotels are usually bug-ridden, the roads bad and the food either scarce or inedible - sometimes both.
This can jaundice travel-writers' attitudes towards Africa. Seeking to condense the continent into 400 pages or so, they bump along on the back of trucks or in suicidally driven taxis until they are angry, frustrated and sick.
After sampling a few outsiders' accounts of African journeys, it becomes easy to spot exactly how many pages it will take before the writer hits boiling point.
For Paul Theroux, whose Dark Star Safari is one of the latest additions to the genre, the moment comes around 160 pages in, when he arrives in Kenya after a hungry and uncomfortable ride through Ethiopia.
His irritation is evident, and everyone gets a taste of it. The cattle truck crew giving him a ride are described - after a breakdown - as "the most incompetent and unresourceful mechanics I have ever seen".
This may be true of his particular companions but it gives a very unfair impression of Kenyan drivers, most of whom are exceptionally skilled at keeping ancient cars on the road. Given the state of most of their roads, they have to be.
Nairobi itself is branded "huge and dangerous and ugly", leaving the writer longing for the "simpler and happier bush".
Again, this is unfair to Nairobi, and to African cities in general. While the Kenyan capital may deserve its sobriquet of "Nairobbery", it has its hidden charms. The city centre, to many visitors the epitome of urban aggression, has a vigour and variety that only the long-term resident can appreciate. Even slum quarters such as Kibera have something to offer: bustling market stalls, thumping transistor radios, and a sense of community.
Shiva Naipaul, brother of the better-known writer VS Naipaul, had his own African nightmare a few decades before Theroux. Naipaul begins to despair by around page 125 of North of South, his account of travels in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia in the 1970s.
Again, it is the travel itself that is his undoing. "Africans tend to drive either dangerously fast - or dangerously slowly," he writes of a hellish journey on a minibus-taxi. "The roadsides of east Africa are littered with the rusting remains of cars, buses and trucks."
From then on, the book begins to feel like an exercise in misanthropy, with equal dollops of loathing served out for every African Naipaul meets, black, brown or white.
It seems to be the mode of transport that brings both writers down. Like journalists, travel writers do not go in the normal African direction of travel, streaming from the villages to the cities, or the routes tourists take, from the airports to scenic spots in the bush.
Instead they hike across borders and into backwaters. Land borders in much of Africa are wastelands or warzones, occupied by guerrilla armies or the most marginalised tribes; crossing them is rarely a comfortable experience.
The continent's hinterlands have their charms, but food and comfortable lodging are not among them. Travel writing that concentrates on these experiences suffers the same problem as journalism about Africa that focuses on the horror stories; the reader in Europe or North America who is not familiar with the continent is left with a misleading impression of unremitting bleakness.
It may be that, when confronted with the breadth and complexity of Africa, most travel writing simply fails. Or perhaps the miserable writer should just stay in a five-star hotel now and then, take an air-conditioned bus and give the continent a break.
Sometimes, the best way to absorb Africa is by staying in one place. This certainly applies in the case of the former BBC Africa correspondent George Alagaiah's autobiography, A Passage to Africa.
The remarkable part of this book is not his zip through four years in the 1990s as the BBC's Africa correspondent, but rather the account of his childhood in 1960s Ghana. It is astonishing as a reminder of the optimism that gripped the continent in the early years after independence.
It was, Alagaiah writes, a time when "to be a Ghanaian ... meant being an African. [It] was like subscribing to an idea: the idea that Africa's time had come." Playground discussions about a future "United States of Africa", or what to call the first African spaceship - Black Star was the consensus - illustrate how different the outlook of young Africans was then.
The young Alagaiah embraces Africa with a joy that is infectious. His experience suggests that it is not just the hardships of travel but the world-weariness some writers bring with them that gets in their way.
Five decades before Alagaiah's childhood in Ghana, Elspeth Huxley was the child of colonial settlers in Kenya. In The Flame Trees of Thika, the child narrator slips easily between the worlds of the African and the European, portraying proud Masai, cunning Kikuyus and belligerent Somalis with an accuracy that holds true today.
