Quo's Reviews > The Shadow of the Sun

The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski is many thing, too many things in fact & rendered over far too great a period of time to be completely coherent, though much of the writing, especially the pieces written about Africa later in the author's career, are quite compelling.



Beginning in Ghana in 1958 with a declaration that "the whites in Africa are a sort of outlandish & unseemly intruder" and the hope that Kwame Nkrumah will be an African savior, I sensed that Kapuscinski had been lifted from his native Poland to the African continent without any concept of its pre-colonial history. Rather quickly, he decides that they (speaking of Ghana but seeming to infer all of Africa) lack any sense of time, meaning "western time". The same might have been said of the people in many other countries around the globe whose lives proceed at a much slower pace.

Beyond that, there is a tendency by Kapuscinski to sweeping conclusions & gross generalizations, including "the philosophy that inspired Auschwitz was formulated & set down centuries earlier by slave traders." Many of the slave traders were in fact other Africans & while they may have considered themselves superior to other tribes, they can hardly be lumped in with the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

The author's treatment of Liberia is informative, with that country founded during James Monroe's administration as a place for freed American slaves, but with the result that for 110 years those Americo-Liberians acted as a kind of aristocracy over the indigenous Africans, with Liberia more recently having a particularly bloody landscape. Kapuscinski covers the various wars involving child soldiers, corruption, diamond-fueled leadership & a general disintegration of what had originally been an attempt at bettering the lot of enslaved people.



There are a lot of journalistic exaggerations within the early coverage, much like a writer far removed from his paper aiming to enhance his standing with the editors back in Poland. (To be sure Simon Winchester & other authors do this as well, at least on occasion.) As travel commentary, an encounter with a cobra for example, the book can be enticing but when it is masked as more serious reporting, one hopes for greater clarity of expression. Here is an example of commentary that drifts well beyond the the descriptive to the realm of the unsubstantiated & purely speculative:

Ordinary people here (in Zanzibar) treat political cataclysms--coups d'état, military takeovers, revolutions, wars--as phenomena belonging to the realm of nature. They approach them with exactly the same apathetic resignation & fatalism as they would a tempest. One must just wait them out, hiding under the roof, peering out from time to time to observe the sky, then in time resume that which was momentarily interrupted--work, a journey, sitting in the sun.

Having lived in Africa, my own evaluation is that its people feel extreme, even paralyzing fear in the face of a cataclysm, just like those in more developed countries. My concern with this kind of writing is that someone just passing through a place like Zanzibar in the midst of upheaval, en route to a potential journalistic scoop, should dispense with such expansive generalizations.



The articles on the subterranean Coptic churches at Lalibela in Ethiopia, the horror of Idi Amin in Uganda & the author's account of being stranded in the desert sands of Mauritania are much better. The coverage of Rwanda and the extensive, bloody rift between Tutsis & Hutus is far more thoughtfully composed. But using a German word like Entlosung for "Final Solution" to detail even extensive African tribal warfare seems a stretch. In my view, African tribalism stands at something of a remove from the Nazi extermination of Jews, even if often just as bloody & even though perhaps as many as a million Hutus & Tutsis perished in a small Central African area few could locate on a map.

One of the best chapters in the book is The Well, Kapuscinski's shared journey by camel in northern Somalia, today's semi-independent Somaliland, as distinct from the rest of that fractured country. The mode of transit represents a different culture, a completely different way of life, for...

as we walked, we were participating in a struggle in ceaseless & dangerous maneuvers, in potential collisions & clashes with other groups that could at any moment end badly. For a Somali is usually born on the road, in a shack-tent or directly under the open sky. He will not know his place of birth; it will not have been written down. Like his parents, he will have no single town or village to call his home.

He has but a single identity--it is determined by his ties to family, to the kinship group, to the clan. When two strangers meet, their personal rapport has no meaning; their relationship, friendly or hostile, whether to attack or to embrace, depends on the current state of affairs between the two clans. The human being, the singular, distinct person, does not exist--or he matters only as part of this or that bloodline.

Beyond that, the wealth & status of a Somali depends on & is also defined by his relationship to camels, just as that of the Tutsis is based on an ingrained sense of the importance of cattle. Kapuscinski also informs the reader of an innate quality of sharing whatever one has, at least in much of Africa and even if the village is beset with extreme scarcity of food or other essentials. But even after countless trips to Africa, mostly sub-Saharan Africa, the author still comments:

I have often been unable to determine exactly what the people are doing. Perhaps, they are not doing anything. They don't even talk. They resemble people sitting for hours in a doctor's waiting room but in the end the doctor will arrive. Here no one arrives. No one arrives & no one leaves. The air trembles, undulates, stirs restlessly, like over a kettle of boiling water.

Again, when a journalist moves from place to place on a continent as large as Africa, sometimes randomly, it is undoubtedly more difficult to get a proper feel for the context within individual settings. In the later vignettes, Kapuscinski's writing seems more balanced, more nuanced, less critical & his patience with Africa seems enhanced.



Surprisingly, in spite of 40 years of experience on the continent, there are few real interactions with the African people he encountered, with much of the book detailed at something of a distance from the inhabitants, even during a long rail journey from Dakar in Senegal to Bamako in Mali as 1 of only 3 Europeans on board a crowded passenger train and also during the author's visit to fabled Timbuktu. Either because of insufficient language skills or the author's disposition, there seems very little personal interchange with the people of Africa.

Might there not not have been some mention of African leaders who did not enrich themselves while instead doing a great deal to empower the lives of their citizens, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania & Nelson Mandela in post-Apartheid South Africa for example? Yes, there is dirt, disease & destitution aplenty on the African continent but it is also a place of hope, as well as caring & sharing people who embody the promise of a better future.



I most enjoyed some of the later chapters within The Shadow of the Sun, with images cast by the author that will stay with me the longest. I gave the book 4*s, in spite of some inconsistencies & over-simplifications, being pleased to have read about Ryszard Kapuscinski's manifold experiences in Africa.

*Within my review are photo images of the author, Liberian child-soldiers, a subterranean Coptic Church at Lalibela, Ethiopia & a baobab tree in Tanzania, where the author spent extensive time.