By Ryszard Kapuściński
While Africa has long captured the Western imagination, the Western imagination has not often returned the favor.Many of the best-known attempts by non-African authors to evoke the continent employ it as a backdrop—or even metaphor—for the white protagonist’s travails (Heart of Darkness, Out of Africa). In recent times, meticulous research and respect for the African perspective are often ensconced in tales of woe (We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, What is the What, The Rebels’ Hour).Naturally, some of the best portraits of the region come from African writers themselves—and the continent boasts a deep bench of talent. But when navigating a foreign environment, it’s often helpful to have a guide from a similar culture to one’s own, who can render the other society all the more vivid for the contrast between them.The American author Paul Theroux made a rather cranky addition to the genre earlier this year. The 70-year-old veteran travel writer took The Last Train from Zona Verde, journeying from South Africa to Angola, and was so disgusted by the trip that he swore off ever writing about Africa again. “I have no interest in urbanized Africa or safari Africa or failed state Africa,” he proclaimed afterward.Lest anyone mistake these three "Africas" for an exhaustive list, The Shadow of the Sun (1998), by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, tells a different story. This collection of essays stands in contrast to many other Western works about the region, both in its breadth of coverage (Kapuściński traveled across the entire continent, through some of its remotest backwaters, for over 40 years as a foreign correspondent), and its unwavering, sympathetic focus on the lives of Africa’s people.Kapuściński is something of a controversial figure, having been showered with accolades in his lifetime (he died in 2007) but also accused of shading fiction into facts, making overly broad cultural generalizations, and even helping the secret police in Communist Poland, who permitted his travels in return. The extent of Kapuściński’s actual assistance seems minimal, however, and his best-known works concern the downfall of unpopular regimes: The Emperor (1978), on the end of Haile Selassie’s rule in Ethiopia, and Shah of Shahs (1982), an absorbing history of the Iranian Revolution.Any ongoing debate should not detract, however, from the singular achievement of The Shadow of the Sun. Although based on Kapuściński’s field notes, the book is best viewed as a form of “literary journalism” of the type pioneered by writers like Truman Capote, where the specifics of minor details are subordinated to the aim of capturing a story’s larger truth. And yes, Kapuściński does employ generalizations on occasion, but sprinkles “disclaimers” throughout, such as this one in an author’s note that begins the book:
This is not a book about Africa, but rather about some people from there—about encounters with them, and time spent together. The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say “Africa.” In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.
How, then, can one accurately convey such an elusive subject? On the day of the first moonwalk, a college literature professor was said to have remarked to his class: “Maybe one day they’ll send a poet, and we’ll find out what it’s really like.”As it happens, Kapuściński is also a published poet, and The Shadow of the Sun may be considered a poem of Africa. Light on rigorous analysis, the book instead creates a feeling for a complex, vastly diverse place that often confounds interpretation. Kapuściński’s writing hopscotches the continent over place and time, from Ghana just after independence to the modern conflicts of Sudan, Somalia, and Rwanda. He deals in anecdotes, observations, and personalities, filling in context through lively sketches of history and culture. Aiming to extract extraordinary insights from ordinary situations, Kapuściński rents a room in a Nigerian slum, visits remotes villages, and hitches a ride into the Sahara. He speaks as often with farmers, truckers, or civil servants as with expats, NGO workers, or government ministers.These encounters shine with frequent lyrical asides and striking imagery. The desert, for instance, is a “motionless, petrified ocean” where, in the afternoon, “people and objects have no shade, exist and yet do not exist, reduced to a glowing, incandescent whiteness.”But a poet’s perspective also casts a unique light on history, as Kapuściński demonstrates in his chapter on the 1994 Rwanda genocide. In 1959, the ruling Tutsis were driven out of Rwanda by their Hutu countrymen and amassed around the border, dreaming of taking back their land. This obsession helped fuel the next several decades of ethnic conflict and the ultimate paroxysm of violence. Kapuściński writes:
When [the Tutsi] awakens in the morning in a refugee camp and walks out in front of his shabby tent, he beholds the mountains of Rwanda. In those early hours of the day, they are a startlingly beautiful sight…. High yet gentle peaks stretch before you into infinity. They are emerald, violet, green, and drenched in sunlight…. The mountains of Rwanda radiate warmth and benevolence, tempt with beauty and silence, a crystal clear, windless air, the peace and exquisiteness of their lines and shapes. In the mornings, a transparent haze suffuses the green valleys. It is like a bright veil, airy, light and glimmering in the sun, through which are softly visible the eucalyptus and banana trees, and the people working in the fields.
With but a single chapter to explain a genocide that has inspired volumes, Kapuściński devotes so many lines to this vista to ensure the reader really sees those mountains, feels that aura of calm and awe—understands, in other words, the literal viewpoint of the Tutsi. He goes on to note a more pragmatic aspect of their motivations, but in heated prose that would discomfit a historian:
But what the Tutsi sees there above all else are his grazing herds. Those herds, which he no longer possesses yet which were for him the foundation of existence and the reason for living, now swell in his imagination into myth and legend, become his fondest desire, dream, obsession.
While more rigid analysis is embedded throughout the chapter, these passages give a sense of the irrational, emotional tinge to history that more straightforward narratives can miss. When I first visited Rwanda, for instance, I needed a refresher on the details of the 1994 genocide, but I remembered well that passage in The Shadow of the Sun. It transformed an otherwise uneventful drive to the capital, as we passed among the bright, verdant giants that had beckoned the Tutsis to their doom.The tragedy of Rwanda was one of the most notorious African stories to filter through the Western news media. But Kapuściński’s primary method is to focus on the regular citizens amid the cataclysms that light up TV screens, the people just trying to get through another day. He recognizes the tendency of news coverage to fixate on the negative: “Europe’s image of Africa?” he writes. “Hunger; skeletal children; dry, cracked earth; urban slums; massacres; AIDS, throngs of refugees without a roof over their heads.”Determined to see beyond this simplistic paradigm, Kapuściński lived for a time in one of these “urban slums,” a fetid but endlessly innovative collection of temporary structures outside Lagos that provided housing for thousands of impoverished Nigerians. He was robbed constantly (at least until a sympathetic Nigerian showed him a talisman to hang from the door as a mysterious, stunningly effective, thief deterrent) but gained insight from a literal window into his neighbors’ world.“You live in the immediate, current moment,” he writes of the mindset of the deeply poor. “Each day is an obstacle difficult to surmount, and the imagination does not reach beyond the present, does not concoct plans, does not dream.” Where outsiders have been tempted (secretly) to interpret laziness, Kapuściński looks deeper: “After a day of heat and hunger, one is weak and listless. But a certain stupor, an internal numbness, has its benefits: man could not survive here without it, for otherwise the biological, animal part of his nature would bite to death everything that is still human in him.”Here Kapuściński demonstrates one of his unique talents: marrying the irregular, ordinary details of life with a taste of the poetic and philosophical. This tendency turns an explanation of the evolution (and de-evolution) of the state of Liberia, for example, into a resonant consideration of the larger forces that mold human history.In 1989, the Liberian president, Samuel Doe, was threatened by opposition forces after nearly a decade of incompetent and ruthless governance. Two of his former associates—Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson—amassed armies and began menacing the capital, Monrovia.Concerned by the chaos next door, Nigeria dispatched a military contingent that arrived at the Monrovia port in September 1990. President Doe decided to meet with them personally, driving down with a small security detail in the middle of a capital under siege. But Johnson’s forces were waiting. They killed Doe’s security team, captured him, and proceeded to torture him for hours, filming the entire procedure for posterity. At one point, tired of haranguing Doe for his bank account number, Johnson ordered first one ear, and then the other ear, to be sliced off from the battered former president.The whole episode is not just macabre, but bewildering. Why did Doe risk driving down to the fort in person in the first place? Where were the members of his vast security apparatus after he was captured? One could even wonder why Johnson ordered Doe’s ears (of all things) cut off. All Johnson wants is his bank account number—why complicate communication with the one man who has that information?In Monrovia during the aftermath, Kapuściński marvels at the incongruousness of momentous events unfolding in such a haphazard way. “History is so often the product of thoughtlessness: it is the offspring of human stupidity, the fruit of benightedness, idiocy, and folly,” he writes. “In such instances, it is enacted by people who do not know what they are doing—more, who do not want to know, who reject the possibility with disgust and anger.... Doe’s final hours allow us to see history at the point of total disintegration—the dignified and haughty goddess transformed into its bloody and pitiful caricature.”In this context, the arbitrary actions of a foolish man escape a footnote in Liberian history and take on the aura of Greek tragedy.Ruminations on history run throughout the book, but perhaps nowhere as fascinatingly as in a (potentially controversial) discussion of the divergent outlooks of Africans and Westerners. According to Kapuściński, the African notion of history is inextricably bound up in the African notion of time. To the Western mind, time is immutable and history is fact. But the African viewpoint, as described in The Shadow of the Sun, allows much more human influence on these principles. In cultures where rigorous documentation of events is not standard, “the outer reaches of memory are the limits of history.” There is a rich storytelling tradition through which history can be preserved, but subject to the viewpoint, character, and memory of individuals across the generations—who eventually forge history into myth.Similarly, time is a product of human action in the African mindset, writes Kapuściński, addressing the thorny notion of “African time” familiar to anyone who schedules a village meeting at 3 o’clock and expects it to start at that time. Westerners view time as an external, objective force to which they must adhere and be held accountable: “An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat—time annihilates him.”’For Africans, he claims, time is more elastic. Shaped by human machinations, it is only revealed as a consequence of the events that caused it to come into being: “Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it.” So—when will the meeting take place? When the people come, of course.In these types of discussions—intriguing as they are—Kapuściński walks a fine line between explaining generally applicable phenomena and painting the continent with an overly broad brush. While he does acknowledge the “gross simplification” of the term “African,” he proceeds to describe various characteristics as if they were common to all the stars of the “varied, immensely rich cosmos” he has previously labeled the continent. So we get tutorials on everything from how “Africans” like to greet each other, to how they view political upheaval, to how a belief in the supernatural shapes their lives.These are themes that have been echoed in other works, and by African writers themselves, and so, as with most generalizations, they have a basic underlying validity. But perhaps the more interesting question is the extent to which any fundamental characteristic of African society will persist in the face of a rapidly changing, increasingly globalized world.Many African businesses now find themselves marching to the drum of the clock in order to keep time with globalized industry. Belief in the supernatural is under escalating attack. And widening Internet access is exposing countless hidden pockets of Africa to information, viewpoints, and applications that could fundamentally change their way of life.Written at the dawn of the digital age, The Shadow of the Sun nevertheless serves as a critical snapshot of the forces that will shape the continent for a long while to come. The war, the poverty, the disease—alongside the beauty, the generosity, the ingenuity—all are critical to understanding where the region has been, how it got there, and where it is going.Kapuściński provides important context for these elements in a work that often echoes their shifting and complicated nature, to indelible effect. I recall the book almost every time sub-Saharan Africa makes the news—whether with a vivid tidbit of historical background, a window into the psyche of the main players, or simply a reminder of the myriad facets of ordinary lives hidden behind the day’s headlines.While Kapuściński may remain a controversial writer, few other outsiders have depicted the continent so vibrantly, with the emotional gifts to capture the lives of many different individuals and the intellectual gifts to wrap them in a philosophical framework that renders them universal.Moreover, unlike observers such as Paul Theroux, Kapuściński has not soured on Africa after decades of interaction. True to form, he closes the book with a patchwork of lyrical observations. After all the preceding pages covering horror, hope, and everything in between, this final section is a clear-eyed burst of affection.Fittingly, the last anecdote touches on symbolism, mysticism, and the ability to see beyond the obvious to a larger truth. One night, he writes, he was sitting with a group of friends around a fire at a bush camp in Tanzania. Suddenly, an elephant appeared in the clearing. After walking around and watching the terrified group for several minutes, the animal finally turned and disappeared back into the darkness.After a long pause, one of the Tanzanians sitting next to Kapuściński asked, “Did you see?”“Yes,” he responded. “It was an elephant.”“No,” the man replied. “The spirit of Africa always appears in the guise of an elephant. Because no other animal can vanquish an elephant.”___Rebecca Regan-Sachs works in international development in Washington, D.C., and previously worked and traveled in Africa.
