Product Description

'Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say Africa. In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist'. Ryszard Kapuscinski has been writing about the people of Africa throughout his career. In astudy that avoids the official routes, palaces and big politics, he sets out to create an account of post-colonial Africa seen at once as a whole and as a location that wholly defies generalised explanations. It is both a sustained meditation on themosaic of peoples and practises we call 'Africa', and an impassioned attempt to come to terms with humanity itself as it struggles to escape from foreign domination, from the intoxications of freedom, from war and from politics as theft.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4696 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-28
• Original language: Polish
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Polish writer and foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski may be in the twilight of a golden career spanning more than 40 years but The Shadow of the Sun, an alternative record of his experiences of Africa and its stupefying white heat, is perhaps his finest hour. This for a writer who, to echo the sentiments of Michael Ignatieff, has turned reportage into literature. Drawn to the Developing World through an impoverished wartime upbringing, Kapuscinski arrived in Ghana in 1957 and was on hand to witness the tumultuous years in which colonial Africa was dismantled, resulting in born-again countries ripe for ransacking by despots. From the glare of Accra airport which greets him on first arrival, to the Tanzanian night of the final pages, he crosses savannah, desert and city by foot, road and train, searching out the two most important, yet inconstant commodities on the continent: shade and water. Threatened by an Egyptian cobra, cursed with cerebral malaria and tuberculosis, plagued by black cockroaches the size of small turtles, Kapuscinski intermingles the immediate and the reflective in 29 satisfyingly fragmented vignettes, encompassing historical narratives and personal experience across a host of countries, including Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan and Liberia.

While acknowledging European colonial culpability, he refuses to rinse his words in guilt. The Shadow of the Sun is reminiscent of Gianni Celati's Adventures in Africa, employing similarly symphonic atmospherics that can bear poetic witness to both the tragic history of Rwanda and the Ngubi beetle, which toils in the desert to produce the sweat it drinks to survive. As much about the plastic water container as the warlord and preferring the African shanty town to the Manhattan skyscraper as a monument to human achievement, what Kapuscinski, the author of Shah of Shahs describes is not Africa, which he claims does not exist except geographically but a distillation of life itself, through its religiosity, its trees, the frightening abundance of youth, sun that "curdles the blood" and terrorising, ruling armies that fall in a day. The first in a projected trilogy pulling together Africa, Central America and Asia, The Shadow of the Sun is an exceptional and humbling work of imagination and experience by a writer intent on liberating truths from fact. --David Vincent

From the Publisher
One of the most perceptive evocations of Africa ever written
‘Here is perhaps the most essential of the century’s figures – the wandering dissident.’ Christopher Hitchens

‘Half Hemingway, half Borges,’ Vanity Fair

The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life By Ryszard Kapuscinski

In 1957 the 25-year old Ryszard Kapuscinski arrived in Africa, sent by the Polish news agency. Over the next 40 years as a journalist he witnessed 27 revolutions, survived 4 death sentences, endured malaria, tuberculosis and imprisonment. And in his despatches home he wrote some of the most perceptive evocations of the continent ever published.

The Shadow of the Sun, published by Allen Lane the Penguin Press on 11 June, tells the story of his life in Africa, available in English for the first time.

Kapuscinski is never interested in the obvious. He was once asked by a fellow journalist why, if he hadn’t managed to interview the Rwandan President, he’d bothered to visit the country at all. His reportage nonetheless gives incisive portraits of African leaders – from Amin to Mengitsu, and yet he more often keeps away from high-level politics, palaces, official routes. Instead, he lodges in slum areas of Lagos, hitches across the Sahara in fearsomely delapidated trucks, spends time with peasants in the savannah. In the book he hallucinates mirages in the desert while dangerously dehydrated; he narrowly survives malaria and TB; he makes a moonlight flit by boat from Zanzibar where a coup had just toppled colonial rule.

‘Any time there’s trouble in the world, he wants to get on a plane and go. If he hears about a road no man can take and live, he takes the road just to see if he can get through. The way in which he understands the world is to go to the hot spot, the place where it’s boiling. And actually I think nobody who puts himself in danger as much as he does is entirely sane.' Salman Rushdie

The Shadow of the Sun begins in 1958 in Ghana – the first of the African states to gain independence. Kapuscinski shows how the post-colonial euphoria of the 1950s and early 60s descended into the devastation of coups, revolutions, civil war, and famine. But he also paints a compelling portrait of the people of Africa – their attitudes towards religion, family, and time, their endurance of lives of extraordinary toil and hardship, and their astonishing patience and good humour.

Many westerners remain ignorant of the great and tragic story of Africa. The Shadow of the Sun brings us closer than ever before to an understanding of the continent and its people. At the same time the book tells Kapuscinski’s own story – the tale of one of the most celebrated literary journalists of our generation.

About the Author
Ryszard Kapuscinski was a legendary journalist and writer whose previous books include ANOTHER DAY OF LIFE, THE EMPEROR: DOWNFALL OF AN AUTOCRAT (which Salman Rushdie called 'an unforgettable, fiercely comic, and finally compassionate book'), SHAH OF SHAHS, IMPERIUM and THE SOCCER WAR.

Customer Reviews

Africa comes out of the Shadows
I grew up in Africa, a barefooted white boy enjoying the final desperate priviledges of the dying Empire. And as a young man I taught in Nigeria. These are all fading memories now, yet not until now have I read anything which so transports me back to the white heat of the sun, and the marketplaces, and the footpaths, and the vibrancy that is Africa. This is a book that lays bare the real Africa without any burden of ideology or polemic - except for a touching underlying affection for the place. If you ever felt confused about the tribal factions in Rwanda, or the forces that led to the rise of Amin in Uganda, or whatever happened to the freed American slaves in Liberia, or the reasons for the conflict in Eritrea - then this is the book. Exquisite.

Africa in a nutshell
I've visited Africa several times and have read a number of African travel books, but for me this one stands out hand and shoulders above the rest. Based on the author's personal experiences as a journalist spanning the whole continent each chapter presents a fresh insight into African culture,physchology, beleifs and history . Whether it is describing the revolution in Zanzibar (where the author himself was taken hostage), the rise of the 3rd-rate officer Amin to president of Uganda or observations drawn from travelling amongst the ordinary villages and people the author allows neither sentimentalism nor predjudice to cloud a hugely entertaining and informative read.

Manic violence and measured thoughts
Ignatieff is right - Kapuscinski does turn reporting into literature. But maybe he oversteps the boundary sometime....I catch myself wondering if things happened quite the way he describes them. His imagination is attracted by the the baroque, the sensational, and the extreme. That said, this was probably the reason he fell in love with Africa in the first place - his need for heightened emotions and extreme situations.

That said, it's very worth reading this book, not so much for the reportage as for the analysis. His dispatches from civil war zones are amazingly lurid, especially from Liberia. But maybe too lurid to be food for thought beyond 'heart-of-darkness' similes.
What I particularly value in this book is his very lucid and measured analysis of the rise of Amin; of the ubiquity of the warlord and child soldier; of the genocide in Rwanda; of the class structure of independent Africa; of the perils facing even the most patriotic of African leaders (here, Eritrea; in his book The Soccer Wars he makes a similar point about Ben Bella in Algeria). And his vignettes of daily life are also fascinating: the witchcraft he used against burglars in Lagos, the merchant lady in Senegal.

In notice the cover of this book is plastered with glowing reviews - but not one is from from an African source or african writer. What do Africans make of it, I wonder...