Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3173 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-28
• Original language: English
• 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

Synopsis
"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 a study 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 practices 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.

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.

Customer Reviews

awesome
Read this in Siberia recently. Awesome. K's descriptions of Africa went oddly well with snow and ice...

Vivid sketches of African life
Few people were better qualified to relate an outsider's understanding of the essence of Africa than Kapuscinski, a journalist who spent four decades covering assignments in the continent that he loved. The Shadow of the Sun represents a compilation of vignettes that either detail critical moments in African history - the rise and reign of dictators, numerous coups d'etat that befell them, genocides - or gently demonstrate how an African's mentality is not as rigid as our own: how time to him is a much looser concept, how he prefers community over individual, how he has different notions of culpability and cause and effect. That may sound crassly generalist but as narrated by Kapuscinski is not so: part of the book's resonance comes from its unifying themes, the ironic recognition that Africans, so often divided by tribalist politics, are a coherent people.

Yet although these universal themes appear, the scenes Kapusckinski draws simultaneously recognise the great variety of Africa; as he says in the foreword, "only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say `Africa'". So we witness the midnight rituals of the paranoid Amba, who believe that witches live among them; the unattached, nomadic lives of Tuareg and Somali pastoralists; doomsaying sermons in evangelical sects in Nigeria; the obscene wealth of dictators and corrupt politicians. He relates each sketch through characters and communities, rather than wildlife, or landscapes, or metaphors of suffering, and this makes his tales richer: we see and hear Africa through Africans' voices and experience.

When I'd finished reading this book I was reminded that Africa is an incredibly demanding country, and that much there seems designed to wear a traveller down: public transport that only leaves when it is full to bursting; irrepressible heat; disease; con men or beggars at every corner; grinding bureaucracy; an unwillingness to repair what's broken. But at the same time I felt that I'd been naive to get annoyed by all these things. Everyday people were suffering much more than I was, yet while I was cursing, smiling faces greeted me everywhere. As Kapusckinski puts it: "their life is endless toil, a torment they endure with astonishing patience and good humour." His message is: get out there, meet and talk to Africans, understand how they see you, do your best to understand what life is like for them. It's a hugely important principle, and I'll have this book with me next time I'm there.

Ali Mazrui
i absolutely loved the book. though there was one hitch:

in the book, Ryzard refers to the intellectual 'Ali Mazrui' as 'Ugandan'. He is not Ugandan. He is Kenyan. To be specific from the Coastal Province of Kenya. I say this because:
1. i'm kenyan
2. i'm from the coast of kenya
... and more importantly
3. i am a distant relative of Ali Mazrui.

If the error can be corrected it would be great!