The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, 325 pages, $25.
Reviewed by Margaret Black

Ryszard Kapuscinski may not be a household name in America, but this Polish journalist has forged a massive reputation abroad for his years spent reporting from the Third World, especially from Africa. You might expect, therefore, that The Shadow of the Sun would be his magnum opus about Africa. You can’t help expecting something along the lines of Hedrick Smith’s The Russians or Jasper Becker’s The Chinese. But Kapuscinski tells us that this isn’t "a book about Africa, but rather about some people there—about encounters with them, and time spent together." Well, that statement is overly modest. The Shadow of the Sun may be an impressionistic memoir, but it’s based on half a century’s dense experience, and the author skillfully uses particular events to illustrate larger issues.

In 1958 Kapuscinski, then 26, arrived in Africa for the first time to report on the continent’s euphoria and hope as country after country became independent. Paraphrasing young Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister, the author says that at the time all Africa thought "everything else would follow naturally, all that is good would emerge from the very fact of independence." Alas, that’s not what happened. Military coups came, as did the Cold War by proxy, and then decades of warlord ravages which are only now being partly eclipsed by the disaster of AIDS. Kapuscinski’s memoir suggests some of the reasons for these events, but explanations are not the thrust of his book. Instead, he makes a very humble but agonizingly sincere attempt to capture the experience of radical difference, of living in a place that is absolutely not Europe and among a highly diverse group of people whose worldviews are utterly unfamiliar to Europeans. Implicit in this exercise is his belief that the rest of the world cannot engage fruitfully with Africa unless people come to have some understanding of what Africa is and who its people are.

The author speaks first about the great "dissonance" between the environment of Africa – its vast, often hostile immensity – and the humans who live there. Most apparent to him are the unforgiving sun and the absolute need for shade and water, "two fluid, inconstant things, which appear, and then vanish who knows where." Equally devastating are the vast number of fatal or seriously debilitating tropical diseases and the multiplicity of deadly creatures the Africans live among. Without white men setting one exploitative foot on the continent – without the slave trade and its horrific destruction to people, social connections, land, and resources – the Africans would still be fighting a serious battle just to survive.

Kapuscinski makes these generalizations come alive in his story of going to Kampala to witness the celebration of Ugandan independence. In a resthouse bunk on the way, he starts to grind out a cigarette on the ground. Just in time he sees the lethargic cobra coiled just below his hand. No sooner does he arrive in Kampala, than he literally collapses with cerebral malaria, a condition that usually proves fatal. Kapuscinski survives, but from that time forward, like the millions of Africans who contract malaria, he suffers periodic debilitating fever. Time and again as he trudges down roads or wanders through city neighborhoods, the author points out figures slumped on the ground, apathetic abandoned people shaking with the malarial fever that is gradually killing them if they don’t starve first.

Kapuscinski is completely conscious of being a white man and automatically eliciting a certain response. That he comes from a country historically colonized and brutalized means nothing to the Africans he meets. Nor does the fact that he has almost no money. What can that mean to people who have only a shirt, and if they are lucky, perhaps a shovel which allows them to find work. The author does his best to communicate with ordinary Africans. He moves out of white enclaves to live in poor city neighborhoods. He travels deep into the country to visit nearly inaccessible villages. But, he reflects, what probably made the most difference was getting violently ill, first with malaria, later with TB. His weak, utterly feeble physical state (and his going to a native clinic for medicine) finally eroded his white status.

Although he has a host of hair-raising stories about trips by truck or bus, travel to reach most of Africa means going by foot. "Africa walks," Kapuscinski says. It has practically no roads, just footpaths – trails at best. Historically sub-Saharan Africa didn’t have the wheel. Everything was transported by humans, mostly on their heads. Only in the late 19th century did the European colonizers begin constructing railways to move the riches extracted from the interior more efficiently.

Kapuscinski’s details are brilliant. He observes a makeshift slum market on the railroad tracks and embankment as you leave Dakar. Suddenly the train hurtles around a sharp bend. All the participants scatter, grabbing as many of their goods as they can. Thieves go last, snatching up whatever is dropped. The train passes; the market reassembles. He’s equally good on the lizard which hunts mosquitoes in his room at night.

In addition to his personal stories, he provides a few chilling capsule histories: the anatomy of the 1966 coup in Nigeria, a brief "lecture" on Rwanda, a nauseating chronicle of Liberia. He takes us to see a vast plain of rusting Soviet military equipment in Ethiopia and a refugee camp in Sudan said to contain 100,000 people, but mysteriously empty when he arrives. He talks about clans and tribes, about the curses and benefits of loyalty and sharing. He talks about witchcraft and what that means for concepts of causality. He talks about plastic, how its lightness has made it possible for children to carry water, but also to use automatic weapons and how this has transformed most African conflicts into children’s wars.

The only drawback of the book for me was my constant awareness of the author’s European point of view – his white vision of the primitive – no matter how assiduously he tries to overcome that disability. And while many times he details a diversity of thinking and practice among particular Africans, he simultaneously makes global generalizations which cannot be meaningful if the diversity is true.

As a memoir, however, The Shadow of the Sun is utterly compelling reading. Kapuscinski’s broad analysis seems accurate for the most part and his passionate commitment to ordinary people who just want to live peaceful lives is palpable.