If You Read One Book On Africa This Year It Should Be The Shadow Of The Sun

In The Shadow of the Sun, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski gives us a bird's eye view of Africa from the late 50s until the early 2000s.  The book spans the period from the anti-colonial wars of liberation and revolution to, well, just the wars.  You can only marvel at Kapuscinski's African experiences.

This is a chronicle of The Real Africa.   The author's experience is not the world of embassy parties, seminars in development and beach bars but the Africa of dust, hoards of insects, mind numbing heat and the alternating sweats and chills of malaria.

In his prose you can smell the drying fish and the odors of the African market in the blistering afternoon heat.  You get the idea of the vastness of Africa, all 30 million square kilometers of it or in Ernest Hemmingway's words, 'The miles and miles of bloody Africa.'

"Miles and Miles of Bloody Africa"

Even the author's safari through the Serengeti Plain is not without risk.  He and a fellow journalist narrowly escape getting lost and trampled by a herd of buffalo.  Overnighting in an African hut they encounter an Egyptian cobra.  They crush it with a metal canister, barely avoiding certain death.

One of the themes that Kapuscinski comes back to over and over again is that of ‘the other.’   This theme is introduced by a detailed description of the hierarchy within a pride of lions.  Old and feeble lions shunned by the pride, too slow to hunt their preferred prey, hunt men.  In that world, the old and disabled lions are ‘the other,’ the alienated and powerless.

The Preferred Prey of Lions

The author repeats this analogy in his story of the blood thirsty Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.  Amin was a ‘bayaye.’  His mother was one of the tens of millions of rootless migrants who abandoned the country side for the teaming African cities.  Amin grew up like the man eating lion, shunned, paranoid and tormented by fear.  He too became a man eater.

All too often in Africa, ‘the other’ becomes either a perpetrator or a victim.

The author describes the Tutsi genocide at the hands of the Hutus, the expulsion of the Arabs from Zanzibar as well as the cruel treatment afforded the tribes in Liberia by the liberated American slaves who settled there. 

The Americo-Liberians re-created the social structure that they had escaped.  They set out to conquer and rule the indigenous community.   It was a stunning irony that they wanted to preserve and develop the only society they had ever known - the slave society.  Underlining their superiority by wearing morning coats, derbies and white gloves, they built reproductions of the American plantation homes in which they had served.

During Kapuscinski’s adventures in Africa many acts of courage and sacrifice by Africans are described.  In central Mauritius Kapuscinski sets off in a truck, across the desert, with Salim a Mauritanian truck driver, a man he does not know.  The truck breaks down and the water, stored in four goat skins, begins quickly to run out.  Without water, death will come quickly.  Salim, who has a hammer and a knife, is capable of chasing the author away from the truck to preserve the remaining water for himself.  He doesn’t.  He shares the water with the author until it is gone.  In the nick of time they are rescued by a passing vehicle.

It is the small observations that make Shadow so interesting.  His description of how the plastic bucket revolutionized the lives of African women, for example.  Cheap, light and available in various sizes they make the fetching of water from the communal tap so much easier.  Even the children can help with the task now.

Our Collection of Plastic Buckets

I often ask myself why we, in the west, are so much better off, materially, than the Africans.  After all, Africa has a young population and is teeming with natural resources, oil, gas, gold and diamonds.  You name it, they have it.  The continent should be rich beyond our wildest imaginations.  And yet, after years and years and billions of aid dollars and international relief they are still desperately poor.  The people have nothing and need everything.

I don’t even pretend to know the answer to this and neither does the author.  But, he leaves us with a positive thought.  It is still night but Africa’s most dazzling moment is approaching—the break of day.  Let’s hope so.