The Shadow of the Sun
Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun is a book of rare style and wisdom. Poland’s first ever foreign correspondent, Kapuscinski spent his career in Africa, traveling the continent from the 1950s to the 1990s. The Shadow of the Sun is a selection of his writings — articles, meditations on nature, anecdotes, longform reports, cultural comments, adventures, national histories— from the course of his long, busy life in Africa, translated to English by Klara Glowczewska. I can only assume that both Kapuscinski and Glowczewska are great wordsmiths, because the prose in Sun is beautiful. It’s an episodic book, mostly recounting stories from Kapuscinki’s time in different countries, and it’s hard to tell whether there’s any rhyme or reason to the order of the chapters.
Kapuscinski has an impressive range, geographically and stylistically. Sun has sections written from Somalia to Mauritania, with an emphasis on Kenya, Ghana, and Uganda. Kapuscinski is an astute observer of human and cultural idiosyncrasies (although I always wanted to take the latter with a grain of salt, since he doesn’t always tell you how he arrived at the conclusions he presents or how generally he thinks they apply). A typical Kapuscinski cultural observation is his claim that time for Europeans is empty, homogeneous and mechanical; it is independent of what humans do. This vision of time allows modern European planning and scheduling with its commitments to times and dates. The view of time held by northern Ghanaians, Kapuscinski says, is that it is something humans make: there is no empty time to fix events into in advance. The bus leaves when it is full; the meeting happens when people arrive. If the meeting room is empty, you can’t put an hour to when the meeting will start; it will start when the people arrive.
You can see how this kind of argument is both interesting for anyone interested in structuralism or anthropology and also draws accusations of racism. He can also zoom out and offer great historical overviews of African countries — his chapter here on Rwanda is, unlike the others, secondhand, but still masterful. Sometimes he recreates his mental state in a moment of crisis (of which there are many, including the time he found a cobra under his bed and the time his little boat off Zanzibar escaping a coup ran out of gas). Other times he goes sightseeing: churches carved into stone in Ethiopia, refugee camps in Sudan, tiny villages in Kenya.
The author bio printed in the book casts Kapuscinski as an adventurer: he was friends with everyone from Patrice Lumumba to Che Guevara, saw 27 coups, and was sentenced to death four times. But this is not his only persona: he has a tremendous capacity for uncertainty and feeling small in the face of nature, and equally considerable traditional journalistic skills.
Kapuscinski’s chapter on Idi Amin is an exemplar of his journalistic skills. Generally people know that Amin was a brutal Ugandan dictator; some of his weirder delusions of grandeur, like his conviction that he was King of Scotland, are also widely known. Left implied in this popular conception of Amin is that his eight year reign must have been unpleasant for Ugandans.
In the middle of Sun, Kapuscinski has a chapter called Amin — the two met, Kapuscinski figures, about eight times. Kapuscinski neither ridicules Amin nor make him out to be a figure of Napoleonic evil genius. Despite the title, the chapter isn’t really just about the dictator. It starts with an ethnography of Uganda, and a vivid history of what life was like for Amin’s kinsmen. Then Kapuscinski pivots to a short history of British military policy in Uganda, how it connects to the social geography of Uganda, and how the combination of those factors allowed Amin’s rise. He documents Amin’s early crimes, and psychologizes a bit. He briefly talks about Amin’s paranoid practices once in power, his soldiers’ predations; he has some vivid secondhand stories. The chapter closes (it’s only about eight pages!) with one of the only times he tries to shock the reader: he recounts watching people realize that Amin’s men were dumping bodies into their fishing lake.
The Shadow of the Sun is great in part because Kapuscinski has seen and done more than almost anyone else (Salman Rushdie said Kapuscinksi was worth a thousand other journalists). Driving through the cliffs of Eritrea, or getting stranded in the Sahara, Kapuscinski lived a bold life. But his posture is never that of an assertive hero, or a reminder of his credentials — he is essentially poetic and grateful. The other part of the book’s greatness is that Kapuscinski is an insanely gifted thinker and stylist. Literally flipping to a random page, I found:
Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or at the very most, on the border of their valley. That which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens (171).
Tom Friedman has a new book out. Skip it. Read the more worthwhile thoughts of a now-deceased, deeply gifted Polish journalist. Kapuscinski has a seemingly unending series of fascinating memories recounted in Shadow, so I won’t feel like I’m ruining anything by gesturing at a few of them. He rented a room next to a slum in Lagos in 1967, and noticed that every time he went away on a reporting trip, his room had been robbed. He asked a loiterer about it and learned that as long as his place was good to rob, he was safe — no one would risk cutting off the supply of stuff he was bringing into the neighborhood. In Accra, immediately after independence, Kapuscinski interviewed one of Nkrumah’s ministers, who told him that he didn’t know what the opposition wanted or why they were around, but that the Nkrumists believed an opposition was necessary. Kapuscinski mostly talks about Africans; the book only has one description of a moment of solidarity with other foreign correspondents: they all descended on a French reporter’s home in Nairobi to prepare to cover the Zanzibar coup.
Felix was an institution. He knew everything, and his net of informers stretched from Mozambique to the Sudan….he had the best kitchen in all of Africa…In his mouth he held a cigar. He never removed it…Every now and then the phone would ring. Felix would pick up the receiver, scribble something down…dictate a telegram, fluently, with no hesitations or corrections, then return…before the fireplace, to continue reading (72).
It’s a rare moment of luxury for Kapuscinski. More representative is the chapter about the months he spent with a Somali tribe, wandering the desert in oppressive heat, hoping for an oasis every few days. The immersion pays off. For many Westerners it would be a stunt, but over decades, Kapuscinski earned more credibility, and his comments on the culture he observed are thoughtful. And because it is Kapuscinski, it is written with considerable beauty: “there is a fine web of footpaths and roadways, painstakingly woven over the years to ensure that the clans are able to pass one another comfortably, avoiding unnecessary contact and conflict” (207).
I found the book a bit sordid starting about two-thirds of the way through. At this point Kapuscinski begins considering the Liberian civil war, a particularly graphic chapter. Visiting a refugee camp, even Kapuscinski despairs. His discussions of Somalia and Eritrea are often overbearingly grim. Maybe it all just started piling up toward the end. Earlier in the book there was an essay about the Ethiopian famine (he details the logistical difficulties of even getting to the countryside, which distracts from the horror of the final image) that worked better. Perhaps it was because most of the stories in the first half give us some sense of Kapuscinski as a protagonist, but towards the end he becomes less directly involved in much of what he describes and it just becomes a series of miserable scenes.
The best way to describe the experience of reading Kapuscinski is to say it is like listening to a really, really smart friend who has been more places and done more things and seen more crazy things than you have. Reading Sun, I quickly found myself trusting him like I would anyone I was having a conversation with. Kapuscinski has had so many experiences that could very reasonably have killed him (like getting stranded in the Sahara) that, when presented outside of his calm, effective prose, it seems unbelievable. Even reading it I had to take breaks. I don’t know. I’m not capturing the scale and variety of his accomplishment here. I’m told his other books are equally great — he has a biography of Haile Selassie, a recounting of the Soviet take over of his native Poland, the overthrow of the Shah, and the Angolan civil war. I plan to read them.
