Shadow of the Sun
Kapuscinski’s book, The Shadow of the Sun, has the feel of outtakes from four decades of reporting on Africa: a scattering of fragments set everywhere from Zanzibar in the early sixties to Uganda in the eighties to Liberia in the nineties. The book defies chronological or geographical coherence; there is scarcely any context for these sketches. On one page we’re in an alley in Lagos in 1967; on the next we’re in Mauritania at no discernible time; a few pages later it’s central Ethiopia in the mid-seventies. In a bar in northern Uganda, while sharing a reed to sip from a pitcher of local beer, Kapuscinski suddenly mentions fear of AIDS, and another decade has gone by. One story typically begins, at no particular time or place, “In the darkness, I suddenly spotted two glaring lights,” and is never quite completed. (Kapuscinski 2002) Often the narrator is in transit, negotiating bad roads and ambushes and water buffalo herds, but his destination is seldom reached and his purpose remains obscure. Although Kapuscinski writes in a preface, “This is therefore not a book about Africa, but rather about some people from there–about encounters with them, and time spent together,” few individual Africans step forward from the mass and become characters in their own right, with names and histories. (Kapuscinski 2002)
Then what kind of book is this? Not history or journalism, though we get brief accounts of the career of Idi Amin and the Rwandan genocide and the Liberian civil war. Not travel literature, since the journey is never sustained for more than a few pages. Not memoir, since we learn nothing about the narrator’s own life beyond the fact that to work in Africa was his “lifelong dream.” Not a novel, lacking as it does characters and plot. Its original Polish title is Heban, or “ebony,” which suggests something like a meditation on the condition of Africanness, if not blackness. (Williams 2001) And in an entirely unsystematic, impressionistic way, this is what Kapuscinski attempts: a roaming personal anthropology, fueled by curiosity, sparked by chance encounters, tending toward philosophical reflection, of a place that he finds irresistible.
The natural motion of Kapuscinski’s thought takes him from a recollection of the most viscerally physical sensations–he never lets you forget that living in Africa means constant discomfort, stupefying heat, fragrant and putrid smells, swarming flies, appallingly ordinary sights of human misery–straight to a metaphysical examination of what is constant in the spirit of the place and people. Upon entering Rwanda, he writes, “You will always have the same impression of stepping through the gates of a stronghold that rises up before you, fashioned from immense, magnificent mountains.” (Kapuscinski 2002) Kapuscinski’s descriptive power, too, is evidenced throughout The Shadow of the Sun.
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