“The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life” was first published
in Poland in 1998 bringing together material written by Ryszard Kapuscinski in
his forty years as a journalist in Africa. It was first published in
translation into English in 2001.
Africa was a subject to which the Book Group had often
returned. We touched on it
in “The Undercover Economist”. We wrestled with its complex past in V.S.
Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River”. We arrived in Ethiopia in comic mode in
“Scoop”, and returned to Ethiopia in serious mode with “Digging for Stone”. And
we were immersed in tribal life in
Achebe’s masterpiece “Things Fall Apart”. Common themes of our discussion had
been the sheer mystery of Africa, the impact of the slave trade and of
colonialism, and why Africa had problems achieving economic growth. We had also
wondered whether the questions we ask with our Western European mind-set were
simply the wrong questions.
The proposer had been recommended “The Shadow of the Sun” to
help resolve the mysteries of Africa. And the book had given him a clear and
convincing explanation of, for example, the background to the Rwandan genocide,
and much more besides. It brought out the geography clearly, and the impact of
heat and water shortage on everything that happened.
Kapuscinski had been born in Pinsk, in what was then Poland
but now part of Belarus, in 1932. He died in 2007. His early years had been
marked by war, poverty, and fear as his family moved about struggling to keep
themselves alive in the chaos that followed the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Thereafter he had been brought up in a Poland under Communist control. He had
been lucky that a controversial article criticizing regime policy had brought
him prominence rather than disgrace. In 1957 he first went to Africa, and for
much of the next forty years he was criss-crossing Africa as a poorly paid
Polish journalist.
This book was ostensibly a collection of press articles that
Kapuscinski had written from different African countries over the years.
However, he kept two diaries as a journalist: one for the purposes of the
reports he filed, and one a more private and literary journal. It was not clear
to what degree this book consisted of press reports he had actually filed and
to what extent he had reworked material by drawing on his private and more
literary journal.
Kapuscinski described his work as “literary reportage”, and
had gained international fame as an author. Many thought him the best Polish
writer ever. Recently, however, his reputation had become mired in controversy.
A fellow journalist, Artur Domoslawski, had written a book which “exposed” the
real Kapuscinski. Domoslawski alleged that Kapuscinski had invented much that he
had written as fact, embellishing the truth quite inappropriately. This
allegation placed Kapuscinski somewhere in between a journalist and a writer of
fiction.
He also claimed that Kapuscinski had made more
accommodations with the Communist Government of Poland than he admitted later,
even acting as a spy. Finally Domoslawski stated that Kapuscinski had been a
womaniser on a large scale, regularly betraying his wife who remained in Poland
bringing up his family.
The book was nevertheless well received by the group. It was
captivating, riveting, fascinating, very enjoyable. It was also educational and
insightful:
“More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light
everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere the sun…..Have we sufficiently
considered the fact that northerners constitute a distinct minority on our
planet?...The overwhelming majority live in hot climates…”
“The problem of Africa is the dissonance between the
environment and the human being, between the immensity of African space and the
defenceless, barefoot, wretched man who inhabits it…. isolated and scattered
over vast, hostile territories, in mortal peril from malaria, drought, heat,
hunger….”
“Individualism is highly prized in Europe and.. America;
in Africa it is synonymous with being accursed. African tradition is
collectivist, for only in a harmonious group could one face the obstacles
continually thrown up by nature…”
But how universally valid were such insights? Some felt the
book was more a series of impressions, and the writer was inclined to
over-generalize from one or two instances. He tended to dwell on the central
areas of Africa, on an east-west axis, rather than describing the Maghreb or
South Africa.
Others felt Kapuscinski had an exceptional ability to get
inside the mind of Africans. His forte was to speak to people and get inside
areas of African culture – such as attitudes to witchcraft and religion – that
most of us do not grasp. And he himself had warned against the dangers of
over-generalisation in his preface: “The continent is too large to describe…
In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist…”.
The book’s episodic structure meant it was perhaps better to
dip into than read in a long session, but this made it no less enjoyable.
His descriptions of people and situations were, even in
translation, believable and profound. Ernest Hemingway, that pervasive
influence on twentieth century prose style, and another journalist turned
author, had been an important influence of Kapuscinski’s prose style. For most
the quality of his writing stood out, although one member found some of the
descriptions too over-embroidered, too florid. By contrast another felt that
the quality of Kapucinski’s writing was such that he had transcended the journalism
genre.
We could see the force of the allegation that Kapuscinski
had made things up. Some of the James Bond, or Ernest Hemingway, style
adventures seemed highly implausible. There were factual inaccuracies about the
history of Ethiopia. An axiom of journalistic style was to assert everything
with great confidence, however shaky your knowledge, and Kapuscinski may have
been guilty of this.
Kapuscinski might have been stronger on issues about people
than on politics, but he was not afraid to tackle political issues head-on:
“The government could, of course, have intervened, or
allowed the rest of the world to do so, but for reasons of prestige the
government did not want to admit that there was hunger in the land….A million
people died in Ethiopia during this time”
“They attack women and children because women and
children are the targets of international aid …whoever has weapons has food.
Whoever has food, has power. We are not here among people who contemplate…the
meaning of life. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries
to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day….”
“Many wars in Africa are waged without witnesses,
secretively, in unreachable places, in silence, without the world’s knowledge,
or even the slightest attention…”
The book was almost completely silent on the relationship
between the sexes and sexual matters, despite their importance for a full
understanding of African society and issues such as HIV/AIDS. Against this odd
omission, the allegation that Kapusckinski had been a major philanderer had
some traction.
However, the various allegations of Domoslawski, who had
waited for Kapuscinski’s death before blackening his name, seemed to us fairly
unimportant in the context of what we valued about the book.
Perhaps the most striking thing for us was the empathy that
Kapuscinski had for ordinary Africans, and his ability to convey how they felt
about life and the world:
“the concept of breakfast does not exist here. If a child
has something to eat, he eats it….the children share everything; usually the
oldest girl in the group makes certain that everyone receives an equal share,
even if it is only a crumb. The rest of the day will be a continuous search for
food. These children are always hungry. They instantly swallow anything that is
given to them, and immediately start looking for the next morsel…”
“Half the people in African towns don’t have defined
occupations, permanent jobs. They sell this and that, work as porters, guard
something. They’re everywhere, always at one’s disposal, ready to serve, for
hire…”
“The European and the African have an entirely different
concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists
objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics…[For Africans] it is
a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences
time… Therefore the African who boards a bus sits down in a vacant seat, and
immediately falls into a state in which he spends a great portion of his life:
a benumbed waiting…”
The basis for this capacity for empathy with the poor may
have been the desperate childhood he had experienced during the Second World
War. Indeed one of us had preferred this book to Kapucinski’s better known “The
Emperor” (ostensibly about Halie Selassie, but also a disguised attack on the
Polish Communist Government) as it displayed more humanity than the latter
book.
But not everyone agreed that Kapuscinski had made the case
for the African mind-set being fundamentally different to the Western European
mind-set. Perhaps if, say, the Polish people were moved into Uganda, and
subject to the same climate, they would behave in much the same way as
Africans? For example become involved in endless obscure wars?
But against that what was different was the history that
European peoples had been through. They too had been involved in endless wars,
many now obscure, through the centuries. We hoped, perhaps unrealistically,
that they had learnt from that and now were better at avoiding them. For
example Europe had been through the phase of religious war for several
centuries, and it was disappointing to see religious wars currently breaking
out in the Middle East and in Africa. Was religious war a phase that societies
could not avoid going through as they evolved?
And so the group wandered on through the great mystery of
Africa; sometimes circling back to our starting point lost in the desert;
sometimes pausing to stare at a scene of horror, such as child soldiers;
sometimes spotting an oasis such as a desalination plant – or was it a mirage?;
sometimes being stalked by a big beast such as the survival of the fittest…..
“Enough!” said the
guide. “Sum the book up in one word!”
“Enlightening!”
“Educational!”
“No – impressionistic – educational would be more
reliable!”
“Impressions of people are reliable; only the facts are
unreliable!”
“Great strengths are:
·
empathy with people
·
insights into African culture
·
readable. Language is enjoyable and rewarding.
Sentences shorter than the eighty line examples in a recent book!”
And so we came back to the beginning. Who said that the
Western European view of time was linear?
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