The Shadow of the Sun Review
The journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski provides three broad types of reporting in THE SHADOW OF THE SUN. In general, these examine civil and social dysfunction in sub-Sahara Africa, the mentality of Africans living in this region, and the overwhelming effects of their inhospitable climate.
Certainly, the great subject of SHADOW is dysfunction. Here, the types of this dysfunction, as well as their associated causes and effects, are depressingly familiar. In no particular order, these include greedy and unscrupulous elites, failed traditions and social structures, frequent coup d'états, ethnic hatreds, warlords, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, the paradox of international relief efforts, impoverished internal refugees, child soldiers with automatic weapons, and gargantuan urban areas without industry or jobs.
Kapuscinski's treatment of dysfunction is highly skillful. Primarily what he does is to write about dysfunction in a particular country at a particular time, often attaching a malaise or tragedy to a news story he covered in his thirty years of journalism in Africa. The effect is that these well-known problems are vitalized by Kapuscinski's direct encounters with them. Through his journalism, you are there to witness first-hand the effects of cupidity by the elites, brutality, or widespread joblessness. It's first-rate work.
Kapuscinski's second theme is the mentality of the people in sub-Sahara Africa. In this case, there's much to learn from Kapuscinski as he discusses the spiritual and communal traditions in this region. But the issue he implicitly raises in these discussions is: Do these traditions enable Africans to cope with modern life? Overwhelmingly, his answer is an unambiguous NO.
Kapuscinski's third theme is the heat. In writing about Somalia, for example, he observes: "These are the hottest places on earth... Daytime hours ... are a hell almost impossible to bear. All around, everything is burning... even the wind is ablaze... [in this] people grow still, silence descends, a lifeless overwhelming quiet." Likewise, a visit to a Mauritanian village elicits: "It was noon. In all the dwellings... lay silent, inert people. Their faces were bathed in sweat. The village was like a submarine at the bottom on the ocean; it was there, but it emitted no signals, soundless, motionless." The heat affects everything.
Kapuscinski does provide one upbeat chapter. This describes opportunistic entrepreneurship in the town of Onitsha (Nigeria), where men pull trucks from a sinkhole that is on the road to a huge open-air market. Nonetheless, the content of this book is mostly depressing. Malnourished people, he points out, protect themselves from the heat with their lassitude, since a person "...toiling, would grow weaker still and in exhaustion easily succumb to... tropical diseases. Life here is a struggle, an endlessly repeated effort to tilt in one's favor the fragile, flimsy, and shaky balance between survival and extinction."
Recommended.
The Shadow of the Sun Overview
In 1957, Ryszard Kapuscinski arrived in Africa to witness the beginning of the end of colonial rule as the first African correspondent of Poland's state newspaper. From the early days of independence in Ghana to the ongoing ethnic genocide in Rwanda, Kapuscinski has crisscrossed vast distances pursuing the swift, and often violent, events that followed liberation. Kapuscinski hitchhikes with caravans, wanders the Sahara with nomads, and lives in the poverty-stricken slums of Nigeria. He wrestles a king cobra to the death and suffers through a bout of malaria.
What emerges is an extraordinary depiction of Africa--not as a group of nations or geographic locations--but as a vibrant and frequently joyous montage of peoples, cultures, and encounters. Kapuscinski's trenchant observations, wry analysis and overwhelming humanity paint a remarkable portrait of the continent and its people. His unorthodox approach and profound respect for the people he meets challenge conventional understandings of the modern problems faced by Africa at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
The Shadow of the Sun Specifications
When Africa makes international news, it is usually because war has broken out or some bizarre natural disaster has taken a large number of lives. Westerners are appallingly ignorant of Africa otherwise, a condition that the great Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuœciñski helps remedy with this book based on observations gathered over more than four decades.
Kapuœciñski first went to Africa in 1957, a time pregnant with possibilities as one country after another declared independence from the European colonial powers. Those powers, he writes, had "crammed the approximately ten thousand kingdoms, federations, and stateless but independent tribal associations that existed on this continent in the middle of the nineteenth century within the borders of barely forty colonies." When independence came, old interethnic rivalries, long suppressed, bubbled up to the surface, and the continent was consumed in little wars of obscure origin, from caste-based massacres in Rwanda and ideological conflicts in Ethiopia to hit-and-run skirmishes among Tuaregs and Bantus on the edge of the Sahara. With independence, too, came the warlords, whose power across the continent derives from the control of food, water, and other life-and-death resources, and whose struggles among one another fuel the continent's seemingly endless civil wars. When the warlords "decide that everything worthy of plunder has been extracted," Kapuœciñski writes, wearily, they call a peace conference and are rewarded with credits and loans from the First World, which makes them richer and more powerful than ever, "because you can get significantly more from the World Bank than from your own starving kinsmen."
Constantly surprising and eye-opening, Kapuœciñski's book teaches us much about contemporary events and recent history in Africa. It is also further evidence for why he is considered to be one of the best journalists at work today. --Gregory McNamee
Related Products
Customer Reviews
Shadow of the Sun - Margaret Magnus - Francestown, NH USA
My only scant claim to direct knowledge of Africa is a few weeks spent in Kenya where despite my best efforts, I spent more time with the zebras than the people. Nonetheless, I was so overwhelmed with impressions, that it was hard to keep my exhausted eyes open. My experience was predictably not as dark as he portrays. I have the sense that what prompted Kapuscinsky to choose these tales from what must be a much broader experience is primarily that these are the best stories... though I don't think he would have selected them, had he felt that they were misrepresentative of his experience. I enjoyed the philosophical observations he mixed in and thought it was a very good read. Nonetheless, you feel the distance -- you feel he speaks as an outsider in a way that, for example, Obama (despite his lesser experience of Africa) did not. I am still curious to hear what the Africans feel about it.
The challenges are immense - Luc REYNAERT - Beernem, Belgium
Ryszard Kapuaeciñski brushes a perfect picture of Africa's history, its present situation and mentality and the enormous challenges ahead.
Colonial period
The colonial penetration of Africa began in the 15th century and lasted 500 years. The colonial trade consisted principally of the export of slaves (15 to 30 million over a period of 3 centuries). This slave trade was in the hands of white men, helped by African and Arab partners, and was justified by the ideology that a black man was not human. It left Africa depopulated and ruined, and the rest of its population with a stigma of `inferior people'. This is one of the reasons why Africans do not accept easily criticism. They consider it as a form of racism or discrimination.
Independence
During WW II, the Western allies recruited African soldiers, who, after being sent home, formed or joined national independent movements.
When after a long and mostly brutal battle African countries gained independence, the white bureaucracy was taken over by a black one, thereby creating instantaneously a new ruling class.
The euphoria of the first years of independence was quickly followed by disenchantment. The hatred of the masses was now directed against their own elites, who ruled through rigged elections, corruption and outright murder of the opposition leaders. Moreover, during the Cold War the conflict between the superpowers was also transplanted on African soil.
Army
Between the elites and the masses stood the army, which exploited the tribal and ethnic conflicts (the borders of the African countries were designed by Western political and financial interests). First, it presented itself as the champions of the humiliated, but after the coups d'état and the civil wars warlords could grab power and began to steal also from the poor.
The civil wars were fought by children soldiers, who could easily be recruited as their parents were dead and they were left alone and hungry in the streets.
Challenges
Together with the internecine wars, poverty and hunger drew the masses to the towns as they were looking for more safety and a better chance to survive. It created the problem of hyper urbanization. But the immigrants didn't find employment, housing or schools (even pencils). They became totally rootless with no identity papers, no money and no address.
The author remarks astutely that Africa cannot survive without an educated middle class, but its intelligentsia lives outside its borders.
This book contains excellent analyses of the historical events in Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, Zanzibar, Liberia and Ethiopia. There are also in depth portraits of Idi Amin, Charles Taylor or Mengistu Mariam.
It is a must read for all African scholars and for all those who want to understand the world we live in.
fascinating, can't put it down - Julie Potash -
I absolutely loved this book. He has gone where very few have gone before. I learned so much about Africa while at the same time enjoyed hearing about his experiences. A great mix of personal stories, African history and social/political commentary. Cannot recomment it enough...
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Aug 29, 2010 02:22:05
