Left Coast Justin's Reviews > The Shadow of the Sun

Mr. Kapuscinski was a reporter, and for a couple of decades was assigned to cover all the news coming from Africa. Except, as he's the first to point out, there's really no such thing as 'Africa' -- the experience of a Rwandan coffee farmer, a fisherman in Mozambique and a Tuareg cattle herder are so distinct that to lump them all together is meaningless.

He shows great skill in picking out specific vignettes to illustrate larger truths. In an essay about Idi Amin, the horrible, greedy, bloodthirsty and allegedly cannibalistic leader of Uganda back in the 1980's:

One day I was wandering in the market in Kampala...Suddenly, a band of children came up the street that led up from the lake, calling, Samaki! Samaki ('fish' in Swahili). People gathered, joyful at the prospect that there would be something to eat. The fisherman threw their catch onto the table, and when the onlookers saw it, they grew still and silent. The fish was fat, enormous. These waters never used to yield such monstrously proportioned, overfed specimens. Everybody knew that for a long time now Amin's henchmen had been dumping the bodies of their victims into the lake, and that crocodiles and meat-eating fish must have been feasting on them. The crowd remained silent. Then, a military vehicle happened by. The soldiers saw the gathering, as well as the fish on the table, and stopped. Those of us standing nearby could see the corpse of a man lying on the truck bed. We saw the soldiers heave the fish on to the truck, throw the dead, barefoot man onto the table for us, and quickly drive away. And we heard their coarse, lunatic laughter.

It's really hard to imagine a society sunk so low, but for millions of people over twenty years, this was their reality.

But, but: Although he was a reporter, and his job was to feed back these sorts of horrific stories about coups and revolutions and despots, he found plenty to admire as well. He was not forced to remain there; he enjoyed living there, and moreover made a point of living the same way as the local populace, renting normal apartments rather than staying at the local Sofitel.

The market in Onitsha is where all the roads and paths of mercantile Africa converge. I was fascinated by Onitsha because it is the only market I know of that has spawned its own literature, the Onitsha Market Literature. Dozens of Nigerian writers live and work in Onitsha and are published by as many publishing houses, which have their own printing presses and bookshops in the marketplace. It is a diverse literature--romances, poems, and plays (the latter staged by the numerous little theatrical companies in the market), folk comedies, farces and vaudevilles. There are many didactic tales, countless self-help pamphlets, such as "How to Fall in Love?" or "How to Fall Out of Love?" Many little novellas like "Mabel, or Sweet Honey that has Poured Away," or "Love Games, and Then Disenchantment." Everything is meant to move you, to make you weep, and also to offer instruction and disinterested advice. Literature must be useful, believe the authors from Onitsha, and in the market they find a huge audience thirsty for wisdom and vicarious experience. Whoever cannot afford the brochure masterpiece (or simply doesn't know how to read) can listen to its message for a penny--the admission fee to authors' readings, which take place often here in the shade of stalls piled high with oranges, yams or onions.

Kapuscinski is no fool, and makes no claims to be 'describing Africa,' an impossible task. He does a very good job of describing the misery of being trapped in heat so brutal that people simply find a patch of shade and stop moving, sometimes for hours; a good job of describing the beauty of the Rwandan landscape and the way people, faced with challenges that we in the Western world can scarcely imagine, find ways to cope. Sometimes he tries to lift his matter-of-fact prose into something loftier, which tends not to work very well.

I enjoyed it, but feel only marginally less ignorant than before.