Dolors's Reviews > The Shadow of the Sun

Ryszard Kapuscinski sits under the branchy shade of a solitary acacia and stares at the incommensurable moonlike landscape unfolding in front of him. Plains covered with parched, thorny shrubs and vast extensions of sandy ground seem ablaze in a shimmering haze that refracts on the journalist’s eyes forcing him to squint. “Water and shade, such fluid, inconstant things, and the two most valuable treasures in Africa”, this half-historian, half-journalist recalls while revisiting the thirty years he spent roaming the most recondite spots of this battered continent castigated both by man and the most hostile aspect of nature. A place where its people are one with its arid terrain, blinding light and spicy smells. A place where the night belongs to myth and spirits, where time stretches and melts without shape or tempo. A place where history does not exist in archives or records because it can only be measured by memory, by what can be recounted here and now. So I sit down next to Ryszard and I listen to his chronicle.

With unsentimental approach and spartan phraseology unravelled in a collage of disorderly snapshots spread out in time and assorted geography, Kapuscinski evokes the Africa that runs through his veins, beats in his heart and brims over his memory, avoiding clichés and showing the hidden face of this mistreated continent. He neither judges nor idealizes the African culture. Instead he narrows his incisive perspective down to the daily life of cast leaders, peasants or the bayaye --beggars--, eluding the official routes of embassies, palaces or press conferences to disclose the reality of contemporary Africa. Formally presented in autobiographical narrative but with the intimate tone of a personal diary, the main events of the last century are overtly disclosed: colonialism, racism, tribal wars, mass famine, sadistic genocide, power struggles and corruption are tackled and dissected with factual crudity.

Kapuscinski’s account is that of a witness, that of a wanderer who knows Africa to be a too disparate menagerie of tribes, castes and ancient traditions to be framed as a whole.
“The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, we can say “Africa”. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.”

One needs to inhale the pungent odor of rotten fish drying out in the scorching sun, to wake up in a local hospital shuddering with the feverish coldness of malaria, to observe emaciated children fainting next to markets full of provisions or used as kamikaze soldiers in the militia under the effect of drugs, to assume that a useless object like a casserole or a rusty bicycle can make a difference between poverty and middle class, to respect tribes whose only source of income comes from a camel or a cow and their culture of exchange, to understand that misery condemns most to death and transforms a few into monsters, bloody dictators, crazied executioners like Idi Amín, whose demented quest to exterminate the Tutsis cast in Rwanda was endorsed by several European presidents. One needs to live all that in order to entirely grasp the glory and the consequence of a place like Africa.

Kapuscinski awakens from his reverie. He stares back at me, his eyes full of golden sun and unwavering sadness. Sitting under the shelter of this acacia tree, I have listened to this man’s soul and I have felt The Spirit of Africa. I have envisioned life as an endless battle, as a frail equilibrium between survival and annihilation but also as a mosaic of vivid colors and ceaceless metamorphosis. And I have understood that nothing will ever conquer the immense elephant of the world, nothing will ever conquer Africa and its power within. For its power remains in its untamable nature, and its nature is its people.