Customer Reviews

The Shadow of the Sun

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"Oh, no," you may be thinking, "another 'I Found Africa...' book" by a white journalist who's poked around a bit, extruded the steamy and the exotic, romanticized this, excoriated that, along the way raised a few primoridial terrors to jolt his well-meaning liberal readers, and all in all, told a few ripping yarns.

This man is different, beginning with his more than forty year relationship with the African continent. Great writers like Kapucinski--and he IS a very great writer, assisted by a great translator, Klara Glowczewska--teach us how to see, how to find the right context, how to set out the proper perspective. Most of those who read this book will be Westerners in search of a window. As an introduction, as an intimation of the myriads of Africas--because, as Kapucinski freely acknowledges, it's unfair, and somewhat insulting, to speak simply of "Africa"--and, yes, as an interpretation for Western minds, readers could do no better than The Shadow of the Sun.

For all his his vivid prose and artistic control of story elements, Kapucinski is a scholarly observer, a man who sees through the deep ice, seemingly an anthropologist refitted as a journalist--his eye is uncanny, his descriptive powers precise and powerful, and his range of experiences and depth of understanding makes this a uniquely valuable tutorial. He writes with clarity and fresh insight on familiar topics like Amin, Sudan, and the Rwanda genocide--his "lecture" on the events of 1994 is one of the book's many highpoints--but also on the sensations, struggles, and states of being that accompany the simple act of living in so challenging an array of environments as Africa's geography provides.

Yes, Kapucinski does include exotica, but without sensationalizing: there are harrowing encounters with flora, fauna, disease, the elements and, again and again, the terrible heat (which he finds as many ways of describing as the proverbial Inuit has of describing snow). But Kapucinski always returns to human dimensions and conditions and, above all, to the patterns and rhythms and variations of human exchange around which life in the many Africas organizes itself. And, always, he seeks to convey and to understand the point of view of his many interlocutors, rather than to make facile attributions or easy generalizations.

This is superb reportage and an essential document by a true master. It is to me staggering that, published by the same house as Robert Kaplan (of The Coming Anarchy fame) and sensitively covering the very turf that so alarmed Kaplan, Kapucinski remains comparatively unknown. Fix that.

More than just a docier or biographical narrative, "Shadow of the Sun" is a series of impressions rendered by a writer of exceptional talent, considerable experience, and profound vision. The vignettes capture episodes from the author's experiences on the great continent over a span of more than thirty years. His goal is not to provide a primer in contemporary African history, or to sermonize about the region's poverty, famine, violence, or painful political upheavals. As other's have mentioned, there are other books more suited to these pursuits. His goal is to convey moments of elation, terror, awe, and desperation experienced over the course of a long and distinguished career as a journalist.

Ryszard Kapuscinski is a not an historian, a political scientist, or a sociologist - he is a teller of tales, and a master of language. These stories move, astound, touch, and disturb the reader. The essays expose the highest, lowest, and most absurd types of human behavior, setting all against the limitless and impassive backdrop of the African continent.

The essays in "The Soccer War" and "Imperium" might overall be more unified and cohesive, but in the world of contemporary literature, it doesn't get much better than this.

I was mesmerized by Kapuscinski's account of his travels through Africa during the last 40 years. For me, someone who has not yet been to Africa and has always been confused by the politics of that continent, this book helped greatly in sorting out the issues, politics and history of that region. Kapuscinski is a brilliant writer and, more importantly, a brilliant story teller. Visions of certain related stories play through my head as if a part of my own distant memories, such as his killing of a snake, his night in a cockroach-infested hotel room in Monrovia, his descriptions of heat and sunlight. My only complaint about this book is that it dwells too much on the negatives of Africa. Surely somewhere there are beautiful cities, or at least sections of cities. Although the history, personalities, and misdeeds came through strongly, the beauty of this continent did not.

I bought this book in Johannesburg Airport, waiting for a plane to Madagascar. After turning the first page I became entranced and could barely stop reading until both the book and the plane ride had ended. "Shadow of the Sun" consists of a series of short tales, vignettes really. Each tale provides an insight into the vagaries of human behavior, the punishing impact of a fierce climate, and the lives of people whose only goal is to live until another sun rises. The brief descriptions are poignant and compelling, the prose beautifully translated, and the stories heartwrenching. It's one of those books that make you want to give copies to everyone you know.

Most readers will never have experienced the kind of desperate inventiveness that characterize very poor countries. Barefoot children beg for money and food and live by their wits on the streets. Families in rural areas make do with mud huts and no electricity or potable water; they forage for wood and grass for cooking. And so forth. Kapuscinski shows us all of that and more, but adds a spirit of joy and hope.

To say that this is the best book on Africa that I have ever read would not amount to much of a recommendation, since I have not read much on the subject. However, I can honestly say that it is one of the 10 best books that I have ever read, period! Kapuscinski might know more about Africa than any other non-African writer in the world, since he has spent many years there and been to seemingly every country on the continent. This book contains two dozen or so essays, each about 10 pages long and dealing with one of Kapuscinski's adventures. There are dispatches from everywhere: Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Mali, Mauritania, Cameroon, Liberia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Somalia, Zanzibar, and probably a few more countries that escape my memory. There is something here for everybody. If you are looking for penetrating analyses of current affairs, there is a great chapter on Idi Amin, a chapter on the social origins of the Rwandan genocide, an insider's account of one of Nigeria's many military coups, and many others. One of my favorite chapters was about the Liberian civil war. In a particularly telling scene, two men approach Kapuscinski in the airport just after he has arrived. "We will protect you," one of them says without emotion. "Without us, you will perish." One of Kapuscinski's great strenghts is his ability to convey everyday life in the places he is reporting from, and especially the ways in which that life is disrupted by wars, famines, military takeovers, etc. His dispatches from Liberia, southern Sudan, and Ethiopia are particularly moving. Some of my favorite stories, however, come from Kapuscinski's visits to ordinary African villages far from any cities or major highways. He has an uncanny ability to describe the tenor of life in these places. He describes a typical day in a tiny village near border between Senegal and Mauritania. After beginning the morning by praying towards Mecca, each villager visits every other villager, inquiring about their health, how well they slept the night before, and other trivial matters. It is little scenes like this that I love about Kapuscinski's books. There are hundreds of foreign correspondents out there that have written some great work from the most far flung corners of the globe, but none of them can match Kapuscinski's ability to describe the mundane with such insight, compassion, and humanity. There are some things I take issue with in the book. For instance, Kapuscinski often comes off as a cultural determinist, explaining a country's social and economic underdevelopment by pointing to cultural and religious influences. These are undoubtedly important factors, but Kapuscinski often seems resigned to the fact that such practices and values are immutable. Also, there are relatively few women in this book. This is undoubtedly partly to do with the fact that he is writing about very patriarchical societies, where women have less of a role in public life, but it still would have been nice if he had addressed the issue. There is one particular seen that I will not forget, when Kapuscinski visits a Ugandan village in which the women literally kneel every time a man walks by. Kapuscinski's journalistic objectivity prevents him from commenting critically on this, but it would be nice to know how he thinks such gender biases affect Africa's economic underdevelopment. But these deficiencies are minor. I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about Africa and Africans, anyone willing to have their views of the world challenged, and anyone seeking a great adventure story.

Kapuscinski spent forty years traveling around Africa from the late 1950s to early `90s, a formative period for the continent, when country after country was declaring its independence and breaking free from European rule. The Shadow of the Sun is an expressionist painting of sorts, a collection of unrelated pieces of writing that can't really be called essays for their lack of theme, and can't be called stories for their lack of plot. Still, together, they paint a fascinating portrait of a complicated place, and they give a good historical context for many recent conflicts including those in Rwanda and Sudan. Although Kapuscinski states early on that it is foolish to try to describe "Africa" or "Africans," as there are so many different cultures living on the continent, that's in a way what he's trying to do. And while the book may seem disjointed, it's really an excellent way to capture such a diverse cultural landscape. If there is one uniting theme in the book, it is the historical reality that much (not all, but much) of Africa's problems are rooted in two transgressions by Europeans. First, there is the obvious impact that the slave trade had on the psychology of the people. And second, Europeans failed to see the not-always-subtle cultural differences of the African peoples. Ignorantly, they drew arbitrary boundaries, uniting under country flags people who had nothing in common or, in many cases, were enemies. Kapuscinski offers a fine cross section of these diverse cultures, complicated politics, violent conflicts and resilient spirit of a continent that could never be fully captured in one book.

Ryszard Kapuscinski is a Polish reporter who has been covering Africa since 1957. Through the years, he's written six books about his experiences. This, his latest, is a collection of essays spanning more than four decades. Each can stand alone, and yet, together they form a unique portrait of Africa, its peoples, and the writer himself. From the initial enthusiasm in the 1950s when colonial power began to wane to the destruction of that dream and war and starvation, Mr. Kapuscinski sees it all. He keeps the reader right there with him too, and we share the heat and the dryness and the insects and even the malaria and tuberculosis that attack his body.

We all know that Africa is very different from the world we know, and in this book we learn just how different it is. We learn about the African's identity with his clan, we get a feeling of his sense of time and distance, and understand the joy of something as simple as a sip of water or a small shady spot under a tree. Always, there is heat, so oppressive that people walk slowly to conserve energy and do nothing but lie quietly during the hot burning heat of the day. It's the keenly observed details that bring it all to life. For example, the introduction of plastic containers for carrying water improved the lives of the people. Plastic containers are lighter and come in various sizes. Children can carry water now, thus freeing adult women from hours of work. Reading about this makes me thankful for the clean running water I take for granted. I also learned a lot about some of the raging wars. For the first time, I really understood what exactly the war was about in Rwanda and why so many people died. And his descriptions of the various governments in Liberia and the horrible in-fighting was very clear. I shuddered to read about so many murders in the places he came to know so well. And there were tears in my eyes reading about the starvation and the reasons for it. I'm deeply saddened too, because I see no easy answers.

The episodic nature of the book was both its strength and its weakness. It's true that I got an excellent overview. But the chapters skipped around, from place to place and covered a span of more than forty years. I would have preferred a more in-depth look at any one area. I understand though, that his other books are more focused in this way and I look forward to reading more of his work. I also wish he had included some maps as well as a few photographs. In spite of this, however, I do recommend this book. It really did deepen my understanding of this very complex continent.

Kapuscinski's books are full of exotic, suspenseful violence - entertainment (and/or literature) posing as reportage.
Perhaps that is too harsh, but I always catch myself wondering if things happened quite the way he describes. His imagination is attracted by the the baroque, the sensational, and the extreme. As a result, his amazingly lurid dispatches from civil war zones, even if accurate, are perhaps a little too lurid to be food for thought beyond 'heart-of-darkness' similes. If it is journalism, it is often written in a way that elicits fear, pity and even racial stereotyping rather than sober analysis.

And yet, analysis is not absent. What I value in this book is Kapuscinski's very lucid and measured account of the rise of Amin; of the ubiquity of warlord and child soldier; of how Belgian colonial policy gave rise to 'ethnic' hatred in Rwanda; of the class structure of independent Africa; of the perils facing even the most patriotic of African leaders (here, Eritrea; in his book The Soccer Wars he makes a similar point about Ben Bella in Algeria). His vignettes of daily life are also fascinating: the witchcraft he used against burglars in Lagos; the merchant lady in Senegal.

The cover of this book is plastered with glowing reviews, but not one of them is from an African source or African writer. What do Africans make of Kapuscinski's work, I wonder?

Kapuscinski. one of the world's most underrated journalists, takes you on a forty year journey through the African continent. Like much of Kapuscinki's work, he walks the roads where few journalists go. His is a peoples view of the continent. The heat. The smells. The forlorness. The dangers that lurk around each corner. The optimism and the hopelessness that seems to weave through out the continent.
The book is more of a travel warning than a travel guide. Kapuscinski does not try to give the reader a history lesson, but instead reports the everyday facts that he encountered as he crossed the country speaking with everyone from isolated lepers to Heads of State.
Reading the essays in this book may not give you reason to believe that Africa is on the mend but it will give you insight into the strength, spirituality and even optimisim of the "common" people who live in the most dire of circumstances.
Read Kapuscinki's and Robert Kaplan's works to get a non political view of what it is like to survive and live in undeveloped countries.

If you are expecting a scholarly, organized, dissertation explaining modern day Africa you have picked up the wrong book. If you are looking for something that gives you a window into the every day lives of "ordinary" Africans than I can not think of a better book or writer. Like his earlier works, Kapuscinski educates simply by living and writing down his experiences. While there is tremendous value in the works of those, like Robert Kaplan, to sit back and take the 3,000-year view, there is nothing that paints a clearer picture than the words of somenone who has literally lived his subject matter. I have yet to find a book that so vividly portrays life in Africa today and at the same time provide real entertainment and some background history. Also refreshing is Kapuscinski's total lack of fear when making sweeping judgements (Africans are ____ ), a refreshing departure from the timidity and obsessive annotation of academics. I strongly endorse this book for anyone that wants to learn about Africa and be entertained at the same time. I do not recommend this book for someone looking for source material for their history paper!