The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life: Amazon.co.uk: Ryszard Kapuscinski, Klara Glowczewska: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

Polish writer and foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski may be in the twilight of a golden career spanning more than 40 years but The Shadow of the Sun, an alternative record of his experiences of Africa and its stupefying white heat, is perhaps his finest hour. This for a writer who, to echo the sentiments of Michael Ignatieff, has turned reportage into literature. Drawn to the Developing World through an impoverished wartime upbringing, Kapuscinski arrived in Ghana in 1957 and was on hand to witness the tumultuous years in which colonial Africa was dismantled, resulting in born-again countries ripe for ransacking by despots. From the glare of Accra airport which greets him on first arrival, to the Tanzanian night of the final pages, he crosses savannah, desert and city by foot, road and train, searching out the two most important, yet inconstant commodities on the continent: shade and water. Threatened by an Egyptian cobra, cursed with cerebral malaria and tuberculosis, plagued by black cockroaches the size of small turtles, Kapuscinski intermingles the immediate and the reflective in 29 satisfyingly fragmented vignettes, encompassing historical narratives and personal experience across a host of countries, including Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan and Liberia.

While acknowledging European colonial culpability, he refuses to rinse his words in guilt. The Shadow of the Sun is reminiscent of Gianni Celati's Adventures in Africa, employing similarly symphonic atmospherics that can bear poetic witness to both the tragic history of Rwanda and the Ngubi beetle, which toils in the desert to produce the sweat it drinks to survive. As much about the plastic water container as the warlord and preferring the African shanty town to the Manhattan skyscraper as a monument to human achievement, what Kapuscinski, the author of Shah of Shahs describes is not Africa, which he claims does not exist except geographically but a distillation of life itself, through its religiosity, its trees, the frightening abundance of youth, sun that "curdles the blood" and terrorising, ruling armies that fall in a day. The first in a projected trilogy pulling together Africa, Central America and Asia, The Shadow of the Sun is an exceptional and humbling work of imagination and experience by a writer intent on liberating truths from fact. --David Vincent --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"This harrowing, at times shattering, chronicle of 40 years of adventures in Africa finds Kapuscinski in trouble again. . . . He crushes a cobra to save his life, moves with nomads through Somalia, and waits to die from thirst beneath a truck in the Sahara. Kapuscinski alternates between plain prose and shimmering imagery, using understatement to dispel easy stereotypes about Africa and Africans, and finishing a paragraph or two of spare exposition with some dazzling revelation or note of remorse that leaves you reeling. With rare exception, these distant episodes amaze." -- Brad Wieners, "Outside
""An astonishing piece of writing . . . as vital a book as any I've read in recent years, an outstanding introduction to the tangled threads of African culture and politics and a manual in the modes of human cruelty and redemption . . . Kapuscinski . . . may be the greatest journalist of our time. . . . Kapuscinski bears his historical baggae lightly through the African landscape, but his inability to tell the story in the dispassionate tones of an outsider is what gives this visionary book such power." -- Mark Levine, "Men's Journal

"From the U.K.: "
""A dazzling narrative historian, using his own experience as the principal archive. . . . he is never less than clear and pungent; his short chapter on the genocidal hatreds of Rwanda is worth a hundred newspaper features. . . . He brings the world to us as nobody else." -- Ian Jack, "The Observer"
"Kapuscinski doesn't just 'cover' Africa -- he knows it. His perspective is both vast and uniquely informed." -- Keith Wilson, "Focus"
"His book most successfully conveys the charms, frustrations, tragedies, comedies, brutalities, and kindnesses of life in Africa. . . . as an observer, and as a recorder of his observations, he is second to none." -- Anthony Daniels, "Sunday Telegraph
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"His is the first wide-ranging, elegant, aristocratic intelligence since Conrad's to bear on Africa in all its perplexity. . . . Kapuscinski is a master of the charismatic shorthand that leaves the reader knowing all there is to know, yet wanting to know more." -- Jeremy Harding," Evening Standard"
"Both subtle and haunting, a book written with love and longing, as sharp and life-enhancing as the sun that rises on an African morning." -- Anthony Sattin, "Sunday Times"
"An elliptical picture of African life that is intellectually acute and emotionally rich." -- Will Cohu," Daily Telegraph"
"He has given the truest, least partial, most comprehensive and vivid account of what life is like on our planet. He is an unflinching witness "and" an exuberant stylist." -- Geoff Dyer, "The Guardian"

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61 of 61 people found the following review helpful

Africa comes out of the Shadows 3 Oct 2002

By Dr. J. W. Ironmonger

Format:Paperback

I grew up in Africa, a barefooted white boy enjoying the final desperate priviledges of the dying Empire. And as a young man I taught in Nigeria. These are all fading memories now, yet not until now have I read anything which so transports me back to the white heat of the sun, and the marketplaces, and the footpaths, and the vibrancy that is Africa. This is a book that lays bare the real Africa without any burden of ideology or polemic - except for a touching underlying affection for the place. If you ever felt confused about the tribal factions in Rwanda, or the forces that led to the rise of Amin in Uganda, or whatever happened to the freed American slaves in Liberia, or the reasons for the conflict in Eritrea - then this is the book. Exquisite.

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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful

Africa in a nutshell 4 Nov 2002

By Young Bob

I've visited Africa several times and have read a number of African travel books, but for me this one stands out hand and shoulders above the rest. Based on the author's personal experiences as a journalist spanning the whole continent each chapter presents a fresh insight into African culture,physchology, beleifs and history . Whether it is describing the revolution in Zanzibar (where the author himself was taken hostage), the rise of the 3rd-rate officer Amin to president of Uganda or observations drawn from travelling amongst the ordinary villages and people the author allows neither sentimentalism nor predjudice to cloud a hugely entertaining and informative read.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful

Manic violence and measured thoughts 30 Jun 2004

By And You May Find Yourself

Ignatieff is right - Kapuscinski does turn reporting into literature. But maybe he oversteps the boundary sometime....I catch myself wondering if things happened quite the way he describes them. His imagination is attracted by the the baroque, the sensational, and the extreme. That said, this was probably the reason he fell in love with Africa in the first place - his need for heightened emotions and extreme situations.

That said, it's very worth reading this book, not so much for the reportage as for the analysis. His dispatches from civil war zones are amazingly lurid, especially from Liberia. But maybe too lurid to be food for thought beyond 'heart-of-darkness' similes.
What I particularly value in this book is his very lucid and measured analysis of the rise of Amin; of the ubiquity of the warlord and child soldier; of the genocide 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). And his vignettes of daily life are also fascinating: the witchcraft he used against burglars in Lagos, the merchant lady in Senegal.

In notice the cover of this book is plastered with glowing reviews - but not one is from from an African source or african writer. What do Africans make of it, I wonder...