"Africa recognised" — a review of "The Shadow of the Sun"

Author: Ewa Szumańska source: Rzeczpospolita 24.12.98 no. 301 date: 1998-01-01 ——————————————————————–

I keep going back to Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Shadow of the Sun — to those rustling instalments cut out of the newspaper and held together with paper clips, which I waited for each week with growing impatience. And not only I. A Polish woman wrote to me, an architect living permanently in Denmark, who had gone with a group of Danish volunteers to Tanzania for several years and, alongside her professional work, had set up a free drawing school for Tanzanian children. Friends in Warsaw sent her the first instalment, and while she was in Poland for a few days she took out a subscription to Gazeta Wyborcza purely so she could receive the following instalments quickly, before the book came out. A Cameroonian friend of mine studying in Poland photocopied all the instalments and sent them round to other African students. I think there were a great many such people.

People touched by Africa. If someone has a particular place in the world, more important than others, invested with genuine feeling, provoking unchanging emotions, fixed in hundreds of images and memories so that it cannot be let go — and if that person reads a book, an essay, an article about it — then he is a very demanding reader. If that place is an entire continent, the demands grow further, and can sometimes become unfair. What is at stake then is not facts, dates and particular events. It is the whole atmosphere, the author’s personal attitude, the interpretation of phenomena, small and apparently insignificant observations, the rhythm, the language — everything. How easy it is then for a jarring note, for what is “mine” to be knocked about and wounded, for unreasonable objections. Reading The Shadow of the Sun I had no such objections; Ryszard Kapuściński’s Africa is my Africa too, only as if multiplied, more spacious, fuller, lived through in a deeper experience.

In my small book Obecność, published in 1992, there is a passage I shall take the liberty of quoting:

“In the middle of the 1980s, in a hall filled to the brim, I attended a meeting with Ryszard Kapuściński — probably the only Polish journalist and writer who not only knows Africa well but feels it deeply. Someone asked him about the famine in Ethiopia and about the prospect of dealing with such calamities once and for all. Kapuściński replied — these are not quotations, I did not manage to write everything down, but I think the sense is the same — that the famine in that region is irreversible, and although it sounds terrible, they must and will have to die, because the world has no lasting remedy. Once or twice their existence will be extended, a little. That in this great zone of hunger — southern Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Niger — it even ceases to matter what the government and the politics are; at the zero level of existence there is no politics any more. And that all those things we play at — conflicts, games of power, solutions for the future, even terrorism — can only begin above a certain level of existence; below it there is no room for them. Because hunger shortens the horizon of thought; all that counts is what will happen an hour from now. That is roughly what he said, and I remember the pain with which I listened, and the urge to protest that I could barely hold back. Not against the words that were spoken, of course not — probably against the fate that justified them.”

My first encounter with Ryszard Kapuściński’s prose took place in the dismal early years of communist Poland. Even then I sought out every scrap of material about Africa available here. Since our eastern “hegemon” was at that time straining hard for influence on the continent, our obliging journalists quickly took up the subject. Those were, on the whole, embarrassing texts. There was no knowledge in them, no depth, no experience, nothing lived through — just collections of ideological and propagandistic slogans. One day, however, a book came into my hands: If All Africa…. The author’s name meant nothing to me then. I began to read — and suddenly, illumination. A completely different language, a different way of thinking, a different sense, a different atmosphere: at last something living and true. I did not part with that book and knew it almost by heart; it went with me on my first journeys. Many years later The Shadow of the Sun, a kind of summa of Africa, closed the bracket on that old reader’s fascination.

To know anything at all about Africa you have to come to know it the hard way. Not in an air-conditioned hotel and not on a travel agent’s “safari”. You have to have no money and no bed for the night, to cover great distances by every available means of transport or on foot, to feel hunger, thirst, deadly exhaustion and fever. I know this from my own experience, so much more modest and poorer than the author’s. He came to know that continent in continual danger, through serious illnesses, in uncertainty not of tomorrow but of each next hour. He writes about it sparingly, economically, without display — but that dreadful, sweating, fevered labour rises again and again from the pages of The Shadow of the Sun. And it is not the labour of a panting reporter chasing a sensational subject like a gundog, but the genuine, serious, deep concern of a writer and an honest man for this piece of the world in which he found himself and to whose fate he committed himself.

I recognise in The Shadow of the Sun — and it is exceedingly close to me — a quarrel with Africa. A person who loves something, or someone, is usually engaged in a passionate, affectionate quarrel with them. He judges and immediately revises those judgements, accuses and at the same time looks for excuses, has moments of outrage, fury, even disgust, and then straight afterwards of full acceptance and boundless delight. How often African passivity pained me, the shambling idleness, the instinctive desire for stillness, the absence of responsibility, the absence of curiosity and of wonder at the world which are the engine of all progress, the good nature that can suddenly turn into an inexplicable cruelty. And how, a moment later, I admired the faces of children in some bush school, under a shelter held up by a few bamboo poles, in the heat, among hundreds of flies — their great concentration and tension in the act of learning. Or the work of a potter who does not know the wheel and shapes a vessel in a hollow dug in the ground. Or their care and respect for old people. Or their great solidarity in times of great misfortune, when sharing a few mouthfuls with another may mean hastening your own death. This lurching between contradictory judgements is a little like the way one feels about a member of one’s closest family; one is ashamed of various things they do, criticises them, scolds them, because one so badly wants to be proud of them, so badly wants them to succeed.

I recognise in The Shadow of the Sun the smell of Africa. Unlike any other, made up of the smell of earth, of overripe and rotting fruit, of black sweating bodies, of the scent of certain flowers so intense it catches in the throat, and of burning and smoke. That comes from the bush fires, which never stop; someone is always setting a fire, because he wants a patch of land to cultivate, because the grass is too high and a snake cannot be seen in it, because his father and grandfather and great-grandfather set fire to the bush, so that it is by now an almost automatic gesture, natural, inherited. Kapuściński writes about this smell only a few times and uses few words. But words are so obedient to him that it is as though he had chosen the only possible ones to define the “soul” of a smell and saturate every page of the book with it.

I recognise the rhythm of Africa. This is a matter I find exceptionally hard to explain in a few sentences rather than at length. I mean not only the short, two-syllable words in many African tribal languages — words that do not ring but thud dully, like the beat of a drum, so that all speech, all communication with another person, seems to be underscored by the accompaniment of an invisible instrument. I mean also the shifting rhythm of great verbal explosions, almost oratorical displays with an accumulation of metaphors and adjectives — and an astonishing terseness, a brevity of sentences sometimes reduced to a single word. It seems to me that I find the echo of that rhythm more than once in the language of The Shadow of the Sun.

I recognise the landscape of Africa, its mad climate with downpours hanging vertically from the sky and with the burnt, cracked earth in the time of drought, the splendour of the bush and the monstrousness of the suburban slums, the swarming of insects, the reactions and behaviour of people, their faces, their short guttural laughter, their long motionless gaze.

I recognise the solitude of Africa. The solitude one reads about and knows about from outside the continent, and feels acutely from within. When Iraq invades Kuwait, the most modern army in the world comes to the rescue, because oil is at stake. When a crisis strikes the Asian tigers, billions of dollars are pumped into them, because investments and stock prices are at stake. When something similar, often on a far larger scale, strikes Africa, a few lorries of food are sent, and the local warlords steal most of it anyway. Because here nothing is at stake. Africa has already fulfilled its historical role, supplying first millions of slaves and then millions of tons of assorted raw materials. Now it is no longer needed, forgotten, written off. Kapuściński says this with pitiless honesty, with passion, with immense personal commitment, in almost every chapter of The Shadow of the Sun.

It is a beautiful and important book. Perhaps it is some tiny instalment on the debt that the callousness of our world owes to Africa?

Ryszard Kapuściński, Heban. Czytelnik, Warsaw 1998.

Ewa Szumańska, author of reportage, short stories, novels and essays. A participant in the Warsaw Uprising and a prisoner of the Zeithain stalag, from 1945 an actress in the theatres of Cracow, Łódź and Wrocław, an editor at Polish Radio and a columnist for “Tygodnik Powszechny”. She published many books, among them “Ślady na oceanie” (1963), “Przygoda w Lagos” (1964), “Blizna” (1969), “Inny rytm” (1974), “Tunes, Tunes” (1979), “Moi przyjaciele Latynosi” (1981) and “Bizary” (1987). Two years ago she published “Skrwawione wzgórza Afryki” with Znak.