Piotr Bratkowski reviews "The Shadow of the Sun"

Author: Piotr Bratkowski date: 1998-01-01 ——————————————————————–

“This is not, then, a book about Africa (…) This continent is too large to describe” — Ryszard Kapuściński writes in the introduction to his latest book. If so, if we take those words at face value, then what is The Shadow of the Sun about?

In describing Africa, Kapuściński points out — and not only in the introduction already quoted — that a thing called Africa is a purely geographical notion, that it does not exist as a coherent intellectual concept. Nevertheless, out of the shimmering, often merely sketched images that make up the book, a certain shared picture emerges. Not directly, but very forcefully, Kapuściński takes issue with two Eurocentric stereotypes of Africa. One which would have us see it as a continent of culturally inferior, incomprehensible (and perhaps not worth comprehending) “savages”, and the sentimental postcolonial myth — take, for instance, Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa — which sees in it a paradise lost.

The African, Kapuściński seems to be saying, is a human being like any other, only entirely different. The contradiction is only apparent, though it is very strongly present in the book. Kapuściński looks at Africa in what one might call an anti-mystical way. Where he perceives a fundamental difference in African customs, behaviour and destinies, he does not ascribe to it any cultural inferiority or any innate “otherness” of Africans. He once said that above all he feels himself to be a translator: only not from one language into another, but from one culture into another. Such a translator must first penetrate deeply into the sense of the culture he is translating from, and then express that sense in a language comprehensible to those who will read his translation. And that is not simple: “The consequence of the fact that the aforementioned class of dullards had a monopoly on contact with Africa is that European languages have not developed a vocabulary allowing an adequate description of other, non-European worlds (…) Every European language is rich, but rich in describing its own culture, in presenting its own world. When it tries to enter the terrain of another culture and describe it, it reveals its (…) semantic helplessness.”

And so Kapuściński translates African difference into a language deeply rooted in European thinking. He translates it through history, politics, economics, demography and finally climate. This demolishes our stereotypes: the bloody war between the Rwandan Tutsi and Hutu, for instance, was not caused by a “typically African” tribal hatred but by an economic conflict between two castes of the same society with opposing interests.

The same goes for a matter that is one of the book’s main threads — the political crisis that struck Africa soon after the euphoria of the early 1960s, when most states in the region regained independence. A crisis which in extreme cases — Somalia, Liberia — led to the effective disintegration of those states. Kapuściński repudiates the myth of the “traditional incapacity of Blacks to govern” and offers a rational account. He summarised it in one interview: “The generation of dreamers was swept away at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s by a wave of military coups (…) most of the takeovers were inspired by (…) East or West. The only criterion for judging those regimes was their loyalty to foreign patrons. The elites were downgraded: a colonel overthrew a professor of law, a captain a colonel, a sergeant a captain (…) Today almost all outstanding African intellectuals live outside Africa.” In their place, Kapuściński writes, a new stratum appeared: warlords living off disintegration, chiefs and soldiers of armed bands feeding on chaos and intercepting international aid.

To describe Africa in this way, comprehensible in European categories of thought, Kapuściński — as has been said — first had to learn to look at Africa from within. How did he do it?

Light and shadow

It begins with light. “The first thing that strikes the eye is light. Everywhere — light. Everywhere — brightness. Everywhere — sun. Only yesterday (…) cold wind and darkness. And here, from the morning, the whole airport in sunlight (…) On the steps of the aeroplane we meet another novelty: a smell (…) This smell (…) will not leave us; it is part of the tropics” — that is how Kapuściński reports his first encounter with Africa.

It begins with light and ends with shadow. In the story that closes the book, Kapuściński describes “a solitary, single, widely branching tree” that appears unexpectedly on “sandy earth burnt by the sun”, in a “lunar, lifeless landscape”.

But the description of the shade-giving tree that closes the book is of a wholly different nature from the description of light that opens it. Light is the newcomer’s first impression of an unknown continent. It is a purely sensory description. The description of the tree, by contrast, is — one might say — functional. “If lightning shatters the tree, the people who lived in its shade will perish too.” Kapuściński describes what such a solitary tree is for — and it is a place that gives shelter from the heat, a place where children learn and the elders confer, and where in the evening the stories flow that constitute the historical community of a local, non-literate society.

That tree is seen and described by a different Kapuściński from the one who, in the autumn of 1958, caught his breath at the light at Accra airport. That earlier Kapuściński responds to a new experience with his senses. The one at the end of the book, observing the African landscape, understands its sense; he tries to look at it not from outside but from within. And the space between these two ways of perceiving the world is probably the key to the meaning of The Shadow of the Sun.

Unknown ciphers

Few of us who read Kapuściński can set his experiences against our own. I least of all — my globetrotting feats are pitifully modest. But they are enough for one observation. When we are thrown into a landscape radically different from the one we grew up in (it need not be Africa; southern Europe will do), we try to domesticate it, to master it inwardly. And two opposing psychological mechanisms are at work here.

The first is reducing the unknown to the known. I have watched people abroad come alive when they recognised in a foreign landscape signs familiar from Poland: the same species of bird, similar graffiti on a wall, Polish pickled cucumbers in a Spanish supermarket. As though discovering the globalisation of the world gave them a sense of security, protected them from the anxiety of experiencing the unknown.

Kapuściński, at the start of his African adventure, tries this method too. “The smell of the tropics. A novelty? But this is the very scent that filled Mr Kanzman’s little shop, Colonial Goods and Others, on Perec Street in Pinsk,” he notes. It is worth remarking in passing that this is precisely the spirit in which some of his earlier books, especially The Emperor and Shah of Shahs, were often read in Poland: as a coded tale about Polish social relations and the mechanics of power under communism.

But in The Shadow of the Sun, a few sentences later, Kapuściński begins to revise that first impression: “And yet the smell of the tropics is a little different,” he writes. As though he wanted to say: we will not understand Africa by translating it into the language of our home town. If not that way, then how? On encountering a wholly different world I have also observed a second psychological mechanism. It is a fascination with its otherness combined with intellectual helplessness, a sense of some definitive cutting-off from the sense of what we see. It is a fury at the fact that, being from elsewhere, we cannot at the same time be from here — that Eliadean longing, so deeply proper to the human species, “for all that we might have become, had we not become what we are”. It is envy of the waiter in the local bar because he knows something about this world that we will never learn. And shame — that the waiter reads our ignorance so easily, and that his professional courtesy only very thinly covers the ironic superiority with which he looks at us.

It seems to me that the whole of The Shadow of the Sun — more, the whole of Kapuściński’s long African experience — grows precisely out of such primal fury, envy and shame. And out of a consistent attempt to break through the state I have called a definitive cutting-off from the sense of what we see.

In the first person plural

He writes about this almost directly. “Those barefoot, hungry and illiterate boys had an ethical advantage over me, the one that accursed history gives its victims (…) They could look at me with a sense of superiority. They were of the black race, but a pure one. (…) The white colour of my skin, though privileged, also held me in the cage of apartheid. A golden cage in this case, admittedly, but a cage all the same.”

Kapuściński looks for a way out of that cage. In 1967, against the urgings of both Whites and African acquaintances, he rents a flat in a black district of Lagos, the Nigerian capital, a city with an exceptionally bad reputation for crime. Indeed, every time he goes away he comes back to find the flat burgled. He confides this to a newly met, unemployed Nigerian. “It is a good thing they rob you, he said; it is even a friendly gesture on their part. This is how they let me know that I am useful to them and that they therefore accept me (…) I shall be safe here as long as I let myself be robbed with impunity.”

But the Nigerian proponent of this theory found a solution to Kapuściński’s troubles: “He made me buy a bunch of white cockerel’s feathers from a woman (…) He arranged the feathers, wound thread round them and tied them to the top of the door frame. From that moment nothing ever went missing from the flat again.”

That is an important moment. The author of The Shadow of the Sun does not, after all, fully understand what happened. But he already knows that in order to break through a sense of foreignness one has to use the local — and, as it turns out, effective — cultural code. Some time later, travelling from the Senegalese capital Dakar to Bamako, the capital of Mali, he meets a Scottish couple travelling round Africa who “do not want to meet or speak to anyone. (…) If someone starts to approach them, they turn away and move off.” By then Kapuściński is able to explain to the Scots the sense of the misunderstandings arising in their contacts with local people from within, as it were, from the point of view of the local cultural code. But he is after something more still — after the grammar of that world, in a way. Kapuściński once said that he really feels himself to be an African. I would put it like this: that he worked consistently towards being able to feel it. Towards being able to write sentences like these: “Those of us standing nearer saw that on the floor of the truck bed lay the body of a man. And we saw them hauling that fish into the truck, and throwing onto the table before us a dead, barefoot human being.” What is at stake here is the right to use the first person plural — and obviously not as an empty grammatical figure. The first person plural here is meant to render — emotionally and intellectually — the actual state of things. Kapuściński is not observing Ugandans from whom Amin’s soldiers took the fish they had hoped to eat. He is among them, feels the same hunger and then the same disgust. He writes “we”, suggesting that for him the experience was the same as for the inhabitants of Kampala. Whenever he writes “we” in this book, we have the impression that he does so deliberately, that by the same token he is telling us: I crossed the barrier of the unknowable; at that moment I was one of them. Or rather: one of us.

*Ryszard Kapuściński, Heban, Czytelnik, Warsaw 1998. Piotr Bratkowski