Helena Zaworska on "The Shadow of the Sun"

Author: Helena Zaworska date: 1998-01-01 ——————————————————————–

Ryszard Kapuściński has written the work of his life: a book about Africa entitled The Shadow of the Sun. He first went there in 1957, then went back many times, living there for several years in all.

Living — that is putting it too mildly. He did not look on from outside; he shared the place, he shared its fate. He learned extraordinary things about life. He met people cast into extremely hard conditions who accepted their lot with dignity, calm, even pride. He also met people who were the devil incarnate. The doubleness of human nature revealed itself glaringly there. He tried to understand it. He saw with his own eyes, tested with his own body and his own sensibility, what Africa is: vast, various, hard to take in, mysterious. The Shadow of the Sun is a work about that life, uncovered by the author over decades, often at the highest price — his own illness, danger, death. Hats off, gentlemen.

Kapuściński travelled with Africans in their strange lorries over something that did not resemble roads at all, wandered with nomads across the desert, stayed with peasants of the tropical savannah, lived in their city districts rather than in hotels. He was with them in the family, in the crowd, released from the solitude of white people shut in their comfortable cages of civilisation. For Africans solitude is the greatest curse, sometimes a sentence of physical annihilation. They also maintain a close spiritual bond with their ancestors, and commune with them.

Such experiences changed the perspective from which the world is seen, and the possibilities of understanding life, including our own. Civilisation began to seem odd and somehow impoverished, though materially so indecently rich. In the end Africa stopped resembling another planet and became closer to life on earth, more interesting than many of our ambiguous victories over nature. Until in The Shadow of the Sun it comes to this: one no longer knows who is nearer to discovering the secrets of life and death. Africans, having almost nothing, seem to know almost everything. Kapuściński is astonished by their wisdom without schooling, their history without writing, transmitted orally and turned into myth, their biological and emotional oneness with earth and sky, though the earth yields so little and the sky strikes with sun.

Not long ago, in a conversation with Joanna Szczęsna after the death of Marian Brandys, whom he regarded as his master, the author of The Shadow of the Sun spoke of the types of reporter: “There are inquisitive, prying, aggressive reporters, but there are also reflective reporters who convey the climate, who pass on the secrets and the aura of the place they write about.” Before he became precisely such a reporter, the young Kapuściński was a journalist of the racing kind: who gets to the information first and passes it on. As a war correspondent he flew in to one revolution, coup and civil war and massacre after another. The Shadow of the Sun opens with the chapter “The beginning, collision, Ghana ‘58”. The young man was still flying off to visit ministers, talking to officials and soldiers, and to revolutionaries. He imagined he would grasp everything in a flash by virtue of his considerable intelligence and his skill at making contacts. Writing about his books years ago, I registered that need to run about the world with admiration but also with a certain embarrassment. I valued the appetite for knowledge — I called him “a Herodotus in jeans” — but he acquired knowledge of everything too fast and formulated his diagnoses too confidently. He was too much the brilliant journalist who at moments believes he has the world at his fingertips.

With the years and the accumulation of experience Kapuściński simply turned into a writer whose knowledge and judgement are of another kind. In The Shadow of the Sun events are shown differently, not merely as news. They have a broad backdrop in the past, which Kapuściński explores by turning to history (he is, after all, a historian by training, and that knowledge proves necessary to him as a writer). The Shadow of the Sun is a book open to wide perspectives of time; from it we learn a great deal about the fate of Africa in various epochs: about the slave trade, about the nineteenth-century partition of the continent among European colonisers, about their ways of governing and of ruining the land, about bloody and futile revolts. Until at last one country after another gained independence, only to drown it in civil wars, defile it in dictatorships, and save it in the heroic endurance of ordinary people.

The Shadow of the Sun is above all a book about those people, because they are Africa’s greatest mystery and greatest value. The author says so plainly in his short introduction: “This is not a book about Africa, but about a few people from there, about meetings with them, about the time spent together. This continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied and immensely rich cosmos. Only in a great simplification, for convenience, do we say: Africa. In reality, apart from the geographical name, Africa does not exist.”

That vastness is visible in the book. In successive chapters we move from place to place; countries, systems and landscapes change radically. Kapuściński writes in a disciplined style, carefully choosing facts and details that say a great deal; his images are condensed to the maximum. Only for that reason can he tell us about Ghana and Zanzibar, about the desert and the savannah, about many cities, towns and villages. But when he decides to speak about the massacres in Rwanda, he calls the chapter a “lecture”, so as to place between the description and a reality beyond description the dryness of a lecture, a report.

The chapter entitled “A day in the village of Abdallah Wallo”, by contrast, is a prose poem about a human being in paradise. That human being does not live in a garden but on earth burnt by the sun; he is poor and perpetually hungry and works hard: “Life here is a constant effort, an endlessly repeated attempt to find a fragile and unsteady balance, forever collapsing, between survival and annihilation.” The harder the struggle for biological survival, the more miraculous the capacity of these people for living in an almost tender community. When I read the description of morning in Abdallah Wallo, emotion caught in my throat. The men’s prayer, the children running about, the women bustling, the ritual of morning visits and greetings, when everyone calls on everyone and asks whether they slept well. I envied Kapuściński for having seen one of the wonders of this world: great inner wealth in great poverty. What kind of person must one be to endure such toil without complaint, and with such joyful openness to life and to others? Which of us could do it?

Kapuściński’s book confronts us with many questions. They are questions of first principle. What is life, its meaning, morality, crime, pride and humility, revolt and acceptance of one’s lot? We have always asked them in our culture, but our answers, our reactions, are entirely different. Why does a man vainly searching for a well in the desert, dying together with his camel, curse those who drag him away from it to save his life — he wants to die with his animal. Why is solitude there an unimaginable misfortune, when we have grown used to it like poisoned air? Why do people flee from camps for dying nomads back into the desert, where destruction awaits them? Kapuściński’s African friend answers all this for him: “That is simply our nature — he says it without resignation, indeed with a shade of pride. Nature is something one must not oppose, or try to improve, or do anything to become independent of. Nature is given by God, and so it is perfect. Droughts, heat, empty wells and death on the road are perfect too. Without them a person would not afterwards feel the true delight of rain, the divine taste of water, the life-giving sweetness of milk. An animal would not know how to rejoice in juicy grass, to be intoxicated by the scent of a meadow. A person would not know what it is to stand in a stream of cool, crystalline water. It would not even occur to him that this simply means being in heaven.”

So Africa is hell and heaven joined together, so that one may be told from the other and the true taste of life may be known. That is how it looks in The Shadow of the Sun. Helena Zaworska, Wprost, 6 December 1998.