"Oui, j'y crois" — a review of "The Shadow of the Sun"

Author: Jacek Olędzki Source: Konteksty no. 3/1999

This is the key to understanding our times. Andrzej Wajda, speaking in Filip Bajon’s film “Poszukiwany Ryszard Kapuściński”.

“Anything connected with religion, with supernatural forces, with the world of ritual and of spirit, with something that cannot be seen or touched but that nonetheless exists — and exists more really than any outward materiality — provokes here an immediate reaction of respect, gravity, deference and a little fear.” That is a passage from “The lazy river”, in Ryszard Kapuściński’s collection of thirty pieces of African reportage, The Shadow of the Sun. Let us follow the great writer’s further remarks on a cardinal question in all cultures that have retained much of their original form. It is well known that the countries of contemporary Africa cultivate such a form of culture and share it with strangers with genuine goodwill. We know how any trifling with something higher and secret, sovereign and unfathomable, ends — it ends badly. In truth, however, more is at stake. For the matter concerns the question of the source and the essence of being. The thinking of the Africans I met over the years is deeply religious. “Croyez-vous en Dieu, monsieur?” (Do you believe in God?) I always waited for that question, because I knew it would come, because it had been put to me so many times already, and I knew that whoever put it to me would at that moment be watching me closely, following every twitch of my face. I was aware of the gravity of that moment, of the meaning it carried, and I sensed that the way I answered would determine our mutual relations, and certainly the questioner’s attitude to me. And when I said: Oui, j’y crois (Yes, I believe) — I could see from his face what relief it brought him, how it discharged the tension and dread that went with the scene, how it made him my brother, how it allowed the barriers of skin colour, status and age to be broken. Africans valued and liked to join with another person on that higher, spiritual plane of contact, which often could not be verbalised or defined but whose existence and worth everyone sensed instinctively and spontaneously.

Generally it did not have to be any specific God. One who could be named and whose appearance or attributes could somehow be described. It was rather a matter of something else, of an unshakeable faith in the existence of a Supreme Being, one who creates and rules, and who also imbues the human being with a spiritual substance that raises him above the world of unreasoning animals and dead things. This humble and fervent faith in a Supreme Being means that His envoys and earthly representatives are likewise surrounded by particular esteem and reverential acceptance. That privilege extends, moreover, to the whole numerous stratum of clergy of the most varied confessions, faiths, churches and congregations, of whom Catholic missionaries make up only a small percentage. For Africa holds uncounted throngs of Muslim mullahs and marabouts, ministers of hundreds of Christian sects and offshoots, and priests of African gods and cults. Despite a degree of competition, tolerance in this milieu is astonishing, and the esteem in which they are held among ordinary people is universal. (Heban, pp. 276–277.)

In Ryszard Kapuściński’s writing it is this kind of reflective account — one that, as I have said, touches on a cardinal question in cultures — that I value most highly. As a former researcher of Africa, and of Cameroon in particular, to which the quoted passage directly refers, I know well what extraordinary experience, knowledge and capacity for empathy, and above all what literary talent, one must possess for such a deeply affecting piece of writing to come into being. A profound piece of writing, of the highest cognitive importance. It holds us by one further quality: the presence in it of a personal layer, a constant formal device in Kapuściński’s books. Alongside important observations — some of which escape even seasoned anthropologists, for instance on the African habit of walking in single file — there is always a context that speaks of the author himself, of his fate and of the circumstances in which the material presented was gathered. This gives each account a distinct dramaturgy, and the author himself becomes the protagonist of the events. And we know what the most frequent events in the reportage of a “war correspondent” are. Unhappily, we like bloody stories. That, too, is why one reads Kapuściński in one breath. Only when the reading is over, after a while, does the moment of reflection come, and of release from the enchanting magic of good literature, of swift narrative, of the strong rhythms of terse sentences and of words that strike the reader just as forcefully. In The Shadow of the Sun the two most frequent such words are hell and panic. Undoubtedly, in many readers — particularly those who never had the chance to be in Africa, or who, being there, avoided coming close to the continent’s dangers — it is easy to induce the intended states of horror and dread. But the enchanter who holds us sometimes, willy-nilly, provokes simple and honest astonishment. What is this — you were frightened of a cobra which, like you, our hero, had taken shelter in a hut abandoned by nomadic herdsmen? It could have been driven off with anything to hand! It seems, though, that the author probably knew of that most effective and at the same time safe way of getting rid of the reptile. But he chose to present a trifling episode in such a way that some would be filled with fear and others would feel emotion, perhaps even sympathy directed at the writer himself. The encounter with the venomous snake, its subduing with a tin jerrycan and so on (from the piece “The heart of the cobra”) was used by the publisher, the venerable Czytelnik, to adorn the back cover of a beautifully and tastefully produced book. I suspect, therefore, that behind all this lies a well-tested practice of high craft — how one can and should win a reader. In Poland, which has no very good grasp of the Dark Continent and no deep knowledge of Black Africans, one may assume in advance that the idea of venomous creatures will catch on. In countries hardened by colonial conquest, on the other hand, descriptions of adventures with cobras or scorpions might not be received as they are here. I know something about this. I have watched young English and French people travelling through Africa. They behaved as though they were travelling in their own country. They were surprisingly indifferent to everything that for us is still dangerous and extraordinary. At the sight of a scorpion they reacted as if they were looking at a ladybird or a caterpillar. And it is doubtless a merit of Kapuściński’s writing that his reaction to Africa’s natural peculiarities is so vivid, so sincere, so tinged with dread. The author reveals this attitude most clearly in his descriptions of the climate, the (infernal) heat, the hell of airlessness, and the electrical storms, which take a form unknown to Europeans: “(…) The African feels threatened all the time; on this continent nature takes on such monstrous and aggressive forms, puts on such vengeful and terrifying masks, sets such traps and ambushes for a person, that he lives in a sense of uncertainty about the morrow, in fear and dread. Everything here occurs in multiplied form, unbridled, hysterically exaggerated. If there is a storm — thunderbolts shake the whole planet and lightning tears the sky to shreds; if there is a downpour — a solid wall of water crashes down from the sky and in a moment will drown us and press us into the earth; if there is a drought — it is one that leaves not a drop of water and we die of thirst. In the relations between nature and man there is nothing here to soften them — no compromises, no intermediate states, no gradations. All the time only struggle, fight, a battle for life and death. The African is a person who from birth to death lives at the front, fighting the exceptionally unfavourable nature of his continent, and the mere fact that he lives and is able to survive is his greatest victory.” (Heban, p. 333, the last chapter, “In the shade of a tree, in Africa”.) It is a magnificent, poetic description of the distinctness of African nature. The author attaches great weight to these natural conditions and does not pass over them in the interview he gave to Gabriela Łęcka (Polityka, no. 9 (2182), 27 February 1999, pp. 46–48), “I describe states of mind”: “(…) and he [the African] is afraid all the time, and he is right to be afraid, because something is always threatening him. When a tropical storm comes, when the thunder cracks, then storms in Europe seem by comparison like small sparks.”

It is a splendid comparison, the beautiful language of the long-serving PAP correspondent Ryszard Kapuściński. The suggestiveness of that language, the author’s deeply emotional attitude to the reality he shows, means that The Emperor or The Shadow of the Sun is “swallowed whole”, read with undiminished interest from the first page to the last. But let us look more closely at thunderbolts in Africa and in Europe, or rather in the Eurasian region. Those thunderbolts have preoccupied me from time immemorial, for in primal cultures — and also in the consciousness of the more sensitive representatives of the cultural formations of our own time — they constitute the most communicative and often the most credible and incontrovertible proof of the existence of a Supreme Being. That God thunders in the heavens, that He wields the thunderbolt, is priceless evidence, allowing people of primal cultures to shape their beliefs and, most importantly, their conceptions of the nature of God Himself. According to Kapuściński, tropical thunderbolts in Africa shake the whole planet. Compared with them, electrical discharges in Europe are small sparks. And yet it is precisely these — being most often vertical discharges — that kill people and animals and start the fires that have burned down forests, whole villages and churches too. In the zone of such discharges — most terrible across the Asian steppes — people have from the beginning formed an image of a God who is ruthless, unmerciful and without pity. Catholicism instituted Our Lady of the Thunder Candle and two saints, Agatha and Florian, so that their protective duty of warding off lightning and fire from the heavens might soften the conception of God.

In tropical Africa, on the other hand, the thunderbolts that shake the whole planet are most often horizontal discharges at considerable altitude, ones that do not reach the ground and therefore do not kill people and animals, nor cause the most dangerous fires. When the thunderbolts shake the whole planet, the Maasai do not hide in fear in their safe dwellings plastered with cow dung. Rejoicing, they stand facing those thunderbolts, raising their arms to the heavens in thanks to the Most High for the rain, for everything. And the gorillas dance in the jungle at such times.

So the grounds for fear, dread and terror — being afraid during a storm, of which Kapuściński writes so suggestively — could to a greater degree have belonged to the European peasant or the herdsman of the Asian steppes than to an inhabitant of tropical Africa.

If one accepts this assessment of fear, of “justified being afraid”, a conclusion already signalled suggests itself. It could be put like this. In primal cultures (in Europe, peasant cultures) the image of the Supreme Being varies. That image is determined — among other things — by whether the discharges during storms are lethal or not. Primal peoples express their trust in the Lord of the Heavens most distinctly, most fully and most convincingly precisely where the storms, though “cosmic” in character, do not cause fatalities among people or their living property, their herds. There too, it would seem, the aspect of mercy and pity in the image of the Supreme God imposes itself. And it seems, too, that where the dead and the burnt-out ruins left by lightning appear, that image of the Supreme Being takes shape differently: a certain religious distance is born, along with the phenomenon of deceiving God. In the nature of non-lethal thunderbolts one can therefore find a certain, if only rudimentary, explanation of that living, trust-filled religiosity of which Kapuściński speaks in the quotation with which I began this account of a very important book.

An unquestionable and wholly original method of presenting nature in The Shadow of the Sun is what might be called a complete departure from the adoration of its charms. There are, then, no aestheticising descriptions of nature in this book of the kind so frequent in fiction. Kapuściński — perhaps as no one before him, or as few among the greatest — uncovers for us what is arguably the most important side of that nature. It is the ominous character of the elements, of the climate, and the peculiar relation between day and night. As is well known, in Africa, the closer one comes to the equator the more the morning dawns and evening twilights vanish. The sun appears and disappears suddenly. Night falls, and in The Shadow of the Sun it is often — and sometimes always — pitch dark. Such a night naturally intensifies fear, even great terror. Such a night favours the birth of spectral beliefs and demonic imaginings. But we know that over the Sahara and the Kalahari, and not only there, the stars and the moon shine with a brilliance unknown in Europe.

It is partly thanks to that brilliance, to the depth with which the abyss of the sky can be seen, that the inhabitants of the plateau around Ouagadougou, the Dogon of Upper Volta, acquired an astronomical knowledge that still astonishes and remains the subject of inexhaustible scholarly interpretations as well as fantastical speculations.

Lack of space does not allow me to continue the attentive analysis of this absorbing book. All that remains to the writer of these words is to signal the wealth and variety of important questions and still-current problems. Here are some of them: the inter-tribal wars that consume hundreds of thousands of victims (the author, with a great command of both distant and recent history, supplies the data that allow one to understand the phenomenon of the African Homo necans). The paradigm of being and having. The drama of existence in contemporary Africa. The European dimension of objective time and African subjective time, and the cultural consequences of that difference. The traps of open and uncontrolled space. The African Homo viator. Cities of illusory hopes.

With his characteristic gift for penetrating observation of small things and for endowing them with poetic value, the author sets among these questions of principle a series of small sketches. They may concern a ruined shirt (p. 172) and the eighth wonder of the world, the eleven churches hewn out of solid rock (“Lalibela ‘75”, p. 144), the battle of lizards with mosquitoes on the ceiling (p. 98) and the rays of the sun striking with the force of a knife (p. 129), the veneration of Jeremiah’s prophecies in the Apostolic Church (pp. 304–305), the kitsch murals full of fantasy (p. 19). And there is, of course, new material in The Shadow of the Sun on the elephants’ graveyards (p. 67). Thanks to these “small things” Kapuściński’s writing acquires the qualities of warmth, directness and closeness.

With a description of the dignified conduct of the Spirit of Africa — an elephant at the Christmas Eve table — Ryszard Kapuściński closes another fascinating account of a mystical reality being uncovered close to us, now.