A Good Man in Africa

Author: W. F. Deedes
Source: The Daily Telegraph (UK), June 15, 2001

Editorial summary by kapuscinski.info. The text below is a summary based on the original article. The full article is available in The Daily Telegraph archive.

A review by Bill Deedes — W. F. Deedes, Baron Deedes, one of the legends of British journalism: for decades a reporter and editor at the Daily Telegraph, a Member of Parliament, a minister in Macmillan’s government, a participant in the Abyssinian campaign of 1935, and the likely model for Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot in Scoop.

Deedes assesses The Shadow of the Sun enthusiastically, pointing to Kapuscinski’s singular position: a Pole without colonial baggage, carrying his own national experience of subjugation, able to see Africa with purely human eyes. Deedes — who observed Africa himself for decades from a British vantage point — emphasises what Kapuscinski saw and what escaped Western journalists.

The title alludes to the novel by William Boyd and at the same time expresses a simple judgement: Kapuscinski was good in Africa — good for the continent, for the people who live there, and for his readers. The piece represents the strand of British mainstream reception that raised no objections about facts and admired the humanism and the prose.