Journeys into the interior

Book reviewed: The Shadow of the Sun (Polish title: Heban) — Ryszard Kapuściński
Reviewed by: Geoff Dyer
Date: Saturday, 2 June 2001
Source: The Guardian

Editorial summary by kapuscinski.info. The text below is a summary based on the original article. The full article is available free of charge at The Guardian.

If a spacecraft were being sent out to make literary contact with the inhabitants of a distant galaxy and there were room for only one contemporary writer, Dyer would vote for Ryszard Kapuściński. He is the one who has given the truest, most comprehensive and most vivid account of what life on this planet actually looks like.

For nearly thirty years Kapuściński was the foreign correspondent of the Polish Press Agency. In that time he witnessed twenty-seven revolutions and coups. He discharged his duties conscientiously, but he was also a kind of gonzo journalist — he would break off contact with Warsaw and disappear without trace, to throw himself “into the jungle, down the Niger in a dugout canoe, or across the Sahara with nomads”.

In Nigeria in 1966 he drove down a road from which, he was told, no white man came back alive. He did it because he had to experience everything for himself. That compulsive curiosity earned him a reprimand from his editor, who ordered him to stop taking risks that could end in disaster. It made no difference.

The opening pages of The Shadow of the Sun — the compendium of his African adventures — find him in Dar es Salaam in 1962. Hearing that Uganda is about to gain its independence, he sets off with his friend Leo for Kampala across the Serengeti. Without maps, lost, they come face to face with an enormous herd of buffalo. Kapuściński begins to hallucinate from the heat. When they finally reach a hut in the middle of nowhere, he discovers that his hand is hanging inches from an Egyptian cobra. Kapuściński freezes; Leo subdues the snake with a metal jerrycan. The author survives — only to find that he is suffering not just from heatstroke but from cerebral malaria and tuberculosis as well. All of it inside twenty pages.

Kapuściński is sometimes accused of embellishment. In his prose the Saharan sun strikes “with the force of a knife”, and the cockroaches in Monrovia are “the size of small turtles”. He himself admits that he could dress something up, but does not, because “it would not be true”.

Critics have compared him to Philip Gourevitch, but Kapuściński’s work is an achievement of a different order. As a great writer of the imagination he goes beyond pure reportage. His books are full of digressions and miniature essays — on the history of the Armenian book, or on how to make brandy. And yet these insertions are integral to the whole. He describes real places that seem as fantastical as Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

Kapuściński is deeply immersed in the politics of everything he sees. His courage comes from an awareness of how politics complicates empathy. As a white man in Africa at the moment of decolonisation he feels at home there, because he comes from a country repeatedly wrecked by the imperial ambitions of its neighbours. He knows what it is to have nothing and to wait for history to say a kind word.

He does not play down the corruption or the violence, but their very prevalence makes the survival of goodness all the more remarkable to him. And in return Kapuściński always offers what he wanted from history himself: a kind word.

Original: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jun/02/politics