Misguided Tour

Author: Aleksandar Hemon
Source: The Village Voice, April 24, 2001

Editorial summary by kapuscinski.info. The text below is a summary based on the original article. The full article is available in the Internet Archive (Village Voice).

A review by the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon, published on the occasion of the English edition of The Shadow of the Sun. Hemon — himself a writer in two languages, intimately familiar with the experience of being the foreigner — raises objections that would become the groundwork of the later postcolonial debate.

His central argument: Kapuscinski describes Africa through a lens of essentialism, assuming that “the African” is a definite, homogeneous category with fixed properties — a particular relation to time, to the body, to death. Such generalisations, in Hemon’s reading, reproduce a colonial way of seeing even where the author’s intention is one of empathy.

Hemon does not dispute the beauty of Kapuscinski’s prose, nor his courage as a reporter. What he disputes is the epistemology: how does Kapuscinski know what “the African” feels? On what basis does he generalise from individual encounters to an entire continent?

The title — Misguided Tour — casts Kapuscinski as a guide who leads the reader into Africa through the wrong entrance: his own projections rather than the place itself. The piece is one of the earlier voices in the English-language reception of Kapuscinski to ask about cultural representation rather than about facts alone.