Ryszard Kapuściński (1932 to 2007) was foreign correspondent for the Polish News Agency during the communist era and so one of the few Polish journalists allowed to travel freely outside the country. He first visited Africa in 1957 and returned periodically. As he explains in the brief foreword, although he attended on the state events and interviewed the national leaders he was tasked with reporting, he also went out of his way to explore byways, hitching lifts, travelling on local buses, wandering with nomads in the desert, staying with peasants on the savannah, curious about all aspects of African life.
So this book is not a factual or historical survey. It’s not a collection of his printed articles and reporting. Instead, Kapuściński’s text has more in common with a novel, or the kind of allusive, literary and thoughtful short texts of someone like Italo Calvino. They are more like meditations, in which he mingles personal travels, meetings and interviews, with serious factual points (about slavery or the creation of the African states), along with ‘deeper’ reflections on Africa’s history, geography, customs and plight, mingled with consciously beautiful and lyrical descriptions.
Written over a forty year period, they’re like snapshots, impressions, pegs and pretexts for very ‘literary’, semi-philosophical reflections and musings. So although it contains quite a lot of facts about Africa, they’re not in the form of dates and data, but of generalisations, thoughts and musings.
It struck me that this explains why the book doesn’t contain any maps. That would give it an inappropriate specificity and humdrum factuality. Kapuściński’s Africa is an Africa of the mind, of the imagination.
And because the text has a meandering, sumptuous feel, it’s not a book you read in a hurry in order to process the information, but rather one you pick up and reread to enjoy the thought and style and the civilised, ruminative worldview. Here’s a representative slice of Kapuściński.
Both sides of the road are dense with greenery. Tall grasses, thick, fleecy shrubs, spreading umbrella trees. It’s like this all the way to Kilimanjaro and the two little towns nearby, Moshi and Arusha. In Arusha we turned west, towards Lake Victoria. Two hundred kilometers on, the problems started. We drove onto the enormous plain of the Serengeti, the largest concentration of wild animals on earth. Everywhere you look, huge herds of zebras, antelopes, buffalo, giraffes. And all of them are grazing, frisking, frolicking, galloping. Right by the side of the road, motionless lions; a bit farther, a group of elephants; and farther still, on the horizon, a leopard running in huge bounds. It’s all improbable, incredible. As if one were witnessing the birth of the world, that precise moment when the earth and the sky already exist, as do water, plants and wild animals but not yet Adam and Eve. It is this world barely born, the world without mankind, and hence also without sin, that you imagine you are seeing here. (p.43)
1. The Beginning: Collision, Ghana 1957 (11 pages)
Ghana A vivid description of what it’s like to step off the plane from dark and rainy northern Europe into the dazzling glare of the African sun. A week getting to know Accra, capital of Ghana, especially its intense foetid smell. Kapuściński attends a speech by the new Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, informal, joyful. The friend who took him introduces him to Kofi Baako, the 32-year-old Minister of Education and Information, who he goes to visit the next day in his office, the ramshackle telephone exchange, his books and enthusiasms, he was unemployed till Nkrumah called him, his ambition to drive up literacy rates. Baako invites him to a party where he shows him his collection of cameras.
2. The Road to Kumasi (10 pages)
Ghana He catches a bus from Accra’s chaotic bus station, which is the peg for meditations about the three worlds the African inhabits: the palpable visible world; the world of the ancestors, who lived and died, but not completely; and then the world of the spirits. And standing over all three, God.
African time and Western time. Western man is dominated by time, a slave to time, which is an inflexible machine. For the African time is more flexible, elastic, comes into being as required. Time appears when we need it, hibernates when we don’t.
Hence the Africans’ incredible ability to wait, sitting, squatting, lying passive, on pause, hibernating in the hot sun. Kapuściński fantasises African history, small clans, impermanent and nomadic in a vast continent. They didn’t have the wheel and, south of the Sahara, no pack animals, because of ferocious tropical diseases. Trade was primitive, exchange of goods and ideas and therefore technology, non-existent. Hence the almost complete absence of towns or cities or the indicators of civilisation found on other continents. It was a continual migration, which also explains why the ancestors are the key figures, because they are carried from place to place in oral tradition.
3. The structure of the clan (11 pages)
Ghana In the industrialised West the individual is king and individualism is the dominant ideology, taken to its furthest extremes in America. In Africa, it is the extreme opposite; life is about the clan, which means the extended family. A clan comprises all who believe they share a common ancestor. A clan has a chief whose job is not only to rule the living but to mediate with the much larger number of clan members who are dead, with the ancestors.
The clan chief is expected to share out what he has and any wealth he acquires with the extended family of the clan (like a Viking warlord, like a Roman aristocrat besieged with suppliants). This is basic to the structure of society and explains what the West describes as corruption i.e. as soon as a prominent citizen acquires place and power, they direct money, opportunities and jobs to their extended clan. That’s how it works. Those are traditional African values.
4. I, a White Man (9 pages)
Dar es Salaam, 1962. Kapuściński as correspondent of the Polish Press Agency. He is crushed by his consciousness of being white i.e. the same skin colour as the colonial oppressor. He sees the prominence of skin colour, and generalised forms of apartheid, everywhere. Thus the three zones of Dar es Salaam, white luxury, busy Asian shops, black slums. He feels guilty even though his nation, Poland, never colonised everywhere; the reverse, Poland was itself divided and conquered by its neighbours.
5. The Cobra’s Heart (9 pages)
Tanzania With a Greek colleague, Leo, he hires a four-wheel-drive to drive from Dar to Kampala, capital of Uganda, which is about to be awarded independence, 9 October 1962. They get badly lost in the endless savanna where there are few roads but a bewildering matrix of tracks. They stay overnight in an empty trackside hut. Only when he’s lying on the bed does he realise there’s a poisonous cobra placed directly under it, which he and Leo attack with an empty metal canister.
They drive on for another day and through the night. Kapuściński reflects on how Uganda was carved out in the Scramble for Africa, its borders forcing together different and rival kingdoms. He checks into the converted barracks where journalists covering the independence day celebrations are being house, but feels tired and dizzy, then passes out.
6. Inside the Mountain of Ice (9 pages)
Uganda Kapuściński comes to in a hospital where an Asian doctor tells him he’s for cerebral malaria. He describes the chill and fever and light-headedness of malaria. After an attack you feel like ‘a human rag’.
Reflections on how European settlement of Africa for hundreds of years amounted to little more than ports on the coast. There were no cities or towns, no broad roads, all the rivers are hard to navigate and the interior is purulent with fatal diseases. Only at the very end of the nineteenth century did the various European nations who’d carved up Africa make an effort to create railway lines into the interior. Since the Africans couldn’t be persuaded to do this, the British imported thousands of labourers from India. One of them was the grandfather of the Dr Patel who’s now treating him.
Dr Patel tells him stories of the Asian immigrants’ terror of the lions who preyed on them, and then how you never see a dead elephant because the old weak ones tend to fell into waterholes or lakes and get sucked down into the muddy bottom.
7. Dr Doyle (9 pages)
Tanzania Having returned from Kampala (we hear nothing about the independence ceremony he went to cover) Kapuściński carries on feeling ill. When he wakes one night to find the pillow covered in blood he goes to see a Dr Laird who tells him it’s tuberculosis. Laird is packing up to go back to Blighty and passes him on to an Irish doctor, Dr Doyle.
He takes one of the male nurses, Edu, as an example of the extended family which is so important to Africans, and gives a comic account of the enormous fuss a clan or family member makes when greeting another member.
8. Zanzibar (27 pages)
January 1964. There’s a coup in the island state of Zanzibar. The black Africans overthrow the Arab Sultan. Kapuściński tells us he knows the main press guy in Nairobi, Felix Naggar, chief of Agence France Presse in East Africa, the kind of guy who knows everything and everyone.
A humorous account of the desperate efforts of the 40 or so Western correspondents in Nairobi to get to the island, seeing as how the airport is closed and the coup leaders threaten to shoot down any planes. Very handily, Kapuściński puts in a call to Abeid Karume, leader of Zanzibar’s Afro-Shirazi Party. After a bit of cajoling, Karume says he’ll allow a plane carrying Kapuściński (and Naggar) to land. That’s how you get scoops! The coup was led by 25-year-old John Okello, who Kapuściński manages to visit in his chaotic extended household.
Which turns, unexpectedly, into an extended meditation on the slave trade and it’s long-tern impact on Africa i.e. ruinous not only in economic social terms, but psychologically, embedding a sense of humiliation and defeat.
He and colleagues had only been in Zanzibar a week or so when, during the last week of January 1964, the armies of Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya mutinied, in rapid succession. The half-comic, half-terrifying story of their attempt to escape Zanzibar in a motor dinghy and getting caught in a terrifying storm which drives them back to the coast. Eventually, they catch a plane out.
9. The Anatomy of a Coup d’Etat (10 pages)
Lagos, Nigeria, 1966. Kapuściński’s notes on the key facts. The coup came after a bitter civil war in Western Nigeria. In the coup about 8,000 soldiers were deployed to all the main cities and politicians in Nigeria’s 5 major towns were arrested and, in some cases, shot. The country seems pleased with the coup. He quotes press releases by the military which claim this is the second, true liberation, after the first one of 1961; this time it is a liberation from black imperialists, civilian politicians having, in five short years, become a byword for corruption and greed.
Kapuściński casually makes quite a big point I hadn’t seen before; that because free enterprise commercial economy was still in its infancy, and because all of the raw material extraction corporations, as well as all of the banks, are still in foreign hands – politics, in many African countries, was one of the few careers where an ambitious, money-minded person could actually make money.
A withering pen portrait of Chief Samuel Akintola, Prime Minister of Western Nigeria, who had done just that, siphoned money from public finances into his own accounts, stealing millions, with the result that he had houses everywhere, a fleet of twelve limousines, while his troops fired on protesting, starving crowds.
10. My Alleyway, 1967 (10 pages)
Lagos, 1967. How he chooses not to live in the gated white community of bankers and diplomats at Ikoyi, but above the warehouse of an Italian businessmen who’s sold up and left, up an alleyway in a very poor slum quarter where he interacts with normal Nigerians, although he has to get his own water from a street pump and avoid the street gangs. Power outages. The stifling heat at night. ‘Merely existing in this climate is an extraordinary effort’ (p.111). Extreme poverty among the workless who often have only one possession. Real hunger. Paralysis by heat. Cheap booze. He describes the amazing creation of slums from whatever junk is lying around in the street. A man called Suleiman helps him buy a voodoo charm at the magic market, which he hangs over his door and from that moment on is never burgled again.
11. Salim (9 pages)
Mauretania Kapuściński is at an oasis which has one solitary petrol pump and so is a stopping place for trucks travelling through the Sahara. He’s picked up by a trucker called Salim driving a French Berliet truck. They break down in the desert. Description of the blinding heat as Salim ineffectually tinkers with the motor. They take shelter under the truck from the sun. That night another truck arrives and rescues them, at least he thinks it does, he’s hallucinating exhausted.
12. Lalibela, 1975 (10 pages)
Ethiopia. By the mid-70s the optimism of the 1950s and 60s about Africa had evaporated. Optimists and ideologues had believed that independence, by itself, would bring wealth to over-populated, poverty-stricken places. But it didn’t. Instead it brought the immense corruption of the first generation of independent politicians, who used tribal and ethnic conflicts to stay in power, till overthrown in military coups, which arrived with disillusioning regularity.
Kapuściński knows Teferi, owner of a truck company in Addis Ababa. He sets out to travel to Lalibela which is experiencing a drought and famine. Roads are primitive and everywhere throw up a thin volcanic dust which is as fine as mist, and gets into every crevice of your clothes and body. Alleyways full of still, emaciated people dying of hunger.
On through the parched terrain and the furnace-like gorges to Lalibela, where a series of 11 churches have been carved into the body of a mountain. Ought to be one of the wonders of the world. Kapuściński watches as a crowd of the sick and emaciated surge towards him and his driver. Over a million died in the prolonged drought and famine which during the rule of Haile Selassie and the man who overthrew him in 1974, Mengistu Haile Mariam.
13. Amin (10 pages)
Uganda Kapuściński visited Uganda many times and met Idi Amin several times. This chapter is a potted history of his murderous career, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. During his reign of terror an estimated 300,000 Ugandans died, usually painfully, many tortured to death.
14. The Ambush (9 pages)
Uganda 1988. Kapuściński is one of three journalists accompanying a mission of three Ugandan government ministers to parlay with the rebel soldiers who are laying waste the north of the country.
A passage explaining the prevalence of child soldiers in Africa. In really long-running conflicts it’s because a lot of the adult men are dead. There are lots of orphans and they gravitate to whoever will feed them. And modern weapons are designed to be light and handy. Lacking an adult sense of consequences or conscience, African child soldiers slaughter each other in huge numbers.
15. There shall be a holiday (9 pages)
Uganda, 1990s. Godwin, a journalist from Kampala, takes Kapuściński to his home village. A study in rural poverty of a depth and misery none of us in the West can understand.
16. A Lecture on Rwanda (18 pages)
Precisely that – an unusually detailed, historical explanation of why the two ethnic groups, the minority but often wealthy Tutsis and the majority, mostly peasant farmer Hutus, descended into a spiral of mutual hatred and ethnic massacres, starting at independence in 1959, with another outbreak in 1963, then 1965 all paving the way, though no-one knew it, for one of the most horrific genocides in history, 7 April to 15 July 1994. He mentions France and President Mitterrand’s role in the whole terrible thing (sending French troops to protect the genocidal government because they were French-speaking and the Rwandan Patriotic Front – who sought to end the genocide – had grown up in exile in Uganda and so spoke English. To protect their precious ‘Francophonie’ the French government let the genocide go ahead, and the protected its leaders. Evil scum.)
I’ve read better factual accounts, but Kapuściński tries to give a feel for what it felt like for two mutually hostile, resentful and fearful peoples to be stuck in the same small, claustrophobic country.
17. The Black Crystals of the Night (9 pages)
Uganda Being driven through western Uganda, and forced to stop for the night at a strange village, Kapuściński reflects on the African’s fear of the night, and their completely different causology which attributes events to supernatural forces and magic. The difference between witches and sorcerers. Years later he reads a paper by the anthropologist E.H. Winter about the Amba people of East Africa who are unusual in living in fear that the witches are among them, live in their own communities with the result that their communities are prone to internecine conflict.
18. These People, Where Are They? (10 pages)
Ethiopia 1991. Itang, a place in western Ethiopia near the border with Sudan, has for several years been site of a camp for refugees from Sudan’s civil war. They belong to the Nuer people. Kapuściński has travelled here with the UN Commissioner for Refugees but they have arrived in the pouring rain to find a mystery: the camp is empty.
Kapuściński recounts how the British stapled together two completely different peoples, the Arab Muslim North and the Christian or animist, black South into the country they called Sudan. The first civil war broke out in 1962 and lasted till 1971, when an uneasy ceasefire took hold. When in 1983 the Muslim government in Khartoum tried to impose Sharia law on the entire country the south erupted in rebellion. The war has been going on ever since. Kapuściński reflects on the way wars in Africa are seldom reported, not even recorded by the participants, and their details quickly fade and are lost:
History in these parts appears suddenly, descends like a deus ex machina, reaps its bloody harvest, seizes its prey, and disappears. (p.198).
The military regime in Khartoum is deliberately trying to starve the Southern rebels, led by John Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), into submission. During the second Sudan Civil War an estimated 1.5 million people died, mostly unarmed civilians.
19. The Well (9 pages)
Somalia He hitches a lift with Hamed, a merchant from Berbara, to Laascaanood, in northern Somalia. In fact ‘lift’ means joining a camel train through the blisteringly hot desert, all of which Kapuściński describes with great vividness and goes on to describe the mental world of the nomad tribes whose most precious possession is their camels.
20. A Day in the Village of Abdallah Wallo (8 pages)
Senegal A village by the Senegal river which forms the border with Mauretania to the north. Description of the rhythms of a typical day which starts with girls getting up to go fetch water, then the women go off in search of firewood in a landscape which has been denuded of all trees, bushes and vegetation, looks like the moon, even as time moves towards the unbearable heat of midday.
21. Rising in the Darkness (14 pages)
Ethiopia 1994. Addis Ababa. Mengistu’s Soviet-backed Marxist regime fell in 1991. With Soviet help he had built up one of the biggest armies in Africa. But as fighters from the rebel province of Eritrea approached the capital, Mengistu unexpectedly fled (to Zimbabwe) and his army, just as unexpectedly, disintegrated.
Kapuściński goes to Addis Ababa prison to speak to the imprisoned intellectuals and ideologues behind the disgraced regime.
One of Africa’s problems is that its intelligentsia emigrates. Addis doesn’t even have one bookshop, for a country with a population of 60 million. Invincible illiteracy and ignorance reigns. In the impressive Africa Hall Kapuściński meets impressive, smart new Africans who work for international organisations (the UN etc) and speak fluently and plausibly about Africa’s problems. Like all well-paid consultants they are smooth talkers with plans and schemes and timelines and development goals and gender equality strategies and completely divorced from reality (cf books about the Americans in the Green Zone of Baghdad after the 2003 invasion, notably Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran).
In the real world the biggest change made to African lives in the previous decade has been the widespread availability of lightweight plastic containers for carrying water, the stuff of life, from rivers or streams or wells to settlements. So this carrying can now be done by children. (p.229)
Over half the population of Africa is under 15. In 1998 when this book was published, the population of Africa was 780 million. Today, in 2023, it is 1.4 billion, nearly double in 25 years. By 2050 it is predicted to be 2.5 billion. The poverty, the fighting over resources, the famines and the droughts, will be cataclysmic.
22. The Cooling Hell (28 pages)
Monrovia, capital of Liberia. Incredibly hot and humid.
A large portion of Liberia is covered in jungle. Thick, tropical, humid, malarial, and inhabited by small, impoverished, and weakly organised tribes. (p.239)
At the airport he walks down into a jostling crowd who swiftly steal his passport and return ticket. Two hustlers offer him their protection and drive him to a sleazy hotel packed with prostitutes run by a Lebanese. His room is packed with astonishingly huge cockroaches. Cut to an extended history of Liberia, land of freed slaves from the American South. The amazing thing is how the freed slaves returned to Africa immediately set about recreating the slave society they had experienced in the American South in Africa, depriving the local Africans of political rights, confining them to bantustans.
William Tubman was president of Liberia from 1944 until his death in 1971. He was replaced by his vice president, William Tolbert who was considerably more corrupt and brutal. Tolbert was overthrown in 1980 by a group of army non-commissioned officers who went to the presidential palace to demand back pay, found it undefended and Tolbert asleep in his bed, so they murdered him, chopped his body into pieces with bayonets and threw it in the courtyard for animals to eat.
Their leader was 27-year-old Samuel Doe so he became president. He was an illiterate from a small tribe deep in the jungle, the Krahn, and didn’t know how to run a country so there followed ten years of misrule and drift until:
The First Liberian Civil War began in December 1989 when the National Patriotic Front of Liberia led by Charles Taylor invaded Liberia from the Ivory Coast to overthrow him. A former deputy, Prince Johnson, led another militia, so two armies ended up fighting for control of the capital, Monrovia. When a contingent of Nigerian troops arrived to try and bring order on 9 September 1990, Doe drove to the port to meet them but was captured by Johnson on the way.
Kapuściński describes the two hour long video which shows explicit details of Doe being tortured (after being beaten bloody, his ears were cut off with bayonets) by soldiers while Prince sits at a nearby table asking Doe for the numbers of his bank accounts.
Whenever a dictator is seized in Africa, the entire ensuing inquisition, the beatings, the tortures, will inevitably revolve around one thing: the number of his private bank account. (p.247)
You can watch the video of Doe’s torture YouTube. A few hours after this Doe died and his body was thrown on a municipal tip. But instead of ending with Does’ death, the Liberian civil war intensified, ruining the country’s economy as it collapsed into territories run by brutal warlords.
All of which leads into a meditation on the power of modern African warlords who are responsible more than anyone else for the ruin of entire countries. Who do they prey on? The weakest in their own societies, recruiting children to drug and train as soldiers, raping peasant women or stealing all their food and belongings leading their societies into a downward spiral into barbarism (pages 254 to 256).
Africa too is changing, growing poorer and more wretched. (p.225)
The number of warlords is growing. They are the new power, the new rulers. (p.256)
23. The Lazy River (9 pages)
Cameroon. He drives to a place in the jungle called Ngura, the parish of a priest named Father Stanislawek, who lives in an old ruined barrack and whose life’s work it is to try and build a church, although there are no building materials and no workers. A digression on the fundamentally religious (or superstitious) nature of all Africans.
They drive on to a settlement for gold prospectors working in a deep river gorge and occasionally selling the small dust sized specks of gold they find to Arab merchants lazing in their tents above the gorge.
24. Madame Diuf Is Coming Home
Senegal Kapuściński catches the train from Dakar (Senegal) to Bamako, the capital of Mali. In his compartment are a young Scottish couple, and a ‘heavy energetic’ woman, Madame Duif. At first the train puffs through the attractive colonial buildings on the seaboard. Suddenly there is an eruption of shouting and the scene changes to shanty town slums. Turns out the poor people have their market on the train tracks as it’s one of the few open spaces in the slums, and the train has just ploughed through it, sending stalls merchandise and shoppers flying. Prolonged meditation on the poverty, lack of hope, meaning and purpose, the surviving from day to day, of tens of millions of nameless Africans.
25. Salt and Gold (9 pages)
Mali Bamako, the capital city. He wants to seek out the war with the Tuareg. Description of the centuries-old conflict between the nomadic Sahara-dwelling Tuareg and the land-bound, cattle-raising Bantu. The Tuareg used to capture and trade the Bantu as slaves. Mutual hatred.
He catches a local bus to Mopti, on the Niger river, and then bribes his way onto a plan to Timbuktu, marvelling at the strangeness of the Sahel landscape below. Timbuktu is built of clay the same colour as the sand so it is as if the desert has risen up and adopted the shape of a city.
26. Behold, the Lord Rideth upon a Swift Cloud (9 pages)
Southern Nigeria, Port Harcourt. He attends a revivalist Christian church service. A vivid description and a meditation on the difference between the African and the Western sense of sin and guilt.
27. The Hole in Onitsha (8 pages)
Eastern Nigeria The town of Onitsha is said to host the biggest market in the world. Descriptions of and thoughts about African markets. Only in such a vast teeming place do you fully realise to what extent:
the world is swamped with material tenth-rateness, how it is drowning in an ocean of camp, knockoffs, the tasteless and the worthless. (p.300)
In fact Kapuściński and his driver soon get caught in a massive traffic jam, reduced to a complete standstill. He walks into town to find out what’s causing the holdup and discovers the only road through town has a huge muddy hole in the centre, down into which cars and lorries are gingerly driving, and then have to be pulled out using ropes and winches. Around this event a carnival crowd has assembled with hawkers and vendors and itinerant sorcerers.
28. Eritrean Scenes (8 pages)
The perilous journey, along mountain switchback roads, from Asmara to Massawi, Eritrea’s major port. Eritrea only gained de facto independence from Ethiopia in 1991 and legal independence in 1993, having fought the longest independence war in Africa, for 30 years, since 1961.
During the war the Eritreans built an entire alternative nation underground. They have a museum of abandoned military hardware in Asmara which Kapuściński visits, but it is nothing compared to the vast plain full of ruined military equipment at Debre Zeyit.
29. In the Shade of a Tree, in Africa
The last chapter is a meditation on the importance of trees, often isolated, giant survivors, in remote hot African villages: a place where children are taught in the morning, women meet and gossip at lunch, men sit smoking and chatting in the evening, a symbol of the enduring multifacetedness of African life.
Which morphs into a final meditation on the way the limited languages of Europe, and the simplistic racist worldview engendered by colonialism, limits to this day our understanding of this huge continent, its hugely diverse peoples and spirits and ancestors.
Sample passages from the book
Here are some examples of Kapuściński’s swirling, lyrical, philosophical way of thinking and writing.
Western individualism versus African communalism
This is Africa and the fortunate nouveau riche cannot forget the old clan tradition, one of whose supreme canons is share everything you have with your kinsmen, with another member of your clan or, as they say here, with your cousin…Whoever breaks this rule condemns himself to ostracism, to expulsion from the clan, to the horrifying status of outcast. Individualism is highly prized in Europe, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America; in Africa, it is synonymous with unhappiness, with being accursed. African tradition is collectivist for only in a harmonious group could one face the obstacles continually thrown up by nature. (p.36)
Ryszard Kapuściński on time
The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside of man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton time is absolute: ‘Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equitably and without relation to anything external.’ The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function he must observe its ironclad, inviolable laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days and hours. He must move within the rigours of time and cannot exist without them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat – time annihilates him.
Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being). Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy towards it. It is a subservient, passive essence and, most importantly, one dependent on man.
The absolute opposite of time as it is understood in the European worldview. (pages 16 and 17)
Compare and contrast with his description of the African attitude towards the deep, dark African night, as a hopeless realm in which men are prey to unspeakable fears (p.184). And his comparison of the African and the Western sense of guilt (p.294).
Ryszard Kapuściński on history
Experience has taught me that situations of crisis appear more dire and dangerous from a distance than they do up close. Our imaginations hungrily and greedily absorb every tiny whiff of sensational news, the slightest portent of peril, the faintest whiff of gunpowder, and instantly inflate these signs to monstrous, paralysing proportions. On the other hand, however, I also knew something about those moments when calm, deep waters begin to churn, and bubble into general chaos, confusion, frantic anarchy. During social explosions it is easy to perish by accident because someone didn’t hear something fully or didn’t notice something in time. On such days the accidental is king; it becomes history’s true determinant and master. (p.78)
And:
History is so often the product of thoughtlessness: it is the offspring of human stupidity, the fruit of benightedness, idiocy and folly. In such instances it is enacted by people who do not know what they are doing – more, who do not want to know… (p.252)
The bayaye
Here’s Kapuściński describing the long trek made by Samuel Doe, an unemployed man without a future, from a remote impoverished village though trackless jungles to the distant capital, Monrovia, in search of work, food, a purpose.
The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. but nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became bayaye – that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the chief causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organising coups, fomenting civil wars. (p.244)
So the brute demographic fact of all these unemployed young men goes a long way to explaining the instability of African states, the ease with which warlords can recruit ‘soldiers’, the complete indiscipline so often shown by these ‘soldiers’, who murder, rape and loot at will at every settlement they come to; and the way they often melt away when their warlord is killed, returning to the sullen apathetic groups you see lining the streets of every African city.
In a later chapter Kapuściński continues the theme, explaining that during his lifetime Africa’s cities have become swollen and contorted out of all recognition. He knew the often sweet, provincial cities in the early 1960s. Nowadays some of them are ten times the size, mostly consisting of shanties and slums.
Kapuściński explains two major reasons for the grotesque hyper-expansion of the cities:
- Drought and famine in the 1970s, then again in the 1980s, drove millions off the land where they were starving, and into the cities where there was at least a thin thread of hope.
- Conflict. People fled the countryside in tens of millions because it was the scene of never-ending conflict, with rampaging militias arriving out of the bush, raping and murdering everyone then moving on. That doesn’t happen, in the same way, in towns or cities. So millions of peasants to the towns travelled looking for security. Who can blame them? (p.273).
Results? Vast teeming slums and tens of millions of unemployed bayaye.
Kapuściński’s questions
In Mary Beard’s book about Rome, she drove me nuts by littering every page with sets of rhetorical questions which aren’t designed to search and enquire but merely to introduce the next pre-arranged part of her lecture (which she then, very often, didn’t explain very well).
In complete contrast, Kapuściński uses series of questions to really dig into the roots of the issues he’s discussing. His questions help build up the sense that, even after forty years of visiting, Africa, Africans, and the African mentality are still impenetrable mysteries to a white European like Kapuściński.
Kapuściński’s compassion
I think of the camp we passed leaving Dakar, of the fate of its residents. The impermanence of their existence, the questions about its purpose, its meaning, which they probably do not pose to anyone, not even to themselves. If the truck does not bring food, they will die of hunger. If the tanker does not bring water, they will die of thirst. They have no reason to go into the city proper; they have nothing to come back to in their village. They cultivate nothing, raise nothing, manufacture nothing. They do not attend schools. They have no addresses, no money, no documents. All of them have lost homes; many have lost their families. They have no one to complain to, no one they expect anything from. (p.274)
Klara Glowczewska
A word of praise for the translator, Klara Glowczewska. I don’t speak Polish so can’t vouch for what the original text is like but Glowczewska has turned it into lovely, flowing, rhythmic and evocative English prose. There are none of the surprises or quirks you often find in English speakers writing in English. Instead, everything is turned into a lovely mellifluous, sometimes vivid and arresting, prose which allows Kapuściński’s thoughts and observations to unfold luxuriously, or startle and confront the reader, as appropriate. This book is a deep pleasure to read.
The African interior is always white-hot. It is a plateau relentlessly bombarded by the rays of the sun, which appears to be suspended directly above the earth here: make one careless gesture, it seems, try leaving the shade, and you will go up in flames. (p.280)
Credit
The Shadow of The Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński was published in Polish in 1998. The English translation by Klara Glowczewska was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2001. All references are to the 2002 Penguin paperback edition.
Related reviews
- The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat by Ryszard Kapuściński (1978)
- Africa reviews
Books & Boots 