THE SHADOW OF THE SUN - RYSZARD KAPUŚINSKI

AVAILABLE I read almost all of this book while watching a 12 year old on suicide watch. Her world had been reduced to a desk where I hung out with her all day. She reads a lot, so while she read Charlotte’s Web, I didn’t move from my chair and read this very expansive travel book. I was gifted this one from my buddy Paul when I visited him in Istanbul. Paul’s been everywhere and lived in more than a few countries in Africa and, generally, has great taste in writing so I had high hopes. SHADOW OF THE SUN delivers. Kapuśiński really has been all over the place and across decades. Like Paul Theroux he’s a foreigner who was in Africa in the 50’s and 60’s, when colonialism was ending and the continent was being transformed and urbanized and, according to both of these men, there was a palpable sense of high hope. Flash forward to now, or any intervening decade and Africa is not where the postcolonial dreams would have it. But, one of the major advantages of not being an American is that, unlike Theroux, he understands things don’t always work out. Kapuśiński’s covered Africa as a reported for a Soviet paper in his native Poland. Poles have certainly been conditioned by history to expect setbacks and tragedy and when Kapuśiński finds these, he interrogates instead of wringing his hands over how ugly or chaotic the situation might be. Also, because he’s Polish you get a different frame of references leading to sentences like, “Habyarimana, one can say, is the Radovan Karadžić of the Rwandan Hutus” or his exploration of the differences between Hoxha Marxists and Maoists in Ethiopia. Those two essays, one about Ethiopia and another about Rwanada, are perhaps my favorite in the book. I like when he takes a whole nation and traces it’s political situation over the second half of the twentieth century more than the essays that are more traditional travel tales (about say, crossing a desert). He really harps on how hot it is, but perhaps this is also a Polish quirk. He introduced me to the term lumpenmiliatariat, which he borrows from Ali Mazrui and I find really useful to understanding some current political news out of the continent. Overall, excellent. 54 Suns