The Shadow of the Sun (35 page)

The European in Africa sees only part of it, usually only the continent’s exterior coating, the frequently not very interesting, and perhaps least important, part of it. His vision glides over the surface, penetrating no deeper and refusing to imagine that behind every thing a mystery may be hidden, and within as well. But European culture has ill prepared us for these excursions into the depths, into the springs of other worlds and other cultures—or of our own, for that matter. For historically, it was a fact of the drama of cultures that the first contacts between them were most frequently carried out by the worst sorts of people: robbers, soldiers of fortune, adventurers, criminals, slave traders, etc. There were, occasionally, others—good-hearted missionaries, enthusiastic travelers and explorers—but the tone, the standard, the atmosphere were for centuries set and sustained by a motley and rapacious international riffraff. Naturally, respect for other cultures, the desire to learn about them, to find a common language, were the furthest things from the minds of such folk, for the most part benighted, dull-witted mercenaries, lacking refinement and sensitivity, often illiterate, interested only in conquest, plunder, and carnage. As a result of such encounters, the world’s cultures—instead of becoming versed in one another’s ways, drawing closer, permeating one another—became mutually hostile or, at best, indifferent. Their representatives, aside from the rogues, kept their distance, avoided and even feared one another—intercultural exchange was monopolized by a class of ignoramuses. As one consequence, interpersonal contacts were informed from the outset by the most primitive criterion: skin color. Thus racism became an ideology according to which people defined their place in the world. Whites-Blacks: a division that bred discomfort on both sides. In 1894, when the Englishman Frederick Lugard was advancing at the head of a small division deep into western Africa, with the aim of conquering the kingdom of Borgu, he demanded to meet the king. But a messenger arrived to announce that the ruler could not receive him. As he spoke with Lugard, the envoy kept spitting into a bamboo container hanging around his neck. Spitting, it turned out, was deemed protection and purification from the consequences of contact with a white man.

Racism, hatred and contempt for others, and the desire to exterminate them, have their roots in African colonial relations. Everything was invented and honed there centuries before totalitarian systems grafted those grim and disgraceful impulses onto twentieth-century Europe.

The cultural monopoly of crude know-nothings had a further consequence: European languages did not develop vocabularies adequate to describe non-European worlds. Entire areas of African life remain unfathomed, untouched even, because of a certain European linguistic poverty. How do we describe the dark, green, dank interior of the jungle? Those hundreds of trees and shrubs—what are they called? I know names like “palm,” “baobab,” “euphorbia,” but they happen not to grow in the jungle. And those enormous, ten-meter-high trees in Ubangi and Ituri—what are they called? What about the countless species of insects, which are everywhere continually attacking and biting us? Sometimes one can find a Latin name, but how might that help the average reader? And these are mostly the problems of botany and zoology. What of the immense realm of the psychology, faith, and mentality of Africans? The richness of every European language is a richness in ability to describe its own culture, represent its own world. When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness.

Africa is a thousand situations, varied, distinct, even contradictory. Someone will say, “There is war there,” and he will be right. Someone else, “It is peaceful there,” and he too will be correct. Because everything depends on where and when.

During precolonial times, and hence not so long ago, more than ten thousand little states, kingdoms, ethnic unions, and federations existed in Africa. Roland Oliver, a historian at the University of London, draws attention to a general paradox in his book,
The African Experience
(1991): it has become common parlance to say that European colonialists partitioned Africa. Partitioned? Oliver marvels. Colonialism was a brutal unification, brought about by fire and sword! Ten thousand entities were reduced to fifty.

But much of the underlying variety, this mosaic—this shimmering collage of pebbles, bones, shells, bits of wood, pieces of tin, and leaves—has remained. The more closely we stare at it, the better we see how the bits and pieces of this tableau change place, shape, and hue, giving rise to a spectacle staggering in its mutability, richness, pulse of color.

Several years ago I was spending Christmas Eve with friends in the Mikumi National Park, deep in Tanzania. The evening was warm, clear, windless. In a clearing in the bush, under the open sky, stood several tables piled high with fried fish, rice, tomatoes, local
pombe
beer. Candles, lanterns, and oil lamps were burning. The atmosphere was jovial, easy. There were jokes, laughter, and much storytelling, as is always the case in Africa on such occasions. In attendance were Tanzanian government ministers, ambassadors, generals, clan chiefs. Midnight passed. Suddenly, I sensed in the impenetrable darkness, which began immediately beyond the illumination of the tables, a rocking and thundering. The din intensified rapidly, and then, just at our backs, from the depths of the night, an elephant emerged. It is one thing to find yourself eye to eye with an elephant in a zoo or a circus—quite another in the African bush, where the elephant is the formidable lord of his world. The lone elephant, apart from the herd, is often an animal running amok, a frenzied predator that attacks villages, tramples mud houses, kills people and cattle.

This one was truly immense, his glance gimletlike, strangely piercing. And he was silent. We could not tell what was going on in his gigantic head, what he would do a second from now. He stood for a while, and then began to stroll among the tables. Everyone was dead silent, frozen with fear, paralyzed. You cannot move—for what if that should trigger his fury? And he is fast: you cannot run away from an elephant. Sitting motionless, on the other hand, you expose yourself to a full frontal attack, and might die crushed under the giant’s legs.

So the elephant sauntered about, looked at the set tables, at the flickering lights, at the motionless people. One could see by his movements, by the way he swayed his head, that he was hesitating, that he hadn’t yet reached a decision. This went on and on, seemingly forever, an icy eternity. At a certain moment I intercepted his gaze. He was watching us attentively, heavily, and in his eyes was a profound, unwavering sadness.

Finally, having made his rounds of the tables and the clearing several times, the elephant left us, simply walked away and was swallowed up by the darkness. When the ground ceased rumbling, and the dark grew still again, one of the Tanzanians sitting next to me asked: “Did you see?”

“Yes,” I answered, not quite daring to move yet. “It was an elephant.”

“No,” he replied. “The spirit of Africa always appears in the guise of an elephant. Because no other animal can vanquish an elephant. Not a lion, not a buffalo, not a snake.”

Everyone walked in silence to their huts, and the boys snuffed out the lights on the tables. It was still night, but Africa’s most dazzling moment was approaching—the break of day.

A Note About the Author

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Poland’s most celebrated foreign correspondent, was born in 1932. After graduating with a degree in history from Warsaw University, he was sent to India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to report for the Polish news, beginning a lifelong fascination with the Third World. During his four decades reporting on Asia, Latin America, and Africa, he witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times.

His earlier books—
Shah of Shahs
(about the Iranian Revolution),
The Emperor
(about the fall of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie),
Imperium
(about the fall of the Soviet Union),
Another Day of Life
(about the end of Portuguese Angola), and
The Soccer War
(a compendium of reportage from the Third World)—have been translated into nineteen languages.

Also by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Imperium

The Soccer War

The Emperor

Shah of Shahs

Another Day of Life

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

www.randomhouse.ca

Originally published in Poland as
Heban
by Czytelnik, Warsaw, in 1998.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

Portions of this work were originally published in
The New Yorker.

LCCN
: 2001088076

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Kapuscinski, Ryszard

The shadow of the sun

1. Africa—History—1960 . 2. Africa—Politics and government—1960 . 3. Africa—Social conditions—1960 .

I. Glowczewska, Klara. II. Title.