The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life

by Ryszard Kapuściński

Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say “Africa.” In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.

Have we sufficiently considered the fact that northerners constitute a distinct minority on our planet?

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

The problem of Africa is the dissonance between the environment and the human being, between the immensity of African space (more than thirty million square kilometers!) and the defenseless, barefoot, wretched man who inhabits it.

The problem of Africa

Many wars in Africa are waged without witnesses, secretively, in unreachable places, in silence, without the worlds knowledge, or even the slightest attention.

But how to save Africa? This plan they do not have.

History is so often the product of thoughtlessness: it is the offspring of human stupidity, the fruit of benightedness, idiocy, and folly.

The oneness of the world, so unachievable in the realm of empirical reality, lives in our minds, in the superimposed layers of tangled and confused memories.

Africans valued and liked to make contact on this higher, spiritual plane, to which often they could not give verbal definition, but whose existence and importance each one sensed instinctively and spontaneously.