The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life

by Ryszard Kapuściński

That is how the Rwandan drama is engendered, the tragedy of the Banyarwanda nation, born of an almost Israeli-Palestinian inability to reconcile the interests of two social groups laying claim to the same scrap of land, too small and confined to accommodate them both.

It is true that what strikes you most in a place like Rwanda is its deep provincialism. Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces.

History in these parts appears suddenly, descends like a deus ex machina, reaps its bloody harvest, seizes its prey, and disappears. What exactly is it? Why has it chosen us to cast its evil eye upon? It is better not to think about it. Better not to pry.

Today, as in the past, Africa is regarded as an object,

Meantime, most importantly, it exists for itself alone, within itself, a timeless, sealed, separate continent, a land of banana groves, shapeless little fields of manioc, jungles, the immense Sahara, rivers slowly drying up, thinning forests, sick, monstrous cities—a world charged, at the same time, with a restless and violent electricity.

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, who reject the possibility with disgust and anger.

the evening hour is so important: it is the time when the community contemplates what it is and whence it came, becomes conscious of its distinctness and otherness, defines its identity.

“The desert will teach you one thing,” a nomadic Saharan merchant told me in Niamey. “That there is something that one can desire and love more than a woman. And that is water.”

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,