The Shadow of the Sun

by Ryszard Kapuściński

In times past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the earth passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveler had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate, too, changed gradually. Before the traveler arrived from a cool Europe to the burning Equator, he already had left behind the pleasant warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of the Cape Verde Islands. Today, nothing remains of these gradations. Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat.

This age-old system of paths explains why people here are still in the habit of walking single file, even if they’re traveling along one of today’s wide roads. It explains, too, why a walking group is silent—it is difficult to conduct a conversation single file.

I arrived in Kumasi with no particular goal. Having one is generally deemed a good thing, the benefit of something to strive toward.This can also blind you, however: you see only your goal, and nothing else, while this something else—wider, deeper—may be considerably more interesting and important.

Officially, but only officially, colonialism reigned in Africa from the time of the Berlin West Africa Conference (1884­85), during which several European states (mainly England and France, but also Belgium, Germany, and Portugal) divided the whole continent among themselves, a status that persisted until Africa won independence in the second half of the twentieth century. In reality, however, colonial penetration began much earlier, as long ago as the fifteenth century, and flourished over the next five hundred years. The most shameful and brutal phase of this conquest was the trade in African slaves, which went on for more than three hundred years. Three hundred years of raids, roundups, pursuits, and ambushes, organized, often with the help of African and Arab partners, by white men. Millions of young Africans were deported across the Atlantic in horrific conditions, stuffed down the hatches of ships; those lucky to emerge alive would with their sweat build the riches and might of the New World. Africa—persecuted and defenseless—was depopulated, destroyed, and ruined. Whole stretches of the continent were deserted; barren bush supplanted what had been sunny flowering lands. But the most painful and lasting imprints of this epoch were left upon the memory and consciousness of the Africans: centuries of disdain, humiliation, and suffering gave them an inferiority complex, and a conviction, deep in their hearts, of having been wronged.

When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The course of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system’s defeat and demise. How and why did this happen? First, a short detour into the foul realm of racial thinking. The central subject, the essence, the core of relations between Europeans and Africans during the colonial era, was the difference of race, of skin color. Everything—each exchange, connection, conflict—was translated into the language of black and white. And, of course, white was better, higher, more powerful than black. Whites were sir, master, sahib, bwana kubwa, unchallenged lords and rulers, sent by God to hold sway over the blacks. Into the African was inculcated the notion that the white man was untouchable, unconquerable, that whites constituted a homogeneous, cohesive force. Such was the ideology that ably supported the system of colonial domination, by teaching that to question or contest the system was absolutely pointless. Then, suddenly, Africans recruited into the British and French armies in Europe observed that the white men were fighting one another, shooting one another, destroying one another’s cities. It was a revelation, a surprise, a shock. African soldiers in the French army witnessed their colonial sovereign, France, defeated and conquered. African soldiers in the British army saw the imperial capital, London, bombed; they saw whites seized with panic, fleeing, pleading, sobbing. They saw ragge...

In all of Africa, each larger social group has its own distinct culture, an original system of beliefs and customs, its own language and taboos, and all of this is immensely complicated, intricate, and mysterious. That is why anthropologists never spoke of “African culture,” or “African religion,” knowing that no such thing exists, and that the essence of Africa is its endless variety. They saw the culture of each people as a discrete world, unique, unrepeated.

Meantime, the unschooled European mind, inclined to rational reduction, to pigeonholing and simplification, readily pushes everything African into a single bag and is content with facile stereotypes.

“We believe,” Kwesi told me, “that man is composed of two elements. Blood, which he inherits from his mother, and spirit, donated by his father. The stronger of these components is blood, which is why the child belongs to the mother and her clan—not to the father. If the wife’s clan orders her to leave her husband and return to her native village, she takes all the children with her, for although the wife lives in her husband’s village and house, she is there really only as a guest. This possibility of returning to her clan gives the woman a place to go should her husband abandon her.

A clan comprises all those who believe that they have a common ancestor.

From the moment of his selection, the chief becomes a holy person. Henceforth, he is not permitted to walk barefoot. Or to sit directly on the ground. One is not allowed to touch him or speak a bad word about him. One can tell from afar that a chief is coming—because of the open umbrella. A great chief has an enormous, decorative umbrella, held by a special servant; a lesser chief walks about with an ordinary umbrella

And it is the chief who is responsible for the quality and closeness of these relations. He is the mediator and link between two integral parts of the clan: the world of the ancestors and the world of the living. It is he who communicates to the living the ancestors’ will and decision regarding any given matter, and it is he who pleads with them for forgiveness if the living have violated custom or law.

“While the chief enjoys the greatest respect, he is surrounded by a council of elders and cannot decide anything without seeking their opinion and gaining their consent. That is how we understand democracy. In the morning, each member of the council visits the chief’s house, to greet him. That is how the chief knows that he is governing well and enjoying support. Should these morning visits cease, it means that he has lost the council’s confidence and must go. This will happen if he commits any one of five offenses: drunkenness, gluttony, collusion with sorcerers, bad rapport with people, and governing without seeking the opinion of the council of elders. He must also step down if he is blinded, infected with leprosy, or becomes mentally unsound.

“Several clans together form what Europeans call a tribe.

(In Europe, the bond with a cousin is by now rather weak and distant, whereas in Africa a cousin on your mother’s side is more important than a husband.)

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.

in one year alone, 1960, seventeen African countries ceased being colonies.

As defined by its current borders, it was a young country, barely several decades old. But its territory encompassed parts of four ancient kingdoms: Ankole, Buganda, Bunyoro, and Toro. The history of their mutual animosities and conflicts was as colorful and rich as anything between the Celts and the Saxons, or the Montagues and the Capulets.

At the end of the nineteenth century, his grandfather and thousands of other young Indians were brought by the English to eastern Africa to build the railway line from Mombasa to Kampala. It was a new phase of colonial expansion: the conquest and subjugation of the continent’s interior. If you look closely at old maps of Africa, you will notice a peculiarity: inscribed along the coastlines are dozens, hundreds of names of ports, cities, and settlements, whereas the rest, a vast 99 percent of Africa’s surface, is a blank, essentially virgin area, only sparsely marked here and there.

The Europeans clung to the coasts, to their ports, eating houses, and ships, reluctantly and only sporadically making incursions into the interior. They were hampered by the lack of roads, fearful of hostile tribes and tropical diseases—malaria, sleeping sickness, yellow fever, leprosy. And although they inhabited the coasts for more than four centuries, they did so in a spirit of impermanence, with a narrow-minded goal of quick profits and easy spoils. Their ports were really only leeches on the body of Africa, points of export for slaves, gold, and ivory. Their goal: to carry away everything, and at the lowest possible price. Consequently, many of these European beachheads resembled the poorest sections of old Liverpool or Lisbon. In the course of four hundred years in Luanda, the Portuguese did not dig a single well for potable water, or illuminate the streets with lanterns.

The lion is an efficient and formidable hunter for about twenty years. After that he begins to show his age. His muscles weaken, his speed diminishes, his leaps grow shorter. It is difficult for him to chase down a skittish antelope, a swift and vigilant zebra. He walks around hungry, a burden to the pride. It is a dangerous moment for him—the pride does not tolerate the weak and the ill, and he can fall prey to it himself. More and more frequently, he fears that the younger ones will bite him to death. He gradually detaches himself from the pride, lags behind, and finally is alone. He is tormented by hunger, but can no longer chase game. He has only one recourse: to hunt humans. Such a lion is commonly referred to here as a man-eater,

In many African societies, children are named for an event that occurred on the day of their birth. Edu is an abbreviation of “education,” for on the day he came into the world, the first school was opened in his village. In places where Christianity and Islam had not yet become deeply rooted, there was an infinite richness to given names. They were expressions of the poetry of adults, who called a child Brisk Morning (if he was born at dawn), or Shadow of the Acacia (if he came into the world beneath an acacia tree). In societies without a tradition of written history, names were used to affix in memory the more important events, long past or recent. If a child was born as Tanganyika was obtaining its independence, it was called Independence (Uhuru in Swahili). If the parents were supporters of President Nyerere, they might name their child Nyerere.

On the one hand, experience had taught me that situations of crisis appear more dire and dangerous from a distance than they do up close.

If someone looks carefully at a detailed map of Africa, he will notice that the continent is surrounded by numerous islands. Some are so small they are registered only on highly specialized navigational maps, but others are large enough to appear on ordinary atlases.

In reality, there are many, many more; one can count dozens, if not hundreds of them, for some branch out into whole archipelagos, while others are encircled by mysterious worlds of coral beds and sandy shoals, which emerge only at low tide to display their dazzle of colors and shapes. The abundance of these islands and promontories suggests the act of creation being as it were interrupted, never completed, so that the continent which is visible and palpable today is merely that part of geologic Africa that has managed to emerge from the oceans, while the rest remains at the bottom, and these islands are just those of its peaks that have broken the surface.

The slave trade: it lasts approximately three hundred years. It begins in the middle of the fifteenth century, and ends—when? Officially, in the second half of the nineteenth, but in some instances significantly later. In northern Nigeria, for example, it ends only in 1936. The trade occupies a central position in African history. Millions (the estimates differ—fifteen to thirty million people) were captured and shipped under horrendous conditions across the Atlantic. It is thought that in the course of such a journey (which lasted two to three months) nearly half the slaves routinely died of hunger, asphyxiation, or thirst; sometimes all of them perished.

The slave traders (mainly the Portuguese, the Dutch, English, French, Americans, Arabs, and their African partners) depopulated the continent and condemned it to a vegetative apathy: up to the present day, large stretches remain desolate, transformed into desert.

The slave trade also had disastrous psychological consequences. It poisoned interpersonal relations among Africa’s inhabitants, propagated hatred, inflamed wars. The strong would try to overpower the weak and sell them in the marketplace, kings traded their subjects, conquerors their prisoners, courts of law those they had condemned.

Ordinary people here treat political cataclysms—coups d’état, military takeovers, revolutions, and wars—as phenomena belonging to the realm of nature. They approach them with exactly the same apathetic resignation and fatalism as they would a tempest. One can do nothing about them; one must simply wait them out, hiding under the roof, peering out from time to time to observe the sky—has the lightning ceased, are the clouds departing?

so often I had felt irritated with people who arrived here, lived in “little Europe” or “little America” (i.e., in luxury hotels), and departed, bragging later that they had been to Africa, a place that in reality they had never seen.

why I avoid chain hotels outside the USA

Theft is a method—admittedly unpleasant—of lessening inequality. It is good that they rob me, he declared. It can even be seen as a friendly gesture on the part of the perpetrators—their way of letting me know that I am useful, and, therefore, that they accept me. Basically, I can feel safe. Have I ever felt threatened here? No, I had to admit. Well, there you go! I will be safe here as long as I let myself be freely robbed. The moment I inform the police, and they start to pursue the thieves, is the moment I would be advised to move away.

Berliets are French-made trucks adapted for roadless desert terrain. They have large wheels with wide tires, and grilles mounted atop their hoods. Because of their great size and the prominent shape of the grille, from a distance they resemble the fronts of old steam engines.

In the desert, the first thing man sees when he opens his eyes in the morning is the face of his enemy—the flaming visage of the sun.

Does it make sense to calculate the length of this route in kilometers? Here, one measures distances according to the number of hours and days necessary to traverse from point A to point B.

This woman, who made her way with her child from a poor village in the north to a town in the wealthier south, became part of the population that today constitutes Africa’s biggest problem. It is composed of the tens of millions who have abandoned the countryside and migrated to the monstrously swollen cities without securing adequate housing or employment. In Uganda they are called bayaye. You will notice them at once, because it is they who form the street crowds, so different from ones in Europe. In Europe, the man on the street is usually heading toward a definite goal. The crowd has a direction and a rhythm, which is frequently characterized by haste. In an African city, only some of the people behave this way. The others are not going anywhere: they have nowhere to go, and no reason to go there. They drift this way and that, sit in the shade, stare, nap. They have nothing to do. No one is expecting them. Most often, they are hungry. The slightest street spectacle—a quarrel, a fight, the apprehension of a thief—will instantly draw large numbers of them. For they are everywhere around here, idle, awaiting who knows what, living who knows how—the gapers of the world. The principal characteristic of their status is rootlessness. They will not return to the countryside, and there is no place for them in the city. They endure. Somehow, they exist.

Amin did not represent an obvious threat, and his influence in the army was ultimately limited. But beginning on the night of January 25, 1971, when they took over the barracks in Kampala, Amin and his supporters employed a brutally efficient surprise tactic: they fired without warning. And at a precisely defined target: soldiers from the Langi and Achole tribes. The surprise had a paralyzing effect: no one had time to mount a resistance. On the very first day, hundreds died in the barracks. And the carnage continued. Henceforth, Amin always used this method: he would shoot first. And not just at his enemies; that was self-evident, obvious. He went further: he liquidated without hesitation those he judged might one day develop into enemies.

He chose his cars in accordance with his outfits. Wearing a suit to a reception, he drove a dark Mercedes. Out for a spin in a sweat suit? A red Maserati. Battle fatigues? A military Range Rover. The last resembled a vehicle from a science-fiction movie. A forest of antennas protruded from it, all kinds of wires, cables, spotlights. Inside were grenades, pistols, knives.

Suddenly, a band of children came up the street that led up from the lake, calling, “Samaki! Samaki!” (fish in Swahili). People gathered, joyful at the prospect that there would be something to eat. The fishermen threw their catch onto a table, and when the onlookers saw it, they grew still and silent. The fish was fat, enormous. These waters never used to yield such monstrously proportioned, overfed specimens. Everyone knew that for a long time now Amin’s henchmen had been dumping the bodies of their victims into the lake, and that crocodiles and meat-eating fish must have been feasting on them. The crowd remained quiet. Then, a military vehicle happened by. The soldiers saw the gathering, as well as the fish on the table, and stopped. They spoke for a moment among themselves, then backed up to the table, jumped down, and opened the tailgate. Those of us who were standing nearby could see the corpse of a man lying on the truck bed. We saw the soldiers heave the fish onto the truck, throw the dead, barefoot man onto the table for us, and quickly drive away. And we heard their coarse, lunatic laughter.

Amin’s rule lasted eight years. According to various sources, the field marshal for life murdered between 150,000 and 300,000 people. Finally, he provoked his own downfall. One of his obsessions was his hatred for the president of neighboring Tanzania, Julius Nyerere. Toward the end of 1978, he attacked Tanzania. The Tanzanian army responded. Nyerere’s troops entered Uganda. Amin escaped to Libya, before he was allowed to settle in Saudi Arabia, as a reward for services in propagating Islam. Amin’s army dispersed, some of his troops returning to their homes, others taking up banditry. The losses suffered by the Tanzanian army? One tank.

The eldest among them, Onom, is seventeen. I sometimes read stories about a child in America or Europe shooting at another child. A child killing one of his contemporaries, or an adult. Such news is usually accompanied by expressions of horror and outrage. In Africa, children kill children in enormous numbers, and have been doing so for years. In fact, modern wars on this continent have been, and still are, largely wars of children.

Simon says that the farther one goes from a major road, from the truck and the market, the greater the poverty. “And because people from Europe spend their time here only in the cities,” Simon observes, “and drive along the major roads, they cannot even imagine what our Africa looks like.”

Rwanda. It is a small country, so small that on certain maps of Africa it is marked with only a dot. You must read the accompanying explanatory notes to discover that this dot, at the continent’s very center, indicates Rwanda. It is a mountainous country. Plains and plateaus are more characteristic of Africa, whereas Rwanda is mountains and more mountains. They rise two thousand, three thousand meters, even higher. That is why Rwanda is frequently called the Tibet of Africa—although it earned this moniker not only because of its mountains, but also on account of its singularity, distinctness, difference. It is extraordinary not only geographically, but also socially. As a rule, the populations of African states are multitribal (Congo is inhabited by 300 tribes, Nigeria by 250, and so on), whereas only one group inhabits Rwanda, the Banyarwanda, a single nation divided into three castes: the Tutsi cattle owners (14 percent of the population), the Hutu farmers (85 percent), and the Twa laborers and servants (1 percent).

helps to explain a lot

This mountain kingdom was a closed state, maintaining relations with no one. The Banyarwanda initiated no conquests, and, like the Japanese at one time, they did not allow foreigners into their territory (which is why, for example, they had no experience of the slave trade, the bane of other African peoples).

The Tutsis are not shepherds or nomads; they are not even breeders. They are the owners of the herds, the ruling caste, the aristocracy. The Hutus, on the other hand, constitute the much more numerous and subordinate caste of farmers (in India they are called Vaisyas). The relations between the Tutsis and the Hutus were authentically feudal—the Tutsi was the lord, the Hutu his vassal.

Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant, diminished view, although one with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail.

great travel description

Rwanda’s twin country is its southern neighbor, Burundi. The two have a similar geography and social structure, and a common history going back centuries. Their destinies diverged only in 1959: in Rwanda, the peasant revolution of the Hutus was triumphant, and its leaders assumed power, whereas in Burundi the Tutsis maintained and even strengthened their rule, expanding the army and creating something akin to a feudal military dictatorship. Nevertheless, the preexisting, almost organic connections between the twin countries continued to function, and the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda evoked a retaliatory massacre of Hutus by Tutsis in Burundi, and vice versa.

The only window in my room (number 107) gave out on a gloomy, fetid air shaft, from which a revolting odor arose. I turned on the light. The walls, the bed, the table, and the floor were black. Black with cockroaches.