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The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life | 
 enlarge | Author: Ryszard Kapuscinski
Creator: Klara Glowceska
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
Buy New: £3.50
You Save: £5.49 (61%)
New (29) Used (7) Collectible (2) from £3.00
Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 2416
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0140292624
Dewey Decimal Number: 960
EAN: 9780140292626
ASIN: 0140292624
Publication Date: March 28, 2002
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Perfect condition - No creases, Never Read. Dispatched within 24 hours.
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Polish writer and foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski may be in the twilight of a golden career spanning more than 40 years but The Shadow of the Sun, an alternative record of his experiences of Africa and its stupefying white heat, is perhaps his finest hour. This for a writer who, to echo the sentiments of Michael Ignatieff, has turned reportage into literature. Drawn to the Developing World through an impoverished wartime upbringing, Kapuscinski arrived in Ghana in 1957 and was on hand to witness the tumultuous years in which colonial Africa was dismantled, resulting in born-again countries ripe for ransacking by despots. From the glare of Accra airport which greets him on first arrival, to the Tanzanian night of the final pages, he crosses savannah, desert and city by foot, road and train, searching out the two most important, yet inconstant commodities on the continent: shade and water. Threatened by an Egyptian cobra, cursed with cerebral malaria and tuberculosis, plagued by black cockroaches the size of small turtles, Kapuscinski intermingles the immediate and the reflective in 29 satisfyingly fragmented vignettes, encompassing historical narratives and personal experience across a host of countries, including Ethiopia, Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan and Liberia. While acknowledging European colonial culpability, he refuses to rinse his words in guilt. The Shadow of the Sun is reminiscent of Gianni Celati's Adventures in Africa, employing similarly symphonic atmospherics that can bear poetic witness to both the tragic history of Rwanda and the Ngubi beetle, which toils in the desert to produce the sweat it drinks to survive. As much about the plastic water container as the warlord and preferring the African shanty town to the Manhattan skyscraper as a monument to human achievement, what Kapuscinski, the author of Shah of Shahs describes is not Africa, which he claims does not exist except geographically but a distillation of life itself, through its religiosity, its trees, the frightening abundance of youth, sun that "curdles the blood" and terrorising, ruling armies that fall in a day. The first in a projected trilogy pulling together Africa, Central America and Asia, The Shadow of the Sun is an exceptional and humbling work of imagination and experience by a writer intent on liberating truths from fact. --David Vincent
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
awesome July 25, 2008
Kharms (London, England)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Read this in Siberia recently. Awesome. K's descriptions of Africa went oddly well with snow and ice...
Vivid sketches of African life July 22, 2008
jacr100 (UK)
Few people were better qualified to relate an outsider's understanding of the essence of Africa than Kapuscinski, a journalist who spent four decades covering assignments in the continent that he loved. The Shadow of the Sun represents a compilation of vignettes that either detail critical moments in African history - the rise and reign of dictators, numerous coups d'etat that befell them, genocides - or gently demonstrate how an African's mentality is not as rigid as our own: how time to him is a much looser concept, how he prefers community over individual, how he has different notions of culpability and cause and effect. That may sound crassly generalist but as narrated by Kapuscinski is not so: part of the book's resonance comes from its unifying themes, the ironic recognition that Africans, so often divided by tribalist politics, are a coherent people.
Yet although these universal themes appear, the scenes Kapusckinski draws simultaneously recognise the great variety of Africa; as he says in the foreword, "only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say `Africa'". So we witness the midnight rituals of the paranoid Amba, who believe that witches live among them; the unattached, nomadic lives of Tuareg and Somali pastoralists; doomsaying sermons in evangelical sects in Nigeria; the obscene wealth of dictators and corrupt politicians. He relates each sketch through characters and communities, rather than wildlife, or landscapes, or metaphors of suffering, and this makes his tales richer: we see and hear Africa through Africans' voices and experience.
When I'd finished reading this book I was reminded that Africa is an incredibly demanding country, and that much there seems designed to wear a traveller down: public transport that only leaves when it is full to bursting; irrepressible heat; disease; con men or beggars at every corner; grinding bureaucracy; an unwillingness to repair what's broken. But at the same time I felt that I'd been naive to get annoyed by all these things. Everyday people were suffering much more than I was, yet while I was cursing, smiling faces greeted me everywhere. As Kapusckinski puts it: "their life is endless toil, a torment they endure with astonishing patience and good humour." His message is: get out there, meet and talk to Africans, understand how they see you, do your best to understand what life is like for them. It's a hugely important principle, and I'll have this book with me next time I'm there.
 Ali Mazrui January 8, 2008
Hasani
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
i absolutely loved the book. though there was one hitch:
in the book, Ryzard refers to the intellectual 'Ali Mazrui' as 'Ugandan'. He is not Ugandan. He is Kenyan. To be specific from the Coastal Province of Kenya. I say this because:
1. i'm kenyan
2. i'm from the coast of kenya
... and more importantly
3. i am a distant relative of Ali Mazrui.
If the error can be corrected it would be great!
An Exerllent resource December 8, 2007
Edrissa Jarju (Glasgow UK)
Once in a while you come across a book both entertaining and loaded with useful information. Shadow of the Sun is one them - I found the author's interspersing of narrative with historical commentary very useful in understanding the present circumstances of many of the places he visited - it puts everything into context. The author has done an excellent and accessible account of his African experiences.
Africa is a big and complex continent as the author even admits and warns of failure at any generalization attempts. He however falls into this trap in some instances. I found some of his attempts at accounting the 'metaphysical African' completely unrecognizable as an African. For example in one of the chapters, he found himself in a Nigerian church in the Delta and goes on to explore African religions. He concludes that they incompatible with Christianity. He observed that Africans do not feel guilt and that to them, as long as a crime or an evil deed is undiscovered, it remains an innocent/normal action. I found that to be completely untrue. How else can one explain the forgiveness of bad thoughts in the practice of the traditional African religions I am aware, that includes am sure, the area of Nigeria he found himself. There are a few similar instances in the book, but overall, this author has an extraordinary interaction with Africans in a way most Europeans don't. He is an excellent observer and very detail in his accounts.
This is a great read and I am looking forward to reading more of his books
Sobering travel book - an antidote to brochure-style writing May 27, 2007
Jezza (London)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Great book by a great writer. Curiously I read this at the same time as Braudel, and wondered a lot about how Africa might have developed differently if it hadn't been in the shadow of Europe. Would it have had its own industrial revolution? No answers here, but lots of food for thought.
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