Joseph Conrad believed that Catholic, Western-oriented Poland was historically destined to be a mediator between the civilization of Europe and the barbaric hordes of Asiatic Russia. In a similar fashion, the Polish-born Ryszard Kapuscinski is ideally suited to mediate between the First World of the West and the Third World countries of Africa. Free from colonial guilt and contrition, he told his African friends: “You were colonized? We, Poles, were also! For one hundred and thirty years [1772–1918] we were the colony of three foreign powers. White ones, too.”

Like a hunter pursuing a wounded animal, he has followed the trail of blood through Africa. Frequently risking death, he’s attacked by giant roaches; is threatened by a cobra that can’t be crushed by a huge, sharp canister; suffers tuberculosis and cerebral malaria; is ambushed in northern Uganda; and nearly perishes of thirst when his truck breaks down in the Mauritanian desert. Like Walt Whitman, he can say: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.”

Kapuscinski explains that “the epoch of the fifties and sixties [was] full of promise and hope.” But in the mid-Seventies Africa “entered its two darkest decades. Civil wars, revolts, coups d’état, massacres, and hunger” ravaged and destroyed the continent. In 1964, on the first of my three trips to Africa during that optimistic decade, Africans were friendly rather than hostile to whites, the colonial infrastructure had not decayed, cities were safe, wildlife was protected. Islam was quiescent rather than fanatical, AIDS didn’t exist, corruption and genocide were not yet pandemic. I remember the dry palm leaves flapping in the breeze like buzzards’ wings; the soft pumping handshakes; the outsize bottles of Tusker beer; the smell of rotten fruit, burnt oil, pungent sweat, and red earth; the vultures squatting on corrugated iron roofs; the piles of dead dogs on the beach; the Edenic gardens of the English settlers; the eyes of hyenas reflecting the headlights of cars.

Airports were small, officials engaging rather than rapacious, and when catching a plane you could drive right on to the runway and clamber up the metal stairs. Hitchhiking around East Africa, I sometimes waited half an hour for the first car to appear, but I was always picked up and often given hospitality by farmers and soldiers. Undesirable cabinet ministers were occasionally thrown out of airplanes, but political leaders like Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Kenyatta were at least more statesmanlike than their monstrous successors: Bokassa, Mobutu, and Amin, who fed his enemies to the crocodiles. For all its faults, British colonialism, by providing medicine, education, administration, transport, and industry did a great deal of good in Africa.

In his previous books Kapuscinski zeroed in on the wars and revolutions in Iran, Ethiopia, the Soviet Union, and Angola. Written for Polish newspapers over a period of forty years, this book is more elegiac in tone. A loosely structured collection of dispatches, in neither chronological nor geographical order, it needs a map and a table of contents. In one of the early pieces he describes traditional village life in the Ashanti kingdoms of Ghana as if it were like Edward Hicks’s painting The Peaceable Kingdom. He ignores the well-documented practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism, and states: “They are closely attached to their extremely rich history, their traditions, beliefs, and laws.” But this idealized Africa is soon replaced by a horrific and more realistic vision of “hunger; skeletal children; dry, cracked earth; urban slums; massacres; AIDS; throngs of refugees … rivers slowly drying up, thinning forests, sick, monstrous cities.”

Writing, as it were, in slippers rather than combat boots, Kapuscinski offers too much potted history and is repetitive about the flaming heat, gigantic insects, and backbreaking roads, the poverty, squalor, and hopeless desperation. For an old Africa hand, he makes a surprising number of errors. The marauding bands in Ethiopia are called “shiftas” (not “shifts”). The Berlin Conference, which divided Africa among the European powers, took place ten (not eight) years before 1894. He says the Sultans of Zanzibar were descended from the Arabs of Oman, on the Arabian Sea; then contradicts this by stating that they came from the Persian Gulf. He doesn’t know why these Arabs built their towns “in such a cramped and crowded fashion, why they pressed together this way, practically one atop another.” The reason, clearly, was to provide the maximum amount of shade. African ships never carried slaves to Europe, and slavery did not end in the Sudan and in the Nigerian sultanates in 1936, but has continued until today.

Kapuscinski loses his bearings when discussing elephants and man-eating lions. Elephants—who can be killed by disease, by fights with their kind, and by hunters and poachers—do not die “only a natural death.” And if lions roared, instead of creeping stealthily, they’d frighten away their prey. He claims the lions started to attack (no reason given) the Hindu laborers who were building the Mombasa to Kampala railway and that “No one protected these people, and they didn’t have their own guns.” In fact, as J. H. Patterson pointed out in his classic Man-Eaters of Tsavo (1907), the Parsee (not Hindu) coolies, following the traditions of the Towers of Silence in Bombay, left the bodies of their dead out in the open to be picked clean by the vultures. But the lions of Tsavo ate them first, developed a taste for human flesh and devoured twenty-eight workers before being shot by Colonel Patterson.

The Shadow of the Sun lacks the drama and urgency of his earlier books, but is well worth reading for its unflinching vision— like Naipaul’s in A Bend in the River (1979) —of the awful reality of Africa. In “Marrakech,” Orwell remarked that in the tropics “people with brown skins are next door to invisible.” Kapuscinski takes the individual out of the undifferentiated mass, brings him to life, and makes you see him. His descriptions of genocide in Rwanda, coups in Zanzibar and Nigeria, revolution in Ethiopia are masterful.

Kapuscinski observes that many wars in Africa are  

waged without witnesses, secretively, in unreachable places, in silence, without the world’s knowledge, or even the slightest attention. … History in these parts appears suddenly, descends like a deus ex machina, reaps its bloody harvest, seizes its prey, and disappears.

Blinded by ideologies that were disastrous in other countries, the fanatical dictators drove their countries to ruin: “When Tirana broke with Beijing, in Addis Ababa Ethiopian pro-Hoxha activists shot at Ethiopian Maoists. For months, the streets of the city flowed with blood.”

The real problem is that most of Africa’s intellectuals have been driven into exile. The people who remain are the illiterate downtrodden masses at the bottom and the crazed soldiers at the top. Kapuscinski shows why the masses, who have nothing to lose, support revolution but are quickly disenchanted. His great theme is the revolution betrayed: “the poverty and disillusion of those on the bottom rungs, coupled with the cupidity and gluttony of those on top, create a poisoned, unstable atmosphere, which the army senses; presenting itself as the champion of the injured and the humiliated, it emerges from the barracks, reaches for power”—and, like the pigs in Animal Farm, extinguishes all hope by replacing the old with a new oppression.

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