Kapuscinski arrived in Africa in 1957, the first Polish journalist to be based there. He lives in the midst of the local people, catches malaria then, in his debilitated state, tuberculosis. He struggles with the fierce heat as he travels through sub-Sahara Africa, where a 120 km trip can take three days. He avoids the comfortable suburbs of the affluent foreign correspondents as he tries to experience the Africa that they never see. Kapuscinski's articles cover the wars in Rwanda and Eritrea, the coup d'etat in Nigeria and the disintegration of Liberia with the insight gained from forty years in Africa, seeking to understand.
A brilliant book. ( )

This book by Ryszard Kapuscinski is an incredible read .It is a book not so much about Africa,more about the people of Africa. There are pieces about how time is considered in a different way by the people there as they control it and are not controlled by it as we in the West are. There is an interesting description of a Coup d'Etat and a chapter about the monster Idi Amin,as well as several other equally interesting pieces. Above all this short book,gives the reader a terrific insight into the enigma that is Africa. ( )

Kapuscinski starts out as a complete newby, an ignorant stranger, when he arrives in Ghana in 1958. For me as a reader it felt like I could participate in all the experiences in the following decades that built up his knowledge of Africa and the Africans.
To a large extent this is due to his style, he can really evoke situations. He doesn’t mind spending two paragraphs on someone just sitting in the shadow. Why is he sitting there? What is he thinking? Where did he come from? Kapuscinski also tells you what he doesn’t know, what he wonders about, what he still can’t understand even if people explain.
But it’s not just style and composition. It’s also how he combines the impartial eye of the anthropologist with feelings of genuine friendship. His feelings are always present: between the lines, moderately, not disturbing his observations.
In the sixties a moderate optimism prevails. Ok, he reports about political violence in Zanzibar and Nigeria, but that’s nothing compared to later developments. For Kapuscinki himself there is a certain delight: it’s working out, he is actually getting to know the people that intrigued him so much. He even seems to like it when he gets malaria. Ok, it hurts, but at least now he knows what this African decease feels like. Moreover his fysical vulnerability seems to demolish the walls of racism: the Tanzanians around him start to trust this sickly white stranger.
From the seventies onwards things get nastier. Kapuscinski explains the machinery of tribal violence, warlords and bayaye: the rootless ex-villagers who now crowd the cities, without jobs, without possessions, just hanging around hungry.
The low point for me was his account of Liberia in the nineties, where one dictator succeeded the other. The events seemed to be propelled by a sort of mindless, random cruelty. Reading this I felt like the narrator, Kapuscinski, who keeps his feelings implicit, was for the first time really desillusioned and bitter.
The chapters afterwards seemed to try and soften the picture a bit, focussing on village life and religion. But the images of cynical warlords and hopeless child armies were humming in the background.
I do not often read about this kind of misery. I can only take it from a writer I trust, whose intelligence, commitment and taste make it somehow bearable. ( )

Last fall I read Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist. It was his final book (he died in January, 2007) and I enjoyed it very much, having recently read Herodotus' Histories upon which he draws extensively. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to reading earlier works by Ryszard Kapuscinski. As an introduction to the mosaic of life that is known as "Africa" The Shadow of the Sun did not disappoint. The book consists of loosely connected essays on the travels and specific experiences of the author interspersed with brief historical commentaries. The looseness of the content is linked together through recurring themes such as the Sun of the title, the importance of minerals and elements, such as water in the Sahara, and the pervasive violence of both nature and man. The latter is evidenced by the presence of "Warlords" in several countries and the recurrence of tribal attacks of blacks on blacks leading at one extreme to examples of genocide as happened in Rwanda. The ubiquity of oppression of one group upon other(s) groups, again both black, was striking and the existence of black on black apartheid (before it ever occurred in the Republic of South Africa) was both illuminating and disillusioning.In a book 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 Kapuściński, the author of Shah of Shahs describes is not just Africa, which he claims does not exist except geographically, but more 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. A couple of minor criticisms: the chronology in the book was uncertain at times, infuriatingly so; and, the book would have benefitted from a map for reference as the episodic quality of the content led the reader to and fro across the continent. Kapuscinski is an excellent writer and a literary journalist. He is also a brave man who went into places and faced situations that appeared quite dangerous. His readers benefit from his adventurous personality. This excursion into his world makes me even more interested in reading other examples from his oeuvre. ( )

I'm giving this book 5 stars, because of all the things I've read about Africa, this is probably both the best-written and the most enlightening. It's quite simply a must-read, if only for the 'Lecture on Rwanda' - in 15 pages, Kapuscinski manages to give such a clear, cogent explanation of that country's troubled history that it left me in awe of my own previous ignorance. I can't understand why this wasn't on my African Politics reading lists at university (maybe it was and I just didn't notice!).

That said, I really have to criticise Penguin for not placing the articles in any sort of context. Each one appears simply as a chapter, without any indication of when or in what form each was published - so when, for example, Kapuscinski writes that the civil war in Sudan "is said to have claimed a million lives by now", the reader is clueless as to when that is. I still haven't worked out how the articles are ordered - it could be chronological, or it could be by country or region. It's a mystery! ( )