The Shadow of the Sun is a collection of notes from journeys across Africa spanning thirty years: from the independence of the continent to its more recent upheavals, such as the Rwandan genocide. The book encompasses both the nature of an essay and that of a memoir of lived experience, profoundly engaging for the author. A penniless reporter for an equally cash-strapped Warsaw daily, Kapuściński falls ill with tuberculosis and explains to the doctor that he cannot return home: “The dream of my life, working in Africa, would have vanished forever.” From this passion for travel and for Africa begins a journey across the continent: from Ghana on the west coast to the island of Zanzibar in the east, through Sub-Saharan and tropical Africa, all the way to the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes. The reader skips along, and

everything blurs, overlaps, fades. (...) Often our memory is so saturated with names of localities, regions, and countries that we can no longer associate them with an image, a view, a landscape, an episode, or a face. (...) World unity, so difficult to achieve in practical reality, comes into being in our brains, in their layers of lost and confused memory

. No differently from the superficial businessman who knows only the world's airports, fine restaurants, and luxury hotels, the inquisitive reporter risks his life to deliver the very same portrait: an Africa unchanged across time and space, and ever devoid of hope, because all corners of the vast continent are united “by the same misfortune, the same fate, and the same uncertainty.” To be sure, Kapuściński raises his voice loud and clear against “the international of predatory rabble,” just as he feels part of the “tormented life, the painful vegetating forever on the brink of death” of an oppressed and violated people, and for that reason perpetually in exile. Yet, after so many years on the road, the splendid concluding chapter, bearing the evocative and elusive title “In the Shade of a Tree, in Africa,” leaves us with a message of bitter resignation. Slavery, rapacious and cruel colonialism, the greed of ruling elites, desertification and environmental plunder, and the death and displacement of entire populations have destroyed the “shade of the tree” under which stories and traditions were once handed down: without this shade, the African

would lose every notion and even the memory of his yesterday, becoming people without a past, that is to say, nobody. Those men would lose everything that united them, scattering each on his own way, alone.

Africa spans an area of 30.37 million square kilometers—large enough to contain the United States, China, India, Europe, and several other nations. It has 54 states and 1,500 languages. One cannot help but wonder why we persist in viewing Africa as a monolith, never attempting to grasp its diversity, and with it the changes and potential of this great continent. However well-meaning and observant, Kapuściński falls into the same Eurocentric and exoticizing trap that has long characterized relations between the West and Africa. From this, and not merely from the disjointed structure of the book (travel notes left as they were, without an overarching narrative), arises a sense of repetitiveness: each account seems identical to the last, personal encounters and singular stories rarely break through, while the critical assessments—agreeable though they may be—feel prepackaged. In

Orientalism

Edward Said argued that the West sees the Orient as a mirror of itself: it seeks what it fantasizes the Orient to be (a cherished idea, sedimented across its history) without genuinely studying the peoples and cultures that make up the Orient of today; through this very same process, we view Africa: it is always

Heart of Darkness", a land vibrant and fascinating, to be sure, but forever detached from modernity and consequently doomed to subjugation, to endure unspeakable suffering from which it cannot escape.

Why read it? It is worth it for the final chapter.

Ebony