It's a great sentence but it's not mine, it's the title of the book by Ryszard Kapuscinski (which I have no idea how to pronounce) about his several visits to africa.
Anyone coming to any west african, subsaharan or sahel country should read this.
It is the best description I have found of Africa, africans and african events and history so fa, all written from a very personal experience but keeping a very wide perspective of events, knowing that context cannot come only from the individual but rather a combination of the general and the particular.
"I lived in Africa for several years. I first went there in 1957. Then, over the next 40 years, I returned whenever the opportunity arose. I traveled extensively, avoiding official routes, palaces, important personages, and high level politics. Instead, I opted to hitch rides on passing trucks, wander with nomads through the desert, be the guest of peasants of the tropical savannah. Their life is endless toil, a torment they endure with astonishing patience and good humor.
This is therefore not a book about Africa, but rather about some people from there - about encounters with them, and time spent together. The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say "Africa". In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist."
from the book.
"Kapuściński, a
journalist who covered
Africa from 1957 to the 1990s, wrote a number of books about his experiences in the continent and all over the world which have been widely translated. This book is a collection of essays spanning more than four decades. Each could stand alone as a finished work, yet together they form a unique portrait of Africa, its peoples and the writer himself. From the initial enthusiasm in the 1950s when
colonial power began to wane to the destruction of that dream and war and starvation, Kapuściński sees it all.
While acknowledging European colonial culpability, he refuses to rinse his words in guilt, detailing numerous problems in African governments and societies. 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 Kapuściński, 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." in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_the_Sun
