THE SUN ALSO RISES IN ‘THE SHADOW’

The Shadow of the Sun 
By Ryszard Kapuscinski
Translated from the Polish
by Klara Glowczewska 
Knopf, 325 pp.

Michael Kenney
The Boston Globe

   To write about Europe, writes the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, is a comfortable matter. Having settled himself — or placed his hero — in Florence, “it is enough that he walk and look. What is all around him practically writes itself.’’ A whole chapter can be built around a short walk from the Duomo to the Uffizi. 
   Not so with Africa, writes Kapuscinski, who first went there as a correspondent for the Polish News Agency in 1957, and has spent most of his career there and in other parts of the Third World. He has been covering wars and coups, famines and plagues, and observing daily life with a fascination often tinged with horror — and writing about it all with a grace that would do justice to Florence. 
   The observation about Florence comes after a particularly horrific account of the torture and murder of deposed Liberian president Samuel Doe, at the personal direction of the warlord leader whose troops had seized him. 
   “When I was in Monrovia,’’ writes Kapuscinski with a chilling matter-of-factness, ‘the video showing him being tortured was the hottest ticket in town.’’ But, there being few VCRs in the city, “people had to invite themselves to the homes of well-to-do-neighbors or go to those bars where the tape was running nonstop.’’ 
   Not like lingering over a caffe latte in the Piazza Santa Croce. For if one were to leave that bar in Monrovia, it would be to find “identical cheap and unkempt houses stretching on for kilometers,’’ their interiors “uniformly poor and monotonous,’’ a few pieces of furniture, some cooking utensils, and “a plastic washbowl, which in the event of flight (lately a frequent occurrence here, as battles kept on erupting) serves as a handy suitcase women can carry on their heads.’’ 
   “Is that all?’’ Kapuscinski asks rhetorically. “Yes, more or less.’’ 
   And it is that “more or less’’ that makes up this provocative collection of essays covering some 40 years — roughly 40 years, because while some of these pieces can be dated by the political events (such as coups) they describe, there is a timeless quality to Kapuscinski’s observations, so much so that for all its current-event topicality, “The Shadows of the Sun’’ provides much the same kind of detached pleasure as a 19th-century traveler’s account. 
   One of the most thoughtful pieces to be written about an expatriate’s life in a Third World country is the essay titled, simply, “My Alleyway, 1967.’’ Kapuscinski, “irritated’’ with Westerners who live in foreign enclaves, rents an apartment on a back alleyway in the native quarter of Lagos, the Nigerian capital, to the outrage of fellow Europeans and the “scant enthusiasm’’ of African friends. 
   Thefts are a commonplace along the alleyway. At first, he is “filled with rage,’’ but he comes “to understand that seeing a robbery as a humiliation and an affront is an emotional luxury. Living amid the poverty of my neighborhood, I realized that theft, even a petty theft, can be a death sentence.’’ He tells of a woman on the street whose sole possession was a pot with which she made a bare living, buying beans for credit, cooking and seasoning them, then selling them to passersby. One night, there is “a piercing cry.’’ Thieves had stolen the pot, and the woman “was running around in a circle, despairing, frenzied’’ at the loss of “the one thing she depended on for her livelihood.’’ 
   Considering all the brutality and poverty that is recorded here, it is significant that Kapuscinski chose to bracket them with an account of the delirious independence celebrations in Ghana in 1958 and one of an almost-mystical occurrence in Tanzania. 
   Kapuscinski was at a Christmas Eve party at a national park attended by government ministers, generals, and clan chiefs. Suddenly, “from the depths of the night,’’ a lone elephant emerged. “Everyone was dead silent, frozen with fear, paralyzed. You cannot move — for what if that should trigger his fury?’’ 
   Finally, “having made his rounds of the tables and the clearing several times, the elephant left us, simply walked away and was swallowed up by the darkness.’’ And when “the ground had ceased rumbling,’’ one of the Tanzanians told Kapuscinski that what he had witnessed was “the spirit of Africa (which) always appears in the guise of an elephant. Because no other animal can vanquish an elephant.’’ 
   It was “still night,’’ Kapuscinski writes, “but Africa’s most dazzling moment was approaching — the break of day.’’ Yes, a bit over the top. But if Kapuscinski can write that after all the horror and death he has witnessed, then perhaps a brighter day is coming.