The Shadow Of The Sun

Ryszard Kapuscinski has been visiting Africa since 1957 and has written about its people throughout his career. In a study that avoids the official routes, the palaces and high politics, he sets out to create not a book about Africa, but a book about some of the people who live there; about encounters with them and time spent together. It is an account of post-colonial Africa that doesn't strain after comforting generalizations but bears witness to people and practices seen for once in their own terms - as human responses to an often tormenting environment. It explores this 'Africa' with its endless, unbreakable and incommensurable forms of life in the context of family, clan and village, rather than of nation, region or 'race'. From this concern with the meaningful particular comes an honest and moving account of peoples struggling to escape from foreign domination and disease, from the brute facts of climate and landscape, from war and from politics as theft.