Tales of mythical Africa

Where fact meets tropical baroque: Kapuscinski and literary colonial

JOHN RYLE

Ryszard Kapuscinski

THE SHADOW OF THE SUN 336pp. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. £18.99. TLS £18.49.

071399455 X

 In a career extending over four decades, Ryszard Kapuscinski has published accounts of Iran, of travels in his homeland, Poland, and the former Soviet Union, and a collection of reportage from a number of Third-World countries including Honduras, El Salvador, Chile and Bolivia. But his principal subject has been Africa, where, in the late 1950s, in his mid-twenties, after a brief spell in India and Pakistan, he began his career as a foreign correspondent, working for the Polish state news agency. In the 1960s, he covered the early years of independence and the first of the postcolonial civil wars that have ravaged the continent ever since. In the 1970s, he revisited these conflicts in a sequence of works of reflective reportage, works in which he transformed himself from a journalist into an author of international stature. In The Emperor: The downfall of an autocrat, his account of the final years of the reign of Haile Selassie I, which appeared in Polish in 1978, Kapuscinski invented a new subgenre of political reportage. In a series of linked testimonies from former Ethiopian court officials he created an arresting picture of the accelerating collapse of an authoritarian regime. This was a story that had special resonance for his audience in Poland, where dissent against Communist autocracy was growing. The Emperor was also the book that established Kapuscinski's reputation in the West. When it appeared in English translation, in 1983, it was an immediate critical success. In 1987, in Another Day of Life (published in Polish in 1976), he chronicled the beginning of the civil war in Angola and the disintegration of civil institutions in the capital, Luanda. In The Soccer War (1990), he collected vignettes of insurrection and revolution in Ghana and the Congo, Ethiopia and Somalia, juxtaposing them with accounts of conflicts in South America. Each of these books added to Kapuscinski' s reputation, leading more than one critic to compare his work to that earlier chronicler of the tropics and human beings in extreme situations - his compatriot Jozef Korzeniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad.
The Shadow of the Sun is a more substantial collection of episodes from Kapuscinski' s sojourns in Africa, starting in Ghana in the 1950s and ending in Tanzania in the recent past. Moving back and forth in time, and sometimes right out of time, it is a loose record of a life spent intermittently in countries south of the Sahara. There are accounts here of the revolution in Zanzibar, the 1966 military coup in Nigeria and the early days of civil war in Liberia; there are reflections from unnamed places in the desert and from lodgings in the back streets of Lagos. Here are classics of the Kapuscinski style: on the one hand, there is the tableau vivant, where almost nothing happens (the intricate design of the interior of a bush taxi, the beneficial effect of plastic jerry-cans on the lives of rural women); on the other, the the hair-raising adventure, where he characteristically risks death by thirst, tropical disease, snake bite, or act of war, combining unabashed deering-do with philosophical reflections on the world outside Europe.
It is in the reflective passages that doubts about the precision of Kapuscinski's reportage occur. The force of his writing depends on certainty, on the voice of experience, the authority of someone who, we are told in Shah of Shahs, has survived twenty-seven coups and revolutions, who has driven through burning roadblocks and stayed behind in besieged cities, the only foreign correspondent remaining when the rest of the press-pack leaves. (As he put it, a trifle immodestly, in The Soccer War, "I was driving along a road from where they say no white man can come back alive.") For such reasons Kapuscinski's writing tends to be favored by those for whom Africa is a distant prospect; he makes the remote areas of the continent simultaneously more thrilling and more accessible. But his work is regarded less favorably by many African readers, and by Africanists, both scholars and reporters, who doubt its accuracy.
Questions about the reliability of Kapuscinski' s reportage begin with The Emperor. His informants here are former court servants who labor under anonymizing initials, like characters in an eighteenth-century novel. Only one of those who assisted Kapuscinski is named (and that, we are told, is because he is dead), yet the power of the book derives to a large extent from the fact that it is told almost entirely through the transcribed speech of these witnesses. Their antiquated cadences have a mesmeric quality. With courtly unctuousness they speak of "His Venerable Majesty", "His Most Virtuous Highness", "His Sublime Majesty", "His Charitable Majesty", "His Exalted Majesty", "His Indefatigable Majesty", "His Masterful Highness", "Our Omnipotent Ruler". These expressions of fealty acquire an air of increasing irony as the excesses of the Imperial court are borne in on the reader. It is a subtle piece of reportorial rhetoric. But native speakers of Amharic maintain that these honorifics do not correspond to any expressions in their language. In particular they could not occur in the formal registers of speech employed at court, where there were only one or two acceptable forms of address for the Emperor. So they cannot have been spoken as transcribed. Some of the titles that Kapuscinski gives to his sources are invented too. In the absence of names, this may be held to cast some doubt on their existence. What Kapuscmski and his translators created in The Emperor was a brilliant device, an imaginary archaic language that bespeaks homage while conveying subversion, but it falls short of both scholarly and journalistic standards of verifiability, and even of verisimilitude.
There are other implausibilities in The Emperor. We are told that Haile Selassie did not read books: "His Venerable Majesty was no reader. For him, neither the written nor the printed word existed; everything had to be relayed by word of mouth." But Haile Selassie was undoubtedly well read, both in Amharic and in French. He possessed a large library where he spent a good deal of time and provided copious written comments on manuscripts submitted to him. It seems unlikely that his own palace servants could have been unaware of this. (Haile Selassie's reading habits are documented in a memoir by Hans Lockot, head of research at the National Library of Ethiopia during his reign.) Kapuscinski in fact describes one of his informants bringing him the first volume of Haile Selassie's autobiography, an English translation made by the scholar Edward Ullendorff. But the event is taking place in 1974, and Ullenndorff s translation did not appear until two years later, in 1976. So it cannot have happened in the way described.
In answer to such criticisms it is sometimes argued that The Emperor is not meant to be about Ethiopia at all, that it is an allegory of Communist power in Poland, or of autocratic systems anywhere. The book is undoubtedly informed and deepened by these parallels. Its reception  among literati in the West was also conditioned by an awareness of its doubly exotic origin: a book about a far-off country by an author who was himself a rara avis, an apparent master of Tom Wolfe's new journalism sprung from within the Soviet bloc. Apologists for The Emperor situate it, more subtly, in a Polish literary genre where dissent masquerades as descriptive prose (Kapuscinski has latterly endorsed this view); yet the book gives no indication that it is meant to be regarded as an allegory, or as a traveller's tale in the same genre as Rasselas or Prester John. It is presented ambiguously as reportage. The dearth of other sources on the subject - - no member of the Imperial Court wrote a memoir of Haile Selassie - would give it documentary importance, if it could be trusted. At the time of publication there was, of course, every reason for Kapuscinski to maintain the confidentiality of his living sources. Two regimes later, there seems no reason for their anonymity to be preserved, particularly since other court servants have given legal testimony in Addis Ababa as witnesses in the trial of the Derg, the regime, headed by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, that deposed the Emperor.
Kapuscinski's return to Ethiopia in the 1990s to visit imprisoned members of the Derg occupies one of the later chapters of The Shadow of the Sun. This could have been the occasion for a consideration of the issues raised by his earlier work, but he makes no mention of it. The account of his visit to the Central Prison in Addis Ababa raises more doubts about his fidelity to facts. "After Mengistu's escape", he writes, "his army dispersed and only the academics were left. They were seized without great difficulty and imprisoned in this crowded courtyard." This characterization of the inmates of the prison is misleading (it contradicts, in fact, an earlier reference by Kapuscinski to the "generals of the army and police" among those captured followers of Mengistu). I visited the prison myself around the same time. Some of the prisoners were indeed academics, but officials of the former regime who could be seen there included many prominent military figures: Fikre-Selassie Weg-Deres, an air-force captain who was Mengistu's Prime Minister, Teka Tulu, an army colonel who was his Chief of Internal Security, Sgt Legesse Asfaw, the Butcher of Tigray, and the equally notorious Melaku Tefera, Butcher of Gondar. None of these people were, by any stretch of the imagination, academics. Nor had they been that easy to capture: Melaku Tefera, in particular, was pursued across the desert to Djibouti, where he was nabbed by an Ethiopian hit squad.
Kapuscinski's chapter on Ethiopia has other odd bits of misinformation. To take just one: he describes visiting the bookstore in the University of Addis Ababa. It is, he says, the country's only bookstore, and it is completely devoid of books. Really? There are at least half a dozen bookshops in Addis Ababa, all with books for sale, and have been since the Derg era. Yet Kapuscinski has himself been a trenchant critic of inaccuracy in news reporting. "The ignorance of special correspondents ... is sometimes astonishing", he said in a lecture some years ago.
He prides himself, also, on his personal contact with ordinary people. "I avoided official routes, palaces, important personages and big politics", he writes in the early pages of The Shadow of the Sun. "Instead I preferred to hitch rides on passing trucks, wander with nomads through the desert, be the guest of peasants from the tropical savannah." Yet he gets basic facts about the lives of such people wrong. In his chapter on Sudan we are told that the Dinka and the Nuer, tropical savannah dwellers who comprise half the population of Southern Sudan, "subsist almost exclusively on milk". "Killing cattle", he continues, "is forbidden, and women cannot touch them." But it is men, not women, among the Dinka and Nuer who don't milk cows; the work is done mostly by girls. And none of them live on milk, except in special circumstances. They live on grain and fish - and on meat from their cattle and other livestock. The sacrifice of cattle, far from being forbidden, is a central part of their religion.
It is perhaps not surprising, in view of this made-up ethnography of the peoples of Southern Sudan, that he gets the politics wrong as well. "The first Sudanese war lasted ten years," he says, "until 1972." But the first civil war in Sudan did not last ten years. It lasted seventeen years, from Independence, in 1955, until 1972. Sudan, he tells us, was a British colony. It was not; it was an Anglo-Egyptian condominium. There are "gigantic plantations" of rubber on the Nile. There are not. If you want an accurate summary of the war in Sudan you would do better to read John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener, which doesn't pretend to be anything other than a novel.
There are a host of other errors in The Shadow of the Sun, small but cumulative in effect. The Bari are not, as Kapuscinski states, a Ugandan people, but Sudanese. Bandits in the Somali-Kenya-Ethiopia borderlands are called shifta, not "shifts". There are no people called the Lugabra. There is nowhere called Haragwe. The Kakwa of Uganda, ldi Amin's people, do not live in a region "without roads ... and cultivable land". (The last inaccuracy would be less remarkable if Kapuscinski did not tell us that he once considered writing a book about Amin and has amassed a small library about him.)
How much does all this matter? It is reasonable, I think, to be concerned if the fundamental beliefs of 2 or 3 million Nilotes are casually misrepresented. And it clearly matters to the family of Haile Selassie, as well as those trying to write the recent history of Ethiopia, whether or not the unique testimonies that Kapuscinski was brave and ingenious enough to obtain are rendered accurately.
The Shadow of the Sun also contains a startling number of generalizations about "Africa" and "Africans". Such generalizations are dubious by definition: Africa is just too big and various a continent, with too many cultures and histories, too many contrasting natural environments, for any but the vaguest commonplace to apply to all of them. Initially, Kapuscinski seems to recognize this: in a prefatory note he announces, "in reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist." Yet a few pages later, he is coming up with the first of an increasingly unlikely string of assertions about the continent and its inhabitants. "The European and the African", he writes, "have an entirely different concept of time." "Africans believe that a mysterious energy circulates through the world." Africans eat "only once a day, in the evening". "Africans are collectivist by nature ... all decisions ... are made collectively." "Half the people in African towns don't have defined occupations." "In Africa, drivers avoid traveling at night - darkness unnerves them .... "
Some of these things may be true of some people in some parts of Africa, sometimes. But none of them is anything like a general truth about Africa - no more than comparable statements about Asia or the Americas would be. The difference between Chad and Cape Town or Kinshasa and the Ogaden - is quite as great as that between New York and the Andes, Osaka and the Hindu Kush. There is a revealingly archaic note in these obiter dicta, scattered like talismans through Kapuscinski's text. In their insistence on a collective otherness there is something reminiscent of an earlier era of European writing about the continent. It is here that the comparison with Joseph Conrad, Kapuscinski's strong precursor, comes into its own. In this post-Conradian view of Africa, Kapuscinski is both character and author; he is a modem version of one of Conrad's voyager-narrators, following a similar trajectory into the interior of the continent, to a place where, to use his earlier phrase, "they say no white man can come back alive." It is a narrative pattern familiar from Heart of Darkness. Thus, in a typical episode of The Shadow of the Sun, Kapuscinski travels to a difficult and dangerous place, falls ill and confronts death. He is witness to dreadful events, from which he emerges with a deeper understanding of the further reaches of human nature. At the centre of the present book is his lengthy account of the notorious video recording made of the death by torture of Samuel Doe, former head of state of Liberia. There is an echo here of the climax of Heart of Darkness, in which Marlow, Conrad's narrator, confronts the evidence of the ivory trader Kurtz's complicity in ritual murder and cannibalism. The row of severed heads outside Kurtz's compound is mirrored in Kapuscinski's lingering description of Sgt Doe's severed ears.
The baroque note in Kapuscinski's prose confirms the movement away from fact towards the realm of symbol. The African universe, for him, is a place of extremes, extremes of poverty, of climate, of violence and danger. Its inhabitants are prisoners of their environment. In Somalia, "Daytime hours during the dry season ... are a hell almost impossible to bear. Everything is burning. Even the shade is hot, even the wind is ablaze. The human being ... does not exist - or he matters only as part of this or that bloodline." And further south, "One cannot compare the tropical forest with any European forest or with any equatorial jungle" (yet a tropical forest and an equatorial jungle are the same thing).
In this tropical baroque style, nothing can be ordinary or familiar. Everything is stretched and exaggerated. As Kapuscinski himself wrote of South American baroque, "If there is a jungle it has to be enormous if there are mountains they have to be gigantic if there is a plain it has to be endless .... Fact is mixed with fantasy here, truth with myth, realism with rhetoric." The direction of Kapuscinski's exaggerations and distortions becomes apparent. This is a continent without bookshops. Its inhabitants are prisoners of their environment. They live on milk. They are outside time. (Who knows? They may even have heads beneath their shoulders.) Europeans can never really understand them. Here we may be getting close to the truth, for the one thing that the inhabitants of this hugely various continent do have in common is the experience of European colonialism or occupation. And despite Kapuscinski's vigorously anti-colonial stance, his own writing about the continent is a variety of literary colonialism, a kind of gonzo orientalism, a highly selective imposition of form, conducted in the name of humane concern, that misrepresents Africans even as it purports to speak for them.
Such criticisms do not rob Kapuscinski's writing of its bright allure, but they warn us not to take it as a guide to reality. In the last chapter of The Shadow of the Sun, there is a final epic generalization that embodies his ambiguous attitude to factual reportage and his attraction to the realm of poetry and fiction. "The kind of history known in Europe as scholarly and objective", Kapuscinski writes, "can never arise here because the African past has no documents or records, and each generation, listening to the version being transmitted to it, changed it and continues to change it .... " "As a result", he continues, "history, free of the weight of archives, of the constraints of dates and data, achieves here its purest, crystalline form - that of myth."
This account of the role of collective memory in African societies is partial in the extreme. Oral history can often be accurate; genealogies can be precise. And it leaves out of account decades of scholarly research and the existence of hundreds of universities and libraries in African countries, not all of which, Kapuscinski's view notwithstanding, are empty or malfunctioning. It is, however, a fair description of Ryszard Kapuscinski's own narrative aspirations. Here, in the domain of myth, the reporter is freed from the constraints of dates and data, the tedium of checking and cross-checking, the tyranny of documents and records. Here facts are no longer sacred; we are at play in the bush of ghosts, free to opine and to generalize about "Africa" and "the African" without criticism from self-appointed guardians of fact. Here, in place of facticity, there is endless mutability; in place of reportage, there is relativism. From this place, deep in an imaginary Africa, the writer can return with any tale he wants.

TLS July 27 2001