Ryszard Kapuscinski


The course and temperature of the first greeting are of utmost significance to
the ultimate fate of a relationship, which is why people here set much store by
the way they salute each other.


	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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I didn’t feel comfortable anywhere.  The color of my skin, albeit privileged,
also confined me to the cage of apartheid.  A gilded cage – Oyster Bay – but a
cage nonetheless.  Oyster Bay is a beautiful neighborhood … The residents of
the neighborhood were colonial bureaucrats, who thought only of getting to the
end of their contract, buying a crocodile skin or a rhinoceros horn as a
souvenir, and leaving.  Their wives discussed either the children’s health or a
past or upcoming party.

	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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The Europeans clung to the coasts, to their ports, eating houses, and ships,
reluctantly and only sporadically making incursions into the interior.  They
were hampered by the lack of roads, fearful of hostile tribes and tropical
diseases – malaria, sleeping sickness, yellow fever, leprosy.  And although
they inhabited the coasts for more than four centuries, they did so in a spirit
of impermanence, with a narrow-minded goal of quick profits and easy spoils.
Their ports were really only leeches on the body of Africa, points of export
for salves, gold, and ivory.  Their goal: to carry away everything, and at the
lowest possible price.  Consequently, many of these European beachheads
resembled the poorest sections of old Liverpool or Lisbon.  In the course of
four hundred years in Luanda, the Portuguese did not dig a single well for
potable water, or illuminate the streets with lanterns.

	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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In the disturbed, paranoid world of racial inequality, in which everything is
determined by the color of one’s skin (calibrated shades of difference), my
illness, while physically incapacitating, had an unexpected benefit.  Rendering
me weak and defective, it diminished my prestigious white status – that of
someone formidable, untouchable – and put me on a more even footing with the
black men.  Now a diminished, disowned, flawed white man I could be treated
with familiarity, although I was still a white man.  A warmth entered my
relations with Edu and Abdullahi.  It would have been unthinkable had they met
me as a strong, healthy, imperious European.

	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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Thus many African nations are already living through a second phase of their
short postwar history.  The first phase was a rapid decolonization, the gaining
of independence.  It was characterized by a universal optimism, enthusiasm,
euphoria.  People were convinced that freedom meant a better roof over their
heads, a larger bowl of rice, a first pair of shoes.  A miracle would take
place – the multiplying of loaves, fishes, and wine.  Nothing of the sort
occurred.  On the contrary.  There was a sudden increase in the population, for
which there was not enough food, schools, or jobs.  Optimism quickly turned to
disenchantment and pessimism.  The people’s bitterness, fury, hatred was now
directed against their own elites, who were rapidly and greedily stuffing their
pockets.  In a country without a well-developed private sector, where
plantations belonged to foreigners and the banks to foreign capital, the
political career was the only road to riches.  In short – the poverty and
disillusion of those on the bottom rungs, coupled with the cupidity and
gluttony of those on the top, create a poisoned, unstable atmosphere, which the
army senses; presenting itself as the champion of the injured and the
humiliated, it emerges from the barracks and reaches for power.

	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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Godwin says that earlier, in the years of dictatorship, it was preferable to
camp outside near such candles than to spend time in brightly lit interiors.
Seeing troops approaching, a man could instantly blow out the candle and vanish
into the darkness.  By the time the soldiers arrived, there wouldn’t be a soul
left.  A candle is good, because you can see everything, while remaining
invisible yourself.  Whereas in an illuminated interior, it is the other way
around, and therefore more dangerous.

	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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According to Sebuya I know nothing of darkness. In particular, I do not know
that day and night are two distinct realities, two separate worlds.  In
daytime, man can cope somehow with his environment, can exist and endure, even
live peacefully; the night, however, renders him defenseless, easy prey to his
enemies, and conceals forces with nefarious designs upon his life.  That is why
fear, which during the day slumbers in a man’s heart, secretive and subdued, is
transformed at night into an overpowering fright, a haunting, tormenting
nightmare.  How important it is at that time to be in a group!  The presence of
others brings relief, soothes the nerves, lessens the tension.

	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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We were just about to set off when the driver … announced upon getting into the
bus that someone had stolen a package that had been lying on his seat, with a
girl’s dress inside.  Thefts like this are a common occurrence the world over,
but Traoré fell into a rage, a fury bordering on insanity … It was yet another
instance of something I had observed in Africa before: the reaction to a thief
– although there is plenty of theft here – has an irrational dimension, akin to
madness.  Because there is something in human about stealing from a poor man,
who often has but one bowl or one tattered shirt, that man’s response to the
theft can likewise be inhuman.  If a crowd catches a thief in the market, on
the square, on the street, it can kill him on the sport – which is why,
paradoxically, the task of the police here is not so much the pursuit of
thieves as their protection.

	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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Life here is a constant struggle, an endlessly repeated effort to tilt in one’s
favor the fragile, flimsy, and shaky balance between survival and extinction.

	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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In the past, the cities were administrative, commercial, and industrial
centers, practical constructs, performing productive, creative functions.
Typically of moderate size, they were inhabited only by those who had
employment there.  What remains of these former cities today is merely a shred,
a fragment of the former cities, which even in small and thinly populated
countries have expanded monstrously, become great metropolises.

	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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The African market is a great repository of everything and anything.  A
veritable mine of the cheap and the shoddy.  A mountain of rubbish, gimcrack,
and kitsch.  There is nothing of any value to a Westerner here, nothing to
catch your attention, arouse your admiration, tempt you to possess it.  At one
end are stacks of identical red and yellow buckets and bowls; at the other,
billowing piles of thousands of identical undershirts and sneakers; someplace
else still, pyramids of multicolored calicos and glittering rows of nylon
dresses and men’s jackets.  Only in such a place can one fully appreciate the
extent to which the world is swamped with material tenth-rateness, how it is
drowning in an ocean of camp, knockoffs, the tasteless and the worthless.

	-- Ryszard Kapuściński (2001), The Shadow of the Sun 

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