Return to Ethiopia

Kapuścińksi’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. It might have been expected that this would be the occasion for him to consider the issues raised by his earlier work, but the new book oddly makes no mention of The Emperor at all, nor yet of the court proceedings in Ethiopia where the death of Haile Selassie is currently under investigation. And Kapuścińksi’s account in the new book of his visit to the Central Prison in Addis Ababa raises further doubts about his factual accuracy.

“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 characterisation of the inmates of the Central Prison is misleading; it contradicts, in fact, an earlier reference by Kapuściński to the “generals of the army and police” among those captured followers of Mengistu. I visited the prison myself around this time. A few of the prisoners were indeed former professors, but the officials of the former regime who were held there included many prominent military figures (as they still do at the time of writing, in 2001, though they have been moved from the Central Prison).

Among them were 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 (since deceased), Sergeant Legesse Asfaw, known as the Butcher of Tigray, and the equally notorious Melaku Tefera, the 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 the subject of hot pursuit across the desert to Djibouti, where he was nabbed by an Ethiopian army hit squad.

Kapuściński’s chapter on Ethiopia in The Shadow of the Sun has other odd bits of misinformation. He describes visiting the bookstore in the University of Addis Ababa. It is, he says, the country’s only bookstore—and completely devoid of books. But when I last visited—at around the same time—there were at least a half-a-dozen bookshops in Addis Ababa, all with books for sale, in many languages, as there have been since the Derg era. (The books do not include The Emperor; Kapuściński’s book has been published in more than a dozen translations, but not in any of the languages of Ethiopia.)

Not content with this already quite erroneous assertion, Kapuściński continues “It is this way in most African countries. Once, I remember, there was a good bookshop in Kampala… Now—everywhere, nothing.” Here hyperbole becomes distinctly misleading. There may not be a branch of Barnes and Noble in Kampala, but there are numerous thriving bookshops there, and also, of course, in Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam, Dakar, Abidjan, Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town and dozens of cities across Africa, small and large.

Kapuściński 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.

During the August 1981 strikes in Gdansk, where the Solidarity union was born, half the journalists coming to Poland to cover the events could not even have identified Gdansk on the map.

His lecture continues:

They knew even less about Rwanda at the time of the massacres in 1994. Most of them were setting foot in Africa for the first time…. Almost all of them were ignorant of the causes and reasons behind the conflict.”

Kapuściński’s earlier book about Angola, Another Day of Life is, in part, a response to this kind of ignorance, providing an extended commentary on the malaise of the foreign correspondent, one who knows that his or her newspaper dispatches are not scratching the surface, that they misrepresent local reality. (The chapter on Rwanda in The Shadow of the Sun is, it should be said, one of the better sections of the book, capturing the oppressive, vindictive feeling that prevailed in the country well before the 1994 genocide and accurately summarising the political system of the kingdom of Rwanda and the colonial administration that succeeded it.)

Here, as elsewhere, Kapuściński prides himself 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.”

And yet he gets elementary facts about the lives of such people wrong. In his chapter on Sudan, for example, we are told that the Dinka and the Nuer—tropical swamp and savannah dwellers who comprise perhaps half the population of Southern Sudan—“subsist almost exclusively on milk”. “Killing cattle,” he continues, “is forbidden, and women cannot touch them.” Each of these assertions is completely incorrect, as even a casual visitor could note. Girls and women routinely milk cows among the Dinka (or Jaang, or Muonyjieng, to use the term they themselves use) and also among the Nuer (or Naath). Boys milk cows occasionally and men only rarely. None of them lives on milk, except in special circumstances at particular times of year; they live on grain and vegetables and fish, according to the season, and on meat from their cattle and other livestock. The sacrifice and consumption of cattle, far from being forbidden, is a central feature of indigenous Dinka and Nuer religion. Earlier in the book Kapuściński says the same thing about the Tutsi—that their cattle are not killed and women cannot touch them. But it’s not true of the Tutsi either.

In Sudan again, he describes Fashoda, on the banks of the Nile (the site of a historic showdown in 1898 between British and French invading forces), as “a fishing village”. But “fishing village” is hardly how Fashoda would be seen by its inhabitants, the Shilluk (or Collo) people. Fashoda is their largest and oldest settlement, one of the political and ritual centres of the long-established Shilluk kingdom. There is a substantial ethnographic literature on all four peoples mentioned—Shilluk/Chollo, Dinka/Jaang, Nuer/Naath and Tutsi—which Kapuściński could have drawn on to put himself right on their culture and belief systems. It is perhaps not surprising, in view of this make-believe ethnography, that he gets the politics wrong as well. “The first Sudanese war lasted ten years,” he says, “until 1972.” The first civil war in Sudan is generally said to have lasted seventeen years, from before independence in 1955 until 1972, though large-scale conflict only began in the 1960s. Sudan, he tells us, was a British colony. This, too, is arguable: its official designation was an Anglo-Egyptian condominium. There are “gigantic plantations” of rubber there, on the Nile. Rubber trees do not grow in Sudan. Kapuściński is perhaps confusing Sudan with the Congo. If you want an accurate portrayal of the nature of the current civil war in Sudan you would do better to read a book such as The Constant Gardener, the recent novel by John Le Carré, which is set among aid workers in Southern Sudan. This is a book that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than fiction.

There are a host of other errors in The Shadow of the Sun, small but cumulative in effect. Some of them are typographic, but some bespeak a more serious level of neglect. The Bari are not, as Kapuściński 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, Idi Amin’s father’s people, do not live in a region “without roads… and cultivable land”. The West Nile region of Uganda and the adjacent parts of Congo and Southern Sudan, where the Kakwa homeland is located, is a highly fertile and intensely cultivated area. (The last inaccuracy would be less remarkable if Kapuściński did not tell us that he once considered writing a book about Amin and has amassed a small library about him.)

Literary colonialism; gonzo orientalism

How much does all this matter? And to whom? It’s not a trivial question. It is a matter of concern if the lives and beliefs of African societies, some of them four or five million strong, are casually misrepresented in this way. And it is clearly important for the descendants of Haile Selassie and the members of his court, and for those trying to write the recent history of Ethiopia, to know whether or not the unique testimonies that Kapuściński appears to have obtained with such resourcefulness are genuine or not. When The Emperor was made into a stage play in London in the 1980s, adapted by Jonathan Miller, the Royal Court Theatre was picketed by protesting Ethiopian exiles, some of them former members of Haile Selassie’s court. It cut no ice with them to be told that the play was intended as an allegory of Polish political history, that it was not really about their country at all.

And why should it? There is a double standard at work in excuses like these, a clear eurocentric bias. Consider a hypothetical case in which a writer publishes a book of scandalous revelations about the final years of the Gierek regime in communist Poland. This writer uses dubious information obtained in obscure circumstances from anonymous and untraceable members of the Polish Internal Security Police. The accuracy of the account is then questioned. In the case of such a book would it be considered a reasonable defence to say that it did not matter whether it was true or not because it was really intended, not as a book about Poland at all, but as an allegorical account of events in imperial Ethiopia?

The Shadow of the Sun also contains a startling number of implausible 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 and too many contrasting natural environments for any but the vaguest commonplace to apply to all of them. The physical and cultural distance between Chad and Cape Town, or Kinshasa and the Ogaden, is as great as that between Manhattan and the Andes or Osaka and the Hindu Kush. Initially Kapuściński seems to recognise 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,” an energy that gives them “the strength to set time into motion.” Africans, he continues, “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 travelling at night—darkness unnerves them… they may flatly refuse to drive after sunset.” Finally, and perhaps most oddly of all, “in Africa a cousin on your mother’s side is more important than a husband.”

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—any more than comparable statements about notions of kinship, culture and metaphysics in Asia or the Americas would be.

There is a tellingly archaic note in these obiter dicta, scattered like talismans through the text of Shadows of the Sun. In their insistence on a collective otherness they evoke an earlier era of European writing about the continent. It is here that the comparison with Joseph Conrad—Kapuściński’s strong precursor—comes into its own. In this post-Conradian version of Africa Kapuściński is both character and author, a contemporary equivalent of one of Conrad’s voyager-narrators; and he follows 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”. Thus, in a typical episode of The Shadow of the Sun, he travels to a distant, dangerous location, falls ill and confronts death. And he is witness to dreadful events, from which he emerges with a deeper understanding of the further reaches of human nature.

It is a narrative pattern familiar from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Accordingly, at the centre of Kapuściński’s new book, we find a motif of horror: a long and gory account of a notorious video recording that was made—by his killers—of the death by torture of Samuel Doe, the former head of state of Liberia. This is an episode that has more than an echo of the climax of Conrad’s original story, in which Marlow, the narrator, confronts evidence of the ivory-trader Kurtz’s complicity in ritual murder and cannibalism. The row of severed heads that Marlow sees outside Kurtz’s compound is mirrored, consciously or unconsciously, in Kapuściński’s lingering description of the video footage of Sergeant Doe’s severed ears.

The baroque note in Kapuściński’s prose confirms the movement away from fact towards the realm of fantasy and symbol. The African universe, for him, is a place of absolutes and extremes, extremes of poverty, of climate, of violence and danger. Its inhabitants are prisoners of their environment. Thus he writes of 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 then of Central Africa, “One cannot compare the tropical forest with any European forest or with any equatorial jungle” (a particularly odd remark, unless it is an error of translation, given that an equatorial jungle itself , in fact, one kind of tropical rainforest).

In this mode of writing—the tropical baroque style—nothing can be ordinary or familiar. Everything is stretched and exaggerated, the opposite of home. As Kapuściński has himself written elsewhere of the baroque strain in South American literature.

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… truth with myth, realism with rhetoric.

The direction of his own blurrings and inventions and exaggerations becomes clearer in the light of this inadvertent self-criticism. Africa is a continent without bookshops, he avers. Its rulers are illiterate. Its inhabitants are prisoners of their environment, or of their bloodline. They are afraid of the dark. They live on nothing but milk. (Will we be told they have three legs? Or heads beneath their shoulders?) European and American readers, those from other continents, it is clear, can never really understand such people; they can only marvel, or shudder.

With the last suggestion we are approaching the true nature of Kapuściński’s enterprise. It is an outgrowth of the single historical experience that nearly all the inhabitants of this hugely various continent really do have, historically, in common with each other: the experience of colonization (or military occupation) by European powers—and the simultaneous projection of a European primitivist romance onto African lives. Despite Kapuściński’s vigorously anti-colonialist stance, his writing about Africa is a variety of latter-day literary colonialism, a kind of gonzo orientalism, a highly selective imposition of form, conducted in the name of humane concern, that sacrifices truth and accuracy, and homogenises and misrepresents people in Africa even as it aspires to speak for them.

An imaginary Africa

Such criticisms do not rob Kapuściński’s writing of its bright allure, its illuminating moments, its often lively sympathy for the people of the countries he writes about, but they warn us not to take it seriously as a guide to reality. In the last chapter of The Shadow of the Sun there is a culminating generalization that embodies his ambiguous attitude to factual reportage, and corresponding attraction to the realm of poetry and fiction. “The kind of history known in Europe as scholarly and objective,” Kapuściński 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 characterization of the role of collective memory in African societies is, to say the least, under-informed. It is well-established that oral history is often chronologically accurate and that traditional genealogies can give precise and accurate accounts of lineages. Kapuściński’s account also ignores more than a century of scholarly research and the existence of hundreds of universities and libraries in African countries, not all of which are empty or malfunctioning, and some of which burgeon with the work of African scholars.

What this account of African history does reveal is a telling indication of Kapuściński’s own narrative aspirations. Here in the domain of myth, in a realm untouched by literacy, where the subject never answers back, a reporter is freed from the constraint of dates and data, the tedium of checking and cross-checking, the tyranny of documents and records. Here facts are no longer sacred; the author is at play in the bush of ghosts, free to opine and to generalise about “Africa” and “the African”—and simply make things up—without criticism from scholars, or indigenes, or self-appointed guardians of facticity. For Ryszard Kapuściński, it seems, this is the heart of the continent. Here, in place of fact, there is mutability; in place of reportage, relativism. From this place, deep in an imaginary Africa, the writer may return with any tale he pleases.