The Shadow of the Sun: my African life Ryszard Kapuscinski Penguin, 325pp, £7.99 ISBN 0140292624
Ryszard Kapuscinski has reached that happy stage in his writing life when everything he publishes is received with excited reverence. The names adorning the back cover - John le Carre, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ignatieff, Ian Jack- are appropriately august, and Kapuscinski's "reading" of Africa is rich in liberal sympathy, but never in sentimentality. You will not find any of Robert Cooper's enthusiasm for a renewed form of benign, disinterested colonialism in these pages. What you will find are essays of exceptional imaginative insight and daring.
Kapuscinski has been travelling in Africa since the late 1950s, as a correspondent for Polish newspapers and more recently as a feature-writer. He was present during most of the post-colonial wars that have so blighted the continent, and met many of the most despised dictators. His essays here on the young Idi Amin, on French culpability in the Rwandan genocide and on the torture and death of Samuel Doe in Liberia are among the best I have read on Africa. How reliable is he? In a provocative review of this book in the Times Literary Supplement, John Ryle expressed scepticism about Kapuscinski's method of reportage. He is correct to complain about the unreliability of Kapuscinski's narratives, but wrong, I think, in his final judgement of a writer who is less a reporter than a visionary, whose impressions of Africa are as readable as they are unforgettable.
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