Read Online The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński - Free Book Online

Everything that in Europe is called dusk and evening here lasts only a few minutes, if it exists at all. It is daytime, and then night, as if someone has turned off the sun’s generator with one flip of the switch. All at once, all is black. In one instant we are inside the night’s darkest core. If this change surprises you as you are walking through the bush, you must stop immediately: you can see nothing, as if somebody has unexpectedly pulled a sack over your head. You become disoriented, you don’t know where you are. In such darkness people converse without seeing one another. They might call out to one another, not realizing they are standing side by side. The darkness separates people, and thereby intensifies all the more their desire to be together, in a group, in a community.
    The first hours of the night are the most social time in Africa. No one wants to be alone then. Being alone? That’s misfortune, perdition! Children don’t go to sleep early here. We enter the land of dreams together—as a family, a clan, a village.
    We drove through an already sleeping Uganda, invisible behind the curtain of night. Somewhere nearby must have been Lake Victoria, somewhere the kingdoms of Ankole and Toro, the pastures of Mubende, Murchison Falls. All this surrounded by a night black as soot. A night full of silence. The car’s headlights pierced the darkness, and in their glow whirled a frenzied swarm of little flies, beetles, and mosquitoes, which appeared as if out of nowhere, for a fraction of a second played out before our eyes their role of a lifetime—the insect’s demonic dance—before perishing, splattered mercilessly upon the windshield of the speeding car.
    Every now and then an oasis of light appeared in the undifferentiated blackness—a roadside shack lit up colorfully as though at a fair, glittering from afar: an Indian shop, a
duka
. Above the mounds of biscuits, tea bags, cigarettes, and matches, over the cans of sardines and the sticks of butter, we could make out, illuminated by a fluorescent lamp, the head of the proprietor, who sat motionless, waiting with patience and hope for late clients. The glow of these shops, which seemed to appear and disappear as if at our command, lit for us, like solitary lampposts on an empty street, the whole road to Kampala.
    Kampala was readying for celebration. In several days, on October 9, Uganda was to receive its independence. The complicated deals and maneuvers continued up to the very last minute. Everything about the internal politics of Africa’s states is intricate and entangled. This stems directly from the fact that European colonialists, dividing Africa among themselves under Bismarck’s leadership during the Berlin conference, crammed the approximately ten thousand kingdoms, federations, and stateless but independent tribal associations that existed on this continent in the middle of the nineteenth century within the borders of barely forty colonies. Meantime, many of these kingdoms and tribal groups shared a long history of conflict and wars. And here, without being asked their opinion on the matter, they suddenly found themselves within one and the same colony, subject to the same (and foreign) authority, the same laws.
    Now, with decolonization, the old interethnic relationships, which European rule only froze or simply ignored, suddenly sprang back to life and were becoming relevant again. The chance for liberty appeared, yes, but liberty with a proviso: that yesterday’s opponents and enemies form one nation and become its joint managers, patriots, and defenders. The former European colonial capitals and the leaders of Africa’s independence movements adopted the principle that if bloody internal conflicts erupted within a given colony, that territory would not become free.
    The process of decolonization was to occur through what were stipulated as constitutional methods, at a round table, without great political dramas, ensuring the