The Shadow Of The Sun Excellent piece in The Ob…
The Shadow Of The Sun
Excellent piece in The Observer today about a Polish travel writer I’d never heard of before - Ryszard Kapuscinski. He’s been travelling in Africa for the last 45 years, both as a jounalist and a travel writer. As a Pole who has lived through both Nazi and Soviet occupation of his own country, Kapuscinski is all too aware of the impact of European invaders on Africa and that his skin symbolises “the white man, the one who took everything away from me…”. Yet he has travelled alone throughout the continent during the last 5 decades in an effort to live among the people he was writing about rather than simply being a touring journalist.
Kapuscinski sums up the difference between travel writing and journalism brilliantly - “So as well as sending news of 50 countries back home on the wire Kapuscinski began compiling another kind of intimate account of Africa in his head. ‘Each of my books,’ he says, ‘I see as a second volume. The first volume of events was news items. But the books I did for myself. To try to understand these things for myself.’ Into them he poured everything he knew. ‘I was very interested in anthropology and oral history and I was reading everything, fiction, travel, history, science, poetry and trying to use all that I was reading.’”
Kapuscinski ’s new book, The Shadow Of The Sun, seems to be a retrospective and overview of his travels in Africa, judging by the synopsis on Amazon. I’ll definitely be getting hold of it when it comes out, and hunting down the out-of-print The Emperor, which is an account of the court of Haile Selassie. It’s a been a long time since I’ve read the Sunday papers and come away feeling inspired to go out and buy something, so top marks to Tim Adams for writing such a good article.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Electronic Travel Tales
- Things Are Different In Africa
- New Stuff On Spike: January update
- Debt Bomb
- Gaps in the net Ooh, this is nice - very comfy …
