BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Africa, a Mosaic of Mystery and Sorrow By Richard Bernstein May 11, 2001 See the article in its original context from May 11, 2001, Section E, Page 44 Buy Reprints "New York Times subscr’bers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared SUBSCRIBE *Does not include Crossword-only or Cooking-only subscribers. THE SHADOW OF THE SUN By Ryszard Kapuscinski Translated by Klara Glowczewska. 328 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25. There is nobody else quite like Ryszard Kapuscinski, even though there are others who travel, observe and write about what they see. Mr. Kapuscinski is a Polish journalist whose long career has been spent in far-flung investigations of the underlying aspects of the human condition -- in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Iran and Africa. Perhaps Mr. Kapuscinski's Polishness is just a coincidence, but his burnished prose has always been marked by that special Middle European gift for unillusioned moral penetration - it being difficult, after the experiences of history, for any prescient Pole to entertain illusions about the piece of work known as man. The penetrating intelligence of Mr. Kapuscinski's vision and his knack for a kind of crystallized descriptive writing have never been on better display than in his new book, "The Shadow of the Sun," which consists of densely eventful vignettes from his 40 years of experience in Africa. This book is a marvel of humane, sorrowful and lucid observation. It is not a full account of Africa or of Mr. Kapuscinski's activities there. Indeed, one experiences frustration at times with the spareness of these accounts, their incompleteness. Mr. Kapuscinski rarely explains himself. He goes places for reasons that are never specifically disclosed. He avoids the Big Picture and focuses instead on the telling detail. He goes, for example, to the fabled desert city of Timbuktu because he wants tomake contact with the nomadic and embattled Tuareg in what he calls "their impenetrable Sahara." But once he actually arrives in Timbuktu on an Air Mali flight from Mopti, all Mr. Kapuscinski tells us about is a plaque he sees to the 19th-century German traveler Heinrich Barth. That's it. No Tuareg. Nothing further about Timbuktu ~ except the sand color of its houses and its heat, which "curdles the blood, paralyzes the body, stuns." And yet, one learns something here about the mysteriousness of things, the absence of clear answers and the sometimes colossal futility of human endeavor. And one, more generally, learns prodigiously about Africa in a book that wastes no words, contains no gestures devoid of meaning. Mr. Kapuscinski begins in 1957 with his first visit to Africa, specifically to Ghana at that joyous, hopeful time when European imperialism was giving way to independent states, He interviews the young education minister Kofi Baako, who brims with good nature and enthusiasm and assures Mr. Kapuscinski in his belief that "an opposition is necessary." But even then, Mr. Kapuscinski is interested less in mainstream political commentary than in the telling details, the way, for example, that the rulers’ houses are ingeniously placed to catch the breeze. "Still air has no value," he remarks. "it has only to move, however, and then immediately acquires a price.” Mr. Kapuscinski never loses his affection for the people whose lives he witnesses or his awe at the magnificence of the African spectacle, its oceanic size and variety, the beauty of its landscapes, the heavy weight of its patience and its spirituality. But as the vignettes roll on one after the other, Africa, in Mr. Kapuscinski's version of it, becomes ever more afflicted, more of a disaster. We do not learn in this book what happened in Ghana after the first hopeful years, or what became of Mr. Baako, but in his fragmentary, episodic way, Mr, Kapuscinski shows a continent sliding into governmental gangsterism, dependence on foreign aid, murderous tyrannies and urban populations with nothing to do. “We are here among people who do not contemplate transcendence and the existence of the soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being,” Mr. Kapuscinski writes during a visit to a strangely deserted refugee settlement in southern Sudan, "We are ina world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day." Mr. Kapuscinski, whose Polish has been rendered into sparkling English by his translator, Klara Glow czewska, makes no effort to be comprehensive. There is nothing in these pages filled with accounts of tyrants -- of Mobutu Sese Seku of Zaire, now known as Congo, for example; no account of the terrible Nigerian civil war or of thestruggle against apartheid in South Africa. Mr. Kapuscinski does give us gripping capsule histories of the slaughters of Hutus by Tutsis and of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda. He writes with crisp gloominess about the civil war in Sudan and of the sanguinary years of Idi Amin in Uganda. He gives a hair-raising account of the tormented history of Liberia, an account that makes a mockery of internationalist good intentions. "Liberia is the voluntary continuation of a slave society by slaves who did not wish to abolish an unjust order, but wanted to preserve it, develop it and exploit it for their own benefit,” he writes of the country created in the 19th century by American campaigners against slavery. "Clearly, an enslaved mind, tainted by the experience of slavery, a mind born into slavery, fettered in infancy, cannot conceive or conjure a world in which all would be free." Some of the passages in this book require a strong stomach, like Mr. Kapuscinski's description of the two-hour videotape of the death-by-torture of Liberia's former President Samuel Doe by one of his rivals and former associates, Prince Johnson. But the brilliance of Mr. Kapuscinski’s capacity for unusual perception also lies in the smaller things he notes, like the revolution occasioned by the arrival of cheap, light plastic water jugs, which replaced the much heavier stone and earthenware jugs used earlier. The practical effect of this technological revolution is that children can now carry water, relieving "the exhausted African woman" of that duty. "How much more time she now has for herself, for her household!" Mr, Kapuscinski notes. There is much more in the way of observation -- often sardonic and powerful -- on, for example, the helpfulness to the users of child-soldiers offered by the smaller sizes of today's weapons. Mr. Kapuscinski has written a startling, sobering, mesmerizing account of a few isolated parts of a larger vastness, giving us sharper, clearer images and understandings than many more conventional and more comprehensive books have managed.