Shadow of the Sun

'Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say Africa. In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist'.

The Beginning: Collision, Ghana 1958

More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun. Just yesterday, an autumnal London was drenched in rain. The airplane drenched in rain. A cold, wind, darkness. But here, from the morningrsquo;s earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight.

In times past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the earth passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveller had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate too, changed gradually. Before the traveller arrived from a cool Europe to the burning Equator, he already had left behind the pleasant warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of the Cape Verde islands.

Today, nothing remains of these gradations. Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat. If wersquo;ve come from Europe in the wintertime, we discard overcoats, peel off sweaters. Itrsquo;s the first gesture of initiation we, the people of the North, perform upon arrival in Africa.

People of the North. Have we sufficiently considered the fact that northerners constitute a distinct minority on our planet? Canadians and Poles, Lithuanians and Scandinavians, some Americans and Germans, Russians and Scots. Laplanders and Eskimos, Evenkis and Yakuts ndash; the list is not very long. It may amount to o more than 500 million people: less than 10 per cent of the earthrsquo;s population. The overwhelming majority live in hot climates, their days spent in the warmth of the sun. Mankind first came into being in the sun, the oldest traces of his existence have been found in warm climes. What was the weather like in the biblical paradise? It was eternally warm, hot even, so that Adam and Eve could go about naked and not feel chilled even in the shade of a tree.

Something else strikes the new arrival even as he descends the steps of the airplane: the smell of the tropics. Perhaps hersquo;s had intimations of it. It is the scent that permeated Mr Kanzmanrsquo;s little shop, Colonial and Other Goods, on Perec Street in my hometown of Pinsk. Almonds, cloves, dates, and cocoa. Vanilla and laurel leaves, oranges and bananas, cardamom and saffron. And Drohobych. The interiors of Bruno Schulzrsquo;s cinnamon shops. Didnrsquo;t their ldquo;dimly lit, dark, and solemn interiorsrdquo; smell intensely of paints, lacquer, incense, the aroma of faraway countries and rare substances? Yet the actual smell of the tropics is somewhat different. We instantly recognize its weight, its sticky materiality. The smell makes us at once aware that we are at that point on earth where an exuberant and indefatigable nature labours, incessantly reproducing itself, spreading and blooming, even as it sickens, disintegrates, festers and decays.

It is th

Książka "Shadow of the Sun"
Ryszard Kapuściński; Ryszard Kapuscinski