The section "From Africa" aims to tell the story of African women and men who are working effectively and professionally at the service of their country. These are ordinary people, who perhaps do not get into the news, but who incarnate the true hope of the entire Continent. Harambee has as its objective: show the world this hidden Africa, the the true Africa. Communicating is an effective way of cooperating.
Martyn Drakard | Thursday, 29 March 2007
Africa through Polish eyes
Poland's best-known journalist made travel into an art form with his insightful books.
Hollywood's rediscovery of Africa in the past couple of years is gratifying for those of us who live there, but its films tend to recycle hoary cliches. For a more sympathetic and more insightful look, you must read Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in January. This Polish writer and war correspondent had a life-long love affair with Africa and The Shadow of the Sun must rank among the world's best travel books. Obituaries described him as a "master of modern journalism", "The Greatest Reporter in the World", and a "Herodotus of our times". rumour had it that he was an outside chance for a Nobel Prize. In the Polish parliament he was praised as "a witness of human suffering and a witness of people's hopes."
The section “From Africa” aims to tell the story of African women and men who are working effectively and professionally at the service of their country. These are ordinary people, who perhaps do not get into the news, but who incarnate the true hope of the entire Continent. Harambee has as its objective: show the world this hidden Africa, the the true Africa. Communicating is an effective way of cooperating.
Poland's best-known journalist made travel into an art form with his insightful books.
Hollywood's rediscovery of Africa in the past couple of years is gratifying for those of us who live there, but its films tend to recycle hoary cliches. For a more sympathetic and more insightful look, you must read Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in January. This Polish writer and war correspondent had a life-long love affair with Africa and The Shadow of the Sun must rank among the world's best travel books. Obituaries described him as a "master of modern journalism", "The Greatest Reporter in the World", and a "Herodotus of our times". rumour had it that he was an outside chance for a Nobel Prize. In the Polish parliament he was praised as "a witness of human suffering and a witness of people's hopes."
Published in Polish in 1998, The Shadow of the Sun spans his African visits of over 30 years to the east, west and centre of the continent in which he exposed himself to situations, places and people that no one else, except some of the hardiest missionaries, would dare to take on.
For him the 20th century totalitarian horrors find their origin in the racism of the colonial era and the slave trafficking. Slavery has left scars even to our day, poisoning relations between Africans themselves as well as between the races. It was a way of telling the African he was a nobody, infra-human. This racism still exists, not only in trade and finance but in culture too.
As an example, he asks why the European languages have not developed a vocabulary that allows them to describe non-European cultures and worlds. Why are there no words to describe the dark, suffocating interior of the jungle; the wide range of insects that are never far away; or, more difficult still, the domain of the beliefs, the mentality and the mystery of Africa and its peoples? Kapuscinski tries, as few writers before him, to see Africa as Africans see their surroundings.
Idi Amin's nightmare reign of eight years is summed up in about seven pages. We learn how his mother carried the bonny boy on her back from the far, inhospitable north of Uganda to the fertile, prosperous south, in search of basic survival. How they reached the garrison town of Jinja, on Lake Victoria, and how with his fine physique, boxing skills and cruel fearlessness, the young Amin was just what the British recruiting officers of the King's African Rifles were looking for. Little did they know that this almost illiterate, unemployed youth would destroy his country and become a name to be feared.
Kapuscinski makes a sharp observation: Amin was a Kakwa, a people whose only concern is how to survive. He was a brute of a man, but worse still were the men he surrounded himself with -- huge like himself, poor as he had been, with nothing to lose. So as not to incur the displeasure of their boss and benefactor they played safe and outdid themselves in cruelty towards the Ugandan people.
Marytn Drakard is African Contributing Editor for MercatorNet.
This article was published in www.mercatornet.org