The Shadow Of The Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Another one of Kapuscinski’s work in Africa. The Shadow of the Sun illustrates how Colonial Africa started taking baby steps into developing nations.
Road to Kumasi
The Three Worlds of Africa
The spiritual world of “African” (if one may use the term despite its gross simplification) is rich and complex, and his inner life is permeated by a profound religiosity. He believes in the coexistence of three different yet related worlds.
The first is the one that surrounds us, the palpable and visible reality composed of living people, animals, and plants, as well as inanimate objects: stones, water, air.
The second is the world of the ancestors, those who died before us, but who died, as it were, not completely, not finally, not absolutely. Indeed, in a meta physical sense they continue to exist, and are even capable of participating in our life, of influencing it, shaping it. That is why maintaining good relations with ones’s ancestors is a precondition of a successful life, and sometimes even of life itself.
The third world is the rich kingdom of the spirits - spirits that exist independently, yet at the same time are present in every being, in every object, in everything and everywhere.
Comprehension of Time
We climb into the bus and sit down. At this point there is a risk of culture clash, of collisions and conflict. It will undoubtedly occur if the passenger is a foreigner who doesn’t know Africa. Someone like that wil start looking around, squirming, inquiring “When will the bus leave?"
“What do you mean, when?” The astonished driver will reply. “It will leave when we find enough people to fill it up."
The Europeans and the Africans have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equably and without relation to anything external”. The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must need deadlines, dates, days and hours. He moves within the rigor of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat - time annihilates him.
Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is a man who influences time, its shape, course and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors). Time is even something that that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being).
Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even non-existence, if we do not direct our energy towards it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.
The absolute opposite of time as it is understood in the European worldview.
In practical terms, this means that if you go to a village where a meeting is scheduled for the afternoon but find no one at the appointed spot, asking “When will the meeting take place?" makes no sense. You know the answer: “It will take place when people come”.
Therefore the African who boards a bus sits down in a vacant seat, and immediately falls into a state in which he spends a great portion of his life: a benumbed waiting.