The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński Read Free Book Online

can observe how the quiet residence where an elderly Englishman lived with his taciturn wife is now noisily teeming with the new official’s kinsmen. From the earliest morning, a fire is going in front of the house, women are mashing cassava in wooden mortars, a gaggle of children are romping among the flower beds and borders. In the evenings, the entire extended family sits down to dinner on the lawn—for although a new life has begun, an old custom from the days of unremitting poverty remains: one eats only once a day, in the evening.
    Whoever has a more mobile occupation, and less respect for tradition, tries to cover his tracks. In Dodoma, I once ran into a street vendor hawking oranges who used to bring these fruits to my house in Dar es Salaam. I was happy to see him, and asked him what he was doing here, five hundred kilometers from the capital. He had had to flee from his cousins, he explained. He had shared his meager profits with them for a long time, but finally had had enough, and ran. “I will have a few cents for a while,” he said happily. “Until they find me again!”
    Social advancements of this type are still relatively infrequent in Dar es Salaam in the years immediately following independence. In the white neighborhoods, whites still dominate. For Dar es Salaam, like other cities in this part of the continent, consists of three distinct quarters, separated from one another either by water or by a stretch of bare ground.
    The best neighborhood, close to the sea, belongs of course to the whites. It is called Oyster Bay: magnificent villas, gardens exploding with flowers, thick lawns, smooth, gravel-strewn avenues. Yes, you can live truly luxuriously here, especially since you don’t have to do anything yourself: everything is taken care of by quiet, vigilant, discreetly moving servants. Here, a man ambles along as he probably would do in paradise: slowly, loosely, content that he is here, enchanted by the beauty of the world.
    Beyond the bridge, on the other side of the lagoon, significantly farther from the sea, lies a paved-over, crowded, busy, mercantile neighborhood. Its inhabitants are Indians, Pakistanis, natives of Goa, arrivals from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, all of them collectively called Asians here. Although there are several men of great wealth among them, the majority are middle class, living without any excess. They are traders. They buy, sell, act as middlemen, speculate. They are always counting something, counting endlessly, shaking their heads, quarreling. Dozens, hundreds of shops, wide open, their goods spilling out onto the sidewalks, onto the streets. Fabrics, furniture, lamps, pots and pans, mirrors, knickknacks, toys, rice, syrups, spices—everything. In front of a shop sits a Hindu, one foot resting on the seat of his chair, his fingers digging at his toes.
    Every Saturday afternoon, the inhabitants of this airless, swarming neighborhood go to the seashore. They dress in their finest clothes—the women in golden saris, the men in neat shirts. They travel by car. The whole family piles in, perched on one another’s laps, shoulders, heads—ten, fifteen people. They stop the car on the steep slope above the ocean. At this time of day, the incoming tide pounds the beach with powerful, deafening waves. They open the windows. They breathe in the salty smell. They air themselves. On the other side of the immense body of water before them lies their country, which some don’t even know anymore: India. They spend fifteen minutes here, maybe a half hour. Then the convoy drives off and the shore is empty again.
    The farther from the sea, the greater the heat, the aridity, and the dust. It is there, on the dry sand, on the bare, barren earth, that stand the clay huts of the African quarter. Its individual neighborhoods bear the names of the old slave villages of the sultan of Zanzibar: Kariakoo, Hala, Magomeni, Kinondoni. The names may vary, but the quality of their clay houses is