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

anybody, hadn’t occupied, hadn’t enslaved. They could regard me from a position of superiority. They were of a black race, but a pure one. I stood among them weak, with nothing more to say.
    I didn’t feel comfortable anywhere. The color of my skin, albeit privileged, also confined me to the cage of apartheid. A gilded cage—Oyster Bay—but a cage nonetheless. Oyster Bay is a beautiful neighborhood. Beautiful, blooming with flowers—and boring. Granted, one could stroll here amid tall palm trees, admire the billowing bougainvillea and the elegant, delicate tuberose, the cliffs covered with thick seaweed. But what else? Besides this, what? The residents of the neighborhood were colonial bureaucrats, who thought only of getting to the end of their contract, buying a crocodile skin or a rhinoceros horn as a souvenir, and leaving. Their wives discussed either the children’s health or a past or upcoming party. And I had a daily story to file! About what? Where would I get the material? There was one small local newspaper, the
Tanganyika Standard
. I visited its editorial offices, but the staff consisted of these very same Englishmen from Oyster Bay. And they too were already packing.
    I went to the Indian quarter. But what was I to do here? Where was I to go? Who was there for me to talk to? The heat was dreadful, and it was impossible to walk for any length of time: there is no air to breathe, your legs grow weak, your shirt drips with sweat. After an hour of wandering around, you are fed up with everything. You have but one desire left: to sit down somewhere in the shade. Better yet, beneath a fan. And then a thought strikes you: do the inhabitants of the North appreciate what a treasure they possess in that gray, drab, perpetually cloudy sky, with its one great, miraculous advantage—that there is no sun in it?
    My main goal, of course, was the African suburbs. I had their names written down. I had the address for the office of the ruling party, TANU (Tanganyika African National Union). But I couldn’t find it. Identical streets, sand up to your ankles, children who won’t let you pass, crowding around you, amused, aggressively curious—a white man in these inaccessible back alleys is a sensation and a spectacle. With each step I lose my confidence. I feel the attentive gaze of men sitting idly in front of houses, following me with their eyes. The women don’t look, turning their heads away: they are Muslims, dressed in black, loosely draped gowns called bui-bui, which completely conceal their bodies as well as part of their faces. The irony of the situation is that even if I were to strike up a conversation with one of the Africans and wished to talk further to him, we would have nowhere to go. The good restaurant is for Europeans, the bad one for Africans. They never frequent each other’s establishments; it isn’t the custom. Each one would feel ill at ease if he found himself in a place inconsistent with the dictates of apartheid.
    Now that I had a powerful, four-wheel-drive vehicle, I could set off. And there was reason to: in early October, a neighbor of Tanganyika’s, Uganda, was gaining its independence. The wave of liberation was sweeping the entire continent: in one year alone, 1960, seventeen African countries ceased being colonies. And this process was continuing, though at a diminished pace.
    From Dar es Salaam to Uganda’s capital, Kampala, where the ceremony was to take place, is three days’ solid driving, going from dawn to dusk at maximum speed. Half the route is asphalt, the other half consists of reddish laterite roads, called African graters because they have a crenellated surface over which you can only drive fast, so as to skim over the tops of the crenellations.
    A Greek went along with me, Leo—a part-time broker, part-time correspondent for various Athenian newspapers. We took four spare tires, two barrels of gasoline, a barrel of water, food. We set out at dawn, heading north, to