An embroiderer's licence?

Robert Oakeshott

THE SHADOW OF THE SUN: MY AFRICAN LIFE by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Allen Lane, Penguin, f18.99, pp. 325, ISBN 071399455X

Three hours after Prince Philip, in the name of Queen Elizabeth, transfers Zanzibar into Arab hands, Field Marshal John Okello makes his move and in the course of a single night seizes power in Zanzibar.

So Ryszard Kapuscinski tells his readers in one of the longer pieces in this rather mixed collection of writings drawn from his experience as a Polish journalist in tropical black Africa between 1957, the year of Ghana's independence, and the later 1990s. I for one was pleased to be reminded of Okello, a young African revolutionary of fortune in the 1960s, who was unquestionably the prime mover behind Zanzibar's post-independence revolution but was then quickly elbowed out of the way by Abeid Karume, a much older former merchant seaman and his fellow leaders of the island's Afro Shirazi party, which had won a majority of the votes in the pre-independence elections. Soon afterwards Okello was sent back to the African mainland by the new Afro Shirazi authorities and subsequently returned to his home village in Uganda. In Keesing's Contemporary Archives he is referred to as a Uganda tribesman. I like to think of him more romantically as a kind of African Garibaldi who led a successful revolution but received no office in the new regime. Since my interest in him was revived by this Kapuscinski piece, I have learnt that he was eventually murdered in his home village by a detachment of Ugandan soldiers sent to do just that by the unspeakable Idi Amin.

For what he achieved in Zanzibar and for his quite deplorable and most wretched end, Okello, or so it seems to me, deserves to be rescued from oblivion. All the same, I doubt whether I could justify allotting him all this space were it not for an egregious error in Kapuscinski's sentence quoted above. That sentence is just not true. A full month, not just three hours, elapsed between the granting of independence to the Sultan of Zanzibar's Arab-supported government on 9 December 1963 and the Okello-led revolution of 12 January 1964. What's more, Kapuscinski must have known that, for he describes at some length — and is clearly proud of — his own part in what gave him (together with a French journalist and an American photographer) a head start in reaching the island after Okello's revolution. Earlier, he seems to have established some sort of contact with the ex-seaman, Karume. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that either his memory became almost terminally feeble between 1964 and when he put together this book or he has chosen to allow himself an 'embroiderer's licence' with the facts.

No doubt it doesn't matter that much sub specie aetemitatis whether Okello's revolution followed Zanzibar's independence after a month or three hours. On the other hand it is surely right to point out that not everything Kapuscinski writes has to be accepted as gospel truth.

For example, some scepticism may be in order when he offers, as quasi set-pieces, high-tension encounters with a range of black Africa's life-threatening phenomena. Three of these stick in my memory. A struggle with an 'Egyptian cobra, yellowish grey . . Its venom brings death quickly.' A herd of buffaloes through which the writer and his travelling companion had apparently no real option but to drive, albeit very slowly and in bottom gear. 'A mighty force slumbers in the herd and — should it explode anywhere near us — is deadly.' And a nearly exhausted water supply when

a truck in which Kapuscinski has hitched a lift breaks down, miles from any road or regular traffic, in the Mauritanian desert. There is no need to labour the point that our hero survives to tell the tale of these apparently close encounters with the next world.

But it is not the more political pieces in this book which I will remember. Zanzibar apart, there are for example full length chapters headed 'The Anatomy of a Coup d'Etat' (Nigeria 1966), 'A Lecture on Rwanda' and 'Amin'. Nor do I expect to remember for very long how Kapuscinski and his companion Leo slew the yellowishgrey Egyptian cobra after a titanic struggle, or how the great herd of buffalo let them pass.

The author is at his best when describing the commonplaces of African experience as he observed them. Here he is writing about the long wait which must be endured before a rural bus fills up and can get underway:

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.

There is plenty about which to despair. Worst of all is Kapuscinki's account of the violence and fighting which have been going on now in Liberia for more than 20 years, since President Tubman's successor, William Tolbert, was hacked to pieces in his bed by a group of NCOs headed by Sgt Doe in 1980. It is true that the Southern Sudan has been in a more or less similar state, of warlords fighting each other with private armies largely manned by kids, since even longer, the 1970s. On the other hand a genuine political conflict — between the Christian and animist South and the Arab North — underlies the continuous warfare in the Sudan and thus suggests the posibility of a solution. on Pakistan or, geographically closer, on Eritrean lines. In Liberia, by contrast, the main warlords who followed Sgt Doe, Charles Taylor and Prince Bishop seem, like Leopold of the Belgians in the 19th century, to be animated simply by greed for a combination of personal power and money.

And yet, nevertheless, L'Afrique noire nest pas maudite as Rene Dumont, the great French agronomist felt it necessary to write — as the disclaimer heading for his first chapter — in his highly critical 1960s study of post-colonial black Africa, L'Afrique noire est mal partie. And yes, there are optimistic passages in The Shadow of the Sun. One of the most persuasive is when the author takes part in a service of Christian worship under the auspices of one the multitudinous new Christian churches in post-colonial black Africa. The place is in the neighbourhood of Port Harcourt in the Niger delta in Eastern Nigeria. The participants were

for the most part young people from an industrial African town, the new Nigerian middle class. They belonged to a social group modelling itself on European and American elites, whose culture is essentially Christian. They wanted to familiarise themselves with this culture and this faith, get a feel for their nature, identify with them. So they joined one of the Christian congregations...

That may perhaps be too heavy and churchy for some tastes. Let me close with extracts from what for me is the most delightful cameo of Africa. The scene is Bamako, the scorching capital of Mali, on the southern edge of the Sahara. The drama tells of how the local people are suddenly brought to life by a photographer:

The street . . . is dead still from the early morning. People slump motionlessly against walls . .. they sprawl in the shade of eucalyptus and mimosa trees. They sit on a long bench in a bar run by a Mauritanian . Despite having observed them all at length on several occasions, I have been unable to determine exactly what it is they are doing. Perhaps that's because they are not doing anything. They don't even talk. They resemble people sitting for hours in a doctor's waiting room.

And then:

One day a man from Valencia arrived. He had a travel agency back home and was driving around West Africa collecting material for a tourist brochure. He unpacked a bag full of cameras, lenses, filters, rolls of film and began walking round the street, chatting with people, joking, making various promises. That done, he placed his Canon on a tripod, took out a loud referee's whistle and blew it. I was looking out the window and couldn't believe my eyes. Instantly the street filled with people. In a matter of seconds they formed a large circle and began to dance. I don't know where the children came from. They had empty cans which they beat rhythmically. Everyone was keeping the rhythm, clapping their hands and stomping their feet. People woke up, the blood flowed again through their veins, they became animated. Their pleasure in this dance, their happiness in finding themselves again, was palpable. Something started to happen in this street, around them, within them ...

Partying? No, this was something different, something bigger, something loftier and more important. You had only to look at the faces of the dancers. They were attentive, listening intently to the loud rhythm the children beat on their tin cans. And they looked determined, decisive, alive to the significance of this moment, in which they were able to express themselves, participate, prove their presence. Idle and superfluous all day long, all at once they had become visible, needed and important. They existed. They created.

Tropical black Africa has not been the author's only stamping ground as a foreign correspondent from Poland. His assignments have taken him to Asia and Latin America as well. Furthermore, according to the dust-jacket of this book, he 'befriended Che Guevara, Salvador Allende and Patrice Lumumba, witnessed 27 coups and revolutions, and was sentenced to death four times'. I couldn't help feeling what a mercy it was that we had been spared accounts of those death sentences.