The best thing I’ve read this year is The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinki. I learned of this book from reading Matt Lakeman’s review, which is also fantastic. He opens like this:
Sometimes I want to abandon any pretense of a normal life and live like a drifter. I could drop the burden of ordinary work, friends, relationships, property, and just go to unusual places, see unusual things, and exist on the margins of civilization where society doesn’t really make sense, but is never boring. I’d have to give up on safety, stability, and the traditional building blocks of happiness (family, structure, etc.), but I’d gain adventure, ruggedness, and assuredness born from being solely responsible for my safety. I’d live by my own rules.
In other words, sometimes I wish I could live like Ryszard Kapuscinski.
The books is a series of unconnected chapters about Kapuscinski’s life and travels in Africa. Kapuscinski was a fascinating guy. He was a Polish journalist who wrote like novelist. He had what I think can only be described as genuine curiosity about the world, which naturally led him to some of the most dangerous and unstable places on earth. He describes his own book here:
I lived in Africa for several years. I first went there in 1957. Then, over the next forty years, I returned whenever the opportunity arose. I traveled extensively, avoiding official routes, palaces, important personages, and high-level politics. Instead, I opted to hitch rides on passing trucks, wander with nomads through the desert, be the guest of peasants of the tropical savannah. Their life is endless toil, a torment they endure with astonishing patience and good humor.
This is therefore not a book about Africa, but rather about some people from there—about encounters with them, and time spent together. The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say “Africa.” In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.
One of the many reasons to pick up this book is the chapter on Liberia. It turns out my Dad and my grandparents lived in Liberia for a year in the 70s. Because of that, I assumed Liberia must be a pretty chill place. I vaguely remembered something my dad had told me about Liberia being in part settled by former American slaves, but I didn’t know much of the history of the country. What actually happened is so wild it almost seems like science fiction:
In 1821, a ship arrived at a place near where my hotel now stands (Monrovia lies on the Atlantic, on a peninsula), bringing from the United States an agent of the American Colonization Society, Robert Stockton. Stockton, holding a pistol to the head of the local tribal chief, King Peter, forced him to sell—for six muskets and one trunk of beads—the land upon which the aforementioned American organization planned to settle freed slaves (mainly from the cotton plantations of Virginia, Georgia, Maryland). Stockton’s organization was of a liberal and charitable character. Its activists believed that the best reparation for the injuries of slavery would be the return of former slaves to the land of their ancestors—to Africa.
Every year from then on, ships came from the United States carrying groups of liberated slaves, who began to settle in the area of present-day Monrovia. They did not constitute a large population. By the time the Republic of Liberia was proclaimed in 1847, there were only six thousand of them. It is quite possible that their number never even reached twenty thousand: less than 1 percent of the country’s population.
The fate and behavior of these settlers (they called themselves Americo-Liberians) is fascinating. Yesterday still they were black pariahs, slaves from America’s southern plantations, with no legal rights. The majority of them did not know how to read or write, and had no trade or professional skills. Their fathers had been kidnapped years earlier from Africa, transported to America in chains, and sold in slave markets. And now they, the descendants of those unfortunates, until recently slaves themselves, found themselves once again in Africa, in the land of their ancestors, among kinsmen with whom they shared common roots and skin color. At the will of liberal white Americans, they were brought here and left to themselves, to their own fate. How would they conduct themselves? What would they do? In contrast to their benefactors’ expectations, the newcomers did not kiss the ground or throw themselves into the arms of the local Africans.
From their experience in the American South, the Americo-Liberians knew only one type of relationship: master-slave. Their first move upon arrival in this new land, therefore, was to recreate precisely that social structure, only now they, the slaves of yesterday, are the masters, and it is the indigenous communities whom they set out to conquer and rule.
Liberia is the voluntary continuation of a slave society by slaves who did not wish to abolish an unjust order, but wanted to preserve it, develop it, and exploit it for their own benefit.
The Liberia chapter is incredible, as are many of others. I couldn’t recommend this book more, even if Africa isn’t something you’ve generally been interested in.