(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It is amazing, but none the less true – in Africa, human life depends on something as fleeting and intangible as shadow, writes one of the most prominent writers of our time, the Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in the book "Ebony". In the article "In the shadow of the tree, Africa", he describes the importance of the tree for the Africans who live simple lives without too much material fatigue, to say the least.
Or rather; in the shade of the tree.
The three of life
On his many journeys through Africa, it strikes Kapuscinski that he often encounters barren natural landscapes where hardly any weeds grow. But still; one tree remains majestically in the middle of the village, because the Africans have cared for the tree carefully for generations, knowing its crucial importance. In the shade of the tree, the men make their community decisions, the children receive their education there and the women meet in the evening to exchange gossip about the day's events. With a strong, rooted oral storytelling tradition, the tree becomes history's witness. Without the tree, history stops, no one gets to pass on the generational wisdom and the knowledge becomes useless and fragmented – for the community. "For man's memory here is the horizon of history".
So far in rendering, Kapuscinski would be the first to arrest us for infinite generalization. Africans and African life are no more uniform than a colorful mosaic surface. So we can say that this tree can be found in Adofo, a village not far from the Blue Nile, in the Ethiopian province of Wollega.
It does not touch the symbolism; Africa is perhaps the continent in the world that is largely given the natural elements. The weather is a being or not being. In many places in Africa, one can use a proverb literally: A human being no longer lives beyond his shadow.
At the same time, it is clear that the large tree in Adofo carries greater symbolism, this time with a negative sign. In recent months, various UN reports have unequivocally stated that future climate change will affect the world's poor population. Once again, the leaders of the West show themselves unwilling to accept responsibility for the burden they place and have placed – over several hundred years – on Africa's shoulders. It started in the heyday of the slave trade, and was officially confirmed at the conference in Berlin in 1884-85, when the great powers divided and divided the continent. Well, divided is probably not the right term, because in pre-colonial times there were over ten thousand small states, ethnic confederations and kingdoms in Africa. With the Berlin Conference, ten thousand were reduced to fifty Western colonies.
Ingenuity
It is in the era of decolonization that the journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski comes to Africa for the first time. In 1958. Ghana. He is privileged despite having no money. Poland is a poor country and it is the first time the newspapers have taken the decision to send their own journalist so far away. Despite the fact that he quickly becomes infected with Malaria, he refuses to call home and ask for assistance. Then he will be sent back.
«… Such crisis situations seem worse and more dangerous at a distance than they turn out to be up close. Our imagination thirsts for every hint of sensation, eagerly noticing the slightest sign of danger or the faintest trace of gunpowder odor, to immediately magnify these symptoms to monstrous, crippling dimensions. "
Different shapes
Most of the texts in "Ebony" are written in the classic form of reporting, with a strong subject with a sense of justice in the face of small people and big events, and with the will to draw the big lines backwards, sideways and forwards.
“Our new leader, General Ironsi, is a man of supernatural qualities. Someone shot him, but the bullet bowed, without even striking the general. "
"In a lecture about Rwanda" he has chosen – precisely – the lecture as the form. There, Kapuscinski tells about the historical assumptions that underlay the genocide in 1994; the endless struggle between the caste designations Tutsi and Hutu, about a country with far too many people and far too little space, about the struggle between dictatorship and democracy. In "Amin", Kapuscinski has chosen the portrait form, and paints an extremely fascinating picture of Africa's most famous dictator-in-chief. The poor boy who grows up alone with a mother who has nothing but a pot in which she can cook millet and sell it on. On the threshold of the independence era in the fifties, many of the colonial power's officers have an interest in being stationed as long as possible. So they recruit third-rate people from among their African subordinates, including Amin, who by the time independence comes in Uganda in 1962, has become a general and deputy commander of the army – thanks to the British. Then came a new "popular" revolution and Amin seized power, squashed any threat and appointed himself president, and later field marshal for life. "He was a person with inexhaustible energy, always engaged, ceaselessly in motion. When, as president, he sometimes called a cabinet meeting, he was only able to participate in it for a short time. He got bored, got up from his chair and went out." This energetic man took the lives of somewhere between one hundred and fifty and three hundred thousand people in the course of eight years.
Despite the book's occasionally very gloomy undertone, Kapuscinski, whom he has driven forward, ends with a story about a lighter and more straightforward version of history and the future. The author and his Tanzanian friends have just been visited by a deadly curious elephant around the campfire – under the tree:
""Did you see that?"
"Yes" I emerged, yet another half-death.
«It was an elephant»
"No," he replied. “The spirit of Africa always takes on the shape of an elephant. For the elephant, no animal can defeat. Neither the lion, nor the buffalo, nor the serpent. "
