Free The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński

capturing and incorporating us: we discover within ourselves icy crevasses, chasms, and abysses, whose presence fills us with suffering and fear. But this moment of discovery, too, passes, the spirits desert us, depart, and disappear, and that which remains, under the mountain of the most bizarre coverings, is truly pitiful.
    A man right after a strong attack of malaria is a human rag. He lies in a puddle of sweat, he is still feverish, and he can move neither hand nor foot. Everything hurts; he is dizzy and nauseous. He is exhausted, weak, limp. Carried by someone else, he gives the impression of having no bones or muscles. And many days must pass before he can get up on his feet again.
    Each year in Africa malaria afflicts tens of millions of people, and in those areas where it is most prevalent—in wet, low-lying, marshy regions—it kills one child out of three. There are many types of malaria; some, the gentle ones, you should be able to recover from as you would from the flu. But here, even those can lay waste whoever succumbs to them. First, because in this murderous climate one endures with difficulty even the slightest indisposition; second, because Africans are often malnourished, attenuated, hungry. Time and again you encounter here drowsy, apathetic, benumbed people. They sit or lie for hours on end on the streets, by the roadsides, doing nothing. You speak to them and they do not hear you; you look at them and have the impression that they do not see you. It is unclear if they are ignoring you, if these are just idle lazybones and do-nothings, or if they are being ravaged by a malaria that is slowly and inexorably killing them. You do not know how to behave toward them, or what to think.
    I lay for two weeks in the Mulago Hospital. The attacks recurred, but each one less intense and exhausting than the preceding. I got countless injections. Dr. Patel came every day, examined me, told me that when I was better he would introduce me to his family. He has a wealthy family, owners of large stores in Kampala and in the provinces. They were able to educate him in England, and he received his medical degree in London. How did his ancestors come to find themselves in Uganda? At the end of the nineteenth century, his grandfather and thousands of other young Indians were brought by the English to eastern Africa to build the railway line from Mombasa to Kampala. It was a new phase of colonial expansion: the conquest and subjugation of the continent’s interior. If you look closely at old maps of Africa, you will notice a peculiarity: inscribed along the coastlines are dozens, hundreds of names of ports, cities, and settlements, whereas the rest, a vast 99 percent of Africa’s surface, is a blank, essentially virgin area, only sparsely marked here and there.
    The Europeans clung to the coasts, to their ports, eating houses, and ships, reluctantly and only sporadically making incursions into the interior. They were hampered by the lack of roads, fearful of hostile tribes and tropical diseases—malaria, sleeping sickness, yellow fever, leprosy. And although they inhabited the coasts for more than four centuries, they did so in a spirit of impermanence, with a narrow-minded goal of quick profits and easy spoils. Their ports were really only leeches on the body of Africa, points of export for slaves, gold, and ivory. Their goal: to carry away everything, and at the lowest possible price. Consequently, many of these European beachheads resembled the poorest sections of old Liverpool or Lisbon. In the course of four hundred years in Luanda, the Portuguese did not dig a single well for potable water, or illuminate the streets with lanterns.
    The construction of the railway line to Kampala was the symbol of a new, more paternalistic approach to Africa on the part of the colonial powers, especially London and Paris. With the division of Africa among the European states already securely accomplished, they could turn their