The Shadow of the Sun Read Online Free

fellow passengers are only the second, perhaps even the first generation of Africans fortunate enough to be conveyed to their destinations. For thousands and thousands of years, Africa walked. People here did not have a concept of the wheel, and were unable to adopt it. They walked, they wandered, and whatever had to be transported they carried—on their backs, on their shoulders, and, most often, on their heads.
    How is it that during the nineteenth century there were ships on lakes deep in the interior of the continent? They were first disassembled at oceanic ports, then carried piecemeal on people’s heads and put back together again on the shores of the lakes. Cities, factories, mining equipment, electrical plants, hospitals, all were carried in sections deep into Africa. All the products of nineteenth-century technology were transported into Africa’s interior on the heads of its inhabitants.
    The people of northern Africa, even of the Sahara, were more fortunate in this respect: they could use a beast of burden, the camel. But neither the camel nor the horse was able to adapt to regions south of the Sahara—they perished, decimated by the encephalitis borne by the tsetse fly, as well as by other fatal diseases of the tropics.
    The problem of Africa is the dissonance between the environment and the human being, between the immensity of African space (more than thirty million square kilometers!) and the defenseless, barefoot, wretched man who inhabits it. Whichever direction he turns, there is distance, emptiness, wilderness, boundlessness. Often one had to walk for hundreds, thousands of miles to encounter other people (to say “another human being” would be inappropriate, for a lone individual could not survive in these conditions). For the most part information, knowledge, technological innovation, goods, commodities, and the experiences of others did not penetrate here, could not find a way in. Exchange as a means of participating in world culture did not exist. If it appeared, it did so only accidentally, as a rare event, an exception. And without exchange there is no progress.
    Most frequently, people lived in small groups, clans, tribes isolated and scattered over vast, hostile territories, in mortal peril from malaria, drought, heat, hunger.
    Living and moving about in small groups allowed them to flee danger more easily and thereby survive. These peoples applied the same tactic once practiced by light cavalry on the European field of battle: the keys were mobility, the avoidance of head-on confrontation, the skirting and outsmarting of peril. As a consequence, the African was a man on the move. Even if he led a sedentary life in a village, he was also on the move, for periodically the entire village would set off: either the water had run out, or the soil had ceased to bear crops, or an epidemic had broken out, and off they would go, in search of succor, in the hope of finding something better. Only city life brought them a measure of stability.
    The population of Africa was a gigantic, matted, crisscrossing web, spanning the entire continent and in constant motion, endlessly undulating, bunching up in one place and spreading out in another, a rich fabric, a colorful arras.
    This compulsory mobility of the population resulted in Africa’s interior having no old cities, at least none comparable in age to those that still exist in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia. Similarly—again in contrast to those other regions—many African societies (some claim all of them) today occupy terrain that they did not previously inhabit.
    All are arrivals from elsewhere, all are immigrants. Africa is their common world, but within its boundaries they wandered and shifted about for centuries, a process that continues in certain parts of the continent to this day. Hence the striking physical characteristic of civilization is its temporariness, its provisional character, its material discontinuity. A hut put up only yesterday