Ryszard Kapuscinski
Ebano

Bitter but truthful, rich and never tiring to read, raw yet intense, Ebony is probably one of the best historical-anthropological analyses in novel form of Africa written by a journalist-reporter, specifically sent to the heart of darkness of the Black Continent to record its most hidden and secret details. Structured according to a handful of chapter-digressions concerning individual states and/or common territories, the work shines for its very particular and refined realist approach inscribed within a biography completely devoid of stereotypes, clichés, fairy tales, suggestions, and mass imaginations that would likely be responsible for lower quality and greater detachment from facts.

Ebony is a kind of compendium of post-colonial Africa, a series of reflections on the decolonization process between the Sixties and Seventies and on the disastrous consequences due to the abandonment of the last European banners in the sub-Saharan lands. As a reporter on African soil for the Polish press agency PAP, Kapuscinski undertakes a real but also mental and ideological journey - in the manner of a historical flashback - to what were once the possessions of the white dominator, a journey that instead of limiting itself to sectoral portions of the Continent or according to argumentative and/or thematic schemes embraces the African topos in a grand compendium of events, personal sensations and suggestions, beliefs, folklore, climate, local and/or atypical and curious events, but also of hopes and prayers for a better future that may never come. The author's approach to different African cultures is unique in its kind: demonstrating a vivid anthropological-mental sensitivity - rather "bizarre" for a European reporter-journalist, moreover the son of a context that tended to flirt with the aberrant racist-colonialist theories of the superiority of the "white" individual over the "black" counterpart - Kapuscinski ventures into any environment and state in which he finds himself operating without fleeing and scorning the local human heritage, breaking down the false barriers of Western society in front of the barbarian, building friendships and brotherhood bonds everywhere, even managing to adapt - albeit laboriously - to the climatic harshness of desert and tropical belts (commendable, just to name a few, his tenacious resistance to the unbearable heat of the dunes and sub-tropical metropolises and the chronic lack of food and especially water).

Kapuscinski's post-colonial Africa, although analyzed without clichés, feelings of contempt, and almanac fantasies, is unfortunately an immense cauldron of poverty, famines, economic backwardness, civil wars, pogroms, massacres, and endless dictatorial flows; from Rwanda to Liberia, passing through Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and the Sahel, the conradian "heart of darkness," just freed from the European yoke, is unable to rise and build economic, political, and social philodemocratic systems respectful of human rights. The great African metropolises are moreover the focus of the sufferings of the African people, abandoned by former dominators who nevertheless continue to consider their old possessions as prizes in pseudo-diplomatic games over an immense chessboard of iniquities, arbitrary interests, and sly trades: bombarded by personal armies and revolutionary para-armies, streets filled with bodies, beggars, and petty thieves, sometimes even impenetrable and inaccessible from the outside, cities like Asmara, Zanzibar, Kigali, Kampala, and Monrovia, islands and (un)happy ports between a desert and/or forest, represent the mirror of a continent among the richest and most precious of the globe wickedly torn apart by the wolfish hunger of the pseudo-superior Man and his henchmen and mercenaries.

And yet, amid such ruin, the Africa of the Thousand and One Cultures resonates with inestimable treasures hidden in the heart of the torn metropolises and, above all, in the inhospitable heat of desert and tropical climates. Kapuscinski's pen is indeed very skillful in making the reader perceive the colors and flavors of the local folklore, of the colorful spice markets and foods, of that frugality and simplicity unique and magical in their kind. The best exemplification of this vast and enviable Africa lies in the rail journey that the reporter takes from Dakar to Bamako, the capital of Mali. During the long and arduous journey, the figure of the French-speaking Madame Diuf stands out, who at every stop procures food and other goods from the peddlers crowding in front of the wagons until the compartment is filled with merchandise, a perfect metaphor for the European's curiosity in front of the inestimable patrimony of the Black Continent.

Hefty, dense, in-depth, and never boring or disperse, Ebony is the result of a "European" mind open and receptive to the feared sub-Saharan darkness, of a reporter capable of impressing with vivid yet simple prose the reader, often and willingly outdone by clichés, urban legends, stories from bad anthologies, and mass fairy tales.