Ryszard Kapuscinski: The shadow of Africa

I’m going to do a proper summer reading list but have to mention a book that is so beautifully crafted I can’t put it down.

Ryszard Kapuscinski in his book The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life produces a rattle bag of personal insights of the Africa of the 50′s and 60′s. It’s a personal account of his time as a Foreign Affairs correspondent experiencing and chronicling the destruction of Colonial Africa. It’s elegantly written and darkly comic. Stealing a boat in the dead of night but forgetting it was monsoon season is just one of the very funny tales that have been enriched by time in the recounting. A great read.