The Shadow of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

The town is the capital of the kingdom of Ashanti (which is part of Ghana), and it vigilantly guards its otherness, its colorful and robust traditions. Here you can see tribal chiefs strolling along the streets, or the performance of a rite that dates back to ancient times. And in this culture, the world of magic, of spells and enchantments, thrives and prospers.
    The road from Accra to Kumasi is not just the five hundred kilometers from the Atlantic coast to the interior; it is also a voyage into those areas of the African continent where there are fewer vestiges of colonialism than along the coastlines. For Africa’s immensity, its dearth of navigable rivers and its lack of roads, as well as its difficult, murderous climate, while presenting an impediment to its development, also furnished a natural defense against invasion: colonialists were unable to penetrate very deeply. They kept to the shores, to their ships and fortifications, their supplies of food and quinine. In the nineteenth century, if someone—like Stanley—dared to traverse the continent from east to west, the feat was widely celebrated for years to come. And it was largely due to these obstacles to communication that many African cultures and traditions have been able to survive intact to this day.
    Officially, but only officially, colonialism reigned in Africa from the time of the Berlin West Africa Conference (188485), during which several European states (mainly England and France, but also Belgium, Germany, and Portugal) divided the whole continent among themselves, a status that persisted until Africa won independence in the second half of the twentieth century. In reality, however, colonial penetration began much earlier, as long ago as the fifteenth century, and flourished over the next five hundred years. The most shameful and brutal phase of this conquest was the trade in African slaves, which went on for more than three hundred years. Three hundred years of raids, roundups, pursuits, and ambushes, organized, often with the help of African and Arab partners, by white men. Millions of young Africans were deported across the Atlantic in horrific conditions, stuffed down the hatches of ships; those lucky to emerge alive would with their sweat build the riches and might of the New World.
    Africa—persecuted and defenseless—was depopulated, destroyed, and ruined. Whole stretches of the continent were deserted; barren bush supplanted what had been sunny flowering lands. But the most painful and lasting imprints of this epoch were left upon the memory and consciousness of the Africans: centuries of disdain, humiliation, and suffering gave them an inferiority complex, and a conviction, deep in their hearts, of having been wronged.
    When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The course of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system’s defeat and demise.
    How and why did this happen? First, a short detour into the foul realm of racial thinking. The central subject, the essence, the core of relations between Europeans and Africans during the colonial era, was the difference of race, of skin color. Everything—each exchange, connection, conflict—was translated into the language of black and white. And, of course, white was better, higher, more powerful than black. Whites were sir, master, sahib, bwana kubwa, unchallenged lords and rulers, sent by God to hold sway over the blacks. Into the African was inculcated the notion that the white man was untouchable, unconquerable, that whites constituted a homogeneous, cohesive force. Such was the ideology that ably supported the system of colonial domination, by teaching that to question or contest the system was absolutely pointless.
    Then, suddenly, Africans recruited into the British and French armies in Europe observed that the white men were fighting one another, shooting one another, destroying one another’s cities. It was a revelation, a surprise, a