By Stephen Williams

The shadow of the Sun

My African life

By Ryszard Kapuscinski

£18.99 Alan Lane

ISBN O-713-99455-X

Ryszard Kapuscinski first went to Accra in 1957. He spent the next 40 years reporting from Africa, Asia and Latin America as a correspondent for the Polish News Agency. During these four decades he witnessed the initial euphoria of Africa’s post-colonial independence, and 27 revolutions and coups around the world. This book is series of encounters with the surreal, the horrific, the wonderful and the magical as he criss-crossed most of the African continent.

Kapuscinski is less concerned with political and historical musings, preferring a more subjective and intimate portrait of the people and places he meets and visits. Throughout the rather piecemeal pattern of the book, the author disregards chronological and geographical order, bouncing the reader from one episode to the next.

He relates his first experiences in Accra, next takes us to Zanzibar before embarking for Uganda, Nigeria, the Horn of Africa, Mali, Mauritania, Rwanda, Sudan, Senegal, Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia and Eritrea. Apart from fleeting references to a visit to Mozambique, and an extraordinary religious cult in Zambia, the southern African region barely gets a mention - another book perhaps?.

Hardships and dangers abound. He nearly drowns attempting to leave post-revolution Zanzibar; escaping not for his own safety, but in order to investigate rumours of similar uprisings on the mainland. He envisages dying of thirst in the deserts of Mali when the truck he is travelling in breaks down. There is a close encounter with a cobra on one page; he falls into a malarial fever on another. He describes a brush with shifta bandits in Ethiopia and a garden party in Tanzania, when he is transfixed by an gatecrashing bull-elephant.

However, he underplays the risk of falling victim to the random violence of Africa’s conflicts in his determination to witness events for the newsroom back in Warsaw.

While many of his fellow correspondents ran equal risks, you sense that Kapuscinski’s circumstances set his apart. There are two main reasons: Firstly, his employers could never match the resources of his western colleagues. While those stringing or reporting for Reuters, AP or any of the other major news agencies could call on budgets to evacuate them if they fell sick, or fly them out of a country if events turned particularly perilous, the Polish News Agency could only work on a shoe-string. The budget never allowed for five-star hotels, private aircraft or air-conditioned vehicles. It only stretched to the most humble of accommodations and travel in hopelessly overcrowded local buses and trains.

The other aspect that sets our author apart from other foreign journalists is that he also a ?third world’ citizen. Born in 1932 in Poland, his early years coincided with the Second World War. The agonies of war - hunger, displacement, deprivation, foreign occupations and suffering - were early experiences. This gives him an edge; an ability to empathise with Africa.

These writings are different from ordinary reportage. Facts and figures, the usual staple of journalists, are given less prominence in this book. This gives the author the luxury of examining the minutiae - what some might dismiss as trivial. It’s the elegance of his narrative, the subtlety of his observations and the integrity of his relationship with Africa that makes the book such a compelling read. No wonder one critic claimed that the author ?..has raised reportage to the status of literature?.

This is the author’s fifth major book. Earlier works were Shah of Shahs about the Iranian revolution; The Emperor, about Haile Selassie; Imperium, about the fall of the Soviet Union; and The Soccer Wars, a compendium of reportage from around the world.

Mosquito

The Story of Man’s Deadliest Foe

By Andrew Spielman & Michael D’Antonio

£10.99 Faber & Faber

ISBN 0-571-20980-7

According to the WHO, malaria affects more than half-a-billion people annually and kills up to 3m, nearly half the victims being children. Malaria is only one of many diseases carried by the mosquito vector, yet as recently as 1870, the idea that the mosquito can kill was considered preposterous.

This book tells of man’s struggle to live with the mosquito. It ranges from the defeat of barbarian armies attempting to invade malaria-infested Rome, the death of thousands of Frenchmen working on the Panama canal to the recent panic over the West Nile virus outbreak in New York.

The adaptable mosquito

The first part of the book describes the life of the mosquito, how the insect can and does adapt to various environments including those special niches where mosquito and man come together.

There are literally thousands of mosquito species that have been identified and classified. There is an equally staggering variation to the creature’s life-cycle that make it such a daunting adversary. Mosquitoes can survive 8,000ft up the Himalayas and below sea-level in the Californian desert. One extremely adaptable mosquito species can survive decades of drought in the Sahara, while another, found above the Arctic Circle, causes herds of caribou to migrate long distances to avoid its bite. This mosquito is so aggressive that it feeds on the still warm blood of recently deceased animals.

The next section addresses the mosquito’s intimate relationship with human beings. Evidence of mosquito-borne diseases can be found in remains from ancient India and Mesopotamia; many Egyptian mummies have enlarged spleens, a classic symptom of malaria. Romans, Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths and Huns were all afflicted. Alexander the Great was most likely killed by the disease; Carthage was known to be infected at the time of Christ and malaria probably helped prevent Genghis Khan from invading Western Europe.

Malaria provided a barrier

Malaria and yellow fever constrained the European colonial invasion of Africa in the 15th Century. Portuguese mariners were the first to suffer and die from the continent’s vector born fever diseases, and in the centuries following disease often defeated European explorers. Sometime in the first half of the l7th Century, yellow fever travelled to the Americas, probably carried by mosquitoes breeding aboard a slave ship.

Though quinine was known as a treatment for malaria, between 1819 and 1836 nearly half of the British soldiers sent to Sierra Leone died. In the same period, the French lost up to one in six of their soldiers in Senegal and Algeria.

Before the vector cause of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases was finally discovered, it was suspected that ?bad air’ was the key, as these diseases were most prevalent in swampy areas. Only at the turn of the 20th century did scientists first observe the transmission of these diseases from mosquito to man. As a result, throughout Europe and North America, huge efforts were made to improve sanitation and drainage to suppress the breeding of mosquitoes.

The final section is concerned with the modern era and how the dangers posed by the mosquito are being confronted. Research into alternatives for quinine was accelerated during WWII when Japan occupied Indonesia and cut off supplies from plantations where the bark, from which quinine was extracted, was cultivated.

A synthetic substitute, Atabrine, was developed in the US, but an even better drug was made in Germany and when it fell into American hands at the end of the war, the US army copied it and developed the cholorquine compound.

The US also drafted into use DDT, first synthesised in 1874, but little used before the US military doused most of Naples’ inhabitants in a bid to prevent a typhoid epidemic threatening the city. So effective was the chemical that the US military loaded it onto bombers and sprayed the pacific islands to control mosquitoes.

After the war it found widespread use in agriculture as a crop pesticide. But, by the 1960s sufficient concern that it posed a health risk as a persistent carcinogenic agent led to a widespread, but not universal, ban of its use.

Is DDT safe?

African Business readers will recall an article in our May issue on GM mosquito research, which also raised the question of using DDT to control mosquitoes. That drew a response from Africa Fighting Malaria in South Africa, who pointed out the effectiveness and relative cheapness of DDT in mosquito control and its ability to save lives (African Business, June and July/August 2001).

The authors of this book agree with the use of DDT, but they also note that DDT has quite a short period of effectiveness, perhaps as little as five years, after which mosquitoes gain some level of DDT resistance. The WWF, one of the world’s foremost environmental/conservation groups, leans to a complete ban on the use of DDT, to stimulate developing safer alternatives.

Authors Andrew Spielman, a world authority on mosquitoes, and Michael D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, advocate further research into how human activities promote malarial transmission. It’s well known that ?modernity’ has its problems - a throw-away consumer society providing the discarded tin can or old car-tyre, the perfect environs for mosquitoes to breed.

Even activities as necessary and commendable as making mud bricks for building, have their own impact. The resulting ?borrow-pits’, dug for the mud, collect water and are usually found right next to newly built homes. Pollen blown from gardens into the borrow pits provides the nutrients ideal for the mosquito larvae to breed.

Minimising these risks by developing low-cost, appropriate technology, seems to be the message. This is a timely book, coinciding with the huge effort being put into the Roll Back Malaria campaign.

Kenana

Both authors have been intimately involved with the Kenana Sugar Farm project for many years. Osman el-Nazir, the company’s Managing Director since 1981, first joined the project as a representative of the Sudan government in 1973. The same year Govind Desai was seconded from Lonrho’s Zambia operations. From 1981 to 1994 he was the company’s Financial Controller.

The extraordinary story of the Kanana project (see African Business May, 2001) began from a concept of Sudan’s then president, Gafaar Mohamed Nimeiri. His dream was to reverse desertification, green the desert, and provide a ?bread basket’ for the region.

Through his foreign investment advisor, Dr Khalil Osman Mahmoud, he met ?Tiny’ Rowlands, then head of the Lonrho group of companies. It seems an immediate rapport was established between the capitalist entrepreneur and the soldier-politician President. Initially Rowlands was interested in the potential of Sudan’s textile industry.

Later, when President Nimiery suggested the sugar project and Lonrho completed an initial survey, Rowlands was convinced of its economic viability. Few others shared his opinion, even within Lonrho’s own boardroom. Lonrho had some experience of sugar farming in Africa, with estates in Malawi, Swaziland, South Africa and Mauritius, but nothing approaching the ambitious scale of the Sudan project.

A rocky beginning

From the outset, finance to get the mega-project off the drawing board was a problem. Geopolitical developments scuppered an initial finance package arranged with the US Exim Bank for US-manufactured factory equipment. The package was aborted following the US government’s 1974 withdrawal of diplomatic recognition, a direct result of President Nimeiri’s commutation of life-sentences imposed on PLO activists who had killed the US ambassador in Khartoum the previous year.

Meanwhile, the estimated start-up costs had shot up from $150m in 1973 to $250m in 1974. Negotiations with the British government’s ECGD also fell through. Lonrho, anxious not to extend its already high debts, sought partner investors.

Through Lonrho’s endeavours, and assistance from Dr Khalil’s Gulf Int group, Nissho-Iwai Corp of Japan was brought in to supply equipment.

The Sudan government committed to a loan of $50m in 1975, and finally Kenana Sugar Co Ltd was incorporated on 11 March 1975. As Kenana’s capital costs continued to escalate, Lonrho itself estimating a figure of $600m by the time Kenana got into full production some time early in the I980s, further finance had to be found. The Kuwait Government and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia both extended soft-loans and subscribed to equity.

Plants construction

The financing of the project is an epic tale in itself but an equally fascinating story is told of the plant’s construction beginning with the challenge of co-ordinating a local labour force with the specialists of 37 nationalities speaking 30 different languages. To build the largest integrated sugar project in the world - factory, power plant, pumping stations and 300kms of irrigation canals, a total of 72,000 tons of material was hauled to the construction site.

The entry point for sea-freight imports was Port Sudan, 1,200kms northeast of the site. Kenana established its own clearing and handling operations at the port, buying five mobile cranes and developing its own lay-down area which is today, post-construction, its sugar export warehouse complex.

Air freight was handled at Khartoum airport, Kenana owning and operating a Dakota DC3 and a Cessna 404 to provide daily passenger and freight flights between Kenana, Khartoum and Port Sudan.

The existing one-metre gauge single-track railway that ran from Port Sudan via Khartoum to the Kenana site was upgraded, and 50 flat rail-wagons were leased from the national railway company. Kenana also purchased bladder-tanks, each capable of holding 8,000 gallons of fuel, water or other liquids, loaded on conventional half-covered rail- wagons.

Much of the ?out-of-gauge’ heavy, bulky and awkward materials had to be hauled overland. During the dry season, ?heavy-lift’ convoys would take some 18 days to complete the journey from Port Sudan to Kenana. Multi-truck convoys - comprising of a mobile workshop, a cook’s galley for the crews, and fuel and water tankers - would be led by a motor grader to level, and widen the rough narrow tracks and roads. A light aircraft was kept on stand-by for emergencies.

Today, except for the Sudanese government itself, Kenana is the country’s largest employer and supports an estimated 100,000 people. Kenana’s mega-agricultural project success story has confounded its early critics. The complexities of one of Africa’s biggest business stories is told in this detailed yet highly readable account.

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