Under The African Sun

A moving portrait of Africa from Poland's most celebrated foreign correspondent - a masterpiece from a modern master. Famous for being in the wrong places at just the right times, Ryszard Kapuscinski arrived in Africa in 1957, at the beginning of the end of colonial rule - the "sometimes dramatic and painful, sometimes enjoyable and jubilant" rebirth of a continent. The Shadow of the Sun sums up the author's experiences ("the record of a 40-year marriage") in this place that became the central obsession of his remarkable career. From the hopeful years of independence through the bloody disintegration of places like Nigeria, Rwanda and Angola, Kapuscinski recounts great social and political changes through the prism of the ordinary African. He examines the rough-and-ready physical world and identifies the true geography of Africa: a little-understood spiritual universe, an African way of being. He looks also at Africa in the wake of two epoch-making changes: the arrival of AIDS and the definitive departure of the white man. Kapuscinski's rare humanity invests his subjects with a grandeur and a dignity unmatched by any other writer on the Third World, and his unique ability to discern the universal in the particular has never been more powerfully displayed than in this work.

Ricky Garrett a Hollywood celebrity is in South Africa to host a music awards when during a short safari he falls foul to a group of poachers. After a long stay in hospital he recovers and making use of his celebrity status joins a group of conservationists in Botswana, tracking a poaching ring in the hope of bringing the criminals to justice. When he meets Sandra, sparks immediately fly, but are the two able to keep this hidden from Sandra's very powerful boyfriend. Beneath the African Sun follows Ricky's slow awakening to the beauty and harshness of Africa, his guarded acceptance into the group, and his quest to find the people that nearly took his life. His journey is thwarted with problems. Is someone in the group hiding something, and will they all stay alive long enough to see justice done.

When Sabby Mendes leaves Portuguese Goa aboard the dhow Monsoon Wind bound for British East Africa in 1916, he has one dream-to find work as a tailor in the relatively new capital of Nairobi. Sabby is a young man, still a teenager, but he is determined to build a life for himself, and he knows that the opportunities in the British Protectorate are better than those facing him at home. A bright, affable young man with a genuine passion and talent for tailoring, he is not prepared for what he is about to find beyond the Arabian Sea. The Protectorate, which will become British Colony of Kenya, is a highly segregated society with the British firmly ensconced at its top; below them are the "Asians" like Sabby; and at the very bottom are the native African population who are regarded as little more than savages in need of civilization. Beneath the African Sun offers, through the eyes of its protagonist, a street-level view of the changing social and political climate of Kenya between 1916 and 1970, including the 'Mau Mau' Uprising of the native Kikuyu, the eventual independence of Kenya in 1963, and the political fallout that followed. More than a history, it is a story about family, home, social justice, and what it means to truly belong somewhere.

Though delighted that an orphan boy has come into his life, an old man becomes insatiably curious about the boy's mysterious powers.