For a long time, Europe has feigned an interest in Africa. “What goes on there?” we ask, expecting a comforting reply. Our questions are a consequence of our bad memory - after all, it was thanks to colonial exploitation that we could develop for 300 years - and from an indifference that short agency dispatches and expansive, all-knowing reports have only served to intensify. Wojciech Albiński writes differently about Africa. In his accounts, we learn about daily life in South Africa and Botswana, as seen from the perspective of a foreign resident. Indeed, this paradoxical combination - foreignness with familiarity, astonishment and knowledge - means that Albiński’s writing doesn’t so much elucidate the real situation of Africa as make us aware of our own ignorance - it allows us to understand that we cannot understand everything. The author has lived and worked in Africa for thirty years, so he is not a new arrival, and certainly not a tourist. However, his observations and stories are still primarily characterised by their restraint. At all times we feel the narrator knows and understands more than he tells us, but something holds him back from drawing ultimate conclusions, making generalisations or formulating neat summaries. Thus his prose does not include phrases like “Africans are lazy, but proud,” or “People in Africa are used to cars now, but still believe in magic.” As a geodesist, Albiński travels around southern Africa a great deal , and he perceives his task as a writer to be documenting what he sees. This is why he has created a narrator who above all looks and listens. He is a good observer: attentive, vigilant and sympathetic. He knows something of the local languages, so he is able to communicate. He does not impose himself on anyone, so people are happy to invite him to share their table or campfire and entertain him with their stories. Because of this, just like an ethnographer, Albiński becomes a collector of anecdotes and tales that do not add up to a recognisable whole. Thus we see political conversations taking place in Pretoria that are deciding the future of the state, while at the same time in the background the small-time wheeler-dealers, the travelling salesmen of postmodern commerce, are arranging profitable contracts for themselves through confidential chats with various ministers. We see the history of the state picking up speed as it enters the fold of the democratic-liberal leviathan, while at the same time we encounter tribes still settling their grudges on the peripheries. We are also informed of Europe’s hand in all this: her envoys are most interested in keeping Africa at peace, so they act according to the principle that “the compromise justifies the means,” but in trying to stay in control, they invariably cause confusion and bloodshed. Finally, Albiński shows that not only does Europe have something to offer Africa, but that the reverse is true as well. The African version of vetting people in public life for the sake of state security can serve as a good example - this is a phantom that has arisen in North America recently and is already raging across the post-communist countries. South Africa is the only country in the world to have successfully avoided bloody solutions to its problems.
- Przemysław Czapliński
Wojciech Albiński (born 1935) is a geodesist by profession, an émigré by choice and a writer by vocation. He left Poland in 1963, and has lived in Africa for several decades. His first book, a set of short stories entitled Kalahari, was published in 2003 and won the Józef Mackiewicz Literary Prize.
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