There are gruelling bus rides and harrowing truck rides, usually toward dubious destinations. In a chapter called ''My Alleyway, 1967,'' Kapuscinski rents an apartment in a poor neighborhood of Lagos. For me this is the most important thing we are facing in the 21st century. But living there allows him to produce a rare, fantastically detailed portrait of life in an African slum. But the cumulative picture of extreme poverty, idleness, illness and the cultural disorientation of the newly urbanized is etched in acid. ''Many of my neighbors here have just the one thing.
Someone has a shirt, someone a panga, someone a pickax.
The Shadow of the Sun'' contains some 29 narratively unconnected pieces. It is, in other words, a miscellany. The former are the victims, the latter are the executioners. He is aware of the problem. In a prefatory note, he writes that Africa ''is too large to describe.