From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle p. 158:
Kapuściński will keep returning to Africa for the rest of his life, and will write his most important books about it. He will witness the evacuation of the Portuguese from Angola, the final stage in the country’s struggles for liberation and the bloody civil war. In Ethiopia (Abyssinia) he will observe the decline of the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie and the beginnings of the Red despotism of Colonel Mengistu. In Uganda he will feel for himself the shivers down the spine prompted among the locals by the regime of Idi Amin; after the tyrant’s fall Kapuściński will go there and collect material for a book about him that he will never complete.
In the early 1990s, while preparing to write the summary of his African experiences, The Shadow of the Sun, he sends his old friend a card from Addis Ababa:
Dear Jurek,
I’ve been in Africa for two months already – I’ve been to Uganda, Tanzania (including Zanzibar), Rwanda, Kenya and Eritrea, and now I’m in Ethiopia (for the second time this year). Rather a sentimental journey, in the footsteps of our youth together – heart-breaking. I found our old embassy, where we used to live – it’s in ruins.
The ruined embassy reflects the state of mind in which Kapuściński returns from his journey. Everything is going downhill, there is disintegration and moral decay. In Addis Ababa he goes to Africa Hall, a modernist building on one of the city’s hills, where in 1963 he attended the first summit of new African leaders. Now children are playing ping-pong there, and a woman is selling leather jackets in the historic building’s auditorium.
He tries to find a specific document which supposedly sets out a plan for the development and rescue of Africa. He questions various secretaries and officials about it, naming it by title, but they cannot find it, and most of the people he asks have never even heard of it before. Kapuściński starts to doubt whether such a plan really does exist, and whether Africa can actually be saved.
Far Outliers 