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The fall of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in 1975 was a good time for journalists in the Horn of Africa. The Polish Press Agency sent its only African hand to cover the story. Ryszard Kapuscinski was not a glamourpuss with the resources of a large western network at his disposal. He was a low-level wheelerdealer with the forbearance of a village mongrel and the genius of a great raconteur.

Three years after Haile Selassie's death, Kapuscinski published The Emperor, a masterpiece about the last days of the monarchy told in the voices of the courtiers and servants in Addis whose confidence he had won. The English version appeared in the 1980s. The Emperor was a work of economy, irony and deep political intuition which made the Jonathan Dimblebys look like noodles by comparison.

His seductive demeanour, which works in Latin America and the Middle East, as well as Africa, has allowed Kapuscinski to report with remarkable intimacy on 27 revolutions and coups since 1964, when he took to the road in earnest. The Shadow of the Sun is his retrospective of the years in Africa - a "veritable ocean", as he calls the continent - and again, in the last moments of the book, "a thousand situations, varied, distinct".

Many are recorded in this carnet de voyage by a man who, for 40 years or more, has seen what he needed to see, and got where he needed to be, by looking puzzled and importunate, propping his spectacles up on his forehead in lowly, clerical frustration, and proclaiming his insignificance to a spectacular cast of leaders-in-waiting, roadblock bullies, gunmen, witches, peasants, villains and heroes of almost every persuasion, in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and the rubble deserts of northern Mali.

Kapuscinski's strategy of immersion pays more dividends than descending on Africa with a tight schedule, a couple of well-paid local minders and a film crew in tow. Waiting, failing, taking sick - with malaria and tuberculosis - are all object lessons, and rapidly he graduates with honours in the ways of the "separate planet" he has chosen to study.

Beside the accounting of scrapes, dangers and general delirium - all vintage Kapuscinski - this collection contains extraordinary disquisitions on the nature of politics in Africa. The 18-page Lecture on Rwanda, unadorned by laughs or derringdo, is required reading for anyone who wants to under-stand the "deep provincial-ism" that lurks in the imagination of the genocidal killer. It is also a shocking tale, scrupulously told, about the complicity of outsiders - of the French, in particular, whose infatuation with "la Francophonie" led them to support the Hutu rulers of a former Belgian colony against the (Tutsi) Rwanda Patriotic Front, which had won its spurs in Anglophone Uganda.

For Kapuscinski, the colonial episode is still crucial. This makes him an unfashionable figure in the eyes of some who believe that the moment you invoke the history of colonialism, you extenuate corrupt African elites on grounds of diminished responsibility.

To his credit, Kapuscinksi makes no judgment either way. He is a canny moralist who prefers description and tragi-comic detail to the pontifical mode. But he won't jettison what he knows for a fact. Or what he has thought over for the better part of half a century.

Europeans, he believes, got off to a ruinous start in Africa. The problem lay in the calibre of the white men - missionaries, by and large, excepted - who "discov-ered" the continent: "the worst sort of people - robbers, soldiers of fortune, adventurers, criminals, slave-traders". "The tone, the standard, the atmosphere were for centuries maintained by a motley and rapacious international riff-raff."

Many figures spring to mind: Cecil Rhodes, Lord Lugard, the young Winston Churchill, and more recently, Mad Mike Hoare or Colonel Tim Spicer, head of the mercenary outfit, Sandline. Perhaps it takes one to know one, but Kapuscinksi is not another illustrious vandal on the make. His is the first wide-ranging, elegant, aristocratic intelligence since Conrad's to bear on Africa in all its perplexity.

Kapuscinski, as it happens, is the son of a village schoolteacher, but both writers, being Polish, have much to say about imperial domination. And, like Conrad on the Congo, Kapuscinski is a master of the charismatic shorthand that leaves the reader knowing all there is to know, yet wanting to know more.