Global Journalist

More than a Journalist

By Christopher Orlet Posted Tue, Jan 30 2007

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When Ryszard Kapuscinski died Tuesday in Warsaw at age 74, many in the profession eulogized him as the greatest war correspondent of his age. As Poland’s only African correspondent in the‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, he witnessed the continent’s independence from European colonial powers via revolution and bloody civil war (by his count he personally witnessed 27 coup d'etats and revolutions).

Ironically, one reason Kapuscinski was able to know his subjects so intimately as well as gain such unique access to the top echelons of power was the fact that he worked for the financially strapped Polish Press Agency. This meant that often he had to cover an entire continent and was unable to stay at swank hotels with his colleagues in the Western media. Instead, he had to live in hovels among the nativesand could rarely afford to go home. Under such conditions Kapuscinski was forced to become somewhat of an operator. While Reuters correspondents purchased plane tickets to the coup du jour in Zanzibar or Luanda, Kapuscinski had to rely on his connections and his wiles. Once when a press agency reporter complained that he had rented a plane to some hot spot but was unable to get official clearance to land, Kapuscinski—who could easily get permission, but had no money for a plane—cut a deal.

The life of the foreign correspondent for a poor press agency was almost Hobbesian, or in Kapuscinski's words, “slavery,” “hellish” and “terrible.” Yet for a gifted storyteller no other experience could compare.

“[I]f there was trouble, I was meant to be there to see it,” he told Granta magazine. “I was responsible for 50 countries; I was bound to come across something at least once a month, in at least one of those countries. I was full of stories.”

It will be as a unique storyteller who raised reportage “to the status of literature”(Michael Ignatieff's phrase) and as a “dazzling narrative historian” (Ian Jack) that he will be remembered.He will also be remembered for his 20 books of literary journalism filled with Hemingway-esque prose shaded with the sort of magical realism associated with his good friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In his published works, Kapuscinski gave a contemporary historian’s account of the Iranian Revolution, the coup d’etat that deposed Haile Selassie, the Angolan Civil War and the breakup of the former Soviet Union. He was given the label “existential journalist” for his coverage of surreal and absurd events such as the war between Honduras and El Salvador that started over a soccer match.

A brilliant student of history with a devotion to philosophy, Kapuscinski was an unlikely foreign correspondent. Brilliance aside, he was lucky in a way that put to shame the supposed Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” He was fortunate not only to be at the right places at the right time, but also was probably the luckiest reporter in the business in that he survived front-line battles; four death sentences by mad African despots; countless beatings; harrowing confrontations on wild African roads with by drunken, European-hating militias and barely survived tuberculosis and cerebral malaria (during which he was visited bedside by Idi Amin). Not that he ever complained.

“[Africa] was aggressive, on the attack,” he said. “And I liked that.”

Kapuscinski described the difference between reporting and his brand of “witness literature” or, as he called it, “literature by foot,” in an interview with Granta, where many of his stories appeared in translation. This definition could be included in every introduction to literary journalism text:

It’s not that the story is not getting expressed in ordinary news reports. It’s what surrounds the story. The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the gossip of the town,the smell, the thousands and thousands of elements that are part of the events you read about in 600 words of your morning paper.

In the opening chapters of Imperium he reminisced about growing up in Pinsk, now in Belarus, where his family was so poor they could not afford shoes so they covered their feet with bark. To quell hunger pangs he took up smoking at age 7 by bumming tobacco from Red Army soldiers. The local Poles and Russians and Jews were so uneducated it was easy for them to believe that communism would usher in a new and better life.

“We had no tradition and no books,” he said “We were poor—really, very, very poor—and inexperienced and uneducated. And the little education that we did have came from Stalinist texts.”

From his first published story, an investigative piece for a small youth journal about corruption at the communist government’s showcase steel plant near Krakow, Kapuscinski learned that “writing was about risk—about risking everything.”

“[T]he value of the writing is not in what you publish but in its consequences,” Kapuscinski said. “If you set out to describe reality, then the influence of the writing is upon reality.”

He was fired, reinstated and later awarded a medal for the story.

With this experience behind him, the outer world beckoned, and he soon found himself as a correspondent in India and the Far East. But it was in the African bush where Kapuscinski felt truly at home—my Africa, he called it—at a time when whites were looked upon with distrust or outright hostility. That he came from poor Poland, a Marxist country and one of the few non-colonial European states, gave him something in common with Africans, a circumstance he related in his story “Dispatches”:

Poland. They did not know of any such country. The elders looked at me with uncertainty, possibly suspicion. I wanted to break their mistrust somehow. I did not know how, and I was tired. “Where are your colonies?” the Nana asked. My eyes were drooping, but I became alert. People often asked that question…Kofi answered, “They don’t have colonies, Nana. Not all white countries have colonies. Not all whites are colonialists. You have to understand that whites often colonize whites.”

He was revered in his native Poland where his works were seen as allegories of his then communist homeland. Kapuscinski always denied the charge, although he said there were bound to be parallels between African nations fighting for independence and his homeland under the thumb of Moscow.

In his later years Kapuscinski often complained that his contemporaries—who grew rich and fat in their tenured university posts composing dull angst-ridden novels—were missing the real stories of our time. He told Grata:

I went from revolution to coup d'etat, from one war to another; I witnessed, in effect, history in the making, real history, contemporary history, our history. But I was also surprised: I never saw a writer. I never met a poet or a philosopher—even a sociologist. Where were they? Such important events, and not a single writer anywhere? Then I would return to Europe, and I would find them. They would be at home, writing their little domestic stories: the boy, the girl, the laughing, the intimacy, the marriage, the divorce—in short, the same story we've been reading over and over again for a thousand years.

Asked why writing was so important to him that he would time and time again risk his life, Kapuscinski replied that it was simply his mission in life.

“I wouldn't subject myself to these dangers if I didn't feel that there was something overwhelmingly important—about history, about ourselves—that I felt compelled to get across,” he said. “This is more than journalism.”

His latest book Travels with Herodotus will come out this June.