The former Polish press agency correspondent is talking about his staggering, ongoing career as chronicler of the Third World; his new book on Africa, “The Shadow of the Sun” (published by Knopf); Idi Amin (“I knew him, a very stupid man”); Julius Nyerere (“a great intellectual”); Herodotus (“a great reporter, the father of reportage-I’m doing a book on him”); the intrepid World Cup midfielder Zbigniew Boniek; the aphorisms of E.M. Cioran; Curzio Malaparte, the Italian correspondent; Zanzibar, and the great desert. Now he’s talking about fear: “Fear is a feeling everyone has,” he says enthusiastically, in a deliberate, accented English, that, for some reason, makes him self-conscious. “But the difference is some can dominate fear and others can’t.”
Meaning? “If you want to be there, in a place, if you have to be there, and you’re so dedicated to really reaching your goal you don’t think about the fear. And when you’re in a dangerous situation, it always looks more dangerous from afar than from inside.”
Kapuscinski would know. While reporting on some 30 revolutions, he was a match flick away from incineration in Nigeria after being doused with benzene, sentenced to death in Congo and survived a shoot-out in the Honduran jungle. He had cerebral malaria that left him unconscious in a dilapidated hotel room for three days and a case of tuberculosis that nearly ended his foreign-reporting career prematurely. He went eyeball-to-eyeball, nearly, with a diabolical Egyptian cobra, got a flat in the Serengeti and was surrounded by lions and nearly capsized in a petulant Zanzibar Channel. Each time, Kapuscinski was saved by chance or the anonymous hand of humanity.
“There was much more,” he says, laughing, “but I don’t want to just write about those adventures. It would be boring.”
So the most remarkable thing about the 69-year-old Kapuscinski-and there’s a lot-is that he’s even alive at all. His hair on the sides, which is all he has, is white but he looks fit and healthy. He’s just revisited Latin America for what will be the second part of a trilogy of observations and recollections, followed by a volume on Asia, especially the Islamic world.
“The Shadow of the Sun” is the first part and takes him back to the place he’s most closely associated with: Africa. It’s his sixth book translated into English, though he has 20 out in Poland (the country he always returns to, sometimes after years away). He’s been translated into 30 languages and speaks six himself: French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, English and his native Polish (the language he always writes in), with a working knowledge of Swahili and Arabic.
His titles are iconic: “The Emperor” (on Haile Selassie), “The Shah of Shahs” (on the last Shah of Iran), “The Soccer War” (a series of short pieces from Latin America and Africa), “Another Day of Life,” (his just-back-in-print sleeper about Portugal’s withdrawal from Angola in 1975) and “Imperium” (on the fall of the Soviet Union). The Selassie and Iran books are his anomalous masterpieces, like nothing before or since. Both are slim, less than 200 pages, both in three parts. The emperor’s fall is told through the sycophants who surrounded him, but it ends up being a larger meditation on the nature of authoritarian rule, Ethiopia serving as the backdrop. The Iranian revolution is reiterated through photographs scattered on his desk. And as if with a long telephoto lens, he focuses on the exact moment a revolution becomes a revolution: when the demonstrator no longer fears authority.
Kapuscinski says he was attracted to these parts, these circumstances, from his own upbringing in Pinsk (now located in Belarus) during World War II. “I think partially it was my childhood. This was the poorest part of Europe, still is. My parents were schoolteachers but when the war came there was terrible hunger, poverty, the winter was coming, I had no shoes. I know what it means to have no shoes, I know what it means not to eat for several days, I know what it means when there’s shooting. So in places like Africa I feel very much at home. I understand them, and I communicate with those situations. I’m empathetic.”
But it’s more than empathy that makes Kapuscinski Kapuscinski. For one, it’s his personality. He’s not a Type A: he readily admits fear, gets sick and weak, gets lost (and asks for directions), gets beaten up, robbed, made the fool of, depressed. There’s an ego there, for sure, and ambitions (“my ambition,” he’ll say now, “is to invent my own style of writing, my own genre of writing”), but somehow he’s different from, say, some of the brawnier correspondents of today, who, you sense, are angling for a contract from Tina Brown or a handsome mid-six-figure book deal or (better yet) movie rights. Or a TV camera. Kapuscinski only envied the guy with the Zenith shortwave radio.
Then there’s his approach: he’s insightful but never patronizing. He obviously has an affinity for the culture, but it’s without sickening white guilt. He’s an acute observer who finds the extraordinary in the quotidian.
In his new book, in a piece of impressionism on Ghana, he writes: “I arrived in Kumasi with no particular goal. Having one is generally deemed a good thing, the benefit of something to strive toward. This can also blind you, however: you see only your goal, and nothing else, while this something else-wider, deeper-may be considerably more interesting and important.”
Kapuscinski finds that “something else” takes it, makes it a fable or collects them and makes a collage or brings a character to life.
Later in the book, describing the bureau chief of Agence France Presse in Nairobi, he writes: “He knew everything.” Kapuscinski didn’t know everything, and didn’t think he did and was open to discovery. He posed questions, even if he found some to be unanswerable.
And there is lots that is unanswerable in Africa. He got there in the hopeful late 1950s, the end of colonial rule, Africa’s Great Leap Forward, but over the decades saw parts of the continent disintegrate into warfare-often fought by children-and famine and disease.
The short pieces in the book reflect this. Some are more dramatic than others, some are cautionary, some are searing primers (on Rwanda, Liberia, Sudan and Uganda under Amin), some are just odd and little (and beautiful) Kapuscinskian tales. Good 20th-century European that he is he eschews plot for the great or small episode.
The book is not without repetition. He makes the point more than once that he could’ve moved to the more livable parts of town but always turned down those opportunities. “How else can I get to know this city? This continent?” (It’s a point, too, he makes in “The Soccer War.”) And the book seems to reflect a European (or is it universal?) awe/fascination with the physique of the black male: “a powerful, well-built young man named Traore”; Habyarimana, the Radovan Karadzic of the Hutus, “is massively built, powerful….”; “The driver … was like the majority of his countrymen, tall and powerfully built.”; “he was a brutal, greedy large man”; “with their strength, grace, and endurance, the indigenous move about naturally….”
Still, it’s as good as Kapuscinski has given us.
Geography and the unforgiving climate, as the title suggests, is a leitmotif and he describes heat richly and differently somehow each time. In the Mauritanian Sahara: “The night chill had set in, a chill that descends abruptly and, after the burning hell of the sun-filled days, can be almost piercingly painful.” In Monrovia: “Dusk too is stifling, sticky, slimy. And evening? The evening steams with a hot, smothering mist. And Night? Night envelops us like a wet burning sheet.” In Timbuktu: “The heat curdles the blood, paralyzes the body, stuns.”
All along, and everywhere, even amid despair, there is grace and Kapuscinski takes us there. What’s missing, intentionally (and thankfully), are specific political details. “I’m not a political writer,” he says. “I don’t like to talk about politics, and I’m not a specialist. My attitude, my approach, is cultural anthropology-and literature. I don’t talk to political leaders, never. Besides politics is a big mess. It’s not interesting, and everything is changing so quickly. It’s a waste of time.”
Although he must realize that he’s revered by writers, editors and readers the world over he says only: “To do this work you have to be very modest.”
He’s hoping to convince Sonny Mehta to publish his aptly titled Lapidarium series of shorter observations and experiences from his travels. Then he’ll be writing-and traveling, and writing and traveling some more, using his usual methods. “I feel very bad in five-star hotels,” he says. “I feel awkward. I like to make things for myself, not to be served.”
And the danger? The fear? “I’ve become an optimist,” he says. “I trust people.”
