Obituarie Ryszard
Kapuściński by Victoria Brittain
Thu 25 Jan
2007 08.25 GMT
For Ryszard Kapuscinski, who has died aged 74,
journalism was a mission, not a career, and he spent much of his life, happily,
in uncomfortable and obscure places, many of them in Africa, trying to convey their essence to a continent far away. No one was more
surprised than him when, in his mid-40s, he suddenly became extremely
successful, with his books translated into 30 languages. He won literary prizes
in Germany, France, Canada, Italy, the US, and was made journalist of the
century in Poland.
Convey: To communicate (a message,
information, etc)
Kapuscinski was born in Pinsk, now in Belarus,
and in 1945 was taken to Poland by his mother, searching for his soldier
father. War as the norm for life was deep in his young psyche after those early
years of ceaseless hunger, cold, sudden deaths, noise and terror, with no
shoes, no home, no books in school. Decades later he wrote: "We who went
through the war know how difficult it is to convey the truth about it to those
for whom that experience is, happily, unfamiliar. We know how language fails
us, how often we feel helpless, how the experience is, finally,
incommunicable."
After university in Warsaw, where he studied
history, he found his metier as a
23-year-old trainee journalist on a youth journal. A story exposing mismanagement and drunkenness in a showcase
steel factory set off a political firestorm that sent him into hiding. He was
vindicated and sent abroad as a treat, to India,
Pakistan and Afghanistan, the first Polish journalist to have that opportunity.
Later he moved to the Polish News Agency (PAP), and stayed there until 1981.
Metier: A profession or trade, esp that
to which one is well suited
Mismanagement:
Maladministration
(mælædmɪnɪstreɪʃən ), inefficiency, mishandling, misdirection
Showcase: You use showcase to refer to a
situation or setting in which something is displayed or presented to its best
advantage.
Treat: If you give someone a treat,
you buy or arrange something special for them which they will enjoy.
Threat: A threat to a person or thing
is a danger that something unpleasant might happen to them.
In 1957 he went to Africa, and returned there
as often as possible over the next 40 years. He covered the whole continent,
including 27 revolutions and coups, and was exhilarated
by the feeling he was in at history in the making. He and his employers had no
money, but he was a deal maker who often had the contacts to help other
journalists who did have the money to hire planes, and thus both arrived at the
scene of the latest drama. "Africa was my youth," he said later,
describing how much the continent had meant to him.
Exhilarated: If you are exhilarated by
something, it makes you feel very happy and excited.
In his early years as a journalist he developed
the technique of two notebooks: one allowed him to earn his living with the bread and butter of agency reporting of facts, while the
other was filled with the experiences he too modestly believed incommunicable,
but which became his famous books, such as The Emperor (1978), on the fall of
that extraordinary figure Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. It was his first book to
be translated into English, and Jonathan Miller adapted it for the Royal Court
Theatre in 1985.
The bread
and butter:
Something that is the bread and butter of a person or organization is the
activity or work that provides the main part of their income.
Before The Emperor, he wrote perhaps his best
book, Another Day of Life (1976), a unique and closely observed account of the
collapse of Portuguese colonialism in Angola, which he described as "a
very personal book, about being alone and lost". He was the only foreign
journalist, and the only person from eastern Europe, in Luanda in the chaotic
and fearful summer of 1975. As the Portuguese settlers
piled their lives into
boxes at the port, soldiers from apartheid South Africa, Zaire and Cuba moved
towards the capital in front of or behind the competing Angolan armies, while
shady men from the CIA and the Portuguese PIDE fed rumours of imminent triumph
for one side or the other.
Settler: Settlers are people who go to
live in a new country. (colons, colonos)
Pile
into: If a
group of people pile into or out of a vehicle, they all get into it or out of
it in a disorganized way.
Amid the unbelievable stories, the heat, the hysteria, the only thread of certainty in
Kapuscinski's days was the evening telex connection with Warsaw, when he would
file a story he had concocted from the
rumours and the crazy scenes on the street, ask about the weather at home, and
complain about the food. He never got that Angola out of his mind, and when we
met in London in 1986 he wanted mainly to talk about another book from that
period, the Portuguese soldier Antonio Lobo Antunes's South of Nowhere, which
he thought was wonderful.
The heat: The hot.
Concocted: If you concoct something,
especially something unusual, you make it by mixing several things together.
Among his other books was Shah of Shahs (1982),
on the last days of the Shah of Persia, and collections such as The Soccer War
(1978), The Shadow of the Sun (1998) and, closer to home, Imperium (1993),
essays and reportage on the Soviet Union, and five volumes of essays and poems,
Lapidarium. A sixth was due to be published soon.
All his writing about developing countries came
out of his lived experience there. It was the ring of authenticity that made
him as popular among African and Latin American intellectuals as at home in
Poland. They all recognised his portraits of the mechanism of dictatorial rule,
as well as appreciating his ease and empathy with ordinary people's lives. The
Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda made him his model for the journalist in his
film Rough Treatment (1978).
Kapuscinksi described his own work as
"literary reportage". And, although he was personally a modest man,
he believed in its importance for understanding the world. "Without trying
to enter other ways of looking, perceiving, describing, we won't understand
anything of the world." The European mind, he believed, was often too lazy
to make the intellectual effort to see and understand the real world, dominated
by the complex problems of poverty, and far away from the manipulated world of
television.
The quiet and stability of Europe bored him,
and in the last years of his life he spent a considerable amount of time
lecturing in Mexico, often with his friend Gabriel García Márquez. He spoke
always about the importance of reportage, and delivered stinging
attacks on news as a commodity, and on the flying "special
correspondents" who report on instant drama without context or follow up.
He hated what he called the "metamorphosis of the media". The value
of news in his day, he said, had nothing to do with profits, but was the stuff of political struggle, and the search for truth.
Stinging: If a plant, animal, or insect
stings you, a sharp part of it, usually covered with poison, is pushed into
your skin so that you feel a sharp pain.
The
stuff of political struggle: The political fight
He is survived by his wife Alicja and their
daughter.
Jonathan Miller writes: It was a great privilege and very
exciting to work with Ryszard Kapuscinski on his magnificent reportage on the
last years of Haile Selassie put on at the Royal Court. He told us that he had
had several previous requests to make a film set in Ethiopia; but he went on to
make it quite clear that it was not really about Ethiopia but about Poland and
language. As we rehearsed, it became immediately apparent from the text that he assigned to the various
witnesses participating in what we turned into a play that this was an
extraordinary representation of ornamental tyranny. I was delighted to discover
that he approved of this almost abstract way of representing what he feared might otherwise have
been a piece of exotic tourism. He was easy to work with, amiably
helpful and, I think, the whole cast enjoyed his reassuring presence. But he
was after all a peculiar genius with no modern equivalent, except possibly
Kafka.
Rehearse: To practise (a play, concert,
etc), in preparation for public performance
Apparent: If something is apparent to
you, it is clear and obvious to you.
Adam Low writes: Ryszard Kapuscinski and I made a
film together for BBC Arena in 1987. At the time he was writing about Idi Amin
and had even drawn a diagram of Amin's brain, which was pinned on the wall of
his small flat in Wola, a working-class district of Warsaw. He had acquired an
almost celebrity status in Poland, where his books were read as thinly disguised commentaries on communist Poland. As a
person Ryszard was extremely modest and self-effacing. He
found the business of filming terribly frustrating ("I am not
actor!"), and was so self-conscious in
public that I was lucky to get one take before he literally disappeared. He had
an inexhaustible number of stories about his experiences in Africa and South
America, and a unique ability to focus on the telling object - the key he was
given in Moscow to a flat in Azerbaijan, the egg he boiled daily in a kettle at
the malaria clinic in Tanzania. He could be very funny, about the pomposity of
British colonial officials in West Africa or the grandiosity of the Shah of
Iran, and equally chilling about the
bodies washed up in Lake Victoria during the final
days of Amin.
Thinly
disguised: Fine critic
Self-effacing: Someone who is self-effacing
does not like talking about themselves or drawing attention to themselves.
Self-conscious: Someone who is self-conscious is
easily embarrassed and nervous because they feel that everyone is looking at
them and judging them.
Chilling: If you describe something as
chilling, you mean it is frightening.
Wash up: In this case if something is
washed up on a piece of land, it is carried by a river or sea and left there.
As a child he had seen Polish partisans being
tortured and executed by the Germans in the forests outside Warsaw, but his
attitude to humanity was always positive and optimistic. He knew from personal
experience that even the most seemingly impregnable dictatorship would
eventually collapse.
· Ryszard Kapuscinski, journalist, born March 4
1932; died January 23 2007
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