Ryszard Kapuściński

Polish journalist and essayist.

• Born: March 4, 1932
• Place of birth: Pinsk, Poland (now Pinsk, Belarus)
• Died: January 23, 2007
• Place of death: Warsaw, Poland

Biography

Journalist Ryszard Kapuściński was among the most trenchant observers of the developing world and its modern revolutions. He was the son of two schoolteachers, Maria Bobka and Józef Kapuściński. While he experienced the upheavals of World War II in his homeland, it was his native city of Pinsk, not the war, that he credited with nurturing his ability to understand widely different parts of the world. Growing up with Jews, Poles, Armenians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Romani in close proximity, if not harmony, allowed him to experience how others lived and, he claimed, to develop the empathy necessary to talk with ordinary people in the developing world.

Kapuściński began his journalism career while still a student at the University of Warsaw, writing for the magazine Sztandar mlodych (Banner of youth) from 1951 to 1958. He earned his MA from the University of Warsaw in 1952 and married Alicja Mielczarek, a pediatrician, in October of the same year. Kapuściński honed his skills in political analysis writing for Polityka (Politics), a political and cultural weekly, from 1959 to 1961. After publishing his first book, Busz po polsku (The Polish bush), in 1962, he began a productive career as a foreign correspondent in Africa, Asia, and Latin America for the Polish Press Agency. That position signaled a turning point in his career, after which he would write primarily about the developing world, living in or passing through more than a hundred countries, witnessing, recording, and analyzing coups, revolutions, and various national upheavals.

The book that first brought Kapuściński international attention was Cesarz (1978; The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, 1983), a haunting collage-style reconstruction of the end of Haile Selassie’s reign in Ethiopia. Written from the perspective of palace insiders, including minor princes and the royal pillow bearer, this fascinating work is neither journalism nor critical history but a selective record of an imperial court in its final years as seen by its courtiers. Through Kapuściński, they describe their own world as it was, one of routines as rigidly exact and comic as the those of the court of Versailles. Haile Selassie is revealed to have maintained his authority—until its sudden, humiliating end in 1974—by keeping the court confused about his intentions and by appointing second-rate individuals to high positions. According to insiders, “the King of Kings preferred bad ministers . . . because he liked to appear in a favorable light by contrast. . . . There can only be one sun.” In the 1960s, while various toadies, flatterers, and servants went about their archaic comedy, the emperor belatedly attempted to preserve the crown and stave off political reform with rapid economic development. Through Kapuściński’s carefully constructed vignettes, the courtiers detail this disastrous program. Foreign contractors swooped in to build bridges and dams. The security services moved into high gear, and the army consumed 40 percent of the annual budget. Students who were sent abroad to study returned so radical that the university came to be seen as an “anti-Palace.”

Many reviewers regarded The Emperor as an allegorical or cautionary tale, noting that it was published in Poland two years before the government of Edward Gierek was ended by the shipyard workers’ strikes and Solidarność (Solidarity), the Polish workers’ union, emerged. Kapuściński, who was a member of Solidarity before it was illegalized, believed that the book’s popularity was due in part to readers everywhere assuming that the description of a declining autocrat fit the totalitarian leaders they hated the most. The double meanings found in The Emperor are the product of meticulous editing and sequencing of conversations that resulted in both an artful document and a parable of despotic rule.

Kapuściński published several books between 1962 and 1982, most dealing with the developing world. After leaving his job with the Polish Press Agency in 1972, he worked as a freelance journalist before becoming deputy editor-in-chief of Kultura (Culture), a weekly magazine, from 1974 to 1981. By the mid-1970s he had won several awards, including the 1975 Bolesław Prus Prize for general achievement from the Polish Journalists Association, the 1976 State Prize for Literature, and the 1976 International Prize from the International Journalists Organization. In 1981 he was made vice chairman of the Committee of Prognosis and Research at the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. He worked as a lecturer and freelance writer, focusing on history and power as subjects. In 1986 he was a visiting lecturer on the developing world at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. In 1998 he published Heban (The Shadow of the Sun, 2001), which reprises his forty years of reporting from Africa. Kapuściński died in Warsaw, in his native Poland, on January 23, 2007.

In all of Kapuściński’s writings, the novelist’s eye, rather than the journalist’s, prevails. The results of this idiosyncratic perspective, which candidly records observations in impressionistic and anecdotal ways, are closer to the work of Graham Greene or V. S. Naipaul, but more sympathetic than their work and absent the cynical judgments that characterize typical journalistic accounts of wars and revolutions in the developing world. Kapuściński’s implicit aim was to make sense of the tragedy of modern conflicts by understanding the workers, peasants, and leaders who are its actors. Rather than telling readers about the complex social conditions that lead to social upheaval, Kapuściński created theater from them. He used the voices of participants—a sort of verbal snapshot—to illustrate their motivations. Through the careful slicing of fragments of people’s voices relating their own experiences, Kapuściński elicited readers’ empathy with the storytellers living through revolution or war. In Szachinszach (1982; Shah of Shahs, 1985), in a section of the book entitled “Daguerreotypes,” one of the voices is that of Mahmud Azari, who after eight years in London returns in 1977 to a Tehran he hardly recognizes. The capital city, once home to a quiet, courteous population, is inhabited by edgy, quarrelsome individuals who refuse to converse publicly, who suspect all fellow citizens—whether eating at an adjoining table in a restaurant or waiting in line at a bus stop—of being secret police agents (SAVAK), and who burst out angrily for no reason at all, cursing one another in the streets. Such vignettes set the stage for Iran’s rejection of its shah’s regime.

By detailing tragedy, both individual and national, Kapuściński took readers on tense journeys through war-torn African nations, into Central American combat zones, and into world capitals on the eve of revolution, illustrating just how fragile the sense of social order and the idea of a comprehensible world are. In Wojna futbolowa (1978; The Soccer War, 1990), he demonstrates how nationalism and sports made temporary brothers of class enemies in Central America. In Jeszcze dzień życia (1976; Another Day of Life, 1986), the death of colonial Angola is epitomized by the Portuguese desertion of Luanda, a city of packing crates, in which a way of life disappeared not because of bombardment but the “way an oasis dies when the well runs dry.” In all these tales of revolution and war, the subtheme is that, appearances to the contrary, power and the consent to govern flow upward from the governed. What Kapuściński poetically and eloquently realized through attentively chosen dialogue and metaphorically rich narrative is the chaos that results from the eventual denial of that consent.

Kapuściński’s unique achievement was in depicting these contemporary upheavals with empathy for the people who were its agents. Unlike other European or American writers, his view was free of contempt, pity, or cynicism about the human condition. He penetratingly portrayed the abuse of power in rotting empires in all its brutal and even comic aspects, but in the end, ordinary citizens emerge from his works as complex and often heroic beings, achieving a kind of sympathy far beyond that found in the work of other contemporary journalists and Western novelists.

Author Works

Nonfiction:

Busz po polsku: Historie przygodne, 1962

Czarne gwiazdy, 1963

Gdyby cała Afryka . . . , 1967

Kirgiz schodzi z konia, 1967

Dlaczego zginął Karl von Spreti, 1970

Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu, 1975

Jeszcze dzień życia, 1976 (Another Day of Life, 1986)

Cesarz, 1978 (The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, 1983)

Wojna futbolowa, 1978 (The Soccer War, 1990)

Szachinszach, 1982 (Shah of Shahs, 1985)

Lapidarium, 1990–2002 (5 volumes)

Imperium, 1993 (English translation, 1994)

Heban, 1998 (The Shadow of the Sun, 2001)

Z Afryki, 2000

In the Shade of a Tree, in Africa, 2002 (excerpt from The Shadow of the Sun)

Powinności obywatela świata wielokulturowego / Our Responsibilities in a Multicultural World, 2002 (bilingual edition)

Autoportret reportera, 2003 (interviews)

Podróże z Herodotem, 2004 (Travels with Herodotus, 2007)

Spotkanie z Innym jako wyzwanie XXI wieku / Encountering the Other: The Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, 2005 (bilingual edition)

Ten inny, 2006 (The Other, 2008)

Kapuściński: Nie ogarniam świata, 2007 (interviews)

The Cobra's Heart, 2007 (excerpt from The Shadow of the Sun)

Zapiski szpitalne, 2008 (published together with Sentymentalny portret Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego, by Jarosław Mikołajewski)

Spacer poranny / My Morning Walk / Morgendlicher Spaziergang / Paseo matutino, 2009 (essay; multilingual edition)

Poetry:

Notes, 1986

Prawa natury, 2006

I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of Ryszard Kapuściński, 2007 (Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba, translators)

Wiersze zebrane, 2008

Bibliography

Ajami, Fouad. “A Tale of Tyranny.” Review of Shah of Shahs, by Ryszard Kapuściński. The New Republic, 8 Apr. 1985, pp. 36–38. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=11023998&site=ehost-live. Accessed 8 June 2017. Praises the book’s “great economy and power” and asserts that “there is a fatalism in Kapuściński’s reportage and insights that must be the gift to him of Poland itself.”

Finnegan, William. “How I Got the Story.” Review of The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński. The New York Times, 27 May 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/05/27/books/how-i-got-the-story.html. Accessed 8 June 2017. A mixed review of The Shadow of the Sun that includes a useful overview of Kapuściński’s career as a journalist.

Kapuściński, Ryszard. Interview. By Bill Buford. Granta, Spring 1987, pp. 81–97. An illuminating discussion.

Kapuściński, Ryszard. Interview. By Josh Weiss. Publishers Weekly, 5 Apr. 1991, pp. 124+. A detailed interview that provides considerable background information.