Editorial: Kapuściński - an appreciation
He began his career at the youth magazine Sztandar Młodych, and earned notoriety with an article entitled: "This too is the truth of Nowa Huta." The steel factory in the Nowa Huta district in Kraków was supposed to be a showcase of industrial prowess, a symbol of the Soviet state's economic triumph. The truth was a volatile combination of appalling working conditions, rampant mismanagement and drunken supervisors. Kapuściński's article somehow cleared the censors and its publication led to a torrent of protest, and forced him into hiding. In an interview with Bill Buford for the Paris Review, he said the experience "illustrated that writing was about ... risking everything. The value of the writing is not in what you publish but in its consequences. If you set out to describe reality, then the influence of the writing is upon reality."
This approach was to be the hallmark of his career. He was frequently the last correspondent (or indeed the first and only correspondent) in whatever war-torn spot he was covering at the time. His most oft-repeated claim to fame was to have been present at 27 coups and revolutions, and been sentenced to death at least four times. He had an unerring ability to get himself into trouble - in The Soccer War, he writes that he "was driving along a road where they say no white man can come back alive. I was driving to see if a white man could, because I had to experience everything for myself."
Kapuściński was not without his detractors. As far as his books were concerned, he admitted that he did not rely overly on notes or tape recordings. Numerous minor errors have been identified in his work, and some critics say that his books, in particular The Emperor, misrepresent the situations they depict. He dismissed these criticisms, grumbling that if people wanted exact dates, names and events, they could find them in their local library.
What Kapuściński rigorously pursued was the overriding spirit of the occasion - his books hum with the captured currents of change, committed to paper as they swept through the streets of Sierra Leone, the steppes of Russia, and the towns of Iran. Dictators rose, dictators fell, explosions, gunfire, civil war, blood on the streets and panic at the airports, and all the while Kapuściński was there to watch, to listen, to learn - and to write.
The Emperor is perhaps Kapuściński's best-known work, and one in which he seems to create an altogether new form of political reportage. Published in 1978, it depicts the downfall of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia by weaving together the stories of the fallen emperor's consorts and court officials. Kapuściński's refusal to embellish the language lends an intimacy to the story, a feeling of being inside the doomed court of Selassie, that is both unnerving and exhilarating.
This is Kapuściński's genius. "I avoided official routes, palaces, important personages and big politics," he writes in The Shadow of the Sun. "Instead I preferred to hitch rides on passing trucks, wander with nomads through the desert, be the guest of peasants from the tropical savannah." This was his trick - mine the ordinary, everyday tales in the most war-ravaged parts of the globe so that they would resonate with a reader in any street in the world. His artifice was to use the story of the person on the street to cast light on events that would have repercussions around the globe. Often, these series of vignettes would coalesce into an allegory for the regime being depicted, or other far-flung totalitarian regimes, though Kapuściński claims this was never his intention.
Kapuściński's prose crackles and whips along at a fiery pace. It is reportage pared back to the bone; not a word more than necessary, not a letter more than needed. He was one of those rare writers who could evoke an entire war zone with a handful of paragraphs. His boundless enthusiasm and almost childlike curiosity with his subjects, combined with his masterful command of the written word, produced books that cut straight to the heart of the matter with no little elegance. He combined the rigorous approach of an intellectual with a thirst for battle, and his books stand as testament to the events they portray and the genius of their author.
Kapuściński was a journalist par excellence, and was often name-checked for the Nobel Prize, though this never came to pass. He is survived by his wife, Alicja, and his daughter.
