Master of literary reportage and the greatest writer among reporters — so people spoke of Ryszard Kapuściński. He was a traveller, reporter, and writer; from 1958 to 1972 a journalist and correspondent of the Polish Press Agency.

Kapuściński, who in his books elevated reportage to the rank of a literary genre, joked that writing was “terrible, physical work.” Yet when asked why he had chosen this particular profession, he invariably answered that the reason was passion. “What fascinated me was people, life, the world. I think that the condition for being a journalist is simply passion and curiosity about others and about otherness,” he would stress. “The reporter’s duty is to be where something important is happening and to give an account of it,” he added.

Among a large group of outstanding journalists from around the world, “only Kapuściński was spoken of as a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in two fields — literature and work for peace.”

By Kapuściński’s own count, in his career as a reporter he witnessed 27 revolutions, was sentenced to death four times, and was present at the fronts of twelve wars. “In the kind of journalism I practise, certain predispositions are needed. One cannot be excessively sensitive, because that would prevent the observation of events, but at the same time one must have a certain measure of sensitivity in order to be moved by another’s fate and to respond appropriately,” he wrote.

From the Borderlands. He was born on 4 March 1932 in Pińsk, in the Polesie region (present-day Belarus). He made his literary debut as a poet, before sitting his school-leaving exams, in 1949, in the weekly Dziś i Jutro. The poems attracted the attention of editors at Sztandar Młodych, who offered the beginning author a collaboration.

In October 1950 Kapuściński began studies at the Faculty of Polish Studies at Warsaw University, and later transferred to history. He studied at the History Faculty of the University of Warsaw from 1952 to 1956. In 1952 Kapuściński married Alicja Mielczarek, a medical student, and the following year their daughter Zofia was born.

After defending his diploma Kapuściński returned to Sztandar Młodych. In 1955 its pages carried the first important reportage of his career: “This Too Is the Truth about Nowa Huta.” Kapuściński’s first trip abroad took place in 1956, when he visited India on behalf of Sztandar Młodych. He went there with a very poor command of English. During a stopover at Rome airport he bought Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls in English, and in his suitcase had a dictionary — that was his first language-learning kit.

Discovering the World. The trip to India was a cultural shock for Kapuściński, about which he wrote in Travels with Herodotus. In 1957 he went to Japan and China. In 1958 he worked for ten months at the Polish Press Agency, and was then offered a post at Polityka. As that weekly’s correspondent he spent four years travelling around the country and writing reportages, the best of which composed his debut book The Polish Bush (1962).

His first journey to Africa took place in the winter of 1959–60 — he was then in Ghana and also visited Dahomey and Niger. Fascinated by the process of decolonisation taking place in African states at the time, he flew to Cairo, from where he made his way to the Congo, then engulfed in civil war. Together with two Czech journalists he was arrested, sentenced to death, and miraculously saved by UN soldiers. What it feels like when a man has just learned he is to be shot the next day, he wrote about only in The Soccer War (1978).

In 1962 he was sent to Dar es Salaam, as the first Polish PAP correspondent for the whole of Africa. He spent five years there. He wrote about the birth of the “Third World” in Black Stars (1963) and If the Whole of Africa (1969).

Before the publication of If the Whole of Africa, A Kirghiz Dismounts appeared (1968) — reportages from a three-month journey through seven Asian and Transcaucasian republics of the Soviet Union. In autumn 1967 he became PAP correspondent in Latin America, spending another five years there in Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil. The journey yielded Why Karl von Spreti Died (1970) and Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder (1975).

Mentor. On his return Kapuściński resigned from PAP, though without severing his collaboration with the agency. He took up teaching at the Faculty of Journalism at Warsaw University and became a reporter for the weekly Kultura. The 1970s were a period of intensive travel — to the Middle East, India, Cyprus, and many African states. A stay in Angola produced Another Day of Life (1976), and journeys to Ethiopia and Iran yielded two books that brought Kapuściński international fame: The Emperor (1978) and Shah of Shahs (1982).

Alongside travel and journalism, Kapuściński’s passion was poetry, which he called “a rare luxury” requiring time he never had. In 1986 he published the poetry collection Notes. In 1990 the first of five volumes of Lapidarium appeared (subsequent volumes in 1995, 1997, 2000, and 2002). Three years later came Imperium — reportages about the collapsing USSR. Kapuściński’s next publication was Ebony (1998) — a book returning to the African theme.

Kapuściński perceived his work as translation — not from language to language, but from culture to culture. “My chief ambition is to show Europeans that our mentality is very Eurocentric, that Europe, or rather a part of it, is not the only thing in the world,” he wrote.

Ryszard Kapuściński died on 23 January 2007 in Warsaw, aged 74.

source: kapuscinski.info