Below is a working list of Polish editions of Ryszard Kapuściński’s “If the Whole of Africa”. ISBN numbers are included only where they could be confirmed in reliable bibliographic or bookselling sources.

Polish Editions

First Edition Year of publication: 1969 Publisher: Czytelnik Print run: 8,000 copies ISBN: no confirmed number

Second Edition Year of publication: 1971 Print run: 15,000 copies Notes: map of Africa from 1967 ISBN: no confirmed number

Third Edition Year of publication: 2011 Publisher: Agora SA Print run: number requires further confirmation ISBN: number requires further confirmation

Table of Contents

1. Marriage and Freedom. 2. The President Sounds Out the Future. 3. Birds on One Leg. 4. The Parliament of Tanganyika on the Question of Alimony. 5. Africa at the Round Table. 6. Rhodesia, Nkomo and Sithole. 7. Mau Mau Comes Out of the Forest. 8. We Shall Bathe Our Horses in Blood. 9. Abbud Comes and Goes. 10. Algeria Covers Its Face. 11. A Dispute over a Judge Ended in the Fall of the Government. 12. Inside a Big Babushka — a Smaller Babushka. 13. Have You Seen the King? 14. Nigeria in the Days of the Coup. 15. On the African Revolution.

The reportage “Algeria Covers Its Face” was originally written for the PAP Foreign Desk under the title “The Algerian Coup.”

Preface to the Book

“The reportages collected in this book constitute accounts of my African wanderings. In Africa I was not looking for adventure, I did not hunt elephants, I did not dig for diamonds. I was a correspondent of the Polish Press Agency and I had to write about what I heard or saw there, about what was happening there. And much was happening. I spent nearly six years in Africa in its most turbulent and restless period — full, moreover, of hopes, though sometimes overly easy ones. It was a turning point between two epochs: colonialism was ending, independence was beginning. That change of reality, that upheaval, that revolution — I tried to describe it. That is how the reportages came into being. I did not write them with a book in mind. Not even with publication in mind. In the years when I was making these notes, a number of the views they contain belonged to the highly controversial — not to say heretical. But I cared about one thing: to write how it really was — for that is, after all, the ambition, the ambition of the reportorial brotherhood.”

Today the sharp edges of those disputes have blunted, the war has ended, and this book is already partly history. Some of its heroes have departed; some were killed. But those who are no longer with us were here only yesterday and shaped the reality of Africa as it is today. Nkrumah, Ben Bella, Kasavubu, Balewa — they have passed, but these were great names of Africa, names that will be remembered. In these reportages I show them as I knew them at close quarters.

This is a book of adventures — political adventures.

In Africa I was fascinated by the exoticism of political life. What interested me most was the way in which local traditions, customs, and environment influence the style of politics — how they deform its mechanisms and shape its new forms. That junction of custom and politics, the mutual influence of both spheres of life upon one another — what a superb object of observation.

This volume is a loose selection of reportages, nothing more. Some of them describe various events I happened to witness. In others I try to explain a few things. I wanted to show a few scenes of the African drama whose beginning I did not see and which may have no end — a few scenes accidentally observed and accidentally collected here. I have not tried to update anything, because that would be a hopeless task: the play will continue — and in effect every book of this kind should end with the note: to be continued.

November 1968

source: kapuscinski.info