Author: Artur Domosławski

From Tuesday in the news-stands: “The Emperor” by Ryszard Kapuściński — the next book in our twentieth-century collection. Not only did it launch the international career of the greatest Polish reporter; it also elevated reportage to the status of high literature. The very highest.

To write a note about Kapuściński’s “The Emperor” is like writing about Homer’s “Iliad”.

The American prose writer John Updike considered “The Emperor” a “magical reflection that often transforms itself into poetry and aphorism”. The review by that very writer, published in the American “New Yorker”, launched the international career of “The Emperor”. The year was 1981.

According to Salman Rushdie, “Kapuściński’s descriptions achieve what only art is capable of achieving: they wing the imagination”.

“The Emperor” was compared to the prose of Voltaire and Albert Camus. Enthusiastic reviews appeared in the most prestigious newspapers and magazines: “The New York Times”, “The New Yorker”, “Time”, “Newsweek”, “The Observer”, “The London Review of Books”, “El País”, “La Vanguardia”. “The Sunday Times” named “The Emperor” Book of the Year 1983.

On the factual level the book tells of the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie — or rather of the people of his court. Of how these people through their servility, toadying, fear, greediness, submissiveness, and races for the ruler’s favour erected the edifice of tyranny.

From the outset, however, the question was raised: does this book really tell of Emperor Haile Selassie? Does it really tell of Ethiopia?

Kapuściński went to Addis Ababa to file dispatches for PAP and on his return to write another cycle of reportages — this time about the military coup d’état in Ethiopia. In 1974 soldiers commanded by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam overthrew the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. People came out into the streets, burned portraits of the tyrant, believed that the era of poverty and backwardness had come to an end and that a bright future now awaited them.

Kapuściński considered that military coups followed more or less the same scenario — “you arrive at the airport and there is a check, then there are tanks, then there are barricades in the streets, then you have to go and register, then you have to take your material to the military censors”. In Ethiopia he had that feeling of journalistic déjà vu — everything had already happened, he had seen it all before, and he did not want to “repeat himself”; he did not want to tell the same story as on the occasion of reporting at least a dozen other coups in Africa and Latin America.

When he returned, he felt that he could not and did not want to write as before. He shut himself in his flat, did not go to the editorial office. After weeks of brooding and tearing his hair out he was close to depression. From the editorial office of “Kultura” they kept calling for him to submit the first reportage to print as quickly as possible. Meanwhile the page was blank — not a sentence, not a word. Breakdown imminent.

And then suddenly a flash of inspiration.

— The beginning of a book is always the hardest part — Kapuściński once recounted — because in writing a book it is very important to get into the rhythm. Once you have got into the rhythm, the rhythm carries you. I knew that when I was having difficulties with the beginning, I always had to look for the simplest thing, some detail, from which to start. I began looking through all the photographs from that period, materials, magazines, and finally I saw it. In one photograph the emperor is sitting on his throne with a small dog on his knees. Then I remembered that Haile Selassie did indeed have such a dog, which he always appeared with. And then I thought to myself that it is not me saying this, but one of the emperor’s servants: “It is a small dog of Japanese breed. It is called Lulu.” When I had that simplest beginning, I knew that I would have a book. I had masses of accounts. The whole problem was one of selection and structure.

But the difficulties were only beginning.

When Kapuściński took the first instalments to the editorial office, he heard: — Well, fine, but where are the reportages from Ethiopia? Something is beginning here about the emperor, about the dog, about how he feeds the animals, but where is Ethiopia? There was a great revolution there, great events, great arrests! He answered: — Don’t worry. Wait. That will come a little later.

After the next instalments it was unanimously agreed that they were splendid reportages, but describing not Ethiopia so much as the “court” of the then First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party Central Committee, Edward Gierek.

Concern arose that the editorial office might suffer unpleasant consequences from the authorities. Kapuściński’s bosses began wondering: what are these texts? Supposedly about Ethiopia, but not really about Ethiopia?

— They wanted me to finish these texts as quickly as possible — Kapuściński recalled — so that there would be no more fear and danger of what might happen next. Afterwards it was already clear to everyone in Poland that this was in effect an allusion to the prevailing regime.

Each instalment published separately in “Kultura” was fairly innocuous; the censors did not stop them. It was only the whole that was devastating. There was, however, in force at that time a provision whereby a text once accepted by the censor did not need to go to the censors again. Each instalment had the appropriate stamp. The publishing house could without fear send the whole to the printer.

Thanks to this the instalments of “The Emperor” appeared as a book.

Kapuściński on many occasions protested against the opinion that “The Emperor” was a book about Gierek’s regime and the system prevailing in Poland at that time. He wanted the story of Haile Selassie to have a more universal dimension. For it to be a book about the mechanisms of power. About how participation in power demoralises people, depraves them, distorts them. About how a normal person enters into arrangements, dependencies, the structure of politics, and how they change him. Whereas when he falls out of them, he once more becomes quite an ordinary person.

— I am not merely interested in the description of Haile Selassie’s court — Kapuściński said on another occasion. — I select that aspect of the court that can also be found in other situations — not only in great politics, but also in the life of various institutions.

He lived to see it confirmed.

In Morocco “The Emperor” was banned, though the thought of relating it to that country’s then ruler, King Hassan, as Kapuściński confessed years later, had never entered his head.

“The Emperor” owed its popularity in Switzerland partly to the fact that people discerned similar hierarchical behaviours in large corporations and other institutions.

In Great Britain readers found analogies to the harsh policy of Margaret Thatcher, which struck at millions of hired workers.

When a few years after writing the book, a theatrical adaptation of “The Emperor” was made at the Royal Court Theatre in London and Kapuściński was invited to the premiere, he met a weeping woman in the office of the theatre’s administrative director.

— Why are you crying? — he asked.

— I have to leave here — she replied.

— What has happened?

— But you described it all in “The Emperor”.

On the basis of “The Emperor” Andrzej Wajda wanted to make a film. A screenplay by Marcel Łoziński was even ready. The Ministry of Culture and Art of the Polish People’s Republic said, however: “Absolutely NOT!” A film of “The Emperor” was never made.

It did, however, see many stage adaptations — in Poland and around the world.

It was considered ready theatrical material; that its very structure predestined it for production in the theatre: exposition — development — climax, excellent monologues, and authorial stage directions and notes about place and time of action.

Adaptations of “The Emperor” were staged in many cities — including Amsterdam, Toronto, Oslo, London.

One of the adapters — the Briton Michael Hastings — justified the decision to bring “The Emperor” to the stage thus: — It gradually became clear that we were dealing with an exceptional artist, who creates against the discipline of pure reportage. It was as though a contemporary Suetonius had been born equipped with the photographic eye of Robert Capa, perceiving the most important traits of a nation when it seems to be committing suicide. There were phrases and events there which no strict historian would have noticed, and which are transformed into art through Kapuściński’s direct experience.

In the New York Public Library poll “The Emperor” was included on the list of 150 greatest works of twentieth-century literature. The book has been translated into 23 languages. The edition in the Gazeta Wyborcza collection is the 22nd Polish edition of this book.

Haile Selassie and Others

He was a monarch for 44 years. After the death of his father in 1906, already as a 14-year-old he began governing some provinces of Ethiopia; he became emperor in 1930. Six years later, defeated by Fascist Italy, he had to go into exile, and returned to his country thanks to the armed support of the British in 1941. During the Cold War he manoeuvred between the great powers — at first he was an ally of the USA, but when at the end of the 1950s the Americans supported the Somali struggle for independence, he drew closer to Moscow. He was overthrown in 1974 by the pro-Soviet Major Mengistu Haile Mariam, who tried to graft the Leninist model onto Ethiopia — with the same result as everywhere else in the world. Haile Selassie spent the last year of his life under “palace arrest”. He died in 1975; there are suspicions that he was murdered. He was officially buried only on 5 November 2000, and his coffin was placed in the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa.

Those descendants of slaves from Jamaica who called themselves Rastafarians (subjects of Ras Tafari, which is to say Haile Selassie himself) regard him to this day as the Father of Creation, the Saviour of the World, the King of Kings, the Heir of King Solomon, the Living God on Earth. Yes — “Living”, because many still do not believe that Haile Selassie has died. They still wait for him himself, or his emissary, to lead them out of Jamaica, the House of Bondage, Babylon, and take them to mythical Africa — the Promised Land. Rastafarians believe that their true history is told by the Bible, except that it was falsified by white people in order to keep Africans in ignorance, subservience, and bondage.

“The Emperor” by Kapuściński was to have been the first volume of a trilogy devoted to despotic rulers and the universal mechanisms of power. The second tyrant portrayed was the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, in the book “Shah of Shahs”, considered by many journalists to be the most brilliant of the master of literary reportage’s books. The third was to have been Idi Amin, the bloodthirsty warlord from Uganda who recently died in exile, who turned his country into a “blood-soaked theatre of one actor”. Although Kapuściński assembled a full documentation of the subject, he never wrote the volume about Amin. He was constantly overtaken — as he himself says — by current events, and the intention of writing the book fell in battle with the spirit of the dispatch-writer. A truly terrifying chapter about the Ugandan despot was however written, which Kapuściński included in his African summa — “Heban”. According to various sources in the course of the eight years of his rule 1971–78, Amin murdered between 150,000 and 300,000 people. “Amin, if he took a suspicion against someone, would invite him to see him. He was pleasant, cordial, he offered his guest a Coca-Cola. After the guest had left, executioners were already waiting for him. No one later found out what had happened to that man.”

Artur Domosławski

source: kapuscinski.info