Are Kapuscinski's reportages still relevant?

Ryszard Kapuscinski described above all the twentieth century: the decolonisation of Africa, the revolutions of the Third World, dictatorships, civil wars, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shifts in the global order. One may therefore ask whether his reportages are still relevant. The world he wrote about has, in many details, receded into the past. The media, the pace of information, the balance of powers, the language of politics and postcolonial awareness are all different. And yet Kapuscinski’s books keep returning, because they are not merely a record of events. Their main subject is mechanisms: power, fear, propaganda, war, inequality, the encounter with the Other and the responsibility of the witness.

The most obvious example of relevance is The Emperor. It is a book about the court of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, but it is read as a story about any power cut off from reality. Kapuscinski shows a system in which people rise through loyalty, not competence; language serves to hide catastrophe; ritual replaces action; and those around the leader are afraid to tell the truth. This mechanism belongs neither solely to the Ethiopian monarchy nor to the twentieth century. It returns in authoritarian states, corporate hierarchies, party courts and all structures that reward flattery more than responsibility.

Shah of Shahs remains relevant as a book about revolution and the limits of modernisation imposed from above. Kapuscinski describes an Iran in which power wants to accelerate history but does not understand social emotions, tradition and anger. He also shows the moment when fear stops working. People go out into the streets, the apparatus of repression loses its certainty, and the existing order falls apart faster than its defenders foresee. A contemporary reader can find in this book not a ready-made template of every revolution, but a warning: no system is stable merely because it has police, propaganda and money. If it loses contact with people, it begins to crack from within.

The relevance of Imperium lies elsewhere. It is a book about the USSR — its vastness, its violence, its peripheries and its collapse — but also about an imperial way of thinking. Kapuscinski looks at the empire from the inside and from the edge: through the memory of childhood in Pinsk, journeys by rail, encounters with people in Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. He is interested not only in the state as an apparatus but in the traces it leaves in the psyche and in space. Today, when questions about Russia, imperial memory, borders, violence and the dependence of nations are again dramatically present in public debate, Imperium can be read as a warning against the illusion that great systems disappear without remainder. The fall of a state does not automatically remove the habits of power.

The Shadow of the Sun remains important, though it demands the most conscious reading. Kapuscinski wrote about Africa from the perspective of a twentieth-century Polish reporter. His view must today be supplemented with the voices of African authors and with contemporary knowledge of the continent. Even so, the book still teaches something essential: resistance to simplification. The author shows Africa as a continent of diversity, full of different cultures, histories and experiences. He does not reduce it to exoticism or to statistics of poverty. The strongest thing in The Shadow of the Sun is precisely the passage from the slogan to the concrete: from “Africa” to a person, a house, a road, the heat, illness, a tree and a conversation.

Kapuscinski is also relevant as an author writing about the media and the reporter’s profession. In A Portrait of the Reporter and Travels with Herodotus the question recurs of how to know the world and how to tell of it. Today, in an age of instant messages, social media and the abridgement, his method seems especially demanding. The reporter should be on the spot, listen, read, compare, doubt, know the context and take responsibility for the word. Kapuscinski is not an unproblematic model, since disputes about the limits of fact and literary interpretation surround his writing. But it is precisely these disputes that make him important for the contemporary conversation about reportage. They show that the question of truth in literary non-fiction is not simple.

Not all elements of his writing age equally. Some political diagnoses belong to the time of the Cold War. Some of the language about Africa or the Third World requires a critical commentary today. Some generalisations may seem too broad. The relevance of Kapuscinski therefore does not lie in his having “predicted” the present in everything. Such a claim would be too easy. His relevance lies in providing tools of seeing: he teaches us to look at power from the side of the court, at revolution from the side of fear, at empire from the side of the peripheries, at war from the side of the human being who has no influence on the leaders’ decisions.

That is why it is worth reading Kapuscinski today together with other authors, not instead of them. The Emperor can be set beside contemporary analyses of authoritarianism. Shah of Shahs beside reportages on revolutions and political religion. Imperium beside texts on Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Shadow of the Sun beside African literature and reportages written from within the continent. Then his books are not monuments but living partners in conversation.

The answer, then, is: yes, Kapuscinski is still relevant, but not as an infallible guide to today’s world. He is relevant as a writer of mechanisms and of borderline experiences. His reportages remind us that history does not happen in the abstract. It happens in the language of power, in the fear of ordinary people, in an emptying city, in a queue, at a border, in the shade of a tree, in the room of a reporter trying to order his notes. That is exactly where the understanding of the world begins.

The best way to read him today is to ask his books new questions rather than to look in them for ready answers. The Emperor can be read by asking about the mechanisms of court and propaganda. Shah of Shahs — about the moment a society stops being afraid. Imperium — about the long life of imperial violence after a system’s formal fall. The Shadow of the Sun — about how to write about a diverse continent and which simplifications to avoid. Travels with Herodotus — about curiosity as a condition of knowledge.

Such a reading is more demanding than the simple slogan “Kapuscinski predicted the present”. He did not predict everything, and he did not have to. His value lies in teaching us to recognise recurring patterns: power isolating itself from society, media confusing speed with understanding, empires hiding violence under the language of mission, people on the road between cultures, and the reporter responsible for someone else’s voice. In a world of excess information, that lesson has not lost its meaning.

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