Kapuscinski's books on revolutions and dictators

Ryszard Kapuscinski is often associated with travel, Africa and literary reportage, but one of the most important themes of his work is power. He was interested in the moment when a system begins to crumble: the court no longer hears the street, the dictator loses contact with reality, people stop being afraid, and a revolution, instead of the promised order, brings a new chaos. Kapuscinski did not write textbooks of political science. He showed the mechanisms of power through a scene, the voice of a witness, the image of a city, a conversation with a person caught up in history. That is why his books on revolutions and dictators are still read not only as documents of an era, but also as universal parables of fear, loyalty, propaganda and collapse.

The most important point of this line of work is The Emperor, a 1978 reportage about the court of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. The book was written after the fall of the monarchy, when Kapuscinski spoke with former courtiers, servants and officials. From their monologues he built a portrait of absolute power. The court comes to the foreground as a machine of dependence. Everyone has his place, everyone courts favour, everyone watches over gesture, tone and distance. The ruler seems almost motionless, yet the whole system revolves around him. Kapuscinski shows that despotism does not rest on violence alone. It rests also on ritual, language, careers, the fear of losing one’s position and people’s readiness to pretend that reality looks the way the centre wishes.

The Emperor is a book about Ethiopia, but from the start it was read more broadly. In communist Poland it was received as an allegory of a system in which loyalty can matter more than competence and the courtly language hides social catastrophe. This universality does not weaken the concrete, however. Kapuscinski writes about a particular state, a particular court and a particular fall. Only from the detail does he draw the rule. That is why the summary and analysis of The Emperor is worth reading as an analysis of the mechanisms of power, not only as a study guide to the book.

The second key title is Shah of Shahs, published in 1982. This time the centre of the story is Iran and the Islamic revolution of 1978–1979. If The Emperor shows a court in a state of decay, Shah of Shahs shows a society that stops recognising the ruler’s authority. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi modernises the country from above, builds an apparatus of control, uses the violence of the secret police and tries to impose on Iran a vision of modernity detached from social emotions. Kapuscinski is interested in the moment when fear stops working. When people go out into the streets, the regime loses the tool that had held it up until then.

Shah of Shahs differs in style from The Emperor. It is more austere, more of a collage, composed of photographs, notes, recordings and fragments. The reporter sits in a room, orders his material and tries to understand what actually happened. This form is significant: a revolution does not arrange itself into a simple story. It is made of images, slogans, recollections, fear, anger and later disappointment. Kapuscinski also shows a bitter truth: the overthrow of a tyranny does not guarantee freedom. A revolution can release the energy of revenge and create a new violence.

To this circle belongs also Another Day of Life, a reportage about Angola in 1975. It is a book about civil war, but also about the void after the fall of the colonial order. The Portuguese leave Luanda, the city empties, crates of belongings wait in the port, and new political forces fight for the future of the state. Kapuscinski describes a chaos in which history is at once global and very personal. On one side there is decolonisation, external interventions, the rivalry of factions and Cold War tensions. On the other — the loneliness of the reporter, the fear of the road, the question of the sense of staying on.

In The Soccer War Kapuscinski returns to conflicts, coups and revolutions in Africa and Latin America, but does so in a more fragmentary form. This book is important because it reveals the backstage of a correspondent’s work. We see not only the events but also the cost of describing them: risk, chance, waiting, the sudden nearness of death. The titular conflict between El Salvador and Honduras shows how easily political violence finds a seemingly trivial pretext, while the real causes lie deeper: in poverty, inequality, nationalism, social tensions.

It is also worth mentioning Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder, a collection of reportages from places of fighting, revolution and liberation movements. It is an earlier book, more immersed in the atmosphere of the Third World and the disputes of the era. Kapuscinski does not describe revolution as an outside chronicler. He tries to understand the people who take up arms because they are convinced they have no other way. At the same time, in his later writing a scepticism towards revolutionary illusions appears ever more clearly. Liberation can turn into a new coercion, and anger into an apparatus of revenge.

What links these books? First, the conviction that power lives through language. The emperor’s court creates its own speech of flattery and dependence. The shah’s regime uses the propaganda of modernisation and fear. A revolution creates new slogans that can quickly become a tool for excluding opponents. Second, Kapuscinski shows that a system falls earlier than the official communiqués reveal. The collapse begins with the loss of contact with reality: in the palace, in the offices, in the secret police reports, in the conviction that subjects will always stay silent.

Third, the author does not reduce history to leaders. At the centre are also courtiers, soldiers, refugees, city dwellers, people waiting for decisions they do not make. It is they who bear the cost of great political projects. That is why Kapuscinski’s books about dictatorships and revolutions do not age as quickly as journalism. Their subject is not only Ethiopia, Iran, Angola or Latin America. Their subject is the mechanism in which a human being is drawn in by history and then tries to save his voice, his memory and his dignity.

In practice these books are worth reading in pairs. The Emperor and Shah of Shahs show two sides of the fall of authoritarian power: the palace isolation and the street eruption. Another Day of Life and The Soccer War shift attention to the terrain of war, where great politics turns into a journey through checkpoints, the fear of being shot, the flight of the population and accidental death. Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder, in turn, adds the earlier stage of fascination with liberation movements and the drama of people convinced that without violence they will not regain their dignity.

Such a reading lets us see the evolution of Kapuscinski himself. He was not the author of a single thesis about revolution. In his writing one first sees curiosity and empathy towards rebels, then a growing awareness that overthrowing a tyranny does not solve all problems. A revolution may be necessary, but it may also quickly produce a new hierarchy, new enemies and a new language of violence. It is precisely this distrust of simple answers that makes Kapuscinski’s books a good starting point for a conversation about contemporary political crises.

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