Obituary: Ryszard Kapuściński

Author: Victoria Brittain
Source: The Guardian, January 25, 2007
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/jan/25/guardianobituaries.mainsection

Editorial summary by kapuscinski.info. The text below is a summary based on the original article. The full article is available free of charge at The Guardian.

An obituary by Victoria Brittain — for many years The Guardian’s correspondent in Africa and Asia, and the author of books on Angola and Equatorial Guinea. Brittain was writing about Africa in much the same years as Kapuscinski, which gives her judgement unusual weight: she is not reviewing him from outside, but from the position of a witness to the same events.

Brittain stresses that Kapuscinski was in Africa at a particular moment — the decolonisation of the 1950s and 1960s — when access to the continent was, paradoxically, easier for a Polish correspondent than for Western journalists. He carried no colonial inheritance, identified with none of the great powers, and could talk to revolutionaries as a man from a country equally dependent.

The piece describes his work in terms of its physical dangers: malaria, interrogations, prisons, the risk of being shot — Kapuscinski escaped with his life more than once. Brittain sees in him a journalist who chose participation over observation from a safe distance.

The Guardian’s obituary closes on a judgement: Kapuscinski was not only a writer but a witness who took the side of the weaker party in every conflict he described.