Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish Writer of Shimmering Allegories and News, Dies at 74

Author: Michael T. Kaufman
Source: The New York Times, January 24, 2007
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/books/24kap.html

Editorial summary by kapuscinski.info. The text below is a summary based on the original article. The full article is available at The New York Times (a subscription may be required).

The obituary of Ryszard Kapuscinski published by The New York Times on the day of the writer’s death, 23 January 2007. Michael T. Kaufman — himself a long-serving NYT foreign correspondent who knew Kapuscinski personally — draws a full portrait for an English-speaking readership.

Kaufman describes Kapuscinski as a writer who turned journalism into poetry and who caught the spirit of decolonisation in a way unavailable to Western correspondents carrying a colonial perspective. He notes that Kapuscinski was the Polish Press Agency’s only permanent correspondent for the whole of Africa — which meant responsibility for fifty countries at once.

Kaufman sets out the essential biography: born in Pinsk in 1932, history at the University of Warsaw, a first foreign assignment to India in 1956, twenty-seven revolutions and coups witnessed at first hand, and the serious illnesses contracted in the field, among them cerebral malaria and tuberculosis.

The headline — Polish Writer of Shimmering Allegories and News — captures the doubleness of Kapuscinski: master of hard reportage and author of texts of an almost poetic register. Kaufman quotes Salman Rushdie: “One Kapuscinski is worth more than a thousand whimpering and fantasising scribblers.”