Autor:Sławomir Majman
Źródło:Warsaw Voice

In those unbelievable times ordinary Poles got up at dawn to stand in line in front of a bookstore, to hunt down their dream book. They followed world politics avidly, and knew more about the Third World than the British and French combined.

You could say that in communist Poland, people hunted for books because everything was in short supply, while rooting for Patrice Lumumba, concern for the fate of Allende or following the stormy life of Che Guevara was a substitute for the complete lack of political attractions in a country ruled by communists.

What was a hundred times more important, though, was that in the West’s voracious discovery of Latin America in the throes of social paroxysms, in learning about Africa at a time when a new independent country was born every month and diplomats from the world powers had problems pronouncing the names of the leaders they were backing in the race to dominate the planet, Poles unexpectedly played a major role. Not Polish politicians, of course, nor ethnographers, nor secret service agents, but reporters. Poland of the 1960s and 70s was extremely lucky, as this was where a group of extraordinarily talented reporters emerged.

Writing about Poland was restricted by the severe rules of censorship, so these writers found refuge in reporting from other countries. One of them managed to elevate reporting to the rank of literature of the highest standard. And, something that was even more difficult for a Pole, he managed to achieve world fame and commercial success. At home, despite barking from the little mongrels of a dated conservative revolution, he maintained the position of a moral authority—no mean feat during times of political breakthroughs.

Today Ryszard Kapuściński is no longer with us, and we can only turn to his famous books, translated into 20 languages: The Emperor, about Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, Shah of Shahs, about Khomeini’s revolution, Imperium, about Gorbachev’s Russia, and Ebony about Africa. But these books are not only about the tyranny in Ethiopia, the nature of the Islamic revolution of Iran, the hell of postcolonial disappointments and the sources of Latin American radicalisms. In fact, whatever Kapuściński described, he was always writing about the same thing: the need to respect and understand others, and the need to remain on the side of the poor and excluded.

Was Kapuściński a leftist?
Certainly Kapuściński was a man of the left. “The principle of moral honesty is a quality of the Latin American leftists,” he wrote in the well-known book Christ With a Rifle on His Shoulder.

He wrote with complete understanding about leftist guerillas and disgust about American imperialism in Latin America. He translated Che’s Guevara legendary Bolivian Diary with foreword by Fidel Castro, was skeptical towards the free market and globalization, and criticized the West for its hypocrisy towards the needs of the Third World.

It makes sense that someone for whom imperialism was not just a catchword on banners during anti-American rallies organized by the ruling communist parties in Eastern Europe, would favor the left. Kapuściński observed and described imperialism every day. In Guatemala, when the U.S. ambassador gave a list to the armed forces commander and demanded that the people on the list be executed within 24 hours. “But why?” asked the colonel. “Because they’re communists,” the ambassador replied. In Africa, where successive countries won independence only to drown it in civil wars upheld by the only technology that the superpowers did not grudge them—weapons.

Kapuściński obsessively returned to the issue of silence, silence that is just as much a political tool as the clash of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is needed by tyrants and invaders, who make sure their actions are accompanied by silence. “If I turn on a local radio station in Guatemala and hear only songs, a beer commercial and one piece of news—that Siamese twins have been born in India, I know that the station is in the service of silence. Also in the service of silence are successive dictators of this country, their protectors from Miami and Boston, the local army and the police.”

Kapuściński was a man of the left, and his leftist views stemmed from sympathy for the disinherited, hurt and humiliated in a world of money. The phenomenon of Kapuściński lay in the fact that he did not describe the destitution of the Third World from the position of a sympathetic Victorian lady. He himself came from the pits of prewar Polish poverty, from Jewish-Polish Pińsk, a town lost among the marshes of today’s Belarus. In his last book, Travels With Herodotus, he described how, aged 10, he cried half the tears of his life because he had to get money for shoes by selling soap from door to door, and no one wanted to buy it. Kapuściński the reporter looked at a barefoot Indian beggar, at the outsider, and that person was close to his heart because he had been carrying that outsider inside him from childhood and had never got rid of him.

The boy from Pińsk also retained the conviction, shared by many peers from Polish villages and towns, that it is certainly not capitalism that can bring a change of fate to the disinherited.

Yes, if leftism means identifying with the disadvantaged and opposing intolerance, xenophobia and religious fanaticism, then the greatest Polish writer was a man of the left.

Obviously, Kapuściński wrote about politics.
He wrote about countries with no great private industry, where the plantations belong to foreigners, the banks are owned by overseas capital and the only way to make a fortune is a political career. Take Akintola, prime minister of Western Nigeria. Five years before, he had been a middle-class lawyer. After a year as PM, he had millions. He simply transferred funds from the government’s account to his private one. The poverty and disillusionment of those at the bottom and the greed and voracity of those at the top created a poisonous, highly charged atmosphere in which the army, calling themselves defenders of the wronged, reached for power.

He wrote about modernization coming from the top. The Great Civilization of the shah turned to dust because it was an alien graft that never took root. It was an attempt to impose a certain model of life on a society that was attached to completely different traditions and values. The rejection of a graft is an inexorable process once it starts. Society will never know peace until it purges itself of the alien tissue transplanted by force.

He wrote about Liberia and the revolt of the slaves of former slaves from America, and about the end of the corrupt President Tolbert, whom the future president, Sergeant Doe, quartered in his bed, pulling out his insides and throwing them to the dogs in the courtyard. Then there was the death of Doe himself, which his successor ordered to be filmed in every detail: the massacred face, the head swollen from blows, his ears being cut off with a bayonet. All this so he would disclose his Swiss bank account number. Every time a dictator is hunted down in Africa, the entire investigation revolves around just one thing—the number of his private bank account.

He wrote about how the almost half-million strong army of Ethiopia’s Marxist tyrant broke down within hours, how soldiers armed with kalashnikovs turned into beggars before the eyes of the capital city’s flabbergasted residents, how they begged for food, and then—abandoning their planes and guns—set off on foot, on mules, and by bus to their home villages.

Kapuściński went to the Third World for the first time in 1956. He got to grips with it at the cost of catching malaria and tuberculosis, and almost dying. He forced his way through to wherever new revolts and new wars were flaring up. Then he stopped rushing forward and got to know the Third World from within and through personal insight.

He wrote about politics, but also about waiting—the dead waiting that Africans spend a sizable part of their lives doing. “He says nothing, silent. The muscles loosen. The figure goes limp, slumps, shrinks. The neck goes rigid, the head doesn’t move. The man does not look around, he watches out for nothing, he is not interested.”

He wrote about time. For Africans, time is a much looser category than it is for Europeans. It is open, flexible, subjective. Time depends on people. In practice this means that if a meeting is to be held in the village at noon and there is no one there, it is pointless to ask, “When’s the meeting?” because the answer is obvious: “When the people gather.”

Kapuściński was a writer of the world’s disintegration and felt the best wherever it was obvious that things would never be the same again. But Ebony also features the beautiful tale of morning in the village of Abdallah Wallo—a village where no hens cluck, no cows moo, where there is no vegetation, greenery, gardens or orchards. People live face to face with the bare earth. There are people and there is water. The men pray, the women are busy cooking rice. There is a ritual of morning visits and greetings, when everyone visits everyone else and asks whether they slept well.

Before Kapuściński told Poles about the Third World, he told them about provincial Poland.

The Bush, Polish Style includes a description of a rural dance and crowds of country girls. The reporter suddenly notices they are all laughing with their lips tight shut. It is because all their front teeth are decayed.

Later Kapuściński wrote about distant countries, but Polish readers anyway recognized Polish communist leaders in the Asian and African rulers. He wrote about Ethiopia and people saw the Polish reality: servility, an ossified system, suspiciousness, fear of change. He wrote about the revolution in Iran, but Poles reading about the Persians rejecting a foreign system of values winked knowingly at one another and thought about how communism had been imposed on them. The books were perceived as allegorical images of the communist system’s decay.

In actual fact Kapuściński always avoided literalism and short-term polemics on Polish affairs. It was enough that thanks to him, Poles during authoritarian times and later, in a free Poland focused only on itself, felt less parochial and less provincial. It is less important to the Poles that, like Norman Mailer or Joan Didion, he turned reporting into literature. The important thing is that he was one of the builders of the Noah’s Ark on which educated Poles floated through communism in a decent mental condition.

The important thing is that very few fail to recognize the first sentences from his best book, The Emperor: “It was a small dog, a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu. He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor’s great bed. During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor’s lap and pee on dignitaries’ shoes.”

źródło: kapuscinski.info