The Nigerian civil war of 1966 finds Kapuscinski “driving along a road where they say no white man can come back alive. I was driving to see if a white man could, because I had to experience everything for myself.” Frenzied rebels have set up roadblocks of burning logs; they beat and rob Kapuscinski and douse his Peugeot with gasoline, shouting “Burn the car!” He escapes, but at the next roadblock the rebels douse Kapuscinski with benzene. “Here they burn people in benzene: it guarantees complete incineration.” Fortunately, the rebels wanted only to humiliate him before waving him on.
Six years earlier, with the Congo in revolt and Lumumba killed, Kapuscinski escapes from Stanleyville only to be taken for a spy, imprisoned and told that he would be shot the next day. The news provokes a consideration of the journalist’s state of mind. “A state of depressing emptiness,” Kapuscinski writes, “collapse, dulled inertia” - his self-analysis proceeds in some detail. Yet when once again he escapes and turns to look at the big picture, he writes: “In the Congo, things turned out as they had to.” He has said his theme is “the tragedy of history,” but you can almost see him shrug.
Kapuscinski has a fine appreciation of loony arguments and behavior: the comic, the murderous, the merely pretentious. His deadpan report of the debate on a bill for child support in the Tanganyikan Parliament should become a classic feminist text. The title piece concerns a war fought in 1969 by Honduras and El Salvador over a series of soccer matches: a war that lasted 100 hours and resulted in 6,000 dead and 12,000 wounded.
A century ago, imperialist British eccentrics made similarly dangerous journeys into the same parts of Africa and returned to write scarcely believable narratives of their ordeals. Kapuscinski is no imperialist, but otherwise not much has changed. Like Sir Richard Burton, Evelyn Waugh and Mungo Park, he makes literature of journalism: “The Soccer War” isn’t just reporting; it’s a travel book that will make anyone glad to stay at home.
At 59, with 35 years of reporting on all this Third World revolution and mayhem behind him, Kapuscinski still sees himself as a foreign correspondent - with a literary mission. “The strength of this literature is its authenticity,” he says. But more than straight reporting is necessary: “The other important element is reflection. The pure account does not satisfy. The pure account is provided by television. People are looking for some explanation, some reflection.”
Leaving his homeland to report for the Polish Press Agency on “countries which people did not know or care about” signified a “liberation” from the reality of pre-solidarity Poland. He had thought that the “Polish October” of 1956 - one year after he graduated from the University of Warsaw - signaled the liberalization of Polish life. “My generation was full of hopes that we could reform socialism here,” he recalls. “But very shortly we became disillusioned.” Still, while reporting from abroad, he was only occasionally reprimanded for not conforming to the political line of the moment. Some dispatches were spiked, but usually the censor’s hand was not particularly heavy.
Kapuscinski paid a physical price for his travels: he had a nearly fatal case of cerebral malaria and a bad bout with tuberculosis in Africa. Then, too, there was the constant exposure to the violence of the regions he was covering. In 1972, he began writing for the Polish literary weekly Kultura; this lasted until he and other Solidarity sympathizers on its staff were dismissed after the government imposed martial law in 1981.
Since then, Kapuscinski has worked on his own. He has written 13 books, but only four have been published in translation. His future projects will continue to focus on the foreign experience, prompting some Poles to question why he has not written more about Poland. His answer: “My idea was to overcome the ethnocentrism of our literature.” Nonetheless, he admits that Polish themes are present in his work since Poland’s experience contains many Third World elements.
For him, “Third World” is less a geographical term than one describing a state of underdevelopment and disarray. Thus, the subject of his current project - the Soviet Union - is easily in keeping with his “obsession with the Third World,” he says. “The Soviet Union is a classic example of such an entity - an area of undeveloped civilization undergoing decomposition.” After he completes that volume, he wants to write a book about his childhood in Pinsk, where he spent the first nine years of his life before the Soviet Union annexed it with other eastern Polish territories. A book on the Sudan is also planned, as well as a long-anticipated work on former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. “I feel a very great necessity to go back to Africa,” he says. “I see that Africa is a completely forgotten continent of growing hunger, war and AIDS.” But when? Kapuscinski sighs. “It’s a question of time,” he says. “Traveling is very time-consuming, but it’s absolutely necessary for me.”
