two of Kapuściński’s first encounter with Asia comes a year later – in China. He also visits Japan, and it is this brief visit of a mere few days, rather than the longer one to China, that generates a series of reports. However, it is China that makes the deeper impression on Kapuściński, in the same way as he was struck by India’s unfathomable, fascinating dissimilarity.
In China he is to arrange co-operation with the communist youth wing and a newspaper called Chungkuo, which is the equivalent of Sztandar Młodych. At a certain point the Polish October and Mao Zedong’s Hundred Flowers Campaign seem to involve similar ideas about re-energizing socialism and making room for greater freedom, but when Kapuściński arrives in Peking, both parties are changing course and the reversal of reforms has begun. Gomułka closes down Po Prostu, while Chairman Mao tightens the screws and gears up for the Great Leap Forward.
One day in Peking, an employee of the Polish foreign trade centre brings Kapuściński a letter from his colleagues at Sztandar Młodych. They inform him that they have refused to support the closure of the weekly Po Prostu and, following the dismissal of Marian Turski from the post of acting editor-in-chief, they have decided to leave the newspaper. Some are hesitating, and want to know what Kapuściński will do. He decides to return home earlier than planned, not by plane but by the Trans-Siberian Railway. He joins the protestors and quits his job at Sztandar.
The journalists who have resigned agree that he should publish the reports from his recent journey in Sztandar. They promise not to regard it as a breach of solidarity or an act of disloyalty towards his colleagues who have left the paper. They understand that if they were to set excessive moral demands, and Kapuściński were to accept them, he would be in trouble: he flew to China as a correspondent for Sztandar, using state money raised by the editors, and so it is appropriate that he fulfil his assignment.
Within a few years the Third World, though not India and not China, will become Kapuściński’s professional passion. ‘Passion, passion, you’ve got to have a passion!’ he repeats to his friends, acquaintances and the young reporters he meets. Years later, he writes in a poem that ‘whosoever creates his own world will live on’.9 The world of Kapuściński the writer and reporter began being created during his journey to India. So, too, did the fate of the ever-absent husband, father, friend and co-worker. Neither in the winter of 1956 nor even a year later, however, does he yet know that he has already picked up the scent of his own tone, his own independent voice, his own original topic.
In his series of reports from India one can see many of the themes that recur in his writing and his world outlook till the end: empathy for the poor, a moral objection to the colonial powers, a certain reserve towards the whole of the capitalist West, a critical attitude to Eurocentric modes of thinking about the world, a basic interest in dissimilarity. In India he also hones his craft as a reporter who prefers to speak with ordinary people in the street, in the desert, or in a godforsaken village than to seek out interviewees in the corridors of power; he would rather blend into the background and try to live like the locals, although he does have a return ticket in his pocket. In a way, from the very start, beginning with his first journey to India, he works towards being an ‘interpreter of cultures’ – a reporter who describes other countries and cultures with respect and without the taint of Western condescension – though of course he has no idea that in thirty years’ time he will be world-famous and, from those heights, teaching that the role of a journalist is to explain faraway cultures to the reader.
Is he really so mature at just twenty-four? Yes and no. On returning from India, he has no idea what he wants. He is experimenting, looking around, searching. India is an accidentally sown seed, from which in a few years’ time something will grow. Apart from some mature reflections on the wealth of Indian culture, all he can write about Afghanistan is that it is ‘a wild country’, and about Sudan that it is ‘a place called Sudan’.
Professor Wipszycka, his college friend, remembers that after Kapuściński’s first return from Africa, in 1958, the history faculty held a meeting at which he said ‘some dreadful things’: ‘The auditorium is packed, and Kapuściński announces that the British should send their Gurkhas to Ghana to deal with internecine conflicts among the tribes. I was horrified. “What is he saying?” I remarked to someone next to me. It was a mixture of colonial thinking and probably criticism of his own views from the previous, i.e., Stalinist phase. I remember that what he said offended me as a historian. He had graduated from the same faculty as I, but at that moment it was as if five years of study had flowed off him like water off a duck’s back. He gave the impression of being naive and downright crude in his thinking. The “wising up” came later.’
Does Kapuściński in fact notice in India that what really fascinates him is large-scale social change? And does it occur to him that he can witness major changes not just in Poland but in other countries as well? At home, Gomułka is just putting an end to the rebellion of the young people who want to reform Stalinist socialism – and yet hope remains that the ideals of socialism, authentic and not distorted, will be successfully implemented in the politically awakening Third World. That is where History is now happening.
In his personal manifesto, ‘Our Birth Certificate’, written shortly before the final suppression of the October renewal in Poland, Kapuściński declares:
Asia, home to more than half of humanity, Asia, downtrodden and despised, decimated by plague and hunger, for the first time in centuries is starting to eat three times a day, to wear shoes and learn to read. Has there ever been an era when an equally humanitarian task has been achieved? What about the total liberation of man from the plough, the mud hut, the tallow lamp, or bast footwear? . . . The twentieth century is the world’s century, and to measure it against the experience of a single country (and one that has been browbeaten throughout history) is like trying to drain the sea with a spoon . . . We should keep taking up the task of liberating the world anew, even if it means falling over dozens of times along the way, and even if everything good always seems to be so infinitely far away.10
The romantic fascinated by revolution – Major Change – will soon be seeking it out on other continents. (‘The revolution at home was over, and he went in pursuit of it elsewhere,’ one of his PAP colleagues told me.) But before he races abroad for good, an exceptional reporter will be born in Poland, who will break free of the strait jacket of Party newspeak – also a man who will learn how to move nimbly within the corridors of power, a skill that will enable his career in the sort of conditions prevailing in Gomułka’s, and later Gierek’s, Poland. Ryszard Frelek, the new friend Kapuściński has gained in India, will soon be his political patron and will play a key role in building his career.
13
In ‘Rakowski’s Gang’
‘I’m not the same person anymore,’ he replies . . . ‘I haven’t got that spark, that vigour. But in those days! Do you remember how we held that meeting at night, how we started the campaign, how it collapsed, and how we got people out afterwards . . .’
Those years have burned him out; he’s worn to a frazzle. He expended a lot and acquired a lot. He has a whole store of experiences and wisdom. He can no longer summon up the energy to start all over again.1
What is a young intellectual to do when he has been battered by the storms of the 1950s and ‘those years have burned him out’? An intellectual who started off by building socialism with neophyte eagerness, then noticed the distortions, and with equal zeal tried to fix socialism but found that the authorities would only allow a limited adjustment. This is someone who has never stopped believing in socialism, and who believed that if the system was to be changed, it must be done with the Party, within the Party, and by the Party. He was on the side of the October ’56 reforms but did not fully identify with the revisionists, because they took the path towards ‘liquidating socialism’, as the Party put it; perhaps
