Brussels on the European Union, or serving the American establishment in Washington, because in those places life takes place in offices, behind closed doors, behind piles of documents – behind desks. He preferred to wade into the River Ganges with the pilgrims, to contract malaria in Uganda, and to shoot a gun during the civil war in Angola.
And so when, in the second half of 1958, Marian Turski comes along with an offer to join ‘Rakowski’s gang’, Kapuściński feels as if life is returning.
Daniel Passent, Polityka columnist: ‘He didn’t join in with social life at the newspaper office. We were always getting together somewhere, going out together, having a drink or a party, but Rysiek didn’t take part in all that. I ascribe this not so much to his reserve towards people from the office, as to his personal plans and his lack of any social, political or environmental needs. He was self-contained, and no one knew much about him. He never talked about his family life.’
Mieczysław Rakowski, for many years chief of Polityka: ‘He was quiet, always on the sidelines, unaggressive.’
Passent: ‘His weak spot was the girls. He used to spend hours sitting at the table for the office gofers. There was an extremely pretty girl working there, and everyone used to sigh over her, but she only had eyes for Rysiek. Sometimes I even used to wonder what he talked to her about for hours and hours on end.’
Rakowski: ‘He made my secretary fall in love with him – a very beautiful girl! He broke her heart. One day she didn’t turn up at work. She left a note on the desk saying she was leaving.’
At Polityka Kapuściński conquers two summits. With several other reporters he cofounds the trend in post-war journalism that will come to be known as the Polish school of reportage. Here, too, he will discover his life’s subject. Witnessing decolonization in Ghana and the civil war in Congo, he earns a reputation as a reporter on African affairs and catches the African bug for the rest of his life.
Polityka sends him out to Ghana almost immediately. When I questioned Rakowski about Kapuściński more than a year before his death in November 2008, he could not remember how the idea arose that the journalist who didn’t know Africa (in Poland, who did in those days?) should be sent to Ghana straight after being taken on staff. ‘Probably,’ he said, trying to remember, ‘Rysiek himself had been following the foreign press and the agency dispatches when he was still working at the PAP, and had noticed that this was a watershed moment in African history. He came to me with this and persuaded me that the topic was worth an expedition. I arranged the consent of the Central Committee Press Office and some hard currency from RSW ‘Prasa’ [the Workers’ Publishing Co-operative], because weeklies had no funds of their own for trips of that kind. There was a great hunger for news from the Third World, and we felt History was happening there.’
Kapuściński himself writes about it as follows:
In those days, the 1960s, the world was very interested in Africa. Africa was a puzzle, a mystery. Nobody knew what would happen when 300 million people stood up and demanded the right to be heard. States began to be established there, and the states bought armaments, and there was speculation in foreign newspapers that Africa might set out to conquer Europe. Today it is impossible to contemplate such a prospect, but at that time, it was a concern, an anxiety. It was serious. People wanted to know what was happening on the continent: where it was headed, what were its intentions?5
Little is known about Kapuściński’s first trip to Africa except what he himself writes in his reports and books. It lasted for about two months.
But before he writes one of the most famous sentences in Polish reportage, ‘I am living on a raft, in a side street in the merchant district of Accra . . .’; before he is dazzled by the bright sunlight described several decades later in The Shadow of the Sun; before he is struck by the odours of hot bodies, dried fish, rotting meat and roasted cassava, on the plane from London to Accra he meets Nadir Khouri, an Arab, who will take him from the airport to the Hotel Metropol (the one that resembles a raft).
In Accra he goes to a rally led by the most iconic figure in the African liberation movements of that era, Kwame Nkrumah. A year earlier, as the first leader of a self-governing African country, Nkrumah declared Ghana’s independence and took over from the British colonial authorities. At the time, people were struck by Nkrumah’s confession in his autobiography that he did not know the date of his own birth.
‘The crowd is standing in West End Square. The crowd is standing in the sunshine, under a white African sky. The crowd is standing and waiting for Nkrumah, the patient black crowd, the sweating crowd.’6 Thus begins the first of Kapuściński’s series of reports for Polityka, ‘Ghana Close Up’.
There is no evidence that Kapuściński meets Nkrumah in person. Certainly he very much wants to, and goes to see one of his ministers. He is fascinated by the Ghanaian leader and his pan-African aspirations, and he likes the references to the ideas of Marx and Lenin. But Nkrumah is also a Christian and says that these two sources of inspiration are not mutually exclusive, and that he is interested in African socialism, which will not use violence either to fight for power or to exercise it.
A few months before Kapuściński’s death, at a reading of his poetry in Rome, a woman comes up to him and introduces herself as Samia Nkrumah, daughter of Ghana’s former leader. Soon afterwards, she will write him a letter in which, without implying that he ever met Nkrumah in person, she invites him to a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Ghanaian independence. Kapuściński does not live to attend it.
It is in Accra’s West End that the seeds sown in India begin to flourish, producing a reporter and writer with an anti-colonial world outlook, critical of the West and of capitalism. This world outlook – despite subtle changes – remains with him for the rest of his life.
So Kapuściński stands on the square in Accra and listens as Kwame Nkrumah says:
We must be vigilant, because imperialism and colonialism might arrive in Africa in a new guise. The imperialists are ready to grant political independence, but at the same time they still want to rule over Africa in the economic sphere by keeping control of economic life in the newly liberated countries. There is no difference between political and economic imperialism.7
The people shout ‘Imperialists Out!’, and ‘Lead us, Kwame!’ After three-quarters of an hour, Nkrumah ends his speech with a cry of ‘Long live the unity and independence of Africa!’, whereupon a jazz band starts to play and the crowd starts to boogie.
In Ghana, Kapuściński discovers something else as well: himself from a few years earlier. He talks to an enthusiastic revolutionary called Ded, who believes that Nkrumah is indeed wonderful but has stopped halfway. That is why, instead of going to America on a scholarship, Ded wants to go to Poland to study revolution. Kapuściński finds that Ded reminds him of someone, and that he envies him something. Another idealist, a young African communist, or ‘pimply’, tells the journalist, ‘We must go further, more boldly to the left. My generation will come to replace Nkrumah, move the country forward and give the people power.8
Following his Polish experiences, Kapuściński has no trouble noticing that the African liberation revolution, though full of lofty ideals, is bound to run into trouble soon; and that after the initial period of enthusiasm, bitterness and disappointment will set in. He asks another African acquaintance why he didn’t go to Nkrumah’s rally. What did Nkrumah say about wages? Nothing. So why should he have gone?
On returning from Ghana but before setting off on his next trip, Kapuściński engages in a small but important skirmish about Africa in the pages of the press. He also gathers wind in his sails – it seems the theme of Africa has caught on.
