Ryszard Kapuściński
Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author. He received many prestigious awards and was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kapuściński's personal journals in book form attracted both controversy and admiration for blurring the conventions of reportage with the allegory and magical realism of literature. He was the Communist-era Polish Press Agency's only correspondent in Africa during decolonization, and also worked in South America and Asia. Between 1956 and 1981 he reported on 27 revolutions and coups, until he was fired because of his support for the pro-democracy Solidarity movement in his native country. He was celebrated by other practitioners of the genre. The acclaimed Italian reportage-writer Tiziano Terzani, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, and Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda accorded him the title "Maestro".
Notable works include Jeszcze dzień życia, about Angola; Cesarz, about the downfall of Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie, also considered to be a satire of Communist Poland; Wojna futbolowa, an account of the 1969 conflict between Honduras and El Salvador, and other stories from the life of the reporter in Africa and Latin America; Szachinszach about the downfall of the last Shah of Iran; Imperium, an account of his travels through the collapsing Soviet Union; Heban, later published in English as The Shadow of the Sun, the story of his years in Africa; and Podróże z Herodotem, in which he ponders over relevance of The Histories by Herodotus to a modern reporter's job.
Biography
Ryszard Kapuściński was born in Pinsk, Polesie Voivodeship, in the Kresy Wschodnie or eastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic in 1932, the son of Maria Bobka and Józef Kapuściński, primary school teachers. His sister Barbara was born the following year. They were born into poverty: he would later say that he felt at home in Africa as "food was scarce there too and everyone was also barefoot." In September 1938 Ryszard started attending Primary School No 5 in Pinsk. He spent the summer of 1939 together with his mother and sister in Pawłów, a small village near Rejowiec in Lublin Voivodeship. When the Second World War began in September 1939 they came back to Pinsk after the city was captured by the Red Army and Ryszard returned to school there. In 1940 Maria, afraid of deportation to the East, together with Ryszard and Barbara left Pinsk and moved to Sieraków, near Warsaw. There they met Józef. Later the family moved near Otwock. Ryszard continued education in primary school in Otwock. He described his early life in the book Imperium.In 1945 the family settled in Warsaw where Ryszard began education in Stanisław Staszic Gymnasium. He became an amateur boxer and football player. In 1948, Kapuściński joined the official Communist youth organisationthe ZMPand served lower rank posts. Kapuściński was the hero of the article published in the weekly periodical Odrodzenie reporting on a poetry conference organised at his school, in which the teenager's poems were compared with works of Mayakovsky and Wierzyński.
In June 1950 he graduated from Gymnasium and started working for the Sztandar Młodych, a nationwide newspaper founded in 1950 as the organ of the ZMP. In October 1950 he began his studies at Warsaw University and in 1951 he moved to the department of history after he suspended working for Sztandar Młodych till 1955. He participated in the Youth Festival in East Berlin staged in August 1951 in East Germany. This was his first foreign trip. From 1952 and till his death Ryszard Kapuściński was married to doctor Alicja Mielczarek. Their daughter Zofia was born in 1953. During the period from 1953 to 1981the year of the imposition of the martial law in PolandKapuściński was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party. His attitude to the PZPR changed early on, "the decisive moment having come in the year 1956".
In June 1955 he graduated from Warsaw University. After publishing, in September 1955, a critical article about the construction of Nowa Huta, a Kraków conurbation built on a site chosen as the "first socialist municipality in Poland", which brought to light the inhuman working and living conditions of the labourers involved in the venture—a story which occasioned consternation before eventually winning favour with the Communist authorities unsure at first how to react to a fault-finding depiction of their pet project by one of their own—Kapuściński was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit at the age of 23.
In August 1956 he reported from Kyiv and in September he was sent to India, his first travel outside Europe. He returned via Afghanistan and Moscow. In August 1957 he went for half a year to China. He came back to Poland by the Trans-Siberian Railway. Beginning with that journey to India undertaken at the age of 24, he travelled across the developing world reporting on wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He started learning English in India by reading, with the help of a dictionary, a copy of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. He wrote about his first travels to Asia in the book Travels with Herodotus.
In 1958 he left Sztandar Młodych and started working for the Polish Press Agency. Shortly afterwards he also joined the weekly Polityka. The result of his work for the weekly was the book Busz po polsku published in 1962, a collection of his articles from the "Polish wilderness" that he went into to relate "the perspectives of forgotten, invisible, marginal people and so to record a living history of those seldom deemed worthy to enter the annals of official history". He was aggrieved at the indifference of the reading public towards the majority of his early books.
In the late 1950s he went for the first time to Africa. After honing his skills on domestic stories he was later "'responsible' for fifty countries" for the Polish Press Agency in Africa.. When he finally returned to Poland, he had lived through twenty-seven revolutions and coups, been jailed 40 times and survived four death sentences. In the English-speaking world, Kapuściński is best known for his reporting from Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, when he witnessed first-hand the end of the European colonial empires on that continent.
In 1961 he reported from the Republic of the Congo. He described his escape to Bujumbura and subsequent arrest in the book The Soccer War. In the years 1962–65 he lived initially in Dar es Salaam and later in Nairobi from where he travelled to other countries in Africa. He came back to Poland for only a few weeks in 1965 but returned to Africa to live in Lagos and continue reporting. In April 1965 he travelled to Senegal and Mauritania which he later described in the book The Shadow of the Sun. At the end of 1966 he came back to Poland. In April 1967 he went to Central Asia and Caucasus. In November the same year he started working as a foreign correspondent in South America, based in Santiago. Later he moved to Mexico. In 1969 he witnessed war in Honduras which he described in the book The Soccer War. In 1969 he edited and translated from the Spanish El diario del Che en Bolivia, the final literary bequest of Che Guevara. Kapuściński analyzed the situation in Guatemala after a German diplomat Karl von Spreti was kidnapped. He published his reportage in 1970 entitled Dlaczego zginął Karl von Spreti. He returned to Poland in 1972 and later worked for magazines Kontynenty and Kultura. In September 1975 he went to Angola after which he published the book Another Day of Life. In 1975 and 1977 he went to Ethiopia. The Emperor was written after his travels there. In 1979 he visited his birthplace Pinsk for the first time since 1940. In 1979 he went to Iran to witness the Iranian Revolution. His book Shah of Shahs deals with this subject and the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran.
File:Ryszard Kapuscinski and Julia Hartwig.JPG|thumb|right|Kapuściński with Julia Hartwig in Warsaw, 2006
In 1980 he witnessed the strikes that took place in Gdańsk, Poland. In 1988 two episodes of Arena were dedicated to him and his work. He travelled in European and Asian parts of the Soviet Union and witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After this experience he wrote Imperium. He was awarded German Academic Exchange Service scholarship in Berlin in 1994. In 1999 Kapuściński talked about his life in VPRO in a series of autobiographical interviews with prominent people from the worlds of science, culture and politics.
In a 2006 interview with Reuters, Kapuściński said that he wrote for "people everywhere still young enough to be curious about the world." He was fluent in Polish, English, Russian, Spanish, French and Portuguese. He was visiting professor in Bangalore, Bonn, Cape Town, Caracas, Columbia University, Harvard University, Irkutsk, London, Madrid, Mexico, San Sebastian, Temple University and Vancouver.
Kapuściński died on 23 January 2007, of a heart attack suffered in a Warsaw hospital where he was being treated for unrelated ailments.
Literary works
From the early 1960s onwards, Kapuściński published books of increasing literary craftsmanship characterized by sophisticated narrative technique, psychological portraits of characters, a wealth of stylization and metaphor and unusual imagery that serves as means of interpreting the perceived world. Kapuściński's best-known book, The Emperor, concerns itself with the decline of Haile Selassie's anachronistic régime in Ethiopia. The book's story had a special meaning that was not lost on the people of Poland, especially as dissent against the PZPR was taking root. The Emperor was also the book that established Kapuściński's reputation in the West. When it appeared in English translation in 1983 it received an immediate critical success. In 1987 the book was adapted by Michael Hastings and Jonathan Miller into a theatre play, produced by the Royal Court Theatre, London.Kapuściński was fascinated by the humanity he found in different worlds and people, as well as the books of these worlds and people: he approached foreign countries first through literature, spending months reading before each trip. He was skilled in listening to the diverse people he met, but he was also capable of "reading" the hidden sense of the scenes he encountered: the way the Europeans moved out of Angola, a discussion regarding alimony in the Tanganyikan parliament, the reconstruction of frescoes in the new Russiahe turned each of these vignettes into a metaphor of historical transformation.
This tendency to process private experiences into a greater social synthesis made Kapuściński an eminent thinker, and the volumes of the ongoing Lapidarium series are a record of the shaping of a reporter's observations into philosophical reflections on the world, its people and their suffering. He had great compassion for the poor, the victimised, and the debased.
Kapuściński himself called his work "literary reportage", and reportage d'auteur. In the English-speaking world, his genre is sometimes characterised as "magic journalism", a term coined by Adam Hochschild in 1994. Kapuściński often introduced himself with the line "I am a poor reporter who unfortunately lacks the imagination of a writer".
Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani and Ryszard Kapuściński shared a similar vision of journalism. Jaime Abello Banfi, the friend and associate of Gabriel García Márquez, reports that García Márquez and Kapuściński, unbeknownst to each other, shared the opinion that the way to good journalism led through poetry.
Kapuściński considered the ancient Greek historian Herodotus a great reporter and his master. He wrote a book Travels with Herodotus where he shows that the Histories of Herodotus are timeless and the masterpiece of reportage. He also considered Melchior Wańkowicz, Ksawery Pruszyński, Curzio Malaparte and Franciszek Gil to have been his literary models and stylistic precursors. On some level, Pruszyński and Wańkowicz shared a very similar approach to facts with Kapuściński, believing that the general picture of the story can be glued from bits and pieces to reveal a truth as a wholly independent construct. Students of Kapuściński's work observed correspondences between his work and that of J. M. Coetzee in that both writers were supposedly beholden to the theory of "the responsibility of witness".
One reviewer saw in Kapuściński's mixing of subtle psychological reflection with vivid description an invitation to a comparison with Joseph Conrad; Binyavanga Wainaina and Aleksandar Hemon made the same comparison, if for other, less laudatory reasons. Kapuściński confirmed to Bill Deedes the fact that Conrad was one of his literary inspirations. Neal Ascherson likened him to Egon Erwin Kisch considered the father of literary reportage. Kapuściński himself cites Kisch with approval as the "classic of reportage" who dealt a death blow to traditional forms of reporting by putting the person of the reporter at centre stage. Certainly, neither Kisch nor Kapuściński believed in what might be called "journalistic objectivity": whereas Kisch thought it necessary for a reporter to "engage politically" with his subject, Kapuściński would put objectivity as a concept out of court altogether, stating explicitly, "There is no such thing as objectivity. Objectivity is the question of the conscience of the one who writes. And he himself should answer the question is this what he writes close to the truth or not".
Kapuściński's views on his craft were published in 2000 in the book in Italian Il cinico non è adatto a questo mestiere: conversazioni sul buon giornalismo, the book in Spanish from 2003 Los cinco sentidos del periodista and in his Polish book Autoportret reportera published the same year. In 1987 Marek Miller talked with Kapuściński on the art of reportage and his life. These conversations were published in Poland in 2012 in the book Pisanie but broadcast in Canada on Kalejdoskop Polski TV as early as 1988. He was vocal denouncing manipulations and ignorance of big media.