LESSONS OF THE HISTORIES

The Observer
Sunday June 17, 2007

In Travels with Herodotus, the late, great Polish writer Ryszard
Kapuscinski weaves epic stories into his own reportage to stunning
effect, says Stephen Smith

Buy Travels With Herodotus at the Guardian bookshop

Travels with Herodotus
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Allen Lane £20, pp275

With Agatha Christie, you know you’re off and running when the
first stiff turns up in the library, harbinger of a terrible body
count. In the case of Ian McEwan, it’s a hint of transgressive
how’s-your-father. Aficionados of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the late
grandmaster of reportage, know to hug themselves in anticipation when
the following conditions obtain: our man is the last European left in
a sweltering hellhole, a wretched government is on its last legs and
about to give way to packs of marauding goons and all contact with
the outside world has been lost. This was the scene of the Polish
writer and journalist’s gripping Another Day of Life (1975). He was
the only foreign correspondent in the Angolan capital, Luanda, as
the Portuguese colonialists fled and rival militias closed in on the
abandoned city. In his suffocating hotel, Kapuscinski sweats and frets,
a Kafka of the tropics. If the book had been any more tightly wound,
it would have turned back into wood pulp in your trembling fingers.

Open Kapuscinski’s Imperium (1994), an account of his travels
through the collapsing Soviet Union, and you may well be met with a
passage like this one, describing the airport at Yerevan in Armenia as
‘hundreds, thousands of people’ awake to another day of waiting in vain
for a seat on a plane, any plane. ‘How long have they been sleeping
here? Well, some not so long; this is only their first night. And
those over there, the crumpled up, unshaven, unkempt ones? Those
– a week. And those others one cannot even get closer to because
they stink so terribly? Those – a month.’ Travels with Herodotus,
which has been published in English following Kapuscinski’s death
earlier this year, will not disappoint his admirers. We are with the
indefatigable reporter in Congo in 1960. ‘There is no functioning
radio station, no government. I am trying to get out of here –
but how? The closest airport is closed. The roads (now in the rainy
season) are swamped, the ship that once plied the River Congo has
long ceased to do so.’ Bliss! You know that by the time you finish
Travels with Herodotus, you’ll be shaking your own gnawed fingernails
from its pages. Once again we have before us the strangely cheering
image of the lonely news agency man from eastern Europe endlessly
chastising himself for the gaps in his knowledge rather than giving
himself credit for what he has learnt the hard way. As before, the
roving reporter is bowed down beneath his own bodyweight in books,
including the Histories of Herodotus, the ancient Greek who opened
the young Kapuscinski’s eyes to the world. The great traveller of
antiquity, he says, was ‘someone who always had many questions and
was ready to wander thousands of kilometres to find an answer to any
one of them’. Kapuscinski could be writing about himself, of course.

A much-travelled journeyman who came to book-writing in mid-career,
Kapuscinski also invites comparison with fellow Pole Joseph Conrad and
mention of the author of The Secret Agent leads us to the ticklish
issue of Kapuscinski the spy. He was named as a former communist
operative after his death. He had allegedly collaborated with the
party in Poland in return for the rare licence he enjoyed to travel
to the outside world – ‘to cross the border’, as he puts it. To which
one can only say that if it is true, a ‘deal’ of this kind is what one
would expect the authorities to have insisted on. What matters is how
Kapuscinski observed his side of the bargain, and that was to publish
The Emperor (1978). Ostensibly an account of Haile Selassie’s court
in Ethiopia and its hysterical feudalism, it was read in his native
Poland as a mordant if samizdat commentary on matters closer to home.

Frankly, anyone who was paying attention will know the reporter’s
dispatches were the flimsiest cover for his ‘product’, as the
spymasters call it. What was encrypted in them was Kapuscinski’s
humanity. Somehow, he crosses Ethiopia with a local driver who knows
only two English expressions: ‘Problem’ and ‘No problem’. How do
the pair communicate? Kapuscinski relies on the ‘tradecraft’ of
his own extraordinary empathy. ‘Everything speaks; the expression
of the face and eyes, the gestures of the hand and movements of the
body … dozens of other transmitters, amplifiers and mufflers which
together make up an individual being.’

It may seem perverse to recommend Travels with Herodotus for the
beach. But if you haven’t encountered Kapuscinski before, you’ll be
pleasantly surprised by how much satisfaction, as well as salience,
there is to be found in this perfect discomfort read.

· Stephen Smith is the culture correspondent of BBC Newsnight

Three to read

Reportage

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski The journalist’s personal portrait
of the life and death of the USSR, 1939 to 1991.

Dispatches by Michael Herr Frontline reports from the madness and
mayhem of the Vietnam War.

All the Wrong Places by James Fenton Powerful examination of South
East Asian politics, from the fall of Saigon to the Philippines
under Marcos.

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