Into Africa

Photo by Françoise Hugier "[A]s I see it," Ryszard Kapuscinski writes in Another Day of Life, "it's wrong to write about people without living through at least a little of what they are living through." This simple but hazardous notion, which could stand as the Polish journalist's credo, has resulted in some spectacular writing, and has landed Kapuscinski in no small measure of trouble. All told, he has lived through quite a bit, and is lucky, very lucky, to have lived to the age of 69.

Active since 1958 as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuscinski has established himself as the great prose-poet of international disorder. His chosen field of expertise is the chronicling of strife in Third World hot spots. The capsule biography found in his books states, with considerable pride, that Kapuscinski has covered 27 coups and revolutions, and has been sentenced to death four times.

He is a reporter who is not unaware of the romance of his profession, and simultaneously not unconscious of its sheer folly. After all, is it not mad for a man to stand in the middle of a fire? Yes, but intoxicating, too. And so, over the years, Kapuscinski has become a connoisseur of extraordinary conflagrations, an investigator of grand infernos, and the closer he is to getting singed — no, incinerated — the happier he appears to be.

Maybe the defining piece in his canon is "The Burning Roadblocks," a chapter from his 1986 book, The Soccer War. In it, he describes his full-tilt solo drive through a flaming obstacle course manned by Molotov cocktail–hurling rebels during Nigeria's 1966 civil war. It's an astonishing report, at once hallucinatory, terrifying and exhilarating. Some might think, on reading this account, that Kapuscinski is merely insane, or at the least junked out on adrenalin; but, as one discovers through a deepening familiarity with his work, being thereis what it's all about for this fearless journalist.

Two current books offer a deep sampling of the writer's immediate, intense prose. Vintage International has returned to print Another Day of Life, his 1976 book about the 1975 civil war in Angola, while Knopf has just published The Shadow of the Sun, a flawed but rewarding compilation of short pieces about Kapuscinski's tumultuous four decades in Africa.

Another Day of Life begins with a typical confession: "All those who could were fleeing Angola. I was bent on going there." Catching the last military plane from Lisbon, Kapuscinski arrived in the West African nation's capitol of Luanda in late '75, as a conflict exploded in the former Portuguese colony between poet-politician Agostinho Neto's Marxist-backed forces and tribal factions supported by South Africa and neighboring Zaire.

In the hands of a lesser reporter, especially one working for the press arm of a socialist government, an account of the Angolan war could have become little more than an ideologue's paean to the courage and resiliency of undermanned and outgunned leftist forces. However, though Kapuscinski is occasionally guilty of indulging in some purplish descriptions of Neto's MPLA guerrillas (especially in a rhapsodic portrait of a doomed female commando named Carlotta), his work is usually clear-eyed and devoid of tub thumping. Politics, it must be stressed, is one of the writer's lesser concerns, though his sympathies are obvious; it is not surprising that he doesn't lay out the underlying political roots of the Angolan war until the last chapter of the book. He views the instability and volatility of successive regimes with detached objectivity. His principal topic is not causes, but effects — not why something happens, but how it feels when it happens.

Kapuscinski unspools the growing chaos in Angola through a telling array of impressionistic detail. (Past comparisons of his work to that of novelists like Gabriel García Marquez are on the money, for his technique draws more from metaphorical intensity than from the gray boilerplating of most reporting.) Though highly inventive by any journalistic standard, Another Day of Life is his most conventional early book; he would mate similarly keen observation with more radical storytelling techniques in his later, more complex works. His irresistible The Emperor(1978), the story of the 1974 fall of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie, is told in the ironically deployed voices of Selassie's courtiers, while Shah of Shahs(1982) uses a refracted "multimedia" style — descriptions of photos, notebook entries, cassette transcriptions — to delineate Iran's Islamic revolution of 1980.

Still, Another Day of Life is distinguished by a magnificent opening chapter, in which Kapuscinski deftly recounts the mounting fear and privation in Luanda as fighting escalates and the day of the nation's official independence approaches. He writes with characteristic dark humor of the "wooden city" that flourishes as fleeing citizens begin to store their belongings in crates that tower above the town's streets and yards. (The crates of the rich are elegant, expensive and "as big as vacation cottages," he notes dryly, while those of the poor are humble, ugly and jerrybuilt.) From his vantage point in the derelict Hotel Tivoli, as a diamond merchant's wife dies of cancer and a cleaning woman putters compulsively while society collapses outside, Kapuscinski watches balefully as waves of humanity abandon the city, leaving it to roving packs of dogs.

"After the exodus of the dogs," he writes, "the city fell into rigor mortis. So I decided to go to the front." His descriptions of fighting in Angola's rough equatorial terrain are similarly fine, as is his nervous report of the burgeoning unease in Luanda as its residents await a strike by South African troops. Another Day of Life ends on a rightly uncertain note: As Kapuscinski points out in a brief, newly appended passage, war rages in Angola to this day, though the Portuguese and the South Africans fled long ago. One reads the book not for any conclusive analysis of the conflict, but for Kapuscinski's pointed observations of human nature in extremis.

"[A]s I see it," Ryszard Kapuscinski writes in Another Day of Life, "it's wrong to write about people without living through at least a little of what they are living through." This simple but hazardous notion, which could stand as the Polish journalist's credo, has resulted in some spectacular writing, and has landed Kapuscinski in no small measure of trouble. All told, he has lived through quite a bit, and is lucky, very lucky, to have lived to the age of 69.

Active since 1958 as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuscinski has established himself as the great prose-poet of international disorder. His chosen field of expertise is the chronicling of strife in Third World hot spots. The capsule biography found in his books states, with considerable pride, that Kapuscinski has covered 27 coups and revolutions, and has been sentenced to death four times.

He is a reporter who is not unaware of the romance of his profession, and simultaneously not unconscious of its sheer folly. After all, is it not mad for a man to stand in the middle of a fire? Yes, but intoxicating, too. And so, over the years, Kapuscinski has become a connoisseur of extraordinary conflagrations, an investigator of grand infernos, and the closer he is to getting singed — no, incinerated — the happier he appears to be.

Maybe the defining piece in his canon is "The Burning Roadblocks," a chapter from his 1986 book, The Soccer War. In it, he describes his full-tilt solo drive through a flaming obstacle course manned by Molotov cocktail–hurling rebels during Nigeria's 1966 civil war. It's an astonishing report, at once hallucinatory, terrifying and exhilarating. Some might think, on reading this account, that Kapuscinski is merely insane, or at the least junked out on adrenalin; but, as one discovers through a deepening familiarity with his work, being thereis what it's all about for this fearless journalist.

Two current books offer a deep sampling of the writer's immediate, intense prose. Vintage International has returned to print Another Day of Life, his 1976 book about the 1975 civil war in Angola, while Knopf has just published The Shadow of the Sun, a flawed but rewarding compilation of short pieces about Kapuscinski's tumultuous four decades in Africa.

Another Day of Life begins with a typical confession: "All those who could were fleeing Angola. I was bent on going there." Catching the last military plane from Lisbon, Kapuscinski arrived in the West African nation's capitol of Luanda in late '75, as a conflict exploded in the former Portuguese colony between poet-politician Agostinho Neto's Marxist-backed forces and tribal factions supported by South Africa and neighboring Zaire.

In the hands of a lesser reporter, especially one working for the press arm of a socialist government, an account of the Angolan war could have become little more than an ideologue's paean to the courage and resiliency of undermanned and outgunned leftist forces. However, though Kapuscinski is occasionally guilty of indulging in some purplish descriptions of Neto's MPLA guerrillas (especially in a rhapsodic portrait of a doomed female commando named Carlotta), his work is usually clear-eyed and devoid of tub thumping. Politics, it must be stressed, is one of the writer's lesser concerns, though his sympathies are obvious; it is not surprising that he doesn't lay out the underlying political roots of the Angolan war until the last chapter of the book. He views the instability and volatility of successive regimes with detached objectivity. His principal topic is not causes, but effects — not why something happens, but how it feels when it happens.

Kapuscinski unspools the growing chaos in Angola through a telling array of impressionistic detail. (Past comparisons of his work to that of novelists like Gabriel García Marquez are on the money, for his technique draws more from metaphorical intensity than from the gray boilerplating of most reporting.) Though highly inventive by any journalistic standard, Another Day of Life is his most conventional early book; he would mate similarly keen observation with more radical storytelling techniques in his later, more complex works. His irresistible The Emperor(1978), the story of the 1974 fall of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie, is told in the ironically deployed voices of Selassie's courtiers, while Shah of Shahs(1982) uses a refracted "multimedia" style — descriptions of photos, notebook entries, cassette transcriptions — to delineate Iran's Islamic revolution of 1980.