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At play in the bush of ghosts
Tropical baroque, African reality and the work of Ryszard Kapuściński
JOHN RYLE
Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of
the Sun, trans Klara Glowczewska
336pp, Penguin,
2001
IN A CAREER
EXTENDING over four decades, Ryszard Kapuściński has published
accounts of his homeland, Poland, of travels in Iran and the former Soviet
Union, and a collection of reportage from third-world countries including
Honduras, El Salvador, Chile and Bolivia. His principal subject, however,
from early in his working life, has been Africa. Africa is where, in the late
1950s, in his mid-twenties, after a brief spell in India and Pakistan, he
began his career as a foreign correspondent, working for the official
Polish state news agency. In
the 1960s, he covered the early years of independence and the first of the
post-colonial civil wars that have ravaged the continent ever since. In the 1970s he revisited these
conflicts in a sequence of works of reflective reportage, works in which
he transformed himself from a journalist into an author of international
repute.
In The Emperor: the
downfall of an autocrat, his account of the final years of the reign
of Haile Selassie I, which appeared in Polish in 1978, Kapuściński
invented a new subgenre of political reportage. In a series of linked,
interpolated testimonies from former Ethiopian court officials he created
an arresting picture of the accelerating collapse of an authoritarian
regime. This was a story that
had special resonance for his audience in Poland, where dissent against
communist autocracy was growing.
The Emperor was also the book that established Kapuściński’s
reputation in the West. When
it appeared in English translation in 1983 it was an immediate critical
success. In 1987, in Another Day of Life (first published in Polish
in 1976), he chronicled the beginning of the civil war in Angola and the
disintegration of civil institutions in the capital, Luanda. In The Soccer War (1990) he
collected vignettes of insurrection and revolution in Ghana and the Congo,
in Ethiopia and Somalia, juxtaposing them with accounts of conflicts in
South America. Each of these books added to Kapuściński’s reputation,
leading more than one critic to compare his work to that earlier
chronicler of the tropics and human beings in extreme situations – his
compatriot, Józef
Korzeniowski, a.k.a. Joseph Conrad.
The Shadow of the Sun
(the original Polish title translates as Ebony) is a more
substantial collection of episodes from Kapuściński’s sojourns in Africa,
starting in Ghana in the 1950s and ending in Tanzania in the recent
past. Moving back and forth
in time, and sometimes right out of time, it is a loose record of a life
spent intermittently in countries south of the Sahara. There are accounts here of the
revolution in Zanzibar, the 1966 military coup in Nigeria, the early days
of civil war in Liberia and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; there are
reflections from unnamed places in the desert and from lodgings in the
backstreets of Lagos. There
are classics of the Kapuściński style: on the one hand, the tableau
vivant, where almost nothing happens (the intricate design of the
interior of a bush taxi, the beneficial effect of plastic jerrycans on the
lives of women in rural areas); on the other, the hair-raising adventure,
where he characteristically risks death by thirst, or tropical disease, or
snakebite, or act of war, combining reflections on the world outside
Europe with unabashed authorial derring-do.
It is in the latter
passages that doubts about the precision of Kapuścińki’s reportage begin
to occur. The force of his
writing depends to a considerable extent on an air of certainty, on the
voice of experience, the authority of someone who, as we are told in
Shah of Shahs, has survived twenty-seven coups and revolutions, who
has driven through burning road-blocks and stayed behind in besieged
cities, the only foreign correspondent remaining when the rest of the
press-pack leaves. There are generally no other outside witnesses to the
events that Kapuściński records. As he put it, somewhat immodestly, in
The Soccer War, “I was driving along a road from where they say no
white man can come back alive.”
For such reasons his writing tends to be admired by those for whom
Africa is a distant prospect: he makes the remote areas of the continent
simultaneously more thrilling and more accessible. Kapuścińki is regarded less
favourably, however, by readers in Africa itself, and by Africanist
scholars and reporters who have come to doubt his adherence to fact.
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE reliability of his reportage
begin with The Emperor.
Kapuściński’s informants here are
mainly former Ethiopian court servants labouring under anonymising
initials, making them sound like characters in an eighteenth-century
English novel. Only one of
those who assisted him is given a full name (that, we are told, is because
he is dead), yet the power of the book derives to a large extent from the
fact that the story is told almost entirely through the transcribed speech
of these unnamed witnesses.
Their antiquated cadences have a mesmeric quality. With courtly unctuousness they
speak of “His Venerable
Majesty”, “His Most Virtuous Highness”, “His Benevolent Majesty, “His
Sublime Majesty”, “His Charitable Majesty”, “His Exalted Majesty”, “His
Indefatigable Majesty”, “His Masterful Highness”, “Our Omnipotent Ruler”.
These
expressions of fealty acquire an air of increasing irony as the excesses
of the imperial court are borne in on the reader; it is a subtle piece of
reportorial rhetoric.
Yet native speakers of
Amharic say that these honorifics correspond to no known expressions in
their language. In particular
they could not occur in the formal registers of speech that were employed
at the court, where there were only one or two acceptable forms of address
for the Emperor. So they
cannot have been spoken as transcribed. Some of the ceremonial titles that
Kapuściński gives his sources are invented too. In the absence of proper names
this may be held to cast further doubt on the existence of these
informants. What
Kapuściński and his unnamed translators created in The Emperor was
a brilliant device, Chinese whispers rather than transcription, an
imaginary archaic language, with touches of comic opera, that bespeaks
homage while conveying subversion. It falls short, though, of both
scholarly and journalistic standards of verifiability, and even of
verisimilitude.
There are other
implausibilities in The Emperor. We are told that Haile Selassie
did not read books:
“His Venerable
Majesty was no reader. For
him, neither the written nor the printed word existed; everything had to
be relayed by word of mouth.”
But Haile Selassie was undoubtedly well-read, both in Amharic and
in French. He possessed a
large library where he spent long periods of time, and provided copious
written comments on manuscripts submitted to him. It seems unlikely that his own
palace servants could have been unaware of this. (Haile Selassie’s reading
habits are documented in The Mission, a memoir by Hans Lockot, the
head of research at the National Library of Ethiopia during the Emperor’s
reign.)
Kapuściński even describes one of
his informants bringing him the first volume of Haile Selassie’s
autobiography, the English translation by the Ethiopianist scholar Edward
Ullendorff. But the event is
taking place in 1974, and Ullendorff’s translation did not appear until
two years later, in 1976. So
it cannot have happened in the way described.
In answer to such
criticisms it has been argued that The Emperor is not meant to be
about Ethiopia at all, that it is an allegory of Communist power in
Poland, or of autocratic regimes in general. Certainly, the book is informed
and deepened by such parallels; and its reception among literati in the
West was conditioned by an awareness of its doubly exotic origin – a book
about a far-off country by an author who was himself rara avis, a
master of the new journalism sprung miraculously from within the Soviet
bloc. Some apologists for
The Emperor have located it, specifically, in a Polish literary
genre where dissent masquerades as descriptive prose, and Kapuściński has
subsequently, on occasion, endorsed this interpretation. Yet there is no indication in the
book that it is meant to be read as an allegory – or as a traveller’s tale
or parable (in the same genre, say, as Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas or
the mediaeval European stories of Prester John, the legendary Abyssinian
king). Like Kapuściński’s
other books, The Emperor is presented unambiguously as factual
reportage – and it asserts its claim on the reader’s attention as
such. The dearth of other
sources on the subject – no member of the Imperial court of Ethiopia
survived to write a memoir of Haile Selassie – means that the book would
have considerable documentary importance if the information in it could
only be trusted.
At the time of publication there was, of course,
every reason for Kapuściński to maintain the confidentiality of any living
sources he might have. Two
regimes later, though, there seems no reason for their anonymity to be
preserved, particularly since a number of court servants (none of whose
names correspond to the initials of the sources in The Emperor)
have been giving legal testimony in Addis Ababa as witnesses in the trial
of the Derg, the regime, headed by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, that
deposed and killed the Emperor in 1975.
Kapuścińksi’s return to
Ethiopia in the 1990s to
visit imprisoned members of the Derg occupies one of the
later chapters of his new book.
One might have hoped that this would be the occasion for him to
consider the issues raised by his earlier work, but The Shadow of the
Sun makes no mention of The Emperor at all, nor yet of the
court proceedings where the death of Haile Selassie is currently under
investigation. And
Kapuścińksi’s account in his new book of his visit to the Central Prison
in Addis Ababa raises further doubts about his factual
accuracy.
“After Mengistu’s
escape,” he writes, “his army dispersed and only the academics were
left. They were seized
without great difficulty and imprisoned in this crowded courtyard.” This characterisation of the
inmates of the Central Prison is misleading (it contradicts, in fact, an
earlier reference by Kapuściński to the “generals of the army and police”
among those captured followers of Mengistu). I visited the prison myself around
this time. A few of the
prisoners were indeed former professors, but the officials of the former
regime who were held there included many prominent military figures, as
they still do: Fikre-Selassie Weg-Deres, an air force captain who was Mengistu’s Prime
Minister; Teka Tulu, an army colonel who was his chief of Internal
Security (since deceased); Sergeant Legesse Asfaw, known as the Butcher of
Tigray; and the equally notorious Melaku Tefera, Butcher of Gondar. None
of these people were, by any stretch of the imagination, academics. Nor had they been that easy to
capture: Melaku Tefera, in particular, was the subject of hot pursuit
across the desert to Djibouti, where he was nabbed by an Ethiopian army
hit squad.
Kapuściński’s chapter on Ethiopia in The Shadow
of the Sun has other odd bits of misinformation. He describes visiting
the bookstore in the University of Addis Ababa. It is, he says, the country’s only
bookstore – and completely devoid of books. Really? There are at least a half-a-dozen
bookshops in Addis Ababa, all with books for sale, and have been since the
Derg era. (The books do not include The Emperor, however.
Kapuściński’s book has been published in more than a dozen languages,
but not in Amharic.) Not
content with this already quite erroneous assertion, Kapuściński continues
“It is this way in most African countries. Once, I remember, there was a good
bookshop in Kampala… Now – everywhere, nothing.” Here hyperbole becomes distinctly
misleading. There may not be
a branch of Borders or Barnes and Noble In Kampala, but there are numerous
bookshops there, and in Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam, Johannesburg, Cape Town
and dozens of other African cities, small and large.
KAPUŚCIŃSKI HAS HIMSELF been a trenchant critic of
inaccuracy in news reporting. “The ignorance of special correspondents… is sometimes
astonishing,” he said in a lecture some years ago. “During the August 1981
strikes in Gdansk, where the Solidarity union was born, half the
journalists coming to Poland to cover the events could not even have
identified Gdansk on the map.”
The lecture continues: “They knew even less about
Rwanda at the time of the massacres in 1994. Most of them were setting foot in
Africa for the first time…. Almost all of them were ignorant of the causes
and reasons behind the conflict.”
Kapuściński’s earlier book about Angola,
Another Day of Life is, in part, a response to this kind of
ignorance, providing an extended commentary on
the malaise of the foreign correspondent who knows that his or her
newspaper dispatches are not scratching the surface, that they
misrepresent local reality.
(The chapter on
Rwanda in The Shadow of the Sun is, it may be noted, one of the
better sections of the book, capturing the oppressive, vindictive feeling
that prevailed in the country well before the 1994 genocide and accurately
summarising the political system of the kingdom of Rwanda and the colonial
administration that succeeded it.)
Here, as elsewhere, Kapuściński prides himself on his
personal contact with ordinary people. “I avoided official routes,
palaces, important personages and big politics,” he writes in the early
pages of The Shadow of the Sun, “Instead I preferred to hitch rides
on passing trucks, wander with nomads through the desert, be the guest of
peasants from the tropical savannah.”
Yet he gets elementary
facts about the lives of such people wrong. In his chapter on Sudan, for
example, we are told that the Dinka and the Nuer - tropical swamp and savannah
dwellers who comprise half the population of Southern Sudan – “subsist
almost exclusively on milk”.
“Killing cattle,” he continues, “is forbidden, and women cannot
touch them.” All these
assertions are incorrect.
Girls and women routinely milk cows among the Dinka and Nuer, boys
and men occasionally. None of
them lives on milk, except in unusual circumstances; they live on grain
and fish, according to the season – and on meat from their cattle and
other livestock. The
sacrifice and consumption of cattle, far from being forbidden, is a
central feature of their traditional religion. Earlier in the book Kapuściński
says the same thing about the Tutsi – that their cattle are not killed and
women cannot touch them. But
it’s not true of the Tutsi either.
In Sudan again, he describes Fashoda, on the banks of the
Nile, the site of a historic showdown in 1898 between British and French
occupying forces, as “a fishing village”. But “fishing village” is hardly
how Fashoda would be seen by its inhabitants, the Shilluk. Fashoda is
their largest and oldest settlement, the political and ritual centre of
the long-established Shilluk kingdom. There is a substantial ethnographic
literature on all four peoples mentioned – Shilluk, Dinka, Nuer and Tutsi
– which Kapuściński could have drawn on to put himself right on their
culture and belief systems.
It is perhaps not surprising, in view of this make-believe
ethnography, that he gets the politics wrong as well. “The first Sudanese war lasted ten
years,” he says, “until 1972.”
But the first civil war in Sudan did not last ten years. It lasted seventeen years, from
independence in 1955 until 1972.
Sudan, he tells us, was a British colony. It was not; it was an
Anglo-Egyptian condominium.
There are “gigantic plantations” of rubber on the Nile. There are none. If you want an accurate summary of
the war in Sudan you would do better to read John Le Carré’s recent novel
The Constant Gardener, set among aid workers in the South of the
country, a book that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than
fiction.
There are a host of
other errors in The Shadow of the Sun, small but cumulative in
effect. The Bari are not, as Kapuściński states, a Ugandan people, but
Sudanese. Bandits in the
Somali-Kenya-Ethiopia borderlands are called shifta, not
“shifts”. There are no people
called the Lugabra. There is
nowhere called Haragwe. And the Kakwa of Uganda, Idi Amin’s people, do not
live in a region “without roads… and cultivable land”. (The last
inaccuracy would be less remarkable if Kapuściński did not tell us that he
once considered writing a book about Amin and has amassed a small library
about him.)
HOW
MUCH DOES ALL this matter?
It is surely a matter of concern if the lives and beliefs of
Nilotic societies three or four million strong are casually
misrepresented. And it clearly important for the descendants of Haile
Selassie and the members of his court, and for those trying to write the
recent history of Ethiopia, to know whether or not the unique testimonies
that Kapuściński appears to have obtained with such resourcefulness are
truthful and genuine.
When The Emperor
was made into a stage play in London in the 1980s, adapted by Jonathan
Miller, the Royal Court Theatre was picketed by protesting Ethiopian
exiles, some of them former members of the court. It cut no ice with them to be told
that the play was intended as an allegory, that it was not really about
their country at all. And why
should it? There is a double
standard at work in such excuses, a eurocentric bias: if someone published
a book of scandalous revelations about the last years of the Gierek regime
in communist Poland, using questionable information that had been obtained
in obscure circumstances from anonymous and untraceable members of the
Polish Internal Security Police, no one would allow that it was a
reasonable defence of the book to say that it did not matter whether it
was true or not because it was really intended, not as a book about
Poland, but as an allegorical account of events in imperial Ethiopia.
The Shadow of the
Sun
also contains a startling number of generalizations about “Africa” and
“Africans”. Such
generalizations are dubious by definition: Africa is just too big and
various a continent, with too many cultures and histories and too many
contrasting natural environments for any but the vaguest commonplace to
apply to all of them. The
physical and cultural distance between Chad and Cape Town, or Kinshasa and
the Ogaden, is as great as that between Manhattan and the Andes, or Osaka
and the Hindu Kush.
Initially
Kapuściński seems to recognise this: in a prefatory note he announces “in
reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not
exist”. Yet a few pages later he
is coming up with the first of an increasingly unlikely string of
assertions about the continent and its inhabitants.
“The European and the
african,” he writes, “have
an entirely different concept of time”. “Africans believe that a
mysterious energy circulates through the world,” an energy that gives them
“the strength to set time into motion.” Africans, he continues, “eat only
once a day, in the evening”.
“Africans are collectivist by nature … all decisions… are made
collectively.” “Half the people in African towns don’t have defined
occupations.” “In Africa, drivers avoid travelling at night – darkness
unnerves them… they may flatly refuse to drive after sunset.” Finally, and perhaps most oddly,
“in Africa a cousin on your mother’s side is more important than a
husband.” Some of these
things may be true of some people in some parts of Africa, sometimes. But none of them is anything like
a general truth about Africa – any more than comparable statements about
Asia or the Americas would be.
There is a tellingly
archaic note in these obiter dicta, scattered like talismans
through the text of Shadows of the Sun. In their insistence on a
collective otherness they evoke an earlier era of European writing about
the continent. It is here
that the comparison with Joseph Conrad – Kapuściński’s strong precursor –
comes into its own. In this
post-Conradian version of Africa Kapuściński is both character and author,
a contemporary equivalent of one of Conrad’s voyager-narrators, following
a similar trajectory into the interior of the continent, to a place where,
to use his earlier phrase, “they say no white man can come back
alive”. Thus, in a typical
episode of The Shadow of the Sun, he travels to a distant,
dangerous location, falls ill and confronts death. And he is witness to
dreadful events, from which he emerges with a deeper understanding of the
further reaches of human nature.
It is a narrative
pattern familiar from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Accordingly, at the centre of
Kapuściński’s new book, we find a motif of horror: a long and gory account
of the notorious video recording made of the death by torture of Samuel
Doe, the former head of state of Liberia. This is an episode that has more
than an echo of the climax of Conrad’s original story, in which Marlow,
the narrator, confronts evidence of the ivory-trader Kurtz’s complicity in
ritual murder and cannibalism. The row of severed heads Marlow sees
outside Kurtz’s compound is mirrored, consciously or unconsciously, in
Kapuściński’s lingering description of Sergeant Doe’s severed
ears.
The baroque note in Kapuściński’s prose confirms
the movement away from fact towards the realm of fantasy and symbol. The
African universe, for him, is a place of absolutes and extremes, extremes
of poverty, of climate, of violence and danger. Its inhabitants are prisoners of
their environment. Thus he
writes of Somalia, “Daytime hours during the dry season… are a hell almost
impossible to bear.
Everything is burning.
Even the shade is hot, even the wind is ablaze. The human being… does not exist –
or he matters only as part of this or that bloodline.” And then of Central
Africa, “One cannot compare the tropical forest with any European forest
or with any equatorial jungle” (odd, given that tropical forests and
equatorial jungles are the same thing).
In this mode of writing – the tropical baroque
style – nothing can be ordinary or familiar. Everything is stretched and
exaggerated, the opposite of home.
As Kapuściński has himself written elsewhere of South American
baroque. “If there is
a jungle it has to be enormous… if there are mountains they have to be
gigantic... if there is a plain it has to be endless…. Fact is mixed with fantasy… truth
with myth, realism with rhetoric.” The direction of his blurrings and inventions and
exaggerations becomes clearer in the light of this inadvertent
self-criticism. Africa is a
continent without bookshops, he avers. Its rulers are illiterate. Its
inhabitants are prisoners of their environment, or of their bloodline.
They are afraid of the dark. They live on milk. (Who knows? They may have
heads beneath their shoulders too.) Thus Europeans can never really
understand them; they can only marvel at them.
With
the last suggestion we are approaching the true nature of Kapuściński’s
enterprise. It is an
outgrowth of the one historical experience that the inhabitants of this
hugely various continent do have in common with each other: the experience
of colonization (or military occupation) by European powers. Despite
Kapuściński’s vigorously anti-colonialist stance, his writing about Africa
is a variety of latter-day literary colonialism, a kind of gonzo
orientalism, a highly selective imposition of form, conducted in the name
of humane concern, that sacrifices truth and accuracy, and homogenises and
misrepresents Africans even as it aspires to speak for them.
SUCH CRITICISMS DO NOT
rob Kapuściński’s writing of its bright allure, its illuminating moments,
its often lively sympathy for the people of the countries he writes about,
but they warn us not to take it seriously as a guide to reality. In the
last chapter of The Shadow of the Sun there is a culminating
generalization that embodies his ambiguous attitude to factual reportage,
and corresponding attraction to the realm of poetry and fiction. “The kind of history known in
Europe as scholarly and objective,” Kapuściński writes, “can never arise
here because the African past has no documents or records, and each
generation, listening to the version being transmitted to it, changed it
and continues to change it….”
“As a result,” he continues, “history, free of the
weight of archives, of the constraints of dates and data, achieves here
its purest, crystalline form – that of myth.”
This characterization of
the role of collective memory in African societies is seriously
under-informed. On the one
hand it is well-established that oral history can be chronologically
accurate and that traditional genealogies can be precise. And on the
other, Kapuściński’s account ignores more than a century of scholarly
research and the existence of hundreds of universities and libraries in
African countries (not all of which are empty or malfunctioning). What his
account of African history does reveal is a telling indication of his own
narrative aspirations. Here
in the domain of myth, in a realm untouched by literacy, where the subject
never answers back, the reporter is freed from the constraint of dates and
data, the tedium of checking and cross-checking, the tyranny of documents
and records. Here facts are no longer sacred; we are at play in the bush
of ghosts, free to opine and to generalise about “Africa” and “the
African” without criticism from self-appointed guardians of facticity.
For Ryszard Kapuściński, it
seems, this is the heart of the continent. Here, in place of fact, there
is mutability; in place of reportage, relativism. From this place, deep in
an imaginary Africa, the writer may return with any tale he
likes.
John Ryle is Anthropology and Ecology
Editor of the Times Literary Supplement
Note
Richard Pankhurst, an
historian of Ethiopia who was personally acquainted with Haile Selassie I,
was the first to note errors in The Emperor, and remains one of the
very few scholars so to have done so in print. In a letter to the Times Literary
Supplement of April 17, 1987, responding to a review of the stage version
of The Emperor at the Royal Court in London that year, Professor
Pankhurst provided a list of some of the implausibilities in the book. “It
is incredible,” he wrote, “that a member of the court could have declared
that ‘the Emperor never signed anything in his own hand’… [that] not even
those closest to him knew what his signature looked like.
“The
present writer,” Professor Pankhurst continued, “though not close to the
Palace, has seen numerous examples of this signature.”
His letter
went on:
“No less
surprising is Kapuściński’s statement that the Emperor was so suspicious
of one of his courtiers, Endelkachew Makonnen, that immediately prior to
the abortive coup of 1960 he ‘added Endelkachew to the travelling party so
that he could keep an eye on him during a visit to Brazil.’ Endelkachew, as readers in Britain may
remember, was then the Ethiopian ambassador to the Court of St
James’s. He remained at this
post throughout the coup and never had anything to do with the Emperor’s
journey to or from Brazil.”
Professor Pankhurst concluded:
“Kapuściński’s
uncritical acceptance of his alleged informants’ statements can also be
seen in the statement that Haile Selassie was responsible for the
introduction of motorcars and the postage service to the country. Both were introduced during the
reign of the previous emperor, Menilek.”
Following the
appearance of the present review, the TLS published a letter (August 17,
2001) from Edward Ullendorff, also a historian of Ethiopia and the
translator of the first part of Haile Selassie’s autobiography, the volume
mentioned by Kapuściński. It
included the following comment
From first-hand close acquaintance,
over a period of thirty years, with the late Emperor I am able to confirm
that every word by Ryle on this subject is factual and accurate, while
Kapuśiński’s assertions are subject to grave misgivings – to put it in the
politest possible way.
The publication of The Shadow of
the Sun in Europe and the United States (where pre-publication
extracts from the book were run in the New York Review of Books and The
New Yorker, the latter a magazine with a global reputation for
fact-checking), was greeted indulgently by most reviewers. Few of these reviewers were
Africanists, or Africans. One or two of them drew attention to
deficiencies in Kapuśiński’s accounts of other events, notably the
revolution in Zanzibar. A
review in The Economist criticised his account of the Rwandan genocide and
of the coming to power of Idi Amin in Uganda. It also noted the absence of any
mention of “the two
great powers that now dominate the continent, the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund.”
Kapuściński, the Economist reviewer concluded, “creates an Africa
of his own. It is a fascinating place, whether it ever existed as he tells
it is another matter altogether.”
There were just two other
dissenting voices among reviewers of the book: in the Village Voice (April 19,
2001) Aleksandar Hemon accused Kapuściński
of racism; David Rieff extended and subtilized this analysis in the L.A.
Times (August xx 2001). Most reviewers appeared unaware of the
interpretive oddities and factual inaccuracies in the book, or else they
seemed to regard them as beside the point.
For the last word on
the subject of accuracy, here is Kapuściński himself. In a
post-publication interview with Alex Duval Smith in The Independent (June
8, 2001) he was reported as saying the following: “We have too many
fables, too much make-believe. Journalists must deepen their
anthropological and cultural knowledge and explain the context of events.
They must read.”
…………………………………………………………………
Times Literary
Supplement
27 July
2001 (extended with post-publication
note)
© John Ryle 2001 All Rights
Reserved
Email
john.ryle@cityofwords.net
…………………………………………………………………
www.richardwebster.net
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