Ryszard Kapuscinski - A Life
by Artur Domoslawski
Tuesday 04 September 2012
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The Emperor, Soccer Wars and The Shah Of Shahs made Ryszard Kapuscinski's name during the last two decades of the 20th century.
Widely and avidly read, they won a plethora of international prizes.
His captivating style of literary reportage and passionate engagement on the side of the downtrodden and the liberation movements lent his narrative unique credibility.
Kapuscinski was a communist and, though a journalist, was never a disinterested witness. "I don't believe in unbiased journalism, in formal objectivity," he stated.
When reporting from Angola he would stand shoulder to shoulder with MPLA fighters as a momentary combatant when circumstances required.
While there he was also privy to a top-secret piece of information, the scoop so lusted after by all journalists. He knew that the Cubans were helping the Angolans but never filed the story, believing it could damage the cause of the MPLA.
Therein lay the two sides to Kapuscinski.
On the one hand there were his razor-sharp, insightful and scrupulously written news dispatches filed from all corners of Africa, Latin America or the Middle East for his Polish Press Agency employers.
On the other, there were books where occasionally facts might be embellished if this served the purpose of better illustrating a point being made or enhancing the narrative.
Artur Domoslawski's approach to this complex man makes his "unmasking" the central premise of his book.
While such an inquisition unearths the predictable abundance of contradictory opinions, it fails to distinguish between the two sides of the man and consequently does little justice to either.
Sinister allegations were spread in 2006 by Poland's Institute Of National Remembrance - whose McCarthyite campaigns of innuendos are often used against political opponents - as to Kapuscinki's collaboration with the secret services of the People's Republic of Poland.
While there is no doubt that he would have been debriefed, very much like everybody else who travelled abroad during the cold war, it would hardly make him or the majority of those interviewed into willing agents.
His sense of powerlessness, though, had an effect on Kapuscinski's health and general well being and he died of a heart attack in 2007.
Ultimately, and perhaps contrary to Domoslawski's expectations, Kapuscinski emerges as a principled, honourable man who was an implacable seeker of truth.
As such he was well respected by those among his peers who valued such qualities.
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