Suppose we were to launch a spacecraft with the intention of establishing literary contact with the residents of some remote part of the galaxy. If we had room for only one contemporary writer, who would we send? Bellow? Márquez? Atwood? Rushdie? I’d vote for Ryszard Kapuściński because he has given the truest, least partial, most comprehensive and vivid account of what life is like on our planet.
For almost thirty years he was a roving foreign correspondent for the Polish press agency. During that time he witnessed twenty-seven revolutions and coups. Though dutifully fulfilling his brief, he was also a kind of narcotic-free gonzo journalist, suddenly breaking contact with Warsaw and disappearing without trace to throw himself “into the jungle, float down the Niger in a dugout, wander through the Sahara with nomads.” In Nigeria in 1966 he was “driving along a road where they say no white man can come back alive. I was driving to see if a white man could because I had to experience everything for myself.” At the first roadblock he was beaten and allowed to drive on after he had paid a toll. At the second roadblock he was beaten again, doused in benzene, but, after handing over the rest of his money, allowed to drive on rather than being set alight. Which meant that by the time he came to the third roadblock he was penniless and highly flammable. Kapuściński survived, sent in a hair-raising account of what happened, and received a telegram from his boss ordering him “to put an end to these exploits that could end in tragedy.”
Fat chance. The early pages of The Shadow of the Sun, a compendium of further adventures in Africa, find him in Dar es Salaam, in 1962, where he hears that Uganda is about to gain independence. He and a friend, Leo, promptly set off for Kampala via the Serengeti with its teeming wildlife: “It’s all improbable, incredible. As if one were witnessing the birth of the world, that precise moment when the earth and sky already exist, as do water, plants, and wild animals, but not yet Adam and Eve.” They have no maps, they’re lost, and they’re confronted with an enormous herd—“stretching almost to the horizon”—of buffalo. They press on regardless. It gets hotter and hotter. “The burning air started to quiver and undulate.” Kapuściński begins to hallucinate. By the time they come to a hut in the middle of nowhere, Kapuściński is “half dead.” He slumps down on a bunk only to discover that his hand is dangling inches from an Egyptian cobra. He freezes. Leo approaches gingerly and slams down an enormous metal canister on the snake. Kapuściński hurls himself on the canister as well, whereupon “the interior of the hut exploded. I never suspected there could be so much power within a single creature. Such terrifying monstrous, cosmic power.” Eventually the cobra dies and they make it to Kampala. Kapuściński is still delirious, not just from heatstroke but—it turns out—also malaria. Cerebral malaria. He’s just about recovered from malaria when he goes down with TB… all in about twenty pages!
Kapuściński, it has to be said, trowels it on. On every other page he is “drenched in sweat.” Having risked life and limb to get into Zanzibar—another coup, naturally—he tries to sneak out in a boat, only to get caught in an imperfect storm that tips him from the precipice of a wave “into a roaring abyss, a rumbling darkness.” Then the engine floods and cuts out. In the Sahara the sun beats down “with the force of a knife.” Step out of the shade and “you will go up in flames.” In Monrovia there are roaches “as big as small turtles.” Is there a touch of exaggeration in all of this? Kapuściński himself alerts us to the possibility by observing that he “could embellish” the stuff with the roaches but decides against it because it “would not be true.”
The possibility, though, is always there. Experience is only the beginning—and some writers can get by on very little of it. I think it was Camus who pointed out that it is possible to lead a life of great adventure without leaving your desk. At the other extreme, Joe Simpson can function as a writer only on condition that he remain roped to the cliff face of personal experience. But what about someone who has the experience and is possessed of consummate intelligence and literary gifts? Then you have what Nietzsche considered “something very rare but a thing to take delight in: a man with a finely constituted intellect who has the character, the inclinations and also the experiences appropriate to such an intellect.” Then you have Kapuściński.
It is often unclear whether he is recycling dispatches sent forty years ago or is only now writing up this hoard of experience. Chronology is deliberately uncertain, the sequence fragmented. Rival tenses jostle for dominance within the same page. Like this, his prose has the unsteady immediacy of the moment and a measure of historical reflection. What was happening in one part of the continent in the sixties affords a glimpse of what will happen elsewhere years later, in Liberia or Rwanda.
Robert Stone was overgenerous when he likened Philip Gourevitch to Kapuściński. Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You… is an outstanding book of reportage, but Kapuściński’s work is of a different order of achievement. A great imaginative writer, he not only processes his material but also goes beyond it. His books may be rooted in his own experience, but they are full of amazing digressions, little essays—in Imperium—on how to make cognac, on the history of the Armenian book, on anything and everything. And yet these digressions are always integral to the conception of the work. In his nomadic life he has described real places—like the city of crates in Angola in the famous opening of Another Day of Life—that are as fantastical as Calvino’s invisible cities. In Ethiopia he meets “a man who was walking south. That is really the most important thing one can say about him. That he was walking north to south.” It’s as if Coetzee’s Michael K has just wandered into The Shadow of the Sun. Dozens of mini-novels and their characters stray briefly into view and then move on: “All of Africa is in motion, on the road to somewhere, wandering.”
He is lyrically succinct—in the stupor of noon, a village was “like a submarine at the bottom of the ocean: it was there, but it emitted no signals, soundless, motionless”—and often hysterically funny. Terror gives way to absurd slapstick, and vice versa. Either way, an endless capacity for astonishment holds sway. He is an unflinching witness and an exuberant stylist.
And yet many fiction writers I’ve spoken with seem not even to have heard of him. In this respect he is the victim of a received cultural prejudice that assumes fiction to be the loftiest preserve of literary and imaginative distinction. It is instructive in this (rather dim) light to compare him with a highly regarded novel that touches on events to which Kapuściński has returned repeatedly. Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist is set amid the historical upheaval surrounding the independence of Zaire and its aftermath (Kapuściński, needless to say, was there), including the death of Patrice Lumumba. Despite its distant location, Bennett’s well-crafted novel never strays from a familiar template of conventions. Kapuściński’s radically unconventional approach, on the other hand, is entirely novel in the literal sense that no one else attempts anything like it. His material generates an apparently ad hoc aesthetic that draws on the chaos threatening to engulf him. The outcome—the formal outcome—is perpetually uncertain, in the balance. Hence the suspense.
There is perhaps a superficial resemblance to The Songlines but The Shadow of the Sun shows Bruce Chatwin for what he was: the rich man’s Kapuściński! Kapuściński is steeped in the politics of everything he sees. His daring—actual and literary—is underwritten by an awareness of how politics complicates empathy, and of how sympathy implicates politics. There he is, a white man in Africa at the moment when countries are liberating themselves from the shackles of colonialism. But Kapuściński is from a country that has been repeatedly ravaged by the imperial ambitions of its neighbors. He knows what it means “to have nothing, to wander into the unknown and wait for history to utter a kind word.” This is one of the reasons he feels at home in Africa, among the wretched of the earth. In other respects, he is utterly alien, making the attempt “to find a common language” more exacting. To Kapuściński it is not Manhattan or La Defense in Paris “that represent[s] the highest achievement of human imagination,” but a “monstrous” African shantytown—an “entire city erected without a single brick, metal rod, or square metre of glass!” The torpor of the wretched is matched by a quite phenomenal resourcefulness. Likewise, he never plays down the corruption and violence he has witnessed—on the contrary, their prevalence makes the survival of kindness all the more remarkable.
“There is more in men to admire than despise”: this was the great truth dramatized by Camus in The Plague. Having narrowly escaped death in The Soccer War, Kapuściński is more direct: “There is so much crap in this world, and then suddenly, there is honesty and humanity.” In the new book he puts it more simply and subtly. Summing up his dealings with a man serving as his driver, Kapuściński eventually achieves the human—rather than strictly economic—relation he craves, one rich in “tenderness, warmth and goodwill.” He is not being naive or sentimental: the goodwill was genuine, heartfelt—but it could only be bought. Does this inhibit him from seeing the spirit of Africa? The answer is revealed, magnificently, on the very last page of the book.
By virtue of the fact that it’s translated nonfiction, The Shadow of the Sun is ineligible for a number of literary prizes. The best thing to do would be to vault the problem by giving him a couple of Nobels—for literature and for peace.
2001