The Third World: A Clash and a Beginning
[W]hen I saw that in India millions of people have no shoes, a sense of community responded in me, a sense of fraternity with these people, and at times I was even overcome by the mood we feel when we go back to our childhood.
Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus1
An Indian face smiles out of the poster. It’s a girl, standing in the shade of the palm trees, and in the distance is the dark silhouette of an ancient temple. Underneath runs the inscription: ‘VISIT INDIA!’ The Indian girl is beautiful, and you can’t say no to beautiful people.2
Before he reaches the point of delighting in the beautiful Indian girl, the palm trees and the ancient temples in the poster, there is major panic. The newspaper wants him to go to India – but he doesn’t know a single thing about India. How can he write about a country of which he’s completely ignorant? He doesn’t even speak English. How is he going to communicate? In Polish? In Russian? How? With whom? A quick dash to the bookshop, the second-hand one, to buy something about India. Do they even have anything? Perhaps at least a dictionary, or a map.
When in the summer of 1956 the editor-in-chief of Sztandar Młodych calls him in and announces, ‘You’re flying to India,’ Kapuściński is twenty-four years old. He has plenty of experience as a journalist fighting for socialism, as a reporter covering ZMP conferences, writing about the lot of the workers at major industrial plants. He’s made a few trips abroad – to Prague and to youth festivals in Moscow and Berlin – but he knows nothing about the work of a foreign correspondent and even less about the place where he is to go. Rysiek is a provincial boy from a modest family of teachers – a novice reporter and activist whom they are sending off to a distant, alien world without preparation, without the language, and without refinement.
Why India? Because it’s the thaw. In the Soviet Union they are settling accounts with Stalinism, Moscow’s international policy is changing, and the rulers in the Kremlin are beginning to open up some of their doors and windows. The socialist camp is looking outwards towards the countries of the so-called Third World which are escaping from colonial dependence on the West. In the era of the Cold War divide, even if they are not Red, liberation movements struggling against colonialism are frequently engaging in some form of co-operation with Moscow as a rival to the West – and later also with Peking. The emerging countries offer large markets for goods from countries in the Soviet orbit, above all for major industrial products such as machinery, fertilizer and weapons. Leaders from the socialist bloc are paying official visits, while the leaders of those newborn countries are coming to see how progress and socialism are doing in Eastern Europe.
Exactly one year earlier, Kapuściński covers Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to Poland for Sztandar Młodych. ‘Prime Minister Nehru is a politician fighting for important issues for humanity: for the peaceful coexistence of nations, co-operation and friendship’, he writes in a predictable welcoming article.3 (Meanwhile, the following joke is doing the rounds: ‘Why did Nehru come to Poland in his long johns?’ – a reference to the tight white trousers he wore – ‘To show that India is building socialism too.’) Kapuściński is the paper’s natural candidate when someone from the Central Committee Press Office decides that, in the spirit of friendship between the socialist camp and the Third World, Polish reporters will go abroad and write about the countries of the far South. The future star journalists of their generation set off on their way. One will go to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq; another to Indonesia; someone else to Morocco. Kapuściński is to go to India.
As a result, he misses the era of greatest revolutionary fever in Poland – he is not there in October 1956, when Soviet intervention is a whisker away, or in the period afterwards, when amid cheering crowds Gomułka assumes the post of Party leader. Indeed, during the coming quarter-century he will not witness any of the major political breakthroughs in Poland – right up to the strikes on the Baltic coast in the summer of 1980, when the Solidarity trade union is born. He will not be there in 1957, when Gomułka closes the weekly paper Po Prostu and cracks down on the movement for the renewal of socialism – instead he will be travelling in China and Japan. During the student protests of March 1968 and two years later, when the Party ruthlessly suppresses the workers’ protests on the coast, he will be working as a PAP correspondent in Latin America. In 1976, when once again the Party deploys force against the working class, in whose name it has supposedly been governing, he will be writing a weekly account of the war in Angola, and will be in Africa for months on end.
For the young reporter whose horizons are tedious Party confabs, factories in small provincial towns, or possibly youth festivals where he can communicate in Polish or in Russian, the trip to Asia is frightening but, to a greater degree, thrilling. Everything on the journey is large and amazing. The aeroplane is massive: a four-engine giant Super-Constellation that flies from Rome to New Delhi and Bombay. The distance to be covered is incredible – eight thousand kilometres! And so many hours in the air – twenty!
Also incredible is the lake of lights that stuns the fledgling globetrotter when the plane stops to refuel in Cairo. With some surprise, he finds that the Egyptians are black and that they dress in white – as he writes – ‘cassocks’. With childlike satisfaction, he notes that he has now set foot in Africa. These are the comments and emotional responses of a greenhorn traveller.
His associations and thoughts on landing in India are amusingly gauche too, including his mention of the fact that Columbus tried to reach India and failed, whereas he, Kapuściński, has succeeded. He makes the conventional first observations: the traffic moves on the left, following the British example; and of course he must mention the sacred cows, which do not obey the rules of the road and walk about the streets with impunity, now with the flow of traffic, now against it – and nothing can be done to them because they are sacred.
Kapuściński gets his first lesson on India in the plane, sitting between an elderly Englishman and an elderly Indian. The Englishman complains that ever since the Indians broke free of colonial dependence they have been limiting the rights of British companies, and by doing so they are making a rope for their own necks.
‘Do you know what India’s economy will be like without the British?’ asks the Englishman.
‘But we do know what India’s economy was like with the British: universal poverty. The Middle Ages,’ the Indian explains to his fellow passenger from Poland. (At least, this is what the reporter who hardly knew any English understood him to be saying.)
The New Delhi airport building is small and dark. It is night – and he is alone in the Indian darkness. He looks around, he is completely lost, he doesn’t know where to go or whom to ask for help. Unprepared for the journey, he can’t speak English, and he has no names or addresses in his notebook. Despair! Described this way in Travels with Herodotus, it sounds like an adventure.
The fact is, Kapuściński stands alone at the airport only until PAP correspondent Ryszard Frelek arrives by car to fetch him. They have met just once before – at a labour camp for prisoners: Kapuściński was going to write a report on it for Sztandar Młodych (he never did), and Frelek was there to research an account for the PAP.
After one day in New Delhi, Kapuściński has just one wish: to go home. He is oppressed by the tropical heat and humidity, tormented by a feeling of loneliness, and horrified by the sight of people suffering en masse.
The city, and the entire area of the country that is situated along the Ganges, have just experienced the predictable annual cataclysm: a flood. The fields beyond the city are filled with people, and in the city there are campsites in the streets. Children lie on the baking-hot ground, and old men warm their bones in the sunshine. Anyone who has managed to spread a small piece of matting on the road has a home; anyone who has failed to do so is roaming about, still searching. All of life is concentrated in the streets. If there’s a bowl above some embers, a stink, and some flies, it’s a restaurant. If there’s a man squatting and another man flourishing a pair of scissors about his head, it’s a barber’s shop.
‘Life here is not life, food is not food, only poverty really is poverty,’ he will write immediately after returning home.4
For the next two weeks, Frelek shows Kapuściński New Delhi. In this apocalyptic setting they strike up a friendship, an understanding that will last for the next thirty years. Frelek will be a guardian angel, a protector and a co-architect of Kapuściński’s career – first as one of the PAP’s decision-makers, and later as a senior Party dignitary, able to help when needed, to protect, push matters forwards, press the right buttons.
After two weeks as a tourist in the capital, Kapuściński starts to worry. He doesn’t know what to write about and has no material to form the basis of his reports for Sztandar. But how can he get any, when he’s losing his battle with English? (‘Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and preventing my going further,’5 he will say years later in his final book.) To teach himself English, he buys Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls from a street stall, but the language of the novel is too difficult – he’d be better off with English for Beginners.
He decides to leave the city and see the provinces, the sites of religious worship and deepest India. ‘You haven’t any clothes – the weather could vary on the journey: winter’s coming,’ says Frelek astutely, and takes his colleague to the bazaar. They buy a warm hat and coat made of multicoloured wool. Kapuściński sets off on a rickety, crowded bus. Frelek notices that his new friend is the only white man among the passengers.
Four weeks later, the watchman comes running into the building where Frelek’s office is located and cries out, ‘There’s a dirty, ragged Indian trying to get in here, and he’s given your name!’
Kapuściński had dark eyes and a swarthy complexion, so once he was dirty and ragged, he could well have looked like a local vagrant. On the journey he bought a quilted blanket that he rolled up during the day and unrolled at night, sleeping in sheds with the locals. Years later Frelek will say, ‘He identified with the Indians.’
From New Delhi:
A large gang of children are lying in the dust, idly gazing around them. They aren’t playing: they are hungry. There’s nothing happening here . . . A couple of kilometres away is the army. Dinghies are doing the rounds, and the soldiers are picking up whatever they can – people out of trees, drowning cattle, the wreckage of tools . . .
It’s the same everywhere. There is no end to the people, the water and the tragedy.6
From Bengal:
India is so unlike Poland! The same concepts do not mean the same things here as there. ‘I have no home,’ says my friend from Warsaw, ‘I’m literally living in the street.’ Of course he wasn’t telling the truth, he was using a metaphor. Not a single person in Poland lives in the street. But if a homeless Indian gives me his address as ‘The Mutra Street roadway, somewhere between the bridge and the cinema’, I can boldly go and look for him in that spot – he is sure to ‘live’ there.
In our life we have no equivalents for various Indian phenomena, and that’s why it’s so easy for all sorts of eyewash to be believed . . .
The exotic? I’ve been looking for it in the streets of Calcutta, the villages of Bengal and the towns of Andhra. I can’t find it, and I’m not in the least bit concerned. India is not an exotic country, but if you insist, then the only thing that’s exotic there is the scenery . . . [India] is living at the bottom of utter poverty, among plagues of disease and under ruthless, alien authority. This was a ‘shameful topic’ and it had to be replaced with something more palatable and more enticing. And so the popularly distributed literature about India is limited to the Mysterious Exotic – jungles and fakirs, sacred monkeys and snake charmers. That is what our imagination has been fed on; hungry as it is for knowledge of faraway countries, it cannot tell that instead of facts it is absorbing myths.7
Thoughts on the road from Bangalore to Hyderabad:
The crime of colonization arrested development a very long time ago . . . Machinery and industry reached India not as an element of progress or the liberation of man, but as an oppressive weapon, a yoke. Higher technology made it possible to plunder and starve, enslave and destroy. This injury has not yet healed today.8
At the end of his journey, Kapuściński has a curious adventure. He is due to go home on a ship called the Stefan Batory, which sails between Gdańsk and Bombay. But conflict erupts over the Suez Canal, whose nationalization has been announced by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser; the British and the French dispatch troops, and traffic through the canal is halted. Kapuściński has to go home by plane, via Karachi, Kabul and Tashkent to Warsaw.
On landing in Kabul he has a nasty surprise. He hands his passport to the immigration official. He waits. The airport is a small barracks, surrounded by desert. The policeman comes back with his passport, places one arm over the other to form a cross and spreads out his fingers: he’s in detention. An official summoned from the airport explains that a transit visa is obligatory in Afghanistan; Kapuściński doesn’t have one.
The Soviet embassy rescues Kapuściński from this predicament. A diplomatic courier whom he met on the plane realizes that he has been detained at the airport; someone from the Soviet embassy finds a Polish salesman, who accompanies the Soviet attaché to the Afghan Ministry for External Affairs, where they sort out a visa, probably by bribing an official. Together they come and fetch the ‘prisoner’ from detention. But now Kapuściński has to extend his visa, because the one issued at the Afghan ministry is valid for only a single day.
At the police station he receives one of his first lessons about the Third World during the Cold War. As the official hands him back his passport, he says in broken English: ‘You are lucky to be under the protection of the Soviet embassy. If you were British, you’d get to know our cellars.’
Part two of Kapuściński’s first encounter with Asia comes a year later – in China. He also visits Japan, and it is this brief visit of a mere few days, rather than the longer one to China, that generates a series of reports. However, it is China that makes the deeper impression on Kapuściński, in the same way as he was struck by India’s unfathomable, fascinating dissimilarity.
In China he is to arrange co-operation with the communist youth wing and a newspaper called Chungkuo, which is the equivalent of Sztandar Młodych. At a certain point the Polish October and Mao Zedong’s Hundred Flowers Campaign seem to involve similar ideas about re-energizing socialism and making room for greater freedom, but when Kapuściński arrives in Peking, both parties are changing course and the reversal of reforms has begun. Gomułka closes down Po Prostu, while Chairman Mao tightens the screws and gears up for the Great Leap Forward.
One day in Peking, an employee of the Polish foreign trade centre brings Kapuściński a letter from his colleagues at Sztandar Młodych. They inform him that they have refused to support the closure of the weekly Po Prostu and, following the dismissal of Marian Turski from the post of acting editor-in-chief, they have decided to leave the newspaper. Some are hesitating, and want to know what Kapuściński will do. He decides to return home earlier than planned, not by plane but by the Trans-Siberian Railway. He joins the protestors and quits his job at Sztandar.
The journalists who have resigned agree that he should publish the reports from his recent journey in Sztandar. They promise not to regard it as a breach of solidarity or an act of disloyalty towards his colleagues who have left the paper. They understand that if they were to set excessive moral demands, and Kapuściński were to accept them, he would be in trouble: he flew to China as a correspondent for Sztandar, using state money raised by the editors, and so it is appropriate that he fulfil his assignment.
Within a few years the Third World, though not India and not China, will become Kapuściński’s professional passion. ‘Passion, passion, you’ve got to have a passion!’ he repeats to his friends, acquaintances and the young reporters he meets. Years later, he writes in a poem that ‘whosoever creates his own world will live on’.9 The world of Kapuściński the writer and reporter began being created during his journey to India. So, too, did the fate of the ever-absent husband, father, friend and co-worker. Neither in the winter of 1956 nor even a year later, however, does he yet know that he has already picked up the scent of his own tone, his own independent voice, his own original topic.
In his series of reports from India one can see many of the themes that recur in his writing and his world outlook till the end: empathy for the poor, a moral objection to the colonial powers, a certain reserve towards the whole of the capitalist West, a critical attitude to Eurocentric modes of thinking about the world, a basic interest in dissimilarity. In India he also hones his craft as a reporter who prefers to speak with ordinary people in the street, in the desert, or in a godforsaken village than to seek out interviewees in the corridors of power; he would rather blend into the background and try to live like the locals, although he does have a return ticket in his pocket. In a way, from the very start, beginning with his first journey to India, he works towards being an ‘interpreter of cultures’ – a reporter who describes other countries and cultures with respect and without the taint of Western condescension – though of course he has no idea that in thirty years’ time he will be world-famous and, from those heights, teaching that the role of a journalist is to explain faraway cultures to the reader.
Is he really so mature at just twenty-four? Yes and no. On returning from India, he has no idea what he wants. He is experimenting, looking around, searching. India is an accidentally sown seed, from which in a few years’ time something will grow. Apart from some mature reflections on the wealth of Indian culture, all he can write about Afghanistan is that it is ‘a wild country’, and about Sudan that it is ‘a place called Sudan’.
Professor Wipszycka, his college friend, remembers that after Kapuściński’s first return from Africa, in 1958, the history faculty held a meeting at which he said ‘some dreadful things’: ‘The auditorium is packed, and Kapuściński announces that the British should send their Gurkhas to Ghana to deal with internecine conflicts among the tribes. I was horrified. “What is he saying?” I remarked to someone next to me. It was a mixture of colonial thinking and probably criticism of his own views from the previous, i.e., Stalinist phase. I remember that what he said offended me as a historian. He had graduated from the same faculty as I, but at that moment it was as if five years of study had flowed off him like water off a duck’s back. He gave the impression of being naive and downright crude in his thinking. The “wising up” came later.’
Does Kapuściński in fact notice in India that what really fascinates him is large-scale social change? And does it occur to him that he can witness major changes not just in Poland but in other countries as well? At home, Gomułka is just putting an end to the rebellion of the young people who want to reform Stalinist socialism – and yet hope remains that the ideals of socialism, authentic and not distorted, will be successfully implemented in the politically awakening Third World. That is where History is now happening.
In his personal manifesto, ‘Our Birth Certificate’, written shortly before the final suppression of the October renewal in Poland, Kapuściński declares:
Asia, home to more than half of humanity, Asia, downtrodden and despised, decimated by plague and hunger, for the first time in centuries is starting to eat three times a day, to wear shoes and learn to read. Has there ever been an era when an equally humanitarian task has been achieved? What about the total liberation of man from the plough, the mud hut, the tallow lamp, or bast footwear? . . . The twentieth century is the world’s century, and to measure it against the experience of a single country (and one that has been browbeaten throughout history) is like trying to drain the sea with a spoon . . . We should keep taking up the task of liberating the world anew, even if it means falling over dozens of times along the way, and even if everything good always seems to be so infinitely far away.10
The romantic fascinated by revolution – Major Change – will soon be seeking it out on other continents. (‘The revolution at home was over, and he went in pursuit of it elsewhere,’ one of his PAP colleagues told me.) But before he races abroad for good, an exceptional reporter will be born in Poland, who will break free of the strait jacket of Party newspeak – also a man who will learn how to move nimbly within the corridors of power, a skill that will enable his career in the sort of conditions prevailing in Gomułka’s, and later Gierek’s, Poland. Ryszard Frelek, the new friend Kapuściński has gained in India, will soon be his political patron and will play a key role in building his career.