In ‘Rakowski’s Gang’
‘I’m not the same person anymore,’ he replies . . . ‘I haven’t got that spark, that vigour. But in those days! Do you remember how we held that meeting at night, how we started the campaign, how it collapsed, and how we got people out afterwards . . .’
Those years have burned him out; he’s worn to a frazzle. He expended a lot and acquired a lot. He has a whole store of experiences and wisdom. He can no longer summon up the energy to start all over again.1
What is a young intellectual to do when he has been battered by the storms of the 1950s and ‘those years have burned him out’? An intellectual who started off by building socialism with neophyte eagerness, then noticed the distortions, and with equal zeal tried to fix socialism but found that the authorities would only allow a limited adjustment. This is someone who has never stopped believing in socialism, and who believed that if the system was to be changed, it must be done with the Party, within the Party, and by the Party. He was on the side of the October ’56 reforms but did not fully identify with the revisionists, because they took the path towards ‘liquidating socialism’, as the Party put it; perhaps he was also motivated by realism, by seeing how the radical reform movement in Hungary was drowned in blood. He was even further removed from the opponents of the system who shut themselves inside either the Catholic Church or the privacy of their own homes. Nor could he summon up the energy to start all over again . . .
The place on the political and cultural map of People’s Poland where this intellectual can find a safe haven is the newly founded weekly Polityka (Politics). Sacked from his job as managing editor of Sztandar Młodych, Marian Turski has moved to Polityka, bringing with him the group of journalists who resigned in a gesture of solidarity against his dismissal. Among them is Kapuściński.
Polityka had a terrible start. It was established in January 1957 by the Central Committee secretariat. Stefan Żółkiewski – Marxist scholar of the humanities, and minister of higher education (years later, to show solidarity, he would support the Warsaw University students demonstrating against the authorities) – was put in charge. This happened before the closure of the revisionist weekly Po Prostu – Polityka was meant to be a whip to beat the revisionists, an anti–Po Prostu publication. It was seen as heralding the departure of First Secretary Gomułka from the ideals of October ’56, and as a desire to exercise full control over intellectual life and thought, which had been relatively free during the years of the thaw and the October movement.
The revisionists from Po Prostu – ‘the rabid’, as their opponents call them – regard Polityka as a ‘despot’s organ’, a paper that on Gomułka’s orders is to determine the political line for the entire press. Both editorial offices are located within the Palace of Culture and Science, Po Prostu on the fifth floor and Polityka on the eleventh. The Po Prostu people are so allergic to the Polityka people that when they don’t have enough glasses in their office, and the head of administration amicably wants to borrow some from Polityka six floors above, the Po Prostu staff have a meeting, debate the idea, hold a vote and reject it.
When Gomułka closes down Po Prostu in the autumn of 1957, the editors of Polityka welcome the move. Many people assume that once the revisionists’ weekly has been eliminated, Polityka will have carried out Party orders and may leave the press scene. Meanwhile, under the management of its new chief, Mieczysław Rakowski, a former political officer and Party apparatus man, Polityka is changing from a dull, sermonizing newspaper into the most interesting weekly with a Party stamp. It will train the journalistic stars of the generation, create the Polish school of reportage and become a notorious thorn in the side of the government, a disparaging and sometimes ironic internal critic of the Party and the realities of People’s Poland. Marian Turski will say that Polityka began by being branded anti–Po Prostu but ended up becoming a sequel to its revisionist predecessor.
The young editors at Polityka knew their generation, and could sense its needs. They had been through October with it, and started their first jobs with it. They knew that the time for rallying was over, and now the time had come to establish families, wait for accommodation, and confront theory with actual life. But life was putting up resistance to their ambitions. Because life, as it turned out, also meant stagnant systems, stupid bosses defending their own jobs, regulations that block initiative, provincialism and backwardness.2
So wrote Wiesław Władyka, a historian of the PRL and beginning in the 1980s a features writer for Polityka, many years later in a book about the newspaper.
Polityka intuitively seeks contact with the engineers who have packed up their books and left the student hostel to go out into the country, with the teachers who once founded the Young Intellectuals’ Clubs, with the managers who believed in reforms, and with the artists who – as at Warsaw’s Student Satirical Theatre – made fun of the absurdities of life and of themselves, as well as of politics.3
These are the people who will be the heroes of the reportage and also the readers of the weekly created by ‘Rakowski’s gang’ (no one can remember who gave the Polityka team this name). On returning from a brief period of exile behind a desk, Kapuściński quickly earns himself a prestigious place in this ‘gang’.
‘Gomułka’s departure from the ideals of October was a disappointment for Rysiek; he believed that an original form of socialism would come into being in Poland, another path, different from the Soviet one.’
Jerzy Nowak, his closest friend for forty-six years, is trying to reconstruct Kapuściński’s state of mind and spirit at that time. They will meet a few years after the withdrawal from the new thinking of October ’56, in 1961, when Nowak is getting ready to leave for his first diplomatic posting in Dar es Salaam. Kapuściński has already made his first two journeys to Africa when they arrange to meet at a café in central Warsaw. Kapuściński is keen to meet someone who apparently shares his interest in Africa, and who is going to Tanganyika as a diplomat. The time for serious conversations about Poland and socialism, about their hopes and disappointments, will come much later.
‘At that time Rysiek believed that only within the Party, through acting from the inside, would it be possible to have a reasonable effect on Polish reality. That meant we should muster as many intelligent, sensitive people from the October generation as possible and encourage them to join the Party ranks, because without it we would never accomplish a thing and our efforts would be in vain.’
This is a good explanation for why the recent ‘thaw supporter’ and denouncer of the abuses of Stalinist bureaucracy would find a safe haven at Polityka – the weekly branded an ideological destroyer of the deeper reform of socialism. But there is another one as well.
On returning from his journey to the Far East and uniting with his colleagues who have left Sztandar Młodych in protest, Kapuściński does not know where to go. Some of the protestors find work at an evening paper, others at a magazine covering international affairs; one is banned from appearing in print. They set up a welfare fund to help anyone left without work; each of them pays a small sum into it. Officially it is a collection for a sailing boat, in case the Party should accuse them of forming an illegal professional union or an anti-government conspiracy.
Kapuściński’s new friend from India, the PAP correspondent Ryszard Frelek, now comes in handy. Frelek recommends Kapuściński to his boss, Michał Hoffman. A communist from the inter-war years, Hoffman takes Kapuściński into his team.
Because I had arrived from China, my new boss, Michał Hoffman, concluded my expertise must lie in matters of the Far East and decided that this would now be my beat – specifically, the part of Asia to the east of India and extending to the innumerable islands of the Pacific.
We all know a little about everything, but I knew nothing about the countries I had been assigned, and so I burned the midnight oil studying up on guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Burma and Malaysia, the revolts in Sumatra and Sulawesi, the rebellions of the Moro tribe in the Philippines. The world once again presented itself to me as something impossible to even begin to comprehend, let alone master. And all the more so because, given my work, I had so little time to devote to it. All day long, dispatches arrived in my office from various countries, which I had to read, translate, condense, edit, and send on to newspapers and radio stations.4
He hates working at a desk. Only once again in his life, and only for a short while in the late 1960s, will he be exiled behind a desk again – by the same Hoffman – at the agency’s Warsaw headquarters. Kapuściński thinks a man who works behind a desk is like ‘an invalid in an orthopaedic corset’: while the desk is his instrument of power, it is also his prison, fencing him off from life and from people, and making him into a slave. The world of the man behind the desk undergoes radical transformation as other values become important, and his career becomes a journey from a smaller to a bigger desk. That is not what Kapuściński wants.
He has a flair for reporting, he is ‘stoked up’ – as he puts it – by talking to ordinary people in Poland, India, Japan, and, later, other continents too. Not only would he have been incapable of working at a desk for long, he couldn’t have been a reporter in any Western country either. A few years before his death, he said in earnest that he would have died of boredom as a correspondent reporting from Brussels on the European Union, or serving the American establishment in Washington, because in those places life takes place in offices, behind closed doors, behind piles of documents – behind desks. He preferred to wade into the River Ganges with the pilgrims, to contract malaria in Uganda, and to shoot a gun during the civil war in Angola.
And so when, in the second half of 1958, Marian Turski comes along with an offer to join ‘Rakowski’s gang’, Kapuściński feels as if life is returning.
Daniel Passent, Polityka columnist: ‘He didn’t join in with social life at the newspaper office. We were always getting together somewhere, going out together, having a drink or a party, but Rysiek didn’t take part in all that. I ascribe this not so much to his reserve towards people from the office, as to his personal plans and his lack of any social, political or environmental needs. He was self-contained, and no one knew much about him. He never talked about his family life.’
Mieczysław Rakowski, for many years chief of Polityka: ‘He was quiet, always on the sidelines, unaggressive.’
Passent: ‘His weak spot was the girls. He used to spend hours sitting at the table for the office gofers. There was an extremely pretty girl working there, and everyone used to sigh over her, but she only had eyes for Rysiek. Sometimes I even used to wonder what he talked to her about for hours and hours on end.’
Rakowski: ‘He made my secretary fall in love with him – a very beautiful girl! He broke her heart. One day she didn’t turn up at work. She left a note on the desk saying she was leaving.’
At Polityka Kapuściński conquers two summits. With several other reporters he cofounds the trend in post-war journalism that will come to be known as the Polish school of reportage. Here, too, he will discover his life’s subject. Witnessing decolonization in Ghana and the civil war in Congo, he earns a reputation as a reporter on African affairs and catches the African bug for the rest of his life.
Polityka sends him out to Ghana almost immediately. When I questioned Rakowski about Kapuściński more than a year before his death in November 2008, he could not remember how the idea arose that the journalist who didn’t know Africa (in Poland, who did in those days?) should be sent to Ghana straight after being taken on staff. ‘Probably,’ he said, trying to remember, ‘Rysiek himself had been following the foreign press and the agency dispatches when he was still working at the PAP, and had noticed that this was a watershed moment in African history. He came to me with this and persuaded me that the topic was worth an expedition. I arranged the consent of the Central Committee Press Office and some hard currency from RSW ‘Prasa’ [the Workers’ Publishing Co-operative], because weeklies had no funds of their own for trips of that kind. There was a great hunger for news from the Third World, and we felt History was happening there.’
Kapuściński himself writes about it as follows:
In those days, the 1960s, the world was very interested in Africa. Africa was a puzzle, a mystery. Nobody knew what would happen when 300 million people stood up and demanded the right to be heard. States began to be established there, and the states bought armaments, and there was speculation in foreign newspapers that Africa might set out to conquer Europe. Today it is impossible to contemplate such a prospect, but at that time, it was a concern, an anxiety. It was serious. People wanted to know what was happening on the continent: where it was headed, what were its intentions?5
Little is known about Kapuściński’s first trip to Africa except what he himself writes in his reports and books. It lasted for about two months.
But before he writes one of the most famous sentences in Polish reportage, ‘I am living on a raft, in a side street in the merchant district of Accra . . .’; before he is dazzled by the bright sunlight described several decades later in The Shadow of the Sun; before he is struck by the odours of hot bodies, dried fish, rotting meat and roasted cassava, on the plane from London to Accra he meets Nadir Khouri, an Arab, who will take him from the airport to the Hotel Metropol (the one that resembles a raft).
In Accra he goes to a rally led by the most iconic figure in the African liberation movements of that era, Kwame Nkrumah. A year earlier, as the first leader of a self-governing African country, Nkrumah declared Ghana’s independence and took over from the British colonial authorities. At the time, people were struck by Nkrumah’s confession in his autobiography that he did not know the date of his own birth.
‘The crowd is standing in West End Square. The crowd is standing in the sunshine, under a white African sky. The crowd is standing and waiting for Nkrumah, the patient black crowd, the sweating crowd.’6 Thus begins the first of Kapuściński’s series of reports for Polityka, ‘Ghana Close Up’.
There is no evidence that Kapuściński meets Nkrumah in person. Certainly he very much wants to, and goes to see one of his ministers. He is fascinated by the Ghanaian leader and his pan-African aspirations, and he likes the references to the ideas of Marx and Lenin. But Nkrumah is also a Christian and says that these two sources of inspiration are not mutually exclusive, and that he is interested in African socialism, which will not use violence either to fight for power or to exercise it.
A few months before Kapuściński’s death, at a reading of his poetry in Rome, a woman comes up to him and introduces herself as Samia Nkrumah, daughter of Ghana’s former leader. Soon afterwards, she will write him a letter in which, without implying that he ever met Nkrumah in person, she invites him to a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Ghanaian independence. Kapuściński does not live to attend it.
It is in Accra’s West End that the seeds sown in India begin to flourish, producing a reporter and writer with an anti-colonial world outlook, critical of the West and of capitalism. This world outlook – despite subtle changes – remains with him for the rest of his life.
So Kapuściński stands on the square in Accra and listens as Kwame Nkrumah says:
We must be vigilant, because imperialism and colonialism might arrive in Africa in a new guise. The imperialists are ready to grant political independence, but at the same time they still want to rule over Africa in the economic sphere by keeping control of economic life in the newly liberated countries. There is no difference between political and economic imperialism.7
The people shout ‘Imperialists Out!’, and ‘Lead us, Kwame!’ After three-quarters of an hour, Nkrumah ends his speech with a cry of ‘Long live the unity and independence of Africa!’, whereupon a jazz band starts to play and the crowd starts to boogie.
In Ghana, Kapuściński discovers something else as well: himself from a few years earlier. He talks to an enthusiastic revolutionary called Ded, who believes that Nkrumah is indeed wonderful but has stopped halfway. That is why, instead of going to America on a scholarship, Ded wants to go to Poland to study revolution. Kapuściński finds that Ded reminds him of someone, and that he envies him something. Another idealist, a young African communist, or ‘pimply’, tells the journalist, ‘We must go further, more boldly to the left. My generation will come to replace Nkrumah, move the country forward and give the people power.8
Following his Polish experiences, Kapuściński has no trouble noticing that the African liberation revolution, though full of lofty ideals, is bound to run into trouble soon; and that after the initial period of enthusiasm, bitterness and disappointment will set in. He asks another African acquaintance why he didn’t go to Nkrumah’s rally. What did Nkrumah say about wages? Nothing. So why should he have gone?
On returning from Ghana but before setting off on his next trip, Kapuściński engages in a small but important skirmish about Africa in the pages of the press. He also gathers wind in his sails – it seems the theme of Africa has caught on.
Polityka’s journalists go out and circulate, meeting their readers at schools, student clubs, youth clubs and cultural centres. In the course of barely eighteen months, Kapuściński attends almost fifty such meetings. He is staggered by the interest in the ‘exotic’ continent. The people who come to the meetings do not especially want to hear about elephants and African dances; above all, they want to know what is happening in politics and society; how the Africans are liberating themselves from colonial bondage, how they are ruling themselves, and what problems they are facing.
At public meetings Kapuściński grapples with the racist, distorted image of Africa which popular literature has created in the readers’ minds. For instance, the Polish Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz, who wrote: ‘As one observes this human swarm, one feels as if one were observing teeming maggots’. Or a Catholic missionary from the 1930s: ‘Wherever the blacks enjoy liberty, where the eye of the white man’s authority is not watching over them, old pagan practices firmly prevail, hideous rituals at which human flesh is the major and favourite dish’.
At one of these meetings Kapuściński comments ironically: ‘Africa was a mystery, wild and primitive, its peoples were passive cavemen and, topped up with palm trees, the shadow of the jungle, the roar of lions, and the hiss of snakes, the whole thing presented a scene where the white saviour could play his historic role as the Messiah in a pith helmet.’
People ask questions such as, ‘Do they slaughter each other there?’ and ‘Are the Negroes like children?’ One lady is embarrassed to ask out loud, so after the meeting she comes up to Kapuściński and says, ‘Please tell me the truth, do those black people stink? Because they are actually very handsome!’
So Kapuściński patiently explains. He looks for analogies, for points of contact in the history of the Poles and the Africans. In a personal account after a series of meetings, he writes:
We have a clear conscience with regard to Africa: we never had a colony there, and we had our own experience of life under the colonial boot. Thus in our history there is something that brings us particularly close to the drama that the Dark Continent is going through, to the fortunes of its citizens, their struggle and their opportunity. The year 1960 is Africa’s year. So people are saying, and it is true. In this unexpected, unorganized way the African question, one of the biggest problems of the modern world, has come into our field of vision and become the object of our fascination.9
He is irritated by articles that play on fascination with ‘the exotic’. Years later, eliminating ‘the exotic’ when writing about the Third World and guarding against this pitfall will be the subject of Kapuściński’s lectures, interviews and workshops.
The so-called exotic has never fascinated me, even though I came to spend more than a dozen years in a world that is exotic by definition. I did not write about hunting crocodiles or head-hunters, although I admit they are interesting subjects. I discovered instead a different reality, one that attracted me more than expeditions to the villages of witch doctors or wild animal reserves. A new Africa was being born – and this was not a figure of speech or a platitude from an editorial. The hour of its birth was sometimes dramatic and painful, sometimes enjoyable and jubilant; it was always different (from our point of view) from anything we had known, and it was exactly this difference that struck me as new, as the previously undescribed, as the exotic.10
After writing his reports from Ghana, Kapuściński cannot sit still, and he seeks excuses to return to Africa. Rakowski, however, sends him into the field to report on the Polish provinces. Meanwhile, that summer – it is 1960 – Congo declares independence. The army rebels, Belgian paratroopers intervene, and there is civil war and anarchy. Kapuściński rushes back to Warsaw by train and begs Rakowski to send him to Congo. Although Rakowski is in favour of this plan, it turns out that all the journalists from socialist countries have been thrown out of Congo.
‘Then maybe go to Nigeria,’ Rakowski suggests.
‘Nigeria will have to do.’
Rakowski supports his efforts to raise money for the trip, and the RSW’s travel committee assigns Kapuściński some funding for an expedition to Nigeria. Almost twenty years later, Kapuściński recalls in The Soccer War:
But what’s Nigeria to me? Nothing’s going on there (at the moment). I walk around depressed and heart-broken. Suddenly a glimmer of hope – somebody claims that in Cairo there’s a Czech journalist who wants to force his way into the Congo by the jungle route. Officially I leave for Nigeria, but secretly have the airline ticket rewritten for Cairo and fly out of Warsaw. Only a few colleagues are in on my plan.11
The ‘secret plan’ is presumably one of the legends that are to form the reporter’s adventurous biography, filled with amazing events. But it wasn’t baseless legend. Indeed, in Cairo, Kapuściński meets up with two Czech journalists, Jarda Bouček and Dušan Provazník (who later translated his books into Czech); together they fly to Sudan and then daringly make their way across into Congo. Also taking part in the expedition are Miloslav Vaclavik, from Department I of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Internal Affairs, posing as Mirek Vesely, a journalist for Czechoslovak Radio, and a reporter named Fedyashin, from the Soviet press agency, TASS, who joins the group in the Congolese city of Brazzaville. However, the expedition by no means takes place in secret from his colleagues at the office: Kapuściński sends a letter home, which is published in Polityka:
Dear Friends,
I’m writing on my knee, shortly before leaving Khartoum. Tomorrow night (on 27 January) I will cross the Congolese border. The road from the border to Stanleyville runs through the thickest jungle in Africa. This 900-kilometre road leads through terrain inhabited by entirely primitive tribes whose only understanding of white men is as Belgian colonialists. In Cairo people from Congo told us: even if they don’t take you for Belgians, they will take you as brothers of the Belgians.
Hell knows what’s better . . . For the time being, I’m not afraid somehow. I think the fear will come later. You know, it’s going to be a 900-kilometre drive through dense jungle, in full awareness that at any moment someone could fire a volley of shots at the car from the bushes. I’m very curious about this journey.
I have left a list of documents, some money and other things at the diplomatic post in Cairo, just in case I go missing. Some friends in Khartoum have supplied me with food, cigarettes, bandages and other small items.
The most intriguing fact is that we’re going there totally in the dark. We don’t know a thing – neither how to get there, nor where to live, nor what to pay with, nor whom to talk to. NOTHING. The situation means that we could immediately fall into the hands of Mobutu, and that’ll be the end. There are too many fronts in Congo for us to be able to get our bearings. Casual groups from both sides are moving about the entire country, and only pot luck will decide whose wing I first come under.
. . . It is very hot here, and it will be even hotter there. Literally and metaphorically. But I’m feeling well and I believe in my lucky star . . . My God, how far it is from here to Poland. I envy you the snow. But I must stop writing now, the engines are starting up. Goodbye until spring. Keep your fingers crossed for me. I’ll do my best not to disappoint you.
All the best,
RYSIEK
Khartoum, 26 January 196112
When they finally cross the border into Congo, the beauty of the country takes his breath away:
This is a fairytale place, like a wonderful dream. The landscapes of the eastern province and Kiwu, the roads through the jungle, the riverbanks, Garamba Park, the waterfalls and bridges – at last after driving across the barren Sahara and the burned-out Sudanese savannahs, we are entering the enchanted kingdom of Africa. I never want to leave this place.13
The political situation, however, is not in the least like a fairytale or a dream, more like a nightmare. The group of reporters reaches Congo at the moment when the divided country has, in effect, four governments, each of which has its own army. The government of Colonel Mobutu, supported by the West, is exercising power in Leopoldville; the government of Antoine Gizenga, supported by the socialist bloc and some African and Asian governments, has its headquarters in Stanleyville; Moise Tshombe and Albert Kalonji, the leaders supported by the Belgians, control the richest province, Katanga, and the ‘diamond state’ of Kasai; on top of which, with Belgian support, Tshombe has earlier announced the separation of Katanga from the rest of the country. The culminating point of the crisis is the kidnap by Mobutu’s men – with the support of the US and Belgian governments – of Patrice Lumumba (a colleague of Gizenga’s), hero of the Congolese anti-colonial movement, who has recently (in September 1960) been dismissed from the post of prime minister. In January 1961, shortly after being imprisoned and subjected to torture, Lumumba is brutally murdered; his family flees to Cairo (where Bouček’s wife, PAP correspondent Aniela Krupińska, will visit them).
In Stanleyville, at the Résidence Equateur hotel, the reporters find out about the murder of Lumumba. It is February, and Lumumba was killed a month earlier, but news of his death has been covered up. Now it is circulating in a version propagated by Mobutu’s people – a version which implies that after escaping from prison, Lumumba was battered to death by enraged villagers. No one in Stanleyville believes this story. There is a general conviction – to be confirmed in the coming years – that Lumumba’s death is the result of a plot by the Belgians and the Americans, in short the West, the white man, never mind whether the sentence was carried out by his African compatriots, sent by Mobutu, or by Western agents.
According to Kapuściński’s account, the reporters are afraid to leave the hotel, because Lumumba’s supporters are – absolutely correctly, in fact – blaming the Western powers for their leader’s death. In practice, the hatred of the street is turning against anyone with white skin.
The Stanleyville station was giving government communiqués appealing to all the whites still in the city to stay off the streets and not to appear in public because of the behaviour of isolated elements and certain military groups which the government ‘is not able to control fully’.14
Not for the first time – though for the first time in such a way as to make him fear for his life – Kapuściński realizes what the stigma of skin colour can mean. Later he writes that once, in Accra, he was walking with an African female student, who was being hounded by curses and derision for associating with a white man.
‘I had five people and twenty blacks with me,’ an Englishman told me. It’s the ones like him who help build the myth. The total, absolute myth of the colour of skin, still alive and powerful.
People ask why the blacks beat the whites in the Congo. Why, indeed. Because the whites used to beat the blacks. It’s a closed circle of revenge.15
Then come days when Kapuściński and his travelling companions are able to leave the hotel and go out into the streets. They go to the post office to send their reports. They run away from gendarmes. So Kapuściński tells it. Not without perturbation and reluctance on the part of the UN mission staff, he recalls years later, the pack of reporters succeeds in leaving Stanleyville. They are to fly by UN freight plane to Juba, in the north-east, but instead they land at Usumbura (later Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi), where Belgian soldiers are permanently stationed.
In a dramatic account in The Soccer War, Kapuściński describes the entire group’s brutal treatment by Belgian paratroopers, their imprisonment for several days in a barred room at the airport, and the fear that they would be murdered and their bodies would disappear without trace.
I once heard a comment to the effect that Dušan Provazník only found out what happened to the group in Congo years later, when he read The Soccer War.
Is there an unintentional hint of irony in that remark?