Life in Africa, Continued
In Warsaw, Alicja receives a call from the Nowaks: ‘Rysiek is seriously ill. He has contracted malaria, and what’s more, it’s the nastiest kind – cerebral malaria.’
At this point in time Alicja is on an internship at the Infectious Diseases Clinic. She turns to a tropical diseases specialist, who is horrified. ‘Has there been any improvement in his condition?’ the specialist asks calmly, not wanting to upset her colleague. Cerebral malaria can lead to fatal complications.
For months Alicja has been learning to live without her husband – that is, her husband is somewhere out there, but far away, sometimes in an unknown place. At home she just about manages to make ends meet. When Kapuściński is in Poland, they borrow money; when he leaves, he lives on his daily allowance, and Alicja uses his salary to pay off their debts. They will live like this for years on end. Before one Christmas holiday, Alicja sells waste paper, because there is no money for Christmas tree decorations, and Zojka must have a decorated tree.
Shortly after the news about the malaria, Maria Rutkiewicz calls from Polityka (in private life, she is the partner of Artur Starewicz). She asks Alicja if they might meet, and invites her to the weekly’s office.
‘We’re wondering if you could go and join your husband to take care of him. There’s something wrong with his lungs.’
‘It’s not tuberculosis, is it?’
Rutkiewicz reveals what she knows: they have had news that Rysiek is spitting blood and is completely worn out.
Alicja makes an instant decision: ‘I’m going.’ She gets a passport and unpaid leave from the hospital. Her husband’s cousin will house-sit. She sends Zojka, who is now ten years old, to stay with her mother in Szczecin. For the next year, their daughter goes to school in Szczecin.
Teresa Torańska and I ask:
How did she cope with the year without both parents?
She wasn’t thrilled. Many times afterwards she said: ‘You went alone, you didn’t take me.’
And how did you explain it to her?
I said that no one would have sent me with her in tow, and that I was going to join her sick father, who had tuberculosis in the tropics . . . I wasn’t going there on holiday.
The most important thing for him were his trips abroad. And then what?
Working on his books.
And after that? A long, long gap and then . . . ?
I fitted in there somewhere. I think I had my permanent place. So at least it seems to me.
Didn’t you bear any grudges?
It’s not as if he travelled for tourism, for pleasure. Just for work. And I knew I had to respect his work. I was always absolutely sure this work was the only kind he wanted or had an ambition to perform. I never told him ‘maybe you’d better not go’, or ‘I’d prefer you to stay’, or simply ‘don’t go’.
Did you want to say it?
Perhaps I did. But I understood that every trip – however safe or unsafe – was the fulfilment of his dreams. And the only way in which he would want to fulfil himself. So what was I to say in that situation? You tell me.
Sometimes he was away for half a year at a time, sometimes several months. I used to go to the PAP to ask them to show me what dispatches he had sent. I’d look to see where they were from, thanks to which I knew more or less where he was and what was happening to him. Communication with him was always a nightmare.
He would say: ‘I’ll be back in six weeks.’ And all of a sudden it would turn out something was happening in Mozambique. Or in Congo, or Zanzibar. He’d apply to the PAP for consent, get it and go.1
The first illness, malaria, troubles Kapuściński in Kampala. Accompanied by a man called Leonid (probably a correspondent for TASS), he drives his Land Rover from Dar es Salaam to Kampala. The reason for this trip is to attend celebrations for the declaration of independence in Uganda. On the way there, Kapuściński breaks his own life record for driving a car – from six in the morning to eleven at night, 750 kilometres on African roads.
In Kampala, like most of the journalists, he stays at the barracks attached to an old hospital on the edge of the city. There he suddenly loses consciousness.
Unconscious for an unknown length of time, he is found by his travelling companion. There is no way to call for help; the entire city is dancing and singing, because independence has just been declared. All night Leonid nurses Kapuściński, who is delirious. Finally Leonid drives to a hospital and fetches an ambulance. They take Kapuściński away in nothing but his underpants, wrapped in a blanket, with a temperature of 40.6 degrees C (105 degrees F). He ends up in the newly opened Mulago Hospital – a present for the Ugandan people from the British queen, Elizabeth. As Ugandan conditions go, this is luxury.
He opens his eyes and sees a large white screen (it is the ceiling painted white); against the screen he sees an African girl’s face. Soon afterwards, he hears a male voice saying, ‘Thank God you’re alive.’
Worn out by fever, now and then he loses consciousness. The diagnosis is cerebral malaria. From hospital he writes to the Nowaks:
Today this is heaven, but two days ago I thought I was going to croak.
What rotten luck. I’m surrounded by a colourful city full of light and noise, but I’m lying under six heavy blankets, sweating and wailing with cold. Today I asked my doctor if I’m going to be a loony, and he replied: ‘We can’t be sure yet.’ So there is some hope! Outside I can hear the roar of the stadium, because there’s a Ghana [he probably means Uganda] v. London boxing match. I guess whenever the Englishman hits the floor the stadium roars. This is the only evidence of anti-colonialism I’ve found in Uganda.
The difference between Kampala and Dar is like the one between Paris and Kielce. Kampala = Paris, Dar = Kielce . . . Uganda is a beautiful country, but it’s boring . . . I don’t think I can last another week here . . . I’m being thrown about the bed again, so I’ll end now. I send you my heart [here there is a drawing of a heart with the caption ‘my heart’] and best regards, Rysiek2
The doctor decrees he must stay in hospital at least a month. ‘I thought I’d go mad when I heard that,’ says Kapuściński. He is alone, ‘hellishly, hellishly lonely’, he doesn’t know anyone and has no one to talk to; Leonid drops in and brings apples, but quickly disappears. He has nothing to read, and in any case he cannot: he is suffering from fever, hallucinations, drowsiness, and exhaustion.
He can only drink water, and is not eating at all – he cannot, everything comes back up. He starts to dream of broth, chicken and tomatoes. He asks the doctor to feed him glucose intravenously – he is incapable of eating the hospital delicacies and he hasn’t any money to send someone to buy better food in the city. He weighs 54.5 kilos (120 lbs); in a letter to Nowak he draws his arm and adds a note to the drawing saying: ‘circumference at the fattest point = 1.75 cm’.
On another day he writes again, although writing tires him:
Something inside me has cracked in the last few days. I’m suffocating, I feel like howling . . . Now I’m like that reed in the gale – thin, fragile and at the mercy of every gust of wind.3
In the next letter he is agitated and depressed because he hasn’t had news from his friends in Dar:
My dears! This is my third letter, but no one has written a word to me . . . The sad side of all this is that I’ll come out of this hospital a ruined man – with a sick head, a sick liver, a sick stomach, totally worn out and so on. But I won’t give in, and maybe everything will be OK.4
The PAP and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs co-operate to see that someone from the embassy in Dar flies to Kampala to fetch Kapuściński. It is Izabella Nowak who goes – and when she gets there, she does not recognize her friend, who has become just skin and bones. She removes him from the hospital, and they return together to Dar.
Once Kapuściński is on the mend, during a drunken evening at home (‘he had rather a weak head’, says Nowak), he announces: ‘I had a dream there was a big event in my honour. I made a speech and finished by saying, ‘‘Let Iza come up on stage – she’s the one who saved my life’’. Iza came on, and there were resounding cheers.’
After returning to Dar he has no strength for anything, so he leads a quiet life, lying down to rest for whole days on end. One night he finds blood on his pillow. In spite of this, he refuses to go to the doctor. To drag him off for tests, his friends resort to trickery: he must take Iza to hospital, because she is in the early stages of pregnancy and Jerzy is busy at the embassy all day. At the hospital she manages to persuade him to have an X-ray. There are holes in his lungs – it is acute-stage tuberculosis! He is not allowed to travel anywhere by plane or ship.
While being treated he moves closer to the embassy, where the Nowaks live. He lives separately but eats his meals at their house. To avoid infecting anyone, he is given his own wash-basin for cleaning his plates and cutlery. Rysiek knows he should leave Africa and return to Poland. However, he is afraid that if he tells the PAP about the tuberculosis they won’t send him here anymore. If you catch diseases in the tropics, they’ll say, you’re obviously not suited to the climate.
So he stays put. He has fallen in love with Africa – this isn’t a job, it’s a passion, a truly incurable disease.
He can choose be treated in a hospital for white people, for which the agency would have to pay, or for free in a clinic for Africans. He goes to the clinic for locals. (Afterwards, he will describe how the syringes are boiled in the same pot as the eggs.) He does not want to worry his loved ones; in a letter to his mother, he lies and says he’s doing well. He tells her how tanned, strong and healthy he is. He arranges for his mother to receive medicines that are hard to get in Poland, and he sends her money. He asks her not to put the money aside but to buy herself something she’s always dreamed of having – let it be a present from him.
Finally, Alicja comes to the rescue. She arrives in Dar, and once Kapuściński begins to recover from his illnesses, they move to Nairobi.
First impressions:
This place is a dreadful shambles – the British don’t give a damn about anything, the Africans haven’t yet taken anything on, in short there’s an organizational interregnum, so whatever you want to arrange takes three days to-ing and fro-ing . . .
[T]he city is really lovely, enchanting, and it’s a dream climate, the Riviera twenty-four hours a day . . .
[I]f anything can be done in this part of Africa, all hopes are pinned on Kenya; it looks as if the Cold War will get here, in fact it already has . . . yet it’s a much higher calibre than Dar, at any rate the dynamics here are incomparably greater . . .5
Shortly after his arrival in Kenya comes news of the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy. From Kapuściński’s dispatch:
Kennedy’s death has stirred deep emotion in Nairobi. The flags are at half mast. The civic committee of the ruling KANU party stresses in its telegram to the US consul in Nairobi that those behind Kennedy’s assassination are ‘racist and fascist groupings in the southern states of the USA’. Within political circles in both Nairobi and in Dar es Salaam the belief is held that Kennedy’s assassination was organized by racists. Here a general fear is being expressed that in the USA racist elements will come to prominence, which will have an effect, among other things, on reducing US aid for Africa, and will make it harder for African countries to operate on UN terrain.6
The most exciting event he covers in those months – not counting the scandal prompted by his article about corruption in Kenya and other newly liberated African countries – is the revolt in Zanzibar. In a report published by Trybuna Ludu, Kapuściński writes:
I was the first journalist from the socialist countries to reach Zanzibar five days after the outbreak of the armed revolution, which overthrew the neocolonial government of the Arab bourgeoisie and put the revolutionary government of Sheikh Abeid Karume into power. I gained permission to come here on Wednesday, during a conversation I held by telephone from Dar es Salaam with the president of the new republic, Sheikh Abeid Karume, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence, Abdel Rahman Babu. On Thursday I landed in a small tourist plane at Zanzibar’s airport, which since the outbreak of the revolution has only been open for planes that have permission to land issued by the HQ of the revolution’s field marshal.7
When Kapuściński lands on the island, armed patrols of the revolutionary army are touring the narrow little streets of labyrinthine Stone Town. The city resembles a military camp. The shops are closed, and armed civilian rebels are walking about the streets. The units most dedicated to the revolutionary cause are guarding the jail, where members of the deposed government are imprisoned. They are also standing around the headquarters of ‘Field Marshal’ John Okello. There, the marshal’s deputy personally writes out a pass for Kapuściński, allowing him to move about the island.
He goes to the post office to send his correspondence. The post office is especially well-guarded: outside the building are armed men and women, soldiers of the revolution. Each dispatch is read by two men with guns on their chests – they are the censors. Kapuściński goes back to his hotel under revolutionary escort. That evening the streets are empty, martial law is declared, and also a curfew. He sees troops surrounding the American consul’s car; President Karume himself and his minister Abdel Rahman Babu take part in the arrest. ‘The Republic’s intelligence,’ reports Kapuściński, ‘has uncovered evidence of a counter-revolutionary plot organized by the American embassy. The President announced that on Friday all American journalists will be deported from Zanzibar. At present they are under arrest at a hotel, along with other Western journalists.’
The main controversy of those days is the alleged participation of Cubans in the Zanzibar revolt. Kapuściński denies it:
The Western press has been trying to sow rumours that Cuban officers led the revolution, and even that you can hear military personnel speaking Spanish in Zanzibar’s capital today. This is made-up nonsense – there is not a single Cuban or Algerian in Zanzibar. ‘At this point our main task is to establish complete order, to avoid giving the imperialists an excuse for armed intervention,’ a member of the Field Marshal’s staff told me.8
Indeed, during the spontaneous, lumpenproletariat revolt, there are no Cubans in Zanzibar. The left-wing Umma Party (derived from the Zanzibar Nationalist Party) is surprised by the uprising, but it soon takes the helm of the chaotic rebellion. Some twenty-five Umma activists, who are still in the Nationalist Party, underwent military training two years earlier in Cuba, and now their skills are coming in handy.
Is Kapuściński ignorant of their connections with Cuba? Or does he know of it but become, at this moment, a reporter in the service of a revolution with which he sympathizes? It is possible he does not know, because information about the training came to light much later on, though in 1964 the CIA already knew about it. Did the revolutionaries confide such information to the reporter from socialist Poland, either during the revolt or perhaps earlier, on the terrace of the Hotel New Africa in Dar es Salaam?
Fifteen or so years from now, after he has gained more experience, Kapuściński will talk about a reporter’s involvement and sympathies, and the dilemmas he faces in wars and revolutions. What is the meaning of journalistic ‘objectivity’ in a situation where one side is being oppressive and the other side is fighting against the oppression? Or when one group are cannibals and another is fighting for liberation and socialism? In Zanzibar the journalist realizes that certain things might depend on the provision or denial of information – many people’s lives, for instance, or the entire fate of a small country.
The most famous guerrillero of the twentieth century, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, number two in the Cuban revolution, will later admit that Cuba did play a role in the success of the revolt on Zanzibar. ‘Zanzibar is our friend, and when it was necessary, we provided it with a little assistance, our fraternal assistance, our revolutionary assistance,’ he revealed, referring to the training of the corps of Zanzibari nationalists who would later become leftist revolutionaries.
It is in Zanzibar, a little later, that Attaché Nowak meets Che Guevara. Kapuściński is green with envy: What’s this Guevara like? What did you talk about?
‘You, comrade, are from a socialist country,’ says a stranger, accosting the Polish diplomat in the bar at the Hotel Stanley, the name of which had just been changed to Mao Zedong. ‘You may have heard of me, I was a minister in Cuba.’
The stranger is Guevara. They spend half the night chatting. Che is lively and full of passion, but when it comes to ideological matters he becomes stiff and doctrinaire. He has come to Zanzibar to see how the revolution is getting on. However, he cannot see a rosy future for socialism on the island: the inheritance of colonialism, of racism . . . The uprising in Zanzibar has, in his opinion, more of the features of a rebellion in the context of race rather than class, and he is a Marxist, after all.
Less than a year after the move to Nairobi, sometime following the scandal involving the article about the corruption and prodigality of Kenyatta’s government, Kapuściński and his wife return to Poland. He needs a rest (‘he was incapable of resting, he got bored,’ say the Nowaks), and he’s longing to see his parents, especially his beloved Maminek.
On the way, in West Germany, they buy a Volkswagen Beetle with the first money set aside from his foreign allowance. In those days a Beetle is a piece of good fortune, a luxury, the high life. Kapuściński, however, is not excited by things one can buy, possess or accumulate (with the exception of books). What brightens him up is the thought that after a short rest and some convalescence at home, he will soon be returning to Africa.
Is Kapuściński given orders to transfer the PAP’s African post to Nigeria because that’s where ‘it’s all going to be happening’, because now that’s going to be the main front for superpower rivalry for influence – not just between Moscow and Washington, but also between Moscow and Peking? Nowadays no one can say what the actual reason was. Most likely, after more than two years in East Africa, where decolonization fever is ending, Kapuściński himself suggests it’s time to explore West Africa. He writes from Lagos:
Nigeria is independent Africa’s biggest power. It is black Africa’s main exporter of products such as crude oil, tin and columbite . . . According to geological estimates, it is one of the richest countries in Africa in terms of mineral assets . . . Nigeria has been treated by Washington as the main base for American influence in Africa . . . Nigeria was among the top seven countries in the world to be receiving US aid. Every other white person you meet in Lagos is an American. The largest Peace Corps team in the entire world operates in Nigeria. For the Americans, losing Nigeria is an enormous blow.9
What has happened is the military coup d’état of January 1966, which overthrows a corrupt neocolonial regime incapable of controlling the tribalism that is tearing the country apart at a time of economic crisis. Ten days after the coup, Kapuściński writes an analysis. He predicts ‘sabotage, provocation and blackmail on the part of the old reactionaries’ and reckons that ‘Washington and London will do everything to hold on to Nigeria as their base in Africa,’ asserting that ‘Nigeria is not Ghana or Tanzania – in Nigeria the West will not let go or give way.’ Some of his texts from Nigeria for the PAP’s Special Bulletin are marked with the restriction ‘Not for publication’. (Nowak reckons the reason for this restriction could have been that the PRL authorities of the time wanted to do business with the corrupt Nigerian politicians, and writing sincerely about them was not in their interest.)
In another report, Kapuściński writes that ‘the day of the coup is regarded in popular sentiment as the day of liberation’:
So far there is a lack of proof implying any outside inspiration for the coup. Its main organizer was a group of officers of a decidedly patriotic, independent attitude. The Nigerian left wants the army to remain in power for as long as possible. The left regards the army as more progressive than any other realistically possible political system.10
Kapuściński predicts a series of similar coups d’état in other countries. ‘In many cases these coups are the only way out of the decline into which the neocolonial regimes have led the African countries.’ Barely two years earlier, he witnessed similar coups in East Africa. Soon the reporter is disappointed by military regimes as ‘the only way out of the decline’.
In September 1965, before settling in Lagos, he visits Accra. He is horrified – there is a crisis, and there is literally nothing to eat. In a letter to Nowak he complains that he could only live there if his family came too. While he was at work, his wife could spend all day queuing for bread and margarine (butter is unavailable); however, he’s on his own. He complains about the nasty food in the hotels; finally, when someone invites him to their home, he gets something better to eat:
When you go to someone’s house for supper there, and you see e.g. cheese on the table, the done thing is to express surprise and say: ‘Oh, where did you get cheese?’ I borrowed this writing paper from the embassy because there isn’t any paper at all. On the other hand, Ghana is interesting in terms of politics, but so what? If I’d had to spend another month there, it would have been the end of me.11
Abruptly he starts to lose weight and fears the tuberculosis has returned because of malnutrition. After ten days, he flees from Accra to Lagos, returning to Ghana for brief periods, for conferences or major occurrences.
As for Lagos, his new abode, he doesn’t like it. It is a ‘one-storey colossus made of mud, stretching away for miles. Dar was the size of a tiddlywink! So is Nairobi!’ Unlike in Accra, here in Lagos you can buy everything (‘it’s a capitalist country, so the supplies are like in London; they have everything you want, as in Nairobi’), but the prices are unaffordable for a correspondent from a socialist country (‘terribly costly’). He likes the bars and the cuisine: Lebanese, Chinese, Italian. He gains weight but is bothered by the climate and the city’s situation – on four islands separated by lagoons – because it’s a long way to get anywhere (‘and for all that, there aren’t any good beaches!’).
In terms of heat, Dar was like Siberia! The worst thing here is the humidity – it never stops pouring, there’s always hot mist hanging in the air, and it’s terribly stuffy day and night. You know how much I hate air conditioning, but here even I have to sit under it non-stop. Horrid. And they say it’s very nice here right now – apparently it only starts to be hell in January.12
He battles with the head office in Warsaw to make them send him the money for a car, because he has no way of getting to the post office, where he should be sending off his reports. He sits in the hotel, immobilized because he cannot afford the extremely expensive taxis. He declares a ‘strike’: he won’t write a word until the agency finds funding for a car. And it is doubly necessary, because on top of that there are interesting political events taking place outside the capital, in Ibadan, Enugu and Kano; he has to be on the move all the time. ‘The PAP has sent me off without a penny, and these are the results of their economizing,’ he complains to his friend.13 (Finally he buys a Peugeot 403 for £600, using part of the budget earmarked for something else.)
The passionate workaholic makes every effort not to waste time. He reads a lot and has meetings with people, although – as he writes – ‘personal contacts are very difficult’. He is pleased that, unlike in Dar and Nairobi, here he lives among the Africans. There are no white districts in Lagos; ‘one is right in the middle of Africa’.14
The work itself is more boring than in Dar. The local press is ‘dreadful’, just court chronicles, with no politics and no opinions – ‘nothing you could make a report from’. As he confides in Nowak,
There’s literally nothing happening, and I’m not sending any dispatches at all. Everything has already stabilized here [four months later there will be a coup d’état, which Kapuściński cannot yet know], and above all, purely economic and financial matters dominate the whole of the situation, there aren’t any other political issues. East Africa was a revolutionary volcano, but West Africa is like Sweden or Switzerland. Deadly boring. In this situation all you can do is travel, explore and tot up countries – nothing more.15
But he still doesn’t have a car.
Again he falls ill – an infection, or some sort of poisoning. His body is covered in sores and boils. It puffs up. He wants to return to Poland (and, in fact, soon returns on a stretcher). Years later he will admit,
There is no way out: if you want to enter the most sombre, treacherous and untrodden recesses of this land, you have to be prepared to pay the reckoning with your health, if not your life. Yet every hazardous passion is like this: a Moloch that wants to devour you. In this situation, some opt for a paradoxical state of existence – so that, on arriving in Africa, they disappear into luxurious hotels, never venture outside the pampered neighbourhoods of the whites, and, in short, despite finding themselves geographically in Africa, they continue to live in Europe – except that it’s a substitute Europe, reduced and second-rate. Indeed, such a lifestyle does not agree with the authentic traveller and lies beyond the means of the reporter, who must experience everything at his own cost.16
Apart from illness, he will find it even harder to bear depression, loneliness, sleepless nights, and a morning lack of energy. To defend oneself against them, one has to have ‘steely resistance and willpower’. In a letter to Nowak he writes:
As I sit here in Lagos like this, I realize I’ll never have a time in Africa like I had in Dar. That was totally exceptional, because I met you two, and we were there together. Here I feel homesick for Dar, but for Dar with you, I mean the sort of Dar that no longer exists. We only grow fond of a place if there’s someone we’re fond of in that place. Here I have no one, I spend the evenings howling with boredom in my room, there’s nowhere to go and no way to get there. And no one to go and see. My life is awful.17
In his next letter, a few months later, Kapuściński writes dramatically:
Psychologically I’m taking this stay very badly. I’m old, I’m tired, I want to die. I’m in a state of permanent crisis. I’m not writing anything because I don’t want to write badly, and I can’t write well. It’s paralysis, a mental void. I’ve no energy. Total collapse.18
All his optimism has evaporated. So has all the enthusiasm of his first African journey, to Ghana, and his first few years in East Africa.
Independence is turning out to be a ‘sham’, as is the rule of the Africans. Kapuściński wonders whether decolonization has really taken place at all. Isn’t a change of regime merely superficial? It’s a fact that African leaders have assumed power, but they have driven straight into the ruts of the colonial governments; they aren’t changing the system (with a few rare exceptions), are still dependent on the mother country, and are letting themselves be corrupted by the West.
These questions are posed by the still-committed communist, who at the same time can see why it is hard for the Africans to break free of the old order: their economies are tied to Western markets; they need capital, which only their recent colonialists can supply; they have a common language and personal contacts, inasmuch as the African intelligentsia studied in the European mother countries.
Throughout the continent, independence has become synonymous with poverty and demagogy. It has improved the situation of the more or less Europeanized leaders, and also the revolutionaries, as well as the lackeys of imperialism, but nowhere has it brought improvement for the masses. Once we used to cry that liberation from the colonial yoke would be enough to open the road towards progress, but in the meantime independence has brought us new difficulties, as well as the old problems.19
Kapuściński takes the words of his Congolese comrade Lumumba as his own, using them to add a point to an extensive article on African politics.
Here is the analyst, pouring a bucket of cold water over the head of the revolutionary dreamer.
However, the revolutionary dreamer does have a theory for his own personal use: self-sacrifice, self-immolation. He expounds it to his friend when they are still in Dar es Salaam, during one of their long walks by the ocean.
‘He was shocked by the poverty and hunger in India, and now in Africa,’ recalls Jerzy Nowak. ‘He thinks “salvation via capitalism” has proved a disaster, because the West has done nothing but violate the traditional tribal or clan structures without solving any of the problems of the world it has conquered. The socialist camp in its turn, by promising “social salvation”, is beguiling the poor, but is not prepared to make any sacrifices or really commit itself.
‘So what is the alternative, what is the prescription? An individual programme of self-sacrifice. He is impressed by Saint Francis and the concept of atoning for one’s sins, including sins we ourselves have not committed. He lives with a sense of mission to save the world. He comes from a country which did not have any colonies, and yet he feels guilty about the crimes of Europeans.
‘ “These people can only be helped by those who are prepared to sacrifice their health and devote their life to them, even at risk of losing it,” he says. He reckons fate has given him a chance to make the affluent world aware of what is happening in Africa, the tragedy of the situation there, and that he should speak out to the consciences of the rich. But in order to bear witness, he must live among the Africans and share their fate as much as possible: fall ill like them, and go hungry along with them.
‘Is he speaking like a shiftless idealist? In our African years I did not think so. I saw how he turned his ideas into action. And he did it knowing he was isolated in that idealism, or even naivety of his. In time he started to get used to his own helplessness. Outwardly he oozed optimism, inside he was sinking into a pessimistic state, which for my own purposes – maybe rather unfairly – I called “returning to reality”.
‘When he starts to fall seriously ill with malaria and tuberculosis, he realizes that self-immolation will not put the world to rights. However, he does not abandon his faith in his mission to inform the world about the tragedy of Africa and other poor countries, his faith in the necessity to save the world.’
Kapuściński will keep returning to Africa for the rest of his life, and will write his most important books about it. He will witness the evacuation of the Portuguese from Angola, the final stage in the country’s struggles for liberation and the bloody civil war. In Ethiopia (Abyssinia) he will observe the decline of the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie and the beginnings of the Red despotism of Colonel Mengistu. In Uganda he will feel for himself the shivers down the spine prompted among the locals by the regime of Idi Amin; after the tyrant’s fall Kapuściński will go there and collect material for a book about him that he will never complete.
In the early 1990s, while preparing to write the summary of his African experiences, The Shadow of the Sun, he sends his old friend a card from Addis Ababa:
Dear Jurek,
I’ve been in Africa for two months already – I’ve been to Uganda, Tanzania (including Zanzibar), Rwanda, Kenya and Eritrea, and now I’m in Ethiopia (for the second time this year). Rather a sentimental journey, in the footsteps of our youth together – heart-breaking. I found our old embassy, where we used to live – it’s in ruins.20
The ruined embassy reflects the state of mind in which Kapuściński returns from his journey. Everything is going downhill, there is disintegration and moral decay. In Addis Ababa he goes to Africa Hall, a modernist building on one of the city’s hills, where in 1963 he attended the first summit of new African leaders. Now children are playing ping-pong there, and a woman is selling leather jackets in the historic building’s auditorium.
He tries to find a specific document which supposedly sets out a plan for the development and rescue of Africa. He questions various secretaries and officials about it, naming it by title, but they cannot find it, and most of the people he asks have never even heard of it before. Kapuściński starts to doubt whether such a plan really does exist, and whether Africa can actually be saved.