42

Unwritten Books

He typed out the title page: ‘Ryszard Kapuściński, Amin, Czytelnik 1983’.

In the morning I went to the market, thinking maybe I’ll find some fish. The street was empty, but suddenly I saw a green Land Rover appear in it, which disappeared shortly after. At the last moment, once it had already overtaken me, I noticed Amin at the wheel.1

That was to be the start of one of the books he never wrote.

He left behind several unfinished projects and unwritten volumes. He had been nursing some of the ideas for years, but had then dropped them for more urgent ones. But there were also books he never stopped thinking about, writing them in his mind, and also in exercise books, on notepads and on loose sheets of paper.

1.

The book about the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was meant to be the third volume, after The Emperor and Shah of Shahs, of a triptych about the mechanisms of power.

Years later, Kapuściński told how he had been laid up with cerebral malaria in hospital in Kampala, when he saw Amin among a group of officers who had come to tour the newly opened clinic. How he could have known, in 1962, half-conscious with malarial fever, that the ‘jovial clown, a great big fellow’ was Amin – an unknown figure at the time – remains a mystery. (I think this is just another legend.)

In the period from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin slaughtered – according to various estimates – from 150,000 to 300,000 people.

According to Kapuściński, Amin was:

Psychologically immature, a sort of big, cruel child, unstable, impetuous, volatile. In the morning he could be cheerful, in the evening he could fall into rage or depression. He was quickly bored, would leap up from his chair and leave the room. He had racing thoughts, spoke chaotically and didn’t finish his sentences. However, in his wildness and madness, he acted logically and consistently.

About fifteen years after the unfortunate trip during which he fell ill with malaria, Kapuściński again visits Uganda. It is the zenith of Amin’s violent insanity. Journalists are not admitted to the police state that he rules, and Kapuściński is probably issued a Ugandan visa by mistake in neighbouring Ethiopia.

As soon as he arrives at the airport he notices he is being tailed. Silent, broad-shouldered gentlemen in uniforms and dark glasses never abandon him for a moment. He stays at the Hotel Stanley, as he usually has done on past trips to Kampala. The gentlemen in dark glasses are right behind him. When he goes into the bar and sits down at a table, the gentlemen in dark glasses sit at the next table. They don’t ask questions. They just watch.

On the morning of 24 December 1977 Kapuściński goes to the market. It is Christmas Eve and, in keeping with Polish tradition, he wants to buy fish for dinner. Suddenly a green Land Rover comes speeding down the empty street in the city centre. At the last moment he notices the driver − Amin, it was Amin. In the opening paragraphs of the unfinished book he writes:

He raced along, crossed a junction (in spite of a red light) and waved at someone (whom? there wasn’t a soul in sight). I could have sworn I heard his laughter, still loud as it faded into the distance. Only some time later a column of vehicles came slowly down that same street, in the same direction – some covered jeeps with bodyguards, their barrels aimed at gates, trees, windows and the sky, and in the middle of the column Amin’s shiny Citroën-Maserati (and sprawled on the back seat the massive figure of an officer, on display for an assassin’s murderous shot).2

At the sight of the column Kapuściński does not bat an eyelid, but just keeps on walking as before, no faster, no slower. At moments like these, the iron principle applies: do not draw attention to yourself, just blend into the landscape. The gunmen drive off without stopping or firing a shot.

He goes to the Kisenyi district, the former heart of Kampala. Once, he recalls, there was life here: trading, drinking and amusement all night long. Now Kisenyi is gloomy, suspicious and aggressive. You can get a stone in the face, you can get knifed.

He meets a white missionary called Father Eusebio. Kapuściński invites him to dinner – after all, it is Christmas Eve – but the missionary does not reply.

He smiles and makes a gesture from which I cannot tell if he will come or not, and suddenly disappears. White people prefer not to gather in groups – a group arouses suspicion. They’ve gathered together – what for? They’re standing there talking – about what? Where have they been, who was there, what did they talk about, how long did it last? Names. Precise statements. Who they were laughing at. What they decided. Where who went afterwards. With whom. By what means.3

In his handwritten notes, plans and sketches for the book, Kapuściński writes that Amin will be a book not just about a man but also about a situation; Amin is a man and a situation all in one. It also involves a climate of universal mendacity and all-embracing fear. The lying, notes Kapuściński, depends on total reversal of the truth. The truth cannot be just a little twisted, it must be completely reversed. For example, Amin murders people connected with his enemy Milton Obote, and announces that Obote himself has murdered them in order to compromise Amin.

Kapuściński looks for the key to the character study of the tyrant–butcher, the tyrant–clown, the tyrant–child. He consults the works of philosophers and psychologists. It looks like the makings of a treatise on stupidity. (Once he knows he will never write the book about Amin, he includes some of these comments in the Lapidaria). Here is a sample from the notes:

Popper makes an incisive comment on the topic of ignorance. Ignorance, he writes, is not just a simple lack of knowledge, but an ATTITUDE, an attitude of refusal, an attitude of dissent against accepting knowledge. The fool REFUSES to know . . .

The fool has pre-set opinions about everything which, as they never change, make it seem as if he was born with them, as if he drank them in with his mother’s milk . . .

Here, however, another variety of fool appears – the cunning fool, who sees secret forces everywhere, levers and springs (‘there’s something hiding behind it’, ‘there’s something in it’ etc.).4

A fool of this type, a fool who saw conspiracies everywhere but was at the same time able to calculate, act logically and effectively – to gain and keep his own power – that was Amin.

In February 1988 Kapuściński receives a letter from Kampala. The sender is Piotr Zeydler, a Polish émigré who works in Uganda but whose permanent home is in Switzerland. From the American weekly Time, Zeydler has learned that Kapuściński is planning to write a book about Amin, so he’s come up with the idea of inviting the writer to Kampala. He offers him a place to stay and any help he needs, and warns him of the risks involved.

He reminds Kapuściński that there is a sort of civil war going on in Uganda, and also that the AIDS epidemic is spreading like wildfire. He reassures him that the sexual restraint recommended by the government is providing protection against the disease (though in those years it is not yet clear if it is possible to be infected with AIDS through mosquito bites, and there are plenty of mosquitoes in Uganda).

They set a date for his arrival: 25 May 1988.

Is Uganda an unlucky place for him? A few days after arriving, Kapuściński notes:

Something like a mild attack of malaria. I lie in bed until noon. Then I write up my notes and read. At seven pm, when the sky fades and dusk falls, a loud, intense, very insistent concert of crickets suddenly begins.5

He spends a lot of time in the library, where – as it turns out – there are some properly bound annual volumes of newspapers from the period of Amin’s governments. Almost 100 percent of his notes from the trip are excerpts from the press and from books; there is a fat, green-covered spiral notebook full of them.

For instance, a note derived from Henry Kyemba’s book, State of Blood:

If Amin took a liking to a woman, he murdered her husband or fiancé . . .

Amin took money from the state treasury and kept his pockets stuffed with it. Then he handed it out to whomsoever he wished.6

William Pike, founder and editor-in-chief of the newspaper New Vision, shows him places in Kampala connected with the figure of Amin. The North Korean embassy is now housed in the building from which Amin ran his coup d’état. Thanks to his press card from a socialist country, Kapuściński manages to get inside and poke around for a while, under the watchful eye of some Korean security agents.

Years later he told an interviewer:

Lots of books have been written about Amin, but no good ones that deal with the actual phenomenon of Amin. There’s a simple reason why I never wrote my own. I had only just started to make a few drafts, when perestroika began in the Soviet Union. The reporting journalist in me won the day − I dropped Amin and raced east to gather material for Imperium.7

His friends recall that he was indeed urged to write the book about the collapsing Soviet empire. At first he hadn’t been keen on this idea. One reason he held back was that he was busy working on the book about Amin. The argument was won by the potential success in the West of a book about the fall of communism, written by a reporter from Eastern Europe who by then was already famous. Who, if not someone from the region, for example Kapuściński, should be telling people in the West about the collapsing empire?

Wasn’t it a pity to abandon so many years of work on Amin?

‘It’s a pity, but I don’t know if I’ll have time, if I’ll ever manage to fit him into my demanding schedule’, he said in August 2003,8 just before Amin died in exile in Saudi Arabia.

2.

On 25 May 2000, Kapuściński lands in Lima. He doesn’t recognize the city where he briefly lived thirty-two years ago. At the time, he shut himself away in a hotel room for two weeks and translated the diary of Che Guevara, who had been executed a few months earlier.

Many years later, he got down to work on the book about Latin America which he had been talking about since the 1970s. In 1998, when he published his summing up of Africa, The Shadow of the Sun, he announced that he would devote the next volume to the Latin American world.

After Kapuściński’s death I received an e-mail from Ignacio Ramonet of Le Monde Diplomatique, asking if Ryszard had left behind any unfinished passages of this new book, or if he had started writing it at all. While Kapuściński was still alive, Ramonet had said, ‘The world is waiting for this book.’

It was going to be called Fiesta (he also considered the title Flight of Birds). On an A4 sheet of paper he wrote out the idea for the book: it would be the most essay-like of all his books to date. It would contain elements of reportage, but only to serve as a starting point for broader anthropological reflection. There would be three basic themes: the realities of the continent, the mix of cultures – the uniting of both Americas – and the ‘global context’.

But first: the journey. What sort of continent is it nowadays? How has it changed? What do the people live on?

It is his first head-on encounter for years. He does not recognize Lima, he does not recognize a world which he thought he knew extremely well, and where he spent almost five years as a PAP correspondent. The aristocracy and wealthy bourgeoisie have disappeared from the centre of Lima, built according to models of colonial architecture; the richer people have moved to smart districts far from the centre. In his travel diary for 31 May 2000, he notes:

Their former houses and mansions now stand empty, shut up and decaying, often with broken windows.

Only thirty years ago old gentlemen were strolling along these streets, exchanging bows, and dropping in at cafés which were like the cafés in Vienna or Barcelona. Nowadays these streets belong to the young Peruvians, to the Andean people dressed identically in jeans and trainers, eating hamburgers, chips and ice cream on sticks. They come here in crowds, and clearly being here in this place is for them a form of ennoblement – their grandfathers would never have dared to cross the threshold of the old city! But now it is all open to them!

It is curious that all the shops selling Peruvian folklore have vanished from the old town – these people have not brought it with them, they have left it in the Andes and cut themselves off in favour of chewing gum and Coca Cola.9

As ever, Kapuściński takes notice of the poor:

Friday, 2 June 2000. Here (in Peru) El Pobre [the poor man] is like another person, living in a different world . . . It is better to dissociate yourself from El Pobre, pobreza [poverty] is like an infectious disease, a social form of AIDS, something people talk about with reluctance and disgust.10

Keywords, obsession words, in the diary include ‘hybrid’, ‘syncretism’, and ‘-mezcla’ (mixture).

Apart from his observations, he records certain reflections and generalizations heralded in the synopsis of the book:

Latin America offers a model for future world civilization.

This is where modernity began (the arrival of Columbus) – this is where the twenty-first century is beginning. This is the century for presenting a wealth and diversity of different cultures, visions and attitudes. At the centre of the wealth of cultures is the fiesta of the title – a festival. A festival means joy because of the harvest, a festival means joy because of a soccer team’s victory, a festival means sheer fun.11

As always in his writing, there are some adventures, too. In Peru on 9 June 2000 he goes on a ‘suicidal’ – as he notes afterwards – trip to Alto Andino. The means of transport is a dilapidated off-road Toyota, so dirty that it is impossible to tell its colour. At one point the car drives down what appears to be a vertical wall:

There is total silence in the car . . . I’m feeling nauseous. We are driving along a rough track, a shelf in the wall. The bends are hidden. Terror. It’s impossible to turn around. The engine stops. We can’t get out. Bald tyres. Worn brakes. Going back is even worse . . . I cling to the car, but it makes no sense . . . God, let me live a little longer. Why do I have to die now? And here of all places! Somewhere at the bottom of this Barranca [ravine]! I was trying not to look. But no way − the tighter I closed my eyes, the greater the temptation to open them and stare into the abyss . . .

We have to take some extra people to weight the car down. Otherwise we might slip off. Some stone-like figures come to life. They get in, grateful that we’re picking them up, that we’re taking them with us to our death.12

He asks questions about yesterday’s and today’s Peru. His interviewees are academics, clergy and social workers. One of the topics is the criminal guerrilla group the Shining Path.

The provinces – the universities were a school of frustration. The students could not go back to the countryside, but they had no chance of social advance, because the level of teaching was low. They gave them a totalitarian ideology, which explained everything. This sort of ideology has a religious dimension. Like Hitler, Stalin – the leader is a sort of god. This is the mentality of Jehovah’s Witnesses . . . Abimael Guzman [the Shining Path’s ideologue] is a Maoist. He had no love for Peru, just a desire for war against Peruvian society.13

Before landing in Bolivia, Kapuściński is worried about how he will cope with the altitude. The airport at El Alto, where he lands, is situated at over 4,000 metres above sea-level. Some people suffer badly from altitude sickness, soroche. They feel sick, vomit and have hallucinations. It can also cause pulmonary or cerebral oedema.

The officer spent a long time studying the list of countries whose citizens do not require a visa to enter Bolivia. (Here I often come across the question: ‘Is Poland a communist country?’)14

In Bolivia he is interested in the new ethnic movements – one of the leaders, Evo Morales, will become president five years later – but even more in the culture of the Andean peoples.

The Andean world is a world of silence, a world of few words. You have to listen carefully to each of these words, and imagine what lies hidden behind them. There must be a space between them to be filled in by our imagination.15

Then Paraguay. In a town called Encarnación, as he passes a small hotel, the Polish priests who are acting as his guides tell him a local legend. Apparently Dr Mengele, the torturer from Auschwitz, was in hiding here, and a female Mossad agent who was on his trail, was killed.

After almost two months of travelling, Kapuściński is tired. More and more of the excerpts have no date. The notes are perfunctory. He promises to have done with the exhausting journeys.

The final stage is São Paulo, Brazil. His attention is caught by the following information in a newspaper: ‘Supranational corporations are opening their own banks in our country’. The conclusion:

The element of US penetration in Latin America. The era of armed intervention and golpe de estado [coups d’état] is over. Nowadays we have not just velvet revolutions, we also have velvet expansion (the world is becoming civilized – partly!)16

He is surprised by one of his discoveries:

My major topic was mass movements of the wronged and the humiliated who were fighting for dignity and the right to a better life, but the wronged and humiliated aren’t fighting for anything nowadays, they are just trying to adapt, to tear off the little piece they manage to finagle, to dig out for themselves as comfortable, warm and private a niche as possible, and to look out of it, to right and to left, to see what else they might be able to wangle for themselves here.17

A year later, after a visit to Mexico City, he clearly changes his mind. He is impressed by the entry of Subcomandante Marcos’s rebels into the capital. He prophesies the awakening of ethnic America. He discerns a new wave of protests by the wronged and the humiliated, which he calls ‘the spring of the Latino peoples’. He is brimming with optimism, because now the battle is (usually) being fought without the bloodshed which he witnessed when he first came to this continent in the 1960s.

Something on the continent has ended, and something new has begun.

This topic of mine is finished. Because it was the drama of power, and power is no longer going through dramas, at most it is going through fear that its bank accounts will be discovered and that it will go to prison.18

He sets Latin America aside for later.

3.

First the planning and the logistics.

When is the best time to go to the Trobriand Islands?

How do you get there? Can it be done by plane, or only by ship?

Where can you stay?

What security measures should you take?

What medicines and inoculations do you need?

Can you drink the water there?

In July 2004 he finishes writing Travels with Herodotus and starts musing on a new book. He regarded Herodotus as the first reporter, his progenitor. The ancient historian was meant to be a mirror for his own experiences as a reporter, traveller and researcher of Otherness. In this same role he now casts his next hero, the famous Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. Travels with Malinowski? This book, too, is intended to embody in the form of reportage the positive obsession of his final years – the need for an ‘encounter with the Other’ that is marked by respect and understanding (‘otherwise we shall all kill each other, and there are six billion of us!’ he would doggedly repeat in many interviews). Both books are, to some extent, about himself.

Less than a year later, he asks a friend from Gdańsk how to get to the Trobriand Islands, where Malinowski conducted his research. She replies that the days of the PRL are over, when Polish ships used to sail the world’s seas and oceans. The friend establishes that now they only transport goods to Hamburg and Rotterdam and to ports on the Mediterranean, whence the goods travel on huge container ships, to Singapore for example. Only from there do they finally go to Australia. No one knows anything about sea voyages to Papua New Guinea.

There is a chance that the people from POL-Euro and Polfracht (offshoots of Polish Ocean Lines) could assist Kapuściński with the journey, but first they would like to know more about his plans.

The idea falls apart. It is hard to establish anything for certain, and Kapuściński has doubts whether he could cope with such a long journey.

At the same time another friend, Jola Wolski (who has been living in Australia for years) conducts e-mail correspondence on Kapuściński’s behalf to work out a journey in Malinowski’s footsteps. A friend of hers in Sydney establishes that there are only two flights a week (on Tuesdays and Sundays) from Port Moresby to Losuia, and only two places where one can stay on the islands, ‘modest but comfortable’. He writes about difficulties with flight connections and possible delays, and advises how to make a ticket reservation. He also advises checking the web site of the World Health Organization to see if you should take anti-malaria drugs before travelling to the Trobriands. Kapuściński replies that his wife, who is a doctor, has advised caution, long trousers, long sleeves and mosquito repellent.

Kapuściński considers making the journey in September, October or November 2005, and is counting on friends to advise him which time of year is the most suitable. The plan collapses in ruins, however, because of a hip complaint and the dreadful pain that accompanies it. He cannot sit for long and must spend time lying down.

Meanwhile, there’s something he can do at home: get on with the reading. He reads the works of the acclaimed American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, as well as books about Geertz (and, on 30 October 2006, Geertz dies at the age of eighty).

He wonders ‘how to construct a scholarly text based on one’s own, personal, biographical experiences, to be at once a pilgrim and a cartographer, both friendly and dispassionate. Because anthropology is embroiled with the issue of encountering the Other’.

Finally, there is the hero of the story himself, Malinowski:

Malinowski is a man with an exceptionally well-developed ability to adapt and a highly developed capacity to empathize. On the one hand a romantic, on the other a rigorous scholar.

Malinowski embodies ethnography relying on immersion.

Knowledge is only possible through ‘total immersion’. For that you need a ‘sense of vocation’. Immersion in the dark recesses of one’s own ‘self ’. The capacity to lead a polymorphic life . . .

Reporting, surveying – is an act of violence (at a symbolic level) – violating the integrity of my interlocutor. Emersion.19

He makes a simulation of the journey: in a file entitled ‘The Trobriand Islands (Journey)’ is a sort of run-through of the connections, travel times and prices. Warsaw to Frankfurt (1 hr 45 mins), Frankfurt to Singapore (12 hrs), Singapore to Cairns, Australia (7 hrs 50 mins). Then the journey to Papua New Guinea: from Cairns to Port Moresby, then to Losuia on Kiriwina, the biggest of the Trobriand Islands. The approximate price of the flights in both directions (in April–May 2006) is 8,866 zloty (approximately £1,530 in autumn 2006). Another simulation, to Australia and from there to the islands, runs over 12,000 zloty (more than £2,000). On-site some Polish missionaries, Pallotine Fathers, would be helping him (there are four names).

This is the last note he makes on ‘the Malinowski case’:

Nowadays, however, it is not a description of isolated peoples that is needed and possible, but an increase in the possibility for dialogue between people of varying interests and views shut in a world of never-ending mutual connections, a world containing a whole range of ever more interwoven (?) differences. ‘There’ and ‘here’ are less and less sharply defined. You have to struggle with the realities in a world which has changed its nature again.20

During his preparations for the long journey, he makes notes and drafts poems about old age, pain and death. He senses that he will never go. Planning the journey is a way of escaping from depression and from nagging thoughts about the end.