Ryszard Kapuściński

Ryszard Kapuściński (; 4 March 1932 – 23 January 2007) was a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author. He received many awards and was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kapuściński's personal journals in book form attracted both controversy and admiration for blurring the conventions of reportage with the allegory and magical realism of literature. He was the Communist-era Polish Press Agency's only correspondent in Africa during decolonization, and also worked in South America and Asia. Between 1956 and 1981 he reported on 27 revolutions and coups, until he was fired because of his support for the pro-democracy Solidarity movement in his native country. He was celebrated by other practitioners of the genre. The acclaimed Italian reportage-writer Tiziano Terzani, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, and Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda accorded him the title "Maestro".

Notable works include ''Jeszcze dzień życia'' (1976; '' Another Day of Life''), about Angola; ''Cesarz'' (1978; '' The Emperor'', 1983), about the downfall of Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie, also considered to be a satire of Communist Poland; ''Wojna futbolowa'' (1978; '' The Soccer War'', 1991), an account of the 1969 conflict between Honduras and El Salvador, and other stories from the life of the reporter in Africa and Latin America; ''Szachinszach'' (1982; '' Shah of Shahs'', 2006) about the downfall of the last Shah of Persia; ''Imperium'' (1993) an account of his travels through the collapsing Soviet Union; ''Heban'' (1998), later published in English as ''The Shadow of the Sun'' (2001), the story of his years in Africa; and ''Podróże z Herodotem'' (2004; ''Travels with Herodotus''), in which he ponders over relevance of '' The Histories'' by Herodotus to a modern reporter's job.

Biography

Ryszard Kapuściński was born in Pinsk (now in Belarus), Polesie Voivodeship, in the Kresy Wschodnie or eastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic in 1932, the son of Maria Bobka (b. 1910) and Józef Kapuściński (b. 1903), primary school teachers. His sister Barbara was born the following year. They were born into poverty: he would later say that he felt at home in Africa as "food was scarce there too and everyone was also barefoot." In September 1938 Ryszard started attending Primary School No 5 in Pinsk. He spent the summer of 1939 together with his mother and sister in Pawłów, a small village near Rejowiec in Lublin Voivodeship. When the Second World War began in September 1939 they came back to Pinsk after the city was captured by the Red Army and Ryszard returned to school there. In 1940 Maria, afraid of deportation to the East, together with Ryszard and Barbara left Pinsk and moved to Sieraków, near Warsaw. There they met Józef. Later the family moved near Otwock. Ryszard continued education in primary school in Otwock (1944–45). He described his early life in the book ''Imperium''.

In 1945 the family settled in Warsaw where Ryszard began education in Stanisław Staszic Gymnasium. He became an amateur boxer (bantamweight) and football player. In 1948, Kapuściński joined the official Communist youth organisationthe ZMPand served lower rank posts. Kapuściński was the hero of the article published in the weekly periodical ''Odrodzenie'' reporting on a poetry conference organised at his school, in which the teenager's poems were compared with works of Mayakovsky and Wierzyński.

In June 1950 he graduated from Gymnasium and started working for the '' Sztandar Młodych'' (The Banner of Youth), a nationwide newspaper founded in 1950 as the organ of the ZMP. In October 1950 he began his studies at Warsaw University (Department of Polish Studies) and in 1951 he moved to the department of history after he suspended working for ''Sztandar Młodych'' till 1955. He participated in the Youth Festival in East Berlin staged in August 1951 in East Germany. This was his first foreign trip. From 1952 and till his death Ryszard Kapuściński was married to doctor Alicja Mielczarek (b. 1933). Their daughter Zofia was born in 1953. During the period from 1953 to 1981the year of the imposition of the martial law in PolandKapuściński was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party (the PZPR). His attitude to the PZPR changed early on, "the decisive moment having come in the year 1956" (presumably a reference to the events of Poznań June and the process of de-Stalinisation brought about by the Thaw of Gomułka, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956).

In June 1955 he graduated from Warsaw University. After publishing, in September 1955, a critical article about the construction of Nowa Huta, a Cracow conurbation built on a site chosen as the "first socialist municipality in Poland", which brought to light the inhuman working and living conditions of the labourers involved in the venture—a story which occasioned consternation before eventually winning favour with the Communist authorities unsure at first how to react to a fault-finding depiction of their pet project by one of their own—Kapuściński was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit at the age of 23.

In August 1956 he reported from Kiev and in September he was sent to India, his first travel outside Europe. He returned via Afghanistan (where he was detained at the airport in Kabul) and Moscow. In August 1957 he went for half a year to China (via Tokyo and Hong Kong). He came back to Poland by the Trans-Siberian Railway. Beginning with that journey to India undertaken at the age of 24, he travelled across the developing world reporting on wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He started learning English in India by reading, with the help of a dictionary, a copy of Hemingway's ''For Whom the Bell Tolls''. He wrote about his first travels to Asia in the book ''Travels with Herodotus''.

In 1958 he left ''Sztandar Młodych'' and started working for the Polish Press Agency. Shortly afterwards he also joined the weekly ''Polityka'' (where he worked till 1962). The result of his work for the weekly was the book ''Busz po polsku'' (The Polish Bush) published in 1962, a collection of his articles from the "Polish wilderness" that he went into to relate "the perspectives of forgotten, invisible, marginal people and so to record a living history of those seldom deemed worthy to enter the annals of official history" (in the words of Diana Kuprel, the literary scholar and translator of Kapuściński's works). He was aggrieved at the indifference of the reading public towards the majority of his early books. "Antyciała: z Ryszardem Kapuścińskim rozmawia Andrzej Skworz" (Antibodies: An Interview with Ryszard Kapuściński Conducted by A. Skworz)
''Press'' (monthly magazine), No. 2 (121), February 2006, pp. 25–28. ISSN 1425-9818.

In the late 1950s he went for the first time to Africa (Ghana, Republic of Dahomey and Niger