Chris Blattman

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Kapuscinski

If you have never read a book by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, then 2008 will be a wonderful treat, for you have a dozen of the greatest stories ever told awaiting you.

I’m reading Travels with Herodotus over the holidays, a book published in 2007, and Kapuscinski’s last, for he passed away earlier this year. His stories from his travels have a depth and insightfulness that I’ve not encountered elsewhere (and I can only dream to ever match).

Kapuscinski travelled Latin America, Africa, China and India through the 1950s, 60s and 70s reporting on coups, civil wars, revolutions, and other such events of the day. The Shadow of the Sun and The Soccer War emerge from these travels, and are two of the best and most enjoyable books I have ever read. His accounts reflect the stresses of life and war on the people around him, but also on the challenges of being a foreigner and a journalist in a far and unfamiliar place.

Kapuscinski is desperately poor, for Poland has little money to spare for flights, translators, and other tools of the foreign correspondent’s trade. Perhaps because of this poverty, Kapuscinski’s subjects are real people, with personalities and lives being lived, rather than sick and desperate mothers, starving children, and other easy and stock images of the third world.

A stray passage from Travels with Herodotus reveals his perspective on what makes his work so different from that of his richer American and European cousins:

Every expedition into the depths of Ethiopia is a luxury. Ordinarily, my days are spent gathering information, writing telegrams, and going to the post office, so the telegrapher on duty can forward my dispatches to the Polish Press Agency offices in London (this turns out to be less costly than sending them directly to Warsaw). The collecting of information is time-consuming, difficult, and dodgy business–a hunting expedition that rarely results in capturing one’s quarry. Only one newspaper is published here: four pages called the Ethiopian Herald. (I witnessed several times in the countryside a bus arriving from Addis Ababa, bringing not only passengers but a single copy of this publication as well. People gathered in the marketplace and the mayor or a local teacher read aloud the articles in Amharic and summarized those in English. Everyone listened raptly and the atmosphere was almost festive: a newspaper had arrived from the capital!)

An emperor rules Ethiopia at this time; there are no political parties, trade unions, or parliamentary opposition. There are Eritrean guerrillas, but far away in the north, in mostly impenetrable mountains. A Somali opposition movement operates out in a region of equally difficult access, the desert of the Ogaden. Yes, I could somehow make my way to both places, but it would take months, and I am Poland’s only correspondent in all of Africa. I cannot just go silent, disappear into the continent’s uninhabited wastelands.

So how am I to gather my material? My colleagues from the wealthy news agencies–Reuters, AP, or AFP–hire translators, but I lack the funds for this. Furthermore, their offices are equipped with a powerful radio: an American Zenith, a Trans-Oceanic, from which one can tune into the entire world. But it costs a fortune, and I can only fantasize about it. So I walk, ask, listen, cajole, scrape, and string together facts, opinions, stories. I don’t complain, because this method enables me to meet many people and find out about things not covered in the press or radio.

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