Ryszard Kapuscinski is renowned for his ability to transform fact into fable, for writing that is immediate, poetic and enduring.  His latest book ‘The Shadow of the Sun’ draws together 40 years of experience from across the continent of Africa. In an essay review MARK MORDUE looks at the career of the great Polish journalist in detail.

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When I left Iran in late 1998 I found myself both excited and confused by a country that was historically complex and deep, dark, with mystery. How to write about this place accurately and also respond equally to my own intuitions, how to understand it all, became a project that obsessed me.

There were some fine books of history available on Iran, some excellent journalism, but nothing quite affected me or brought the country back to life - from an outsider’s point of view - than a reading of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Shah of Shahs (1985).

Set just after the Islamic Revolution in 1978 and the seizure of the American Embassy by militant students (affirming the Ayatollah’s Khomeini’s austere fanaticism to the world), Shah of Shahs begins simply enough. Not with big picture politics as you might expect, or a missive of crackling reportage from the front lines of change. But with a Polish journalist living in an empty hotel, his notes, memorabilia and photos sprawled around his room as if after some violent search. A search of his own peculiar making. For the mood is ultimately reflective, a little lost, that of the small-time working journalist shunted to one side of history, an unnecessary addendum to the momentous changes taking shape outside on the streets of Tehran.

What Ryszard Kapuscinski  (pronounced ‘Re-shard Kapu-schinski’) does next is remarkable. He proceeds to select the banal images at his disposal and deconstruct them: an old man with a prisoner at the end of a chain, another of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran, a shot of the Shah as a young boy with his overpowering father - and draw each moment into a literary rotogravure of contemporary Iranian history. This is pure Kapuscinski, the particular, even the minor, as a fulcrum for storytelling. A storytelling so potent that his best work never loses the immediacy that excites it, all the while it acquires a patina beyond the historic and closer to that of fable.

There’s no doubt Shah of Shahs is Ryszard Kapuscinski’s masterpiece along with his portrayal of the downfall of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie in The Emperor. In that book he interviews the servants of Haile Selassie’s palace, the small-timers and middle men on the political rung, to conjure up a picture of autocratic power in all its total obliviousness. A situation made more apparent by the ridiculous views and justifications underlying the testimonies Kapuscinski is receiving. Wisely, he never disputes these versions of history or seeks out ‘alternative’ arguments. What emerges is a give-them-enough-rough feeling, and a disturbing sense of delusion. A picture of power so absolute and so corrupting, no one could believe it was coming to an end, even after the end had come.

Kapuscinski certainly has a thing for revolutions and social change. Indeed the man some have called the master journalist of the 20th century appears to have had an almost psychic ability to position himself in countries at those points when their history, and sometimes that of the world, has turned.

His book Imperium (1994) outlined the collapse of the Soviet Union, beginning vividly, disturbingly, with Kapuscinski’s memories of the Russian invasion of his hometown Pinsk in 1939 as a seven year old boy, a childhood of starvation, random persecution, railway carriages to Siberia. Psychologists might see within it the source of all his obsessions. Another Day of Life (1987) covers the decline of Portugese colonialism in Angola, startlingly brought to life in Kapuscinksi’s image of the city of Luanda in a frenzy of crate-building and crate-filling as a mass evacuation accelerates. The Soccer War (1986) gathered his ‘journalism of war’ from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East as the sole foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency. Every book a fine and brilliant work.

Now The Shadow of the Sun (available in hardback, US$25. Alfred A. Knopf, 2001) compiles Kapuscinski’s forty-year involvement with Africa. For such a great writer it is an unsatisfying collection, at times stunning, at others incomplete, and worse still repetitive. It’s hard to tell how much the breadth of Africa was beyond the grasp of even a storyteller of Kapuscinski’s skills; how much the decision to compile journalism, speeches and diary entries from over a forty year period has left us with something less coherent and sometimes confusing. In the end I can’t buy either excuse completely given his past track record.

It’s hard not to wonder if Kapuscinski’s age, now 69, is a factor - that he was simply too road weary for the task of sifting, mutating the material into a more organic whole as he usually manages. His prestige in Europe has probably not helped in the editing process - who dares tell him the work is not quite up to standard when publications such as Granta, The New Yorker and alike accept his individual pieces, while writers of the magnitude of Salman Rushdie, John Le Carre and John Updike praise him to the skies as journalism’s magical realist and transcendentalist extraordinaire.

There is one other problem that can’t be ignored here. In the preface to The Shadow of the Sun, Kapuscinski calls Africa “a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say ‘Africa’. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.”

Despite this, Kapuscinski goes on to make some terribly broad statements, and the book has been fairly critiqued for its lapses into enthnocentrism, even outright racist generalisations. There’s a strange determinism at work in these descriptions of ‘the African’, as if Kapuscinski - most definitely a man on the side of the oppressed - can’t let go of some other notion, an inherency that mars his more complex feelings and finer writing. I put this down to the metaphoric inclinations in his work, a desire to go beyond the particular into something archetypal. At times in The Shadow of the Sun it leads him, unintentionally, astray.

All that said, the best stories here are undeniably very good. ‘The Structure of the Clan’ in which Kapuscinski looks at changing power relations in Ghana, from colonialism to independence, and a metaphysical, native state of mind caught in the superstitious image of witches using spider webs to enmesh the whole country. ‘Zanzibar’, where a clutch of journalists races to an island revolution, only to find themselves stranded within the confusion and inertia, needing to race back to the mainland to consume yet more revolutions elsewhere on a continent where governments are falling like dominos. ‘The Hole in Onitsha’, about (what else) a hole in the road that creates its own minor industry, indeed a whole community, around it.

Most marvellous of all is ‘My Alleyway, 1961’, his evocation of life as a white man in a tough black neighbourhood. Observing the infernal heat here, Kapuscinski says, “a certain stupor, an internal numbness, has its benefits: man could not survive here without it, for otherwise the biological, animal part of his nature would bite to death everything that is still human in him.”

Kapuscinski is from a Poland war-torn, Communist-ruled, more recently democratic. This background, he says, gives him a unique perspective on both post-colonial misadventure and totalitarianism. It’s been said that the abstract nature of his writing in Shah of Shahs and The Emperor was a result of Kapuscinski’s desire to metaphorically attack the Communist regime in power in his homeland. On this notion Kapuscinski remains non-commital.

More pragmatically, being a lowly Polish journalist has meant an inability to enjoy the fruits of corporate media backing. Not for him the life of a CNN or 60 Minutes luxury journalist, or even the standard assistance major Western newspapers provide their reporters. The Shadow of the Sun details his struggles with cerebral malaria and turburculosis, with insect-ridden rooms and robbery, and an improvisational life that drives him closer to ordinary African people and a far more humanistic, intimate view than might otherwise have occurred. Kapuscinski rates this ‘empathy’ highly.

Despite a few lapses into hyperbole, and fly-jacket impressions of a reporter on the edge - it’s an oft repeated back-cover fact that he has witnessed twenty seven revolutions and been sentenced to death four times - Ryszard Kapuscinski usually appears as a quiet and diligent man in his stories. A rather opaque character despite his surely recognizable voice: visible, but only vaguely known, poetic yet always cool, clear.

In truth he is in a league of his own, though comparisons with Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipal and Truman Capote, with the very best of new journalism and travel writing this century, are not without some ground. At a time when this brave tradition is becoming debased by the middle brow cynics and self-flattering adventurers who now dominate the feature-pages of magazines and newspapers, almost all of them indebted to P.J. O’Rourke for their writing style, Kapuscinski does more than just give good browsing for the Saturday afternoon consciousness. Instead he tries to do something noble: expand our vision of the world.

I’d go so far as to say his work has an almost mystic calibration at its best, slotting history, anecdotes, private reflections and philosophy into a profoundly resonant act of storytelling that becomes timeless, and, yes, magical. This strange timelessness, and his essential humanity, make him a great writer, and certainly commend The Shadow of the Sun to you as a highly worthwhile reading experience whatever its flaws. Patchy writing from Kapuscinski, you see, still makes everyone else look unimaginative and dissolute by comparison. We are fortunate to see his kind still roaming the planet.

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