Ryszard Kapuscinski has died. It is terribly sad news, but we are all lucky that someone so gifted as a writer and someone so insanely, recklessly adventurous as a reporter was able to spend forty years doing what he did best.
His books about bad times and ordinary lives in Iran, Latin America, the Soviet Empire and (especially) Africa combined an unblinking scrutiny of human depravity with relentless empathy and compassion. They are full of bizarre and extraordinary events, but he was fascinated more by the strange than by the spectacular, more by moods and personal experience than by the great sweep of history. Even from his numerous brushes with death (nearly drowning off Zanzibar, catching malaria in Uganda, passing out from heat and thirst in the Sahara, to name a few) and other presumably terrifying ordeals he always picked out the beautiful image or the disarming moment of empathy that suddenly puts you right on the spot. He de-mystified ‘exotic’ places or people, bringing home how our culture and our worldview are shaped by our environment, whether it is one of comfort or extreme deprivation. And he loved Africa in particular, with an intensity that is infectious.
Kapuscinski was named “journalist of the century” in Poland (where they read his descriptions of the mad Emperor Selassie as a thinly-disguised commentary on life under communism back home) and I find it hard to think of anyone better from anywhere else. I can’t say his books brought me joy per se - they were too preoccupied with the messy and tragic for that. But they brought me life. Everyone should read them.
Here are obituaries from the Guardian and the Times, and here is a wonderful appreciation from Shefa Siegel: “Kapuscinski did what journalists were invented to do, which is give humanity to those who are different from ourselves”.
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