Travels with Herodotus
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Knopf

In New York, years before publishing his popular satirical essay "How to Write About Africa," Binyavanga Wainaina crashed a party featuring a cross-section of the international literati. His aim, though, was sharper than that of your typical gate-crasher. He wanted to confront Salman Rushdie on the British-Indian author's friend and colleague, Ryszard Kapuscinski. In forty years as a Polish super-correspondent, Kapuscinki had by this time gained a conflicting reputation as both a champion of Africa and an accidental racist.

"Oh, Ryszard is not racist!" Rushdie answered. "He is a beautiful soul!"

"I quoted to him some Kapuscinski lines," Wainaina recalled in "On 'Gonzo orientalism'," an article marking Kapuscinski's death last January. "Rushdie looked at me compassionately" and shifted his attention back to his wife.

A taste for the unknowable can and often will land a person in awkward situations. Kapuscinski's books, which followed on the heels of his more conventional reportage for the Polish Press Agency, left some readers tallying the details left in and out of his pages. Why dwell on the aspects of Africa already trod by the hoariest of anthropo-spiritual travelogues? The insidious fixation on a quasi-mystical "darkness," for example. Or the violence and hunger which must be as essential to the nameless African's daily existence as breast pockets on a safari jacket. And what about this amorphous African faith which denies curiosity for the outside world with grand theories of "energies?"

Why represent these elements at all, then tag them as insights into an impossibly broad African condition even Kapuscinki warns does not exist?

Kapuscinski does caution early on in The Shadow of the Sun the futility in thinking, let alone writing, about a conceptually cohesive Africa — one that, "except as a geographical appellation . . . does not exist". This should suspend for several beats even the most grudgeful critic's conviction of racism. But what of the generalizations which follow his warning? this critic might ask.

There are at least two routes to take to better navigate the bumps in Kapuscinski's narrative roads: the "Short Route" and the "Scenic Route."

The Short Route is taken by browsing through a compendium of Kapuscinski's allegedly racist quotes. Even the casual reader will see how any value judgements found in the observations are purely interpretive. Wainaina himself lists six which are exemplary:

Let us remember that fear of revenge is deeply rooted in the African mentality.

In Africa, drivers avoid travelling at night — darkness unnerves them, they may flatly refuse to drive after sunset.

Africans eat only once a day, in the evening.

In Africa, the notion of abstract evil — evil in and of itself — does not exist.

Africans believe that a mysterious energy circulates through the world.

... in Africa, a cousin on your mother's side is more important than a husband.

In David Ryle's more evenhanded critique of The Shadow of the Sun, we find several more:

The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time.

Africans are collectivist by nature ... all decisions ... are made collectively.

Half the people in African towns don't have defined occupations.

Here are statements suggesting a difference, wrought by history, between the general African and European disposition. What they don't do is propose even a relative value. As such, they hardly expose Kapuscinski's racism. Occasional dimness? Perhaps. But he was no John Rocker, not even a Joe Biden and likely wouldn't have been allowed to share an elevator with Jesse Helms let alone be serenaded in one with the late United States Senator's appalling rendition of "Dixie."

Rushdie, in his own essay, "Kapuscinski's Angola," stressed the Pole's disinterest in the ordinary. However, writing of Kapuscinski's war reportage, it was his grasp not of the abnormal, but of the disorientingly various on which Rushdie based his praise. He pointed out a "distinction between invention and imagination," further claiming that "Kapuscinski had in abundance the gifts of the ladder." Such a mind doesn't see value in the kinds of difference Kapuscinski wrote about in Africa; only something akin to John Keats' truth-beauty and perhaps a few unwritten books.

Ryle, in the Times Literary Supplement, makes some inroads here. In discussing Kapuscinski's "narrative aspirations," he writes of a certain lackadasical relationship between the journalist and his professional code of ethics.

Here in the domain of myth, in a realm untouched by literacy, where the subject never answers back, a reporter is freed from the constraint of dates and data, the tedium of checking and cross-checking, the tyranny of documents and records. ... Here, in place of fact, there is mutability; in place of reportage, relativism. From this place, deep in an imaginary Africa, the writer may return with any tale he pleases.

Ryle's point leads nicely to the other path towards a fresh consideration of Ryszard Kapuscinki's alleged racism: the Scenic Route.

Though not a racist, Kapuscinski had some clear weaknesses in his methods. These weaknesses are drawn out vividly and unintentionally throughout his memoirs, Travels with Herodotus, recently published in English.

The book is organized around a gift the twenty-four year-old Kapuscinski received on the occasion of his first assignment abroad. This was Kapuscinski's introduction to the Histories of Herodotus, the typically celebrated Ancient Greek "father of history." Its very appearance behind the Iron Curtain in 1955 indicated a bend in the shape of Poland's own history after the death of Stalin. This was the time of Khrushchev's Thaw, so-called after the Ilya Ehrenburg novel which captured for many a kind of new openness in Soviet culture, however slight the shift turned out to be. Kapuscinki instantly found his austerely-designed present "alluring" in its thickness and by the end of his assignment, in Delhi, India, a curiosity for Herodotus' elusive, 2,500-year-old life story had taken hold.

During Kapuscinski's trip to Peking months later, Herodotus is fixed into the young journalist's imagination. "What sort of child is Herodotus?" he asks, setting up a string of short and entirely fictional scenarios which read like a skim through his later books — those that deal with the more mundane aspects of life during bloody revolution. "And in school? With whom does he share the bench? Did they seat him, as punishment, next to some unruly boy? Or, the gods forbid, a girl?" (It is interesting to note that, during this string of hypotheticals, Kapuscinski assumes that Herodotus' role model must have been that of a troublemaker in an otherwise unaccounted for youth.)

Besides Herodotus, Kapuscinski's memoirs detail how he acquired and absorbed a wide array of literary resources and influences. Back in Delhi, he makes pedestrian strides towards Hinduism with French cleric J. A. Dubois' 19th century Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies; Yogi Ramacharaka's volume compels him to study The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath; a trip to Peking begs some deep diving into Mao Tse-Tung, though Kapuscinski seems more committed to Confuscius and Lao-tzu.

While he often picked these books up during his travels, Kapuscinski only started to absorb them once back in Warsaw. This, in contrast to his reportage, was where his books were written; in a state of decompression but also, as Kapuscinski noted in interviews, as a way to get back to his own Polish language. It was also here, away from the duty of observation and in the realm of deliberation, that Kapuscinski's weaknesses took shape.

I have seen five photographs of Kapuscinski. Three of them place him in the center of a storm of books, either at a library or in some nondescript archive, if not, "the gods forbid," his office. One gets the impression that, besides being how the author liked to present himself, this is a symbol of his flaws. Kapuscinski was a writer whose most famous work slipped through the fiction/non-fiction divide. He clearly wanted to be seen as a singular figure in literature and to some extent achieved this. However, his tightrope of artistic singularity is woven with the countless predecessors whose books and reputations crowd his publicity photos. Though this lineage can be selected, and even partially steered, its potential pitfalls cannot be anticipated.

Kapuscinski's broad literary aim of atmospheric timelessness in the name of Herodotus — to transcend time through place — conflicts mightily with his yearning to, in his own words, "convey Africa's dynamism." This is because the timelessness of mythology and allegory which Kapuscinski aspired to in his work is its own myth, and rhetorical allowances are often the first scales to fall from a once-awed reading public's eyes.

Kapuscinski's is an important case to consider, not only because his virtues as a writer are heavier than his vices but because it leads straight into the broader issue of cross-cultural empathy. If, as his book asserts, Herodotus was the first Globalist, then Kapuscinski should not be dismissed simply as the "Gonzo orientalist" of Wainaina's and Ryle's otherwise useful criticism. His contribution is too broad for this and can be criticized in part without rejecting the whole.

In truth, his flaws, when examined objectively, can be just as valuable to us. Travels with Herodotus shows that Kapuscinski's most dangerous move wasn't the one made into the heart of wartime darkness and into the line of fire but another, larger project of boundary-crossing fellow feeling. The project is at least as old as the Histories but is made more essential with each crease ironed out of our globalized world — even when the deeply felt need is clumsily heeded.

— Andrew Stout (andrewstout at gmail dot com)