Abstract
Fallen idols lie everywhere: Lance Armstrong, Sir Jimmy Savile – and now “the greatest reporter of the 20th century”, the man long eulogised by the great and good of the left wing literary world, the late Ryszard Kapuscinski. Perhaps inevitably, all extravagantly praised idols turn out to have feet of clay, but the legendary Polish foreign correspondent managed to keep his own thoroughly hidden from sight for most of his much-garlanded life. But those garlands are now withering, thanks to this exhaustive, meticulously-researched and, in the end, subtle, poignant, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger biography.
The exposure of Kapuscinski's habitual fantasising and sometimes downright mendacity has not come from some malevolent “imperialist fascist”. It has come from a long-term hero-worshipper and close friend who referred to him as “the Master” and “Maestro”, and who received unlimited access to his archive.
Artur Domoslawski, himself an award-winning foreign correspondent, clearly embarked on his biography as a labour of love. Brick by agonising brick, this once-adoring biographer has now, carefully and punctiliously, demolished his hero's reputation.
Most foreign correspondents like me took it for granted that “Rysiek”, with his lyrical, brilliant prose and his much-vaunted empathy with the poor and oppressed, was – as every journalist must be – true to the facts that he discovered in his largely solo travels through Latin America, the Soviet Union, the Far East and, especially, Africa.
He was a master of telling vignettes. One of the most telling was his description of Lulu, Emperor Haile Selassie's lapdog, who was allowed to pee on dignitaries’ shoes, and of a courtier whose job for a decade was to wipe those shoes clean with a satin cloth. But what if it wasn't true? What if all the anonymous “interviews” with the former Emperor's courtiers had never taken place? And there is some evidence that they hadn't; that they were simply brilliantly artful contrivances to illustrate an allegory about the failings in his own homeland.
Ethiopians of all political hues were furious that “The Emperor”, his first major prize-winner, deliberately distorted what he saw and, they alleged, that he based most of his vignettes on gossip he picked up at diplomatic dinner parties in Addis Ababa. But nit-picking about mere “details” infuriated him. When a close friend mildly inquired about chronology and location he lashed out: “You don't understand a thing! I'm not writing so the details add up: the point is the essence of the matter!”
He was very fierce about the failings of other journalists, a denunciation which suited many of his literary admirers – including Salman Rushdie who declared that “one Kapuscinski is worth a thousand grizzled journofantasists”. But Rushdie's hero was perhaps one of the most egregious “journofantasists” of all. His “confabulations” (a psychology term employed by Domoslawski) included his own childhood. His father, a Christian teacher in a poor, majority-Jewish town in eastern Poland's borderlands (now Belarus) was, he alleged, taken prisoner by the Soviets and narrowly escaped death at the massacre in the Katyn forest. Except that he didn't: it was simply a lie on the part of his chronically self-mythologizing son.
Did “Rysiek” become chummy, as he implied in interviews, with heroes of the left like Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, Patrice Lumumba? Not possible. Guevara was already dead a month before Rysiek first arrived in Latin America. And Lumumba had already been assassinated before our intrepid reporter first stepped foot in the Congo. As for Allende, he may have met him briefly, if at all, at a dinner.
He never reported what those luminaries, those “friends” of his, actually said to him during their chummy chats. What journalist, let alone the “greatest reporter of the 20th century”, would leave these quotes out of his reports? Even when someone pointed out that he couldn't have known Lumumba, he blamed his publisher for making a mistake – which would be corrected in the next edition. But it never was, nor did he make any effort to ensure that it was.
And what about the number of times he alleged he had escaped death by firing squad? There's no evidence that he was ever before a firing squad, merely his own assertion that he was.
Perhaps the first time I wondered about him was when I started covering the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc in the early 1980s. I first went, as a tourist, to Moscow in 1974 where my group was closely supervised and obliged to read eulogies about the marvels of Soviet production and prosperity. The reality – of dingy pot-holed streets and endless shuffling queues for sausages and heavily-rationed food – instantly gave the lie to all that mind-deadening Soviet bombast. Absolutely no ordinary Russians, apart from drunks, dared to approach any of us and – with the exception of the prostitutes controlled by the KGB and corrupt doormen – they were forbidden to enter our “tourist-only” hotels.
In the early years under Gorbachev's glasnost these strictures were loosened and I managed to make friends with some ordinary Russians. I knew they would have to strike a deal with Soviet security and report on me before and after every visit to their poky little high-rise flats – but I understood that that was the only way they could avoid, to say the least, “unpleasant consequences”. A young Slovak woman I bumped into in Bratislava in 1968 was eager to make friends. And, of course, “to visit the West”. And visit the West she certainly did. Frequently. She'd sometimes even stay with me in London. She would criticise the regime vociferously but, interestingly, exhibited absolutely no support for Alexander Dubcek, who fought – unsuccessfully – to create “socialism with a human face”.
I never asked her how she was able to get exit visas for her frequent travels to the West because naturally I understood that she had to do deals with the authorities. And of course I sympathised. After all, she only had one life – and how was she (or any of us) then to know that the vast, brutal and sclerotic Soviet Empire would suddenly implode? So I was not surprised that Kapuscinski seemed to be allowed to travel the world so freely as a journalist. What did surprise me was his unforced devotion to the Communist Party, of which he remained a loyal card-carrying member for most of his life.
He made much of his courage (and it was courageous to go to those war-torn lands), but in fact he was, in his tortured Polish soul, a coward. Domoslawski notes that he was “thin-skinned, fearful of confrontation” and clearly terrified that one day his “confabulations” would be found out. As they were. Not least when the files of the Communist security services (proving he was a spy) were opened not long after his death at the age of 74.
He won deserved international fame for his writing and insights – but they should have been catalogued under “Fiction”. His biographer sadly concludes that Ryszard Kapuscinski, that dauntless hero of journalistic legend, was himself a largely fictional character, created by Kapuscinski himself. His delicately-constructed legend would long ago have crumbled if this fantasist had had the misfortune to live in the era of Facebook and Twitter. That would have destroyed him much more rapidly than all those alleged firing squads that he so often – and, as he put it, so “miraculously” – escaped.