The Other by Ryszard Kapuscinski

This slim catalogue of pieties—a deontology, the French would call it—will come as a surprise to admirers of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s taut and vivid accounts of some of the globe’s major wars, coups and revolutions of the last forty years. The Other is a collection of three lectures delivered four years ago at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, rounded off with three addresses, all on the subject of what is rebarbatively called in academic circles “alterity”. Except for one short address, “My Other” (1990), the entire book dates from the time when he was working on his last major work, Travels with Herodotus, itself a rather mellow and reflective book on his life as a conscientious reporter. Herodotus, it ought to be remembered, although the “father of history”, was also accused in his day of being a terrible fibber.

As Neal Ascherson remarks in his generous introduction, as journalists get older they tend to reflect more on the perspective they have acquired. This may be a mixed blessing. Some people spend their entire adult life in their bedrooms and are acclaimed great novelists; Kapuscinski went to some of the dark places of the earth (mostly in Africa) before he became famous. Authenticity was the thing: the flat mirage of heat and hardship were his Alps, arduous ascension of which had first marked out those Romantic poets who were truly in thrall to their visions and unhampered by reason. “Being there” afforded him a singular perspective: a white man in Africa in the years of decolonisation, a master of Neue Sachlichkeit whose base was in the Soviet bloc, and last—but by no means least—a Pole treading self-consciously in the footprints of Józef Korzeniowski, known to us as Joseph Conrad.

“I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief, being something that had a right to exist—obviously—in the sunshine.”

That was from Heart of Darkness, but it could have been vintage Kapuscinski.

Perpetually short of funds and resources, unlike his colleagues at Agence France Presse and Associated Press, Kapuscinski was obliged to develop a journalism of reduced means: staying in third-class hotels, sharing “le taxi-brousse” with entire families (and their livestock), even going hungry at times. It was the making of him. In an interview in 1987 he defined his style of writing as follows: “I feel sometimes that I am working in a completely new field of literature, in an area that is both unoccupied and unexplored … I sometimes call it literature by foot.” Except that it wasn’t quite so unoccupied. Ascherson links him to the central European tradition of the “roving reporter” first developed by the Prague German writer Egon Erwin Kisch, although Joseph Roth might be a more obvious provider of exotically entertaining copy. Signally, both of these central European reporter-novelists managed to keep their novels quite distinct from their reportage (even though journalistic deadlines and techniques greatly influenced their approach to the novel).

Kapuscinski was a brilliant raconteur, but he was no anthropologist. Indeed, it is telling that, in the last few years, the propriety of his self-presentation has been challenged from various sides, including by members of the British school of anthropology which was largely founded by a Pole, Bronislaw Malinowski (1888– 1942): what distinguished Malinowski’s anthropology was the anti-speculative tendency that complicated its solid commitment to fieldwork. The past and the present are never as congruent as they appear. Kapuscinski, however, seems to think fieldwork is the sole commandment—“an indispensable condition of getting to know Others”. Fieldwork, arduous and taxing though it may be, is often the intellectually easy part of ethnography: it is always dominated by the clamour of the present.

Although Kapuscinski slates the breezy ignorance of foreign correspondents, he has himself been charged with getting elementary ethnographic facts wrong (John Ryle), of lacking journalistic probity (Jack Shafer), and even of drifting into “the liberal version of neo-colonial racialist discourse” (Aleksandar Hemon)—in other words, of being an ecumenical relativist who out of respect for other traditions and solidarities shores up the deeply conservative notion that human behaviour is shaped solely by the culture into which people are born. For the generation before, that same behaviour-shaping category had been called race.

The Other will not reassure these critics. It would have been instructive, on all accounts, to have read more about Kapuscinski’s literary motivations and strategies: why, for instance, in The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, his much-praised “eyewitness” account of the last days of the Ethiopian monarchy, which ends with an obit from the Ethiopian Herald, does he attribute honorifics to Haile Selassie—“His Most Puissant Majesty”, “His Most Singular Highness,” and so on—that derive not from Amharic but from an old history book on the kings of Poland (as he admitted in an interview in German)?

The Emperor is actually a study of a type, its structure deriving from a series of interviews with initialled courtiers who, for all their tragicomic comments on the turn of events, seem to be highly stylised heraldic personages. But which political structure are these favourites commenting upon? While a European might read the novel as both modern and baroque, finding its treatment of despotism strangely familiar, and perhaps even conceding that Kapuscinski had found a cunning way to evade the domestic censors, an Ethiopian could only read the novel as a travesty—as if his country had been textually colonised, although in point of fact Ethiopia was the only African country never to be subjugated to a European power other than during its brief occupation by Mussolini’s troops. If we didn’t know better we might almost call this fictional blurring of real and ostensible subjects “synchronism”.

Kapuscinski clearly sometimes forgot which hat he was wearing. He gave hostage to fortune by telling a British newspaper in 2001 that “we have too many fables, too much make-believe. Journalists must deepen their anthropological and cultural knowledge and explain the context of events. They must read.” On his actual travels, he was filing terse agency stories from Ougadougou and Addis Ababa for the PAP (Polish National News Service); it was only when he got back to Warsaw that, with the help of his diaries, he was able to write the surrealistic stories that aspired to be more than journalism, news that stayed “news”, even while continuing to feature himself in the starring role with full journalistic credentials. His stories strive for the paradoxical sense of Anatole France’s boutade: “voilà une histoire plus vraie que la verité”.

But the truth is vengeful, especially with stories that aim to be truer than it. Do we really tell tall tales about people we esteem? Richard Leacock, one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema, liked to quote an early Hollywood lighting manual: “When shooting Westerns, use real Indians if possible; but if Indians are not available, use Hungarians.” Kapuscinski might have become famous for writing a lot about “Africans” but for projection purposes he was always using Poles—although, as Ascherson points out, “he never wrote a book about the racial and national prejudices that were endemic in Poland”. Not so much the heart of darkness then, as missing one: Kapuscinski says nothing about how Malinowski, whose methodology was always sceptical about the authority of history, spoke directly to his compatriots in the grim years when world history (as represented by the baleful weight of Soviet dictatorship) seemed to have marooned Poland’s national aspirations in a backwater.

The Other is really a testimony to the purity of intentions masquerading as a potted history of multiculturalism. Many of Kapuscinski’s insights derive from Polish sources, and explicitly mention (aside from Malinowski and Conrad) Father Józef Tischner, a Kraków theologian and confidant of the late pope, and Emmanuel Lévinas, a French philosopher who stemmed from a Jewish family in Lithuania—dialogists to a man. Perhaps because Lévinas had settled in the land of Descartes, and certainly as a reaction to the events on Polish soil during the war (in which his family perished), he insisted that what really counted in philosophy was not cognition, but recognition: “the self is only possible through the recognition of the Other”. Not acknowledging others is an ethical dereliction. In a genuine commitment to universal justice, the other person has to be confronted face to face, an old Deuteronomic observance which strove to see, long before Kant, the other as an end and not an instrument to one’s own ends. Kapuscinski glosses his teachings, in his most sustained lyrical passage:

“Stop, he seems to be saying to the man hurrying along in the rushing crowd. There beside you is another person. Meet him. This sort of encounter is the greatest event, the most vital experience of all. Look at the Other’s face as he offers it to you … The Other has a face, and it is a sacred book in which good is recorded.”

Instead of self-deification, deification of the Other—“he brings you closer to God”. Lévinas called this “the wisdom of love”, but they seem to be words from a sermon so often acknowledged in the breach: the ethics of the face-to-face is routinely subverted by the logic of global economics, for which social claims are subordinate to those of the market. Kapuscinski, like a waif who has just heard about America, calls the latter “the Planet of Great Opportunity”.

After 1945 all cultures were proclaimed equal: being Eurocentric was the deadliest intellectual sin. Revulsion against social exclusion was accompanied by a need to expiate European colonial guilt: the universal community of discourse was predicated on amends being made by oppressor to oppressed. Soon the myth of the Noble Savage was reborn in the guise of tiers-mondisme (the Bandung Conference was held a year before Kapuscinski got his first foreign posting, as he recounts in Travels with Herodotus), a hermeneutic turn that generated a lot more heat than light—as it was bound to do: idealism always comes with a haze of specious rhetoric and bad faith.

But the guilt about the past had a number of consequences. Anthropologists would have to prove that their models of alien societies were not simply tools for their domination. Respect became the universal password. And bien-pensant European intellectuals began to bemoan the world-historical trend towards urbanisation. Here is Kapuscinski:

“establishing identity, which is achieved inter alia by defining our relations to Others, has been complicated in the past few decades for many reasons, and sometimes proves quite impossible. This is the result of a weakening of traditional cultural ties, caused by the migration of rural populations to cities, where a new type of identity is starting to be formed—a hybrid one, previously unprecedented on such a scale … today only half the world’s citizens are peasants, and this class is gradually disappearing. The peasant class used to be the most faithful depository of tradition and identity.”

Alas, quite a few of the Others want to be like us. As Hans Magnus Enzensberger pointed out in an essay titled Reluctant Eurocentrism (1980), symmetry in cultural relations is just as difficult to achieve as in personal ones; and in any case the idea of otherness, now that borders have become porous, has long been a platitude—“The true Eurocentrics are the others.” The others, not having read Lévinas, are still eager for the culture-transcending truth of what it takes for cognitive and productive growth—the conditions that produced the word Eurocentric in the first place. Now the depositories of tradition and identity contribute to the internal patchwork of industrial societies. And they don’t have to deal with a bad conscience.

Kapuscinski shows no qualms about calling on the services of this anonymous, hypostasised “The Other”. If alterity is a philosophy devoted to the second person, then the second person has been objectified so much he looks the same as the third. Kapuscinski commends curiosity, but shows no curiosity about what to my mind is the most immaculate of abstracts, a pulseless personification who brings theory and practice into deep contradiction. Kapuscinski’s own creative efforts were post hoc stylisations, and ones that required ruthless editing, heightening of effect, structural reworkings—those incumbent upon any writer. Style is an expulsion, just as being an effective member of a culture depends upon a sense of discrimination. Immaculate or not, the person with the final say has to chase the Other off the page. And that person we call an author.

What Kapuscinski was engaged on was dream work, not documentary; why he always had to trick it out with so many extraneous supports, chief among them his press card, is something he fails to explain, and perhaps never fully explained to himself either. It is bemusing that a writer who could produce stories that read so naturally and compellingly (and which amusingly show others getting his name comically wrong, vide the courtier “E.” who addresses him as “Mr Kapuchitsky” in The Emperor) felt he had to write a utopian chapbook in favour of “a positive atmosphere for dialogue”. Only bureaucrats talk like that. (In any case, dialogue and story are mutually exclusive modes of discourse.) His dream work resembles the classic, slightly old-fashioned, European projection—one inflected by self-censure, self-doubt and negativity, but certainly not unwilling to enter the maze of ambiguities. And what if the Other had never existed?