When the Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuściński died, I wrote mostly nice things about him. He wrote a lot about Africa.

When the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina last year wrote a great piece in Granta — on the stereotypes Western writers bring when they write about Africa — I wrote nice things about it.

Now, Wainaina writes a piece saying that earlier article was mostly about Kapuściński:

It was Kapuscinski, more than any other single writer, who inspired me to write the satirical essay “How to Write about Africa”…

In his review of The Shadow of the Sun for the Times Literary Supplement in 2001, John Ryle [wrote:] “His writing about Africa is a variety of latter-day literary colonialism, a kind of gonzo orientalism … conducted in the name of humane concern, that sacrifices truth and accuracy, and homogenises and misrepresents Africans even as it aspires to speak for them”…

There are many fools like Kapuscinski wandering about. They don’t get published. They do not become legends. The questions about him have more to do with lingering superstitions about the continent held by editors and foreign correspondent types, who built him up entranced by his Polish-flavoured, left-leaning, Rider Haggard world of strange, voiceless, dark peoples doing strange, voiceless, dark things.

Wainaina is right, of course. Kapuściński was a strange mix of sophistication and parochialism — he tended to view the outside world with a wide-eyed wonder that took on a sort of magical-realist edge. That turned people into archetypes, and in Africa, those archetypes aren’t always good. Kapuściński was all about evoking the romance of the exotic, which has an inherently orientalist cast — and which is why he’s considered of a piece with the great British travel writers of the early 20th century, who were primarily exploring their own fresh empire.

One thing you see in The Emperor and The Shadow of the Sun is that Kapuściński wasn’t very good at depicting real, fleshed-out people — he was good at creating characters. There’s a reason (beyond mere style choice) many people in his work are never given names. As I wrote last time, I liked the idea of Kapuściński more than I liked the man, charmer though he apparently was.

21 March 2007

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