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De mortuis nihil nisi…
A Nobel for that Pole ?
It wouldn’t have been a good idea !
Or:
where was Kapuscinski really ?
It was quite a shock: for several years I had to read again and again that a certain Polish journalist and writer by the name of R. Kapuscinsky was being considerd for the Nobel Proize for Literature. But then as luck – or in his case un-luck – had it, the man died before he got it. Even before his death I did read the man again, and especially so a saga of which he pretended he had lived it in Nigeria.
The man claimed he had lived or rather undergone that experience in Nigeria’s western region in 1966 – a time when I was also there as a young student at the University of Ibadan, and from where I also reported as a journalistic free-lance for radio Deutsche Welle in Cologne.
Now the man pretended he had also been there, and since journalists and writers in the North of the world were so much impressed by Mr. K’s writings, one of Germany’s top writers, Herr Hans Magnus Enzensberger dared (!) to re-edit Mr. K’s writings again three decades after the event.
And a real thriller it is ! Because the man never claimed to have written ‚faction’, a mix of fiction and fact, as the ‘man’ from this very region, a certain Wole SOYINKA readily admits in IBADAN; no the Polish fellow pretends he describes FACTS.
And now for a closer look at Mr. K’s fertile imagination or rather his – let’’s call it that – racist interpretation of facts as he imagined them…
According to Mr. K. (my translation as from here!) „the entire earth of the Yoruba was in flames (p.194 in the new German edition, from which I quote), and then Mr. K. drives „on a road about which it is said that no white person will be able to drive on it and stay alive.” To which those same Yoruba would reply with their proverbial: “„Na how, a wow, now!“
I ask myself: where did Mr. K. get this from ? Did he possibly collect this information from the usual informant at some hotel bar ? Or in the journalistic Cocktail-Circuit ? But our prospective (in the end aborted…) NOBEL is a reporter full of courage and states:
„I decided to go there and try to find out whether this was true”, for “I must experience everything on my own.” Impressive!
And our courageous Pole to continue:
„ I know that man is experiencing angst, when in the dark he slowly moves near the lion..“
Question: whoever told Mr. K. that at the time there were still lions around between Lagos and Ibadan ? No, Mr. K. the highly educated Pole is speaking in a metaphore. Does he mean those fear-inspiring blacks on that road ? And he continues:
„I did approach those lions, so as to experience, what kind of feeling that gives you. I simply had to experience this personally, and I knew that nobody could descrive this for me.”
Now, lion-wise : had Mr. K. never before read Ernest Hemingway and other big-game hunters ?
But then that inimitable Nr. K. admits:
„Me. too, I cannot describe it.“
How that now ??? If that is so, may be Mr. K. should have kept mum and not have written a – single – line. But then Mr. K. does his modesty bit, when he sums up:
“Just as I cannot describe the night in the Sahara.“
Why that now ? And here comes Mr. K’s convincing answer:
“The stars in the Sahara are tremendously huge.”
Now I (seem to ) understand. But then Mr. K’s next sentence leaves me again in the dark (of the Saharan night…), when he writes:
„The night in the Sahara is green like a meadow in Masowia.”
For heaven’s sake: where is Masowia ? No, this is Mr. K’s symbolism again… Masowia must be some region in Poland. Which reminds me of the old Polish joke… Two Poles look at some nude figures on a monument, one of the Poles asks the other: “What is this?” Then the other answers: “That is symbolic.” Whereupon the other one says: “Yes, I know, Symbolik was always a pig.” (The pun only works when you know that many Polish names end on –ik) .
And now Mr. K’s thriller is really building up steam… First Ryszard K. drives up a hill and then he sees the „first bruning barricade.“ And SHOCK:
„It was too late to turn back.“
The situation is really getting serious, since Mr. K. sees “burning tyres across the street.” And worse still, he is seeing
„a dozen young people… who are evidently under the influence of hashish, since in their eyes there was only emptiness and craziness. They were bathed in sweat, in ecstsy, in a state of running amok.”
And then the total shock:
„They attacked me, I felt three knifes in my back and I saw how they dirtected some machetes at my head. A few yards away two activists were standing and aimed their shot-guns at me, so a to prevent any attempt to flee.”
And worse still:
“Immediately in front of me I saw sweaty faces, carzy eyes, sparkling knive baldesand hot-guns.“
And what is our clever Pole thinking ? Tell me what !!
„My African experiences taught me that in such a situation the worst is to show weakness or to attempt to offer resistance, because that will only goad on the enemy, will only liberate new aggressions in him.“
Now STOP, Mr. K: WHY are those people so suddenly your ‚enemies’ ? So suddenly ! Now Ryszard: could it just bet hat you suddenly became a fanatic of plain VICTIMOLOGY ? You must have known what that is ! or – forgive me – may be that discipline had not yet been discovered by then.
However that may be; our poor Ryszard just had his ‚experiences’ to go by, since
“in the Congo machine-guns had been pointed at my stomach.”
Whereas here in Nigeria our Polish hero stays cool:
„I told myself I must not move… but to achieve that immobility what you need is a definite training of your will , because, when you look at it coolly, you simply want to run away or break your opponent’s neck.”
But Ryszard! For heaven’s sake: why ddidn’t you try a simple joke. May be in Pidgin or in petit-nègre. Oh, you did not master either …
And then Ryszard. Who - up to his last breath - was waiting for that telephone call from Sweden, telling him that they would award him the Nobel, had this supreme insight:
„This is the moment when he, the black man, is testing me. Looking for my weak point.“
And what does he, THE black have? At least according to Ryzsard?
„He is fearing that he might hit on my strong point, since the fear of the white man is deeply anchored in his soul; therefore he wants to find my weak points. He is bent on beating me and he is is looking for the exact point to hit at.“
And the – supposedly – grand master of reportage sums it all up – in his fake philosophy-cum-kitchen-anthropology :
„This is Africa, I am in Africa.“
Is that so ??? I would have though that poor K. had at long last landed on the couch of a pseudo-Freudian. But Ryszard knows even more:
„They (that is, those blacks) don’t know that I am not their enemy.“
Good to know – with hindsight – but according to the Pole those blacks seem to know something after all:
„They know that I am a white man, and the only white man they had known, was the colonial master, who had robbed them of their dignity, and therefore they now wanted to take their revenge on me.“
Now poor R. has become the total victim of vulgar history or vulgar sociology, who misses his target totally – since in Western Nigeria those blacks had known quite a number of other whites before him, and that for a long time: missionaries, traders even scholars, even white students at the university, on whom they did NOT want to take any revenge.
Mr. K. however continues cooking up his own Polish potted version of history when he claims – yes he does ! – that those blacks want to punish him for the fact that
„Mrs. Lugard had herself carried on a litter.”
And those blacks threaten to punish him because he refuses to comply with the financial demands of the waylayers. Whereupon our poor Polish correspondent – probably with only Zloty in his pocket – complains that in comparison to the Congo, where the blacks had been content with a pack of cigarettes… “now everything is getting dearer in Africa.”
Now, my dear Kapu, if you read me up above there in the Polish catholic heaven, let me tell you one or two things …
On the day after Nigeria’s first military coup, that is on January 16th, 1966, I drove all the way from Kaduna in Northern Nigeria to ‚this same’ Ibadan, and quite a few miles through ‚your’ area… there were lots of popular road-barriers, but never – I repeat NEVER – did we have to pay for passage. All we were forced to do was to decorate our car with palm leaves, the symbol of the ten UPGA – it really was that easy !
And in the weeks before that coup I really had criss-crossed the Western Rig-On in my old Citroen 2CV and never ever was I threatened. I remember going to the local Citroen garage near Dugbe in Ibadan, and whenever the owner, also the German consul in Ibadan, told me where NOT to go, I went just there. To find out whose house or car was being burnt in the Akintola camp. And never ever anything happened to me.
But let’s now read on in Mr. K’s fable… First those activists want Kapu’s car, which was however not HIS property but that ‚of the Polish state’; then they want to burn it, refrain however, and he can… continue on his journey.
And then Kapu at long last enjoys an afro-erotic experience:
„What I liked best were the girls. They were naked to their hips and on their fullk breast they had painted the name of the party…”
Now, at least that ! And yet… that vision cannot fully satisfy our Polish friend…:
„In my head thoughts were rumbling like mill-stones in a mill.”
But thhere is not much time for that rumbling, since he already tumbles into the next trap, since those ‚activists’ now pour petrol over his body,
„because here all human beings are being burnt with petrol, since petrol burns best.“
Kapu already sees himself burnt at the stakes by the ‘crazy ones’, but then his saviour appears in the person of the ‘crazy’ leader of the group:
„He was happy and he began to laugh happily, And all the others joined him in his laughter.“
And then what ?
„That laughter saved me.“
Now-now, my dear Kapu, up their chanting angel-like songs in front of your former Polish pope, you could have had this right from the start. But, braving death, Kapu drives straight into the next road-block and lets himself be saved by – true – POLICEMEN ! (I would never have let my self be saved by POLICEMEN: NEVER EVER !) And lets himself be driven into life-saving Lagos.
„When we arrived in lagos the sun was setting.”
meaning that our Polish friend had at long last reached ‘The Heart of Darkness.” Greetings from Joseph Conrad. He originally came from Poland, too.
And then I ask you: REALLY; what are we supposed to make of the other so-called ‚reportages’ of a man, whom editors of literary pages of Northern newspapers traded – and that for three deaceds - as THE GRAND reporter of ‘em all, and who was being traded as a prospective NOBEL for Literature ? May be it was ALL Literature and nothing but, but then rather bad-bad literature.
What are we to make of his other reportages elsewhere in Africa, Latin America and so ? Isn’t it high time that some of our colleagues who must have met the man, tell the truth and nothing but the truth. To de-throne that reporter-saint !
The old Romans had a word for it: “si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.“ If only you had shut your mouth, people would have taken you for a philosopher !’ But no way: not only in Germany but also elsewhere the man K. is still being touted as THE reporter of the twentieth century.
Come on now, Mr. Enzensberger and colleagues: the man was a young and poor reporter for the communist news agency of communist Poland, had virtually no money in his pocket, and his command of the English language must have been rather poor as well. And he can’t have been a witty or funny person; otherwise he would have cracked some jokes at those road-blocks and have happily driven away.
And therefore: Nobel boys and girls in Sweden, you did a good job by NOT giving him the Nobel, but watch out: there are more fakes around !
All quotes from: Ryszard Kapuscinski, „Der Fussballkrieg – Berichte aus der Dritten Welt“, Die Andere Bibliothek, herausgegeben von Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt, 1990
Postscriptum:
Some time agao a German-African colleague wrote: „Now Mr. K. is a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.´” by which – so I assume that colleague wanted to say: Mr. K. writes fiction and not fact.
It would, in fact, have been a serious aberration if Mr.K. had dollowed in the footsteps of a certain V.S. Naipaul, that tweedy Oxfordian, who commited when writing about ‘blacks’ in his ‚Bend in the River’, which was rather a… ‚bend in HIS brain’.
Next passage about one of his translator deleted, since that would earn me a court case ! Though it is ALL true!
And on 13.10.199 the correspondent for Germany’s best daily paper, Michael Birnbaum, wrotre about the red-dition of Mr. K’s fables:
“The African continent is just to obig to be able to describe it really. But in the preface to this re-edition Ryszard Kapuscinsky absolves himself of all possible criticism of his writings….
But since Kapuscinski has not lived the most important events in Africa during the last two decades, and since he did not sit down with Africa’s intellectuals ort he new elites to discuss those events, the modern times in Africa simply do not happen in his writings… and thus even his ‚lectures about Ruanda’ remain bloodless, faceless and they do leave a bad taste in your mouth and it is all superficial. The bad taste is caused by the fact that somebody has tried a remake of his former fame. A fascinating failure, interesting to read, but in the end shockingly un-satisfying.”
End of quote, as we say in journalism.
May Mr. K. rest in peace, nay, sing forever happily with the Polish angels.
And the Polish Pope will see to it, as choir-master...
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