The Other Read online

  THE OTHER

  THE OTHER

  RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI

  Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

  with an introduction by Neal Ascherson

  This publication has been subsidized by Instytut Ksiąki

  © POLAND translation programme

  This paperback edition published by Verso 2018

  Paperback edition first published by Verso 2009

  English-language edition first published by Verso 2008

  © Ryszard Kapuściński 2006, 2008, 2009, 2018

  Translation © Antonia Lloyd-Jones 2008

  Introduction © Neal Ascherson 2008, 2009, 2018

  First published as Ten Inny © Wydawnicto Znak, Kraków 2006

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-596-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-527-7 (UK EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-528-4 (US EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the USA by Maple Vail

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Neal Ascherson

  The Viennese Lectures

  My Other

  The Other in the Global Village

  Encountering the Other as the Challenge of the Twenty-First Century

  Notes

  Index

  The subject of the lectures collected in this volume is the Other. They were delivered as follows:

  ‘Viennese Lectures’ (I, II, III), 1–3 December 2004, at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna;

  ‘My Other’, 12 October 1990, at the International Writers’ Symposium in Graz;

  ‘The Other in the Global Village’, 30 September 2003, during the inauguration of the academic year at the Father Józef Tischner Senior European School in Kraków;

  ‘Encountering the Other as the Challenge of the Twenty-First Century’, 1 October 2004, on the occasion of being awarded the title of doctor honoris causa at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

  R. K.

  INTRODUCTION

  Towards the end of this book, Kapuściński quotes the great Polish-born pioneer of social anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski. In his book Argonauts of the West Pacific, Malinowski wrote that ‘to judge something, you have to be there’.1

  It’s a contestable generalisation. It’s obvious that, of those who passed judgements on the nature of the Hitler or Stalin regimes, and who often perished in the effort to enforce those judgements, extremely few had literally ‘been there’. However, Malinowski’s line is an indispensable motto for all good journalists. The late Ryszard Kapuściński followed it throughout his career, pursued it indeed to extremes of danger and isolation which few of his colleagues ventured to endure. Did he really have to find himself awaiting execution in a dirty African cell in order to judge the politics of Congolese independence? No, but he added to his ability to judge fear and humiliation and — because he got out of that cell — to describe the sudden savour of life after the expectation of death.

  His most famous book, The Emperor, also demonstrates the importance of ‘being there’, in that case settling in Addis Ababa in order to seek out and interview the surviving courtiers of the fallen Haile Selassie.2 It should be added that Kapuściński understands ‘being there’ as requiring a dimension in time as well as space. It’s strange to recall that for much of his life he was an agency journalist, often subject to the insane pressure of deadlines and call-backs and updates at any hour of the day or night. His instinct, in complete contrast, was to stop the clock and let people take all the hours and days they needed to disentangle, unwind and lay out their story. This is what he did in The Emperor, whose enquiries seem to take place across weeks and months, as well as in dark lanes and shuttered houses.

  Kapuściński is usually remembered in Western Europe and America as an iconic foreign correspondent and as the writer of narratives about his experiences in Africa, Latin America and Asia, which were famous for their often surreal imagery, their revelations of misery and cruelty, and the fastidious quality of their writing. He was certainly a king at his craft, and also a brave, witty man who could be a good comrade in the field. A question often raised about him later in his career, but never convincingly answered, was where — in him — the frontier between literature and reporting ran. It’s a hard one to answer, not least because there is no such wire barrier (floodlit and dog-patrolled) between the two forms. Some people thought that Kapuściński made things up, that (for example) the marvellous recollections by the Ethiopian courtiers in The Emperor were largely imaginative reconstruction or even fiction. There may be something in that. Kapuściński, I think, did what many journalists do at times: he selected from his notes, perhaps changed the order in which things were said, dropped the parts which didn’t interest him, and then sharpened up the best passages — not for ‘sensational revelation’ purposes, but for literary effect. For me, such ‘heightening’ doesn’t really detract from what was written, as long as the text is not presented as a verbatim record.

  But not many of his readers have absorbed Kapuściński as a thinker, as an intellectual who enjoyed philosophical theorising and ethical reflection on the margins of Catholic theology. He was always a wide, compulsive reader, but this interest in abstract ethics did not show clearly in his work until Travels With Herodotus, the last of his major books to be translated into English.3 The Other will therefore come as a surprise. It consists of a group of collected lectures, one dating back to 1990, but the others delivered in the last five years of his life at gatherings in Vienna and in Kraków. Their subject is the encounter, above all the white European encounter, with unfamiliar cultures whose difference may be distilled into an essential Otherness and loaded with every kind of discourse of ethical and technical superiority. Kapuściński saw a lot of that distilling. Himself immune to its products (his view was the Herodotean assessment: that all peoples are different and that it’s natural that each people thinks its own ways are best), he has witnessed every variety of imperial arrogance and ignorance.

  Otherness is not, of course, a new topic. It’s interesting that Kapuściński’s references and inspirations on the subject are almost all from Polish sources. Malinowski is one. Another is Father Józef Tischner, a senior Kraków theologian and a widely read writer on ethics who was very close to the late Pope John Paul II. Tischner, in turn, drew strongly on the work and thought of Emmanuel Lévinas (d. 1995), and his insistence on the primacy of ethics in philosophical enquiry. Lévinas (only survivor of a Jewish family in Lithuania which perished in the Holocaust) had moved to Paris in 1923, and studied later in Freiburg under Husserl and Heidegger. Although he was not Polish and remained loyal to Judaism, Lévinas’s thought deeply influenced Polish Catholic intellectuals — including Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope — during the Communist period.

  ‘The Other’ was his central topic. Lévinas considered that philosophers were wasting their time on metaphysics and epistemology. Although he lived in France, the land of Descartes, he did not believe that ‘I think, therefore I am’, but that ‘the self is only possible through the recognition of the Other’ (a famous phrase quoted in these lectures).


  This notion informs the conclusions Kapuściński draws from his travelling and reporting encounters in other continents. But there is a background here which the reader needs to bear in mind. This author spent most of his life writing for a Polish readership, a readership isolated by the Cold War inside its own frontiers, which had inherited a traditional taste for Otherness as a form of exotic entertainment. Throughout central Europe, and to some extent in Germany too, landlocked peoples without overseas empires or the opportunity for distant travel longed for amazing tales about remote continents. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a whole genre of travel writing sprang up to satisfy that longing for palm trees, wide-open spaces, strange animals and bizarre tribes. The German novels of Karl May, set in an imaginary Wild West, gripped many landlocked imaginations. Later, gifted journalists set out as world-travelling reporters, serving their Czech or Polish or Hungarian readers a diet of thrilling and addictive articles which described the Other not only in terms of landscape and exotic customs, but as sites of inhuman exploitation, hunger and suffering. In the first half of the century, it was the dazzling Egon Erwin Kisch from Prague, the rasende Reporter (globe-trotting newsman) of his times, who helped to convert the mood of this Other-writing from uncritical awe to an anti-imperial exposé journalism with a distinctly socialist content.

  Kapuściński quite clearly emerges from this tradition as one of its last exponents. When he began to write journalism, over fifty years ago, Poland had been effectively cut off from the world since 1939 — first by Nazi occupation, and then by a Soviet-modelled Communist regime. The hunger for news and images from ‘out there’ was desperate. The ‘out there’ Poles really wanted to hear from was of course Western Europe, but reports from those parts were tightly censored. Next best, but still delicious for starved readers, was reporting from the big world of Africa, Latin America and Asia, and that is what Ryszard Kapuściński was able to provide. And the censors were relatively relaxed about those continents; to describe suffering, capitalist greed and exploitation in the Congo or Guatemala was, after all, no more than to describe reality. Kapuściński flourished, doing an agency reporter’s grind for much of the time, but also contributing reflective and descriptive features and magazine articles which made him famous and popular in his own country.

  As he grew older, he began to reflect more — as journalists often do — on the perspective he had acquired. Western journalists usually know more about psychotherapy than about Christian philosophy or phenomenology; they wrestle with guilt-making problems about voyeurism, repressed attraction to violence, the dishonesty of claims to reproduce the experience of battle. But Kapuściński, as this book shows, is less interested in himself than in the way in which Otherness is manufactured, experienced and understood in the world. He writes in a vein which is already slightly old-fashioned, a voice very much from the later twentieth century. His generation did not — and does not — wish to turn away from the experience of two world wars, from the crimes of two unimaginably murderous totalitarian systems, and from the ‘modernist’ notion of ‘mass society’.

  He relates, in these pages, ‘the transformations and crisis of Western civilisation, and in particular the crisis and atrophy of interpersonal relations between the Self and the Other’ to the sort of collectivist triumphalism encouraged by dictators. But Kapuściński is the last person to see the remedy in an atomising individualism. In line with his gurus, Tischner and Lévinas, he believes that ‘genuine’ individualism — the recognition of selfhood — can only be brought about by contact with and recognition of the Other, the being who is external to oneself and yet a reflection of oneself. As Tischner put it, in his very post-Cartesian way, ‘I know that I am, because I know that another is’. It is an ethical approach which became widespread in modern Christianity during the postwar decades. Some forty years ago, when I was living in Berlin, I was struck by the language of an Evangelical Church poster addressed to Du und der Du neben Dir — ‘You, and the You next to You’.

  It could be said that, in concentrating only on negative Otherness as perceived by white Europeans venturing into other continents, Kapuściński is limiting his subject. The perception of Otherness, leading to the treatment of the Other as less than human, has been an intra-European habit for many millennia, even though it has only just been given a title. It is needless to recall how settled peoples in Europe treated nomadic peoples, or how ‘indigenous’ populations from time to time tried to exterminate urban minorities (Jews, Lombards, Armenians, Flemings, to name a few) as alien and unnatural beings. But Kapuściński, it must be said, had a cunning habit of writing about distant lands in ways which instantly suggested domestic comparisons to his readers. It was a classic way of evading the censors (another was the ‘historical’ novel which was really about the present). For instance, his uncompleted trilogy about autocrats who thought that ‘development’ could make democracy unnecessary (Haile Selassie, the last Shah of Persia, and Idi Amin of Uganda) unmistakeably lampooned the rule of Edward Gierek, leader of Communist Poland in the 1970s. He never wrote a book about the racial and national prejudices that were endemic in Poland. All the same, his awareness of shocking events in his own country gave his reporting of communal hatreds and fear in Africa a special edge.

  When he does write about Europe in this book, it is with hope. The colonial empires have gone, the Cold War is over, and it is possible to replace mass society with global society. The world is merging and becoming multicultural, and Otherness is becoming not just a negative reaction between white Europeans and those they have dominated, but a positive encounter between liberated peoples on every continent. As Kapuściński remarks in these pages, Europe is now free to rediscover its old Enlightenment principles from the era

  when European thought tried to build bridges of understanding with Others. Referring to these efforts, and carrying on with them, is not just an ethical duty but also an urgent task for our time in a world where everything is so fragile and where there is so much demagogy, disorientation, fanaticism and bad will.

  Neal Ascherson

  July 2008

  THE VIENNESE LECTURES

  I

  Conquest and Exchange

  The terms ‘Other’ or ‘Others’ can be understood in all sorts of ways and used in various meanings and contexts, to distinguish gender, for example, or generation, or nationality, or religion and so on. In my case I use these terms mainly to distinguish Europeans, people from the West, whites, from those whom I call ‘Others’ — that is, non-Europeans, or non-whites, while fully aware that for the latter, the former are just as much ‘Others’.

  The genre I do my best to pursue is literary reportage based on my experiences of many years spent travelling around the world. Each piece of reportage has many authors, and it is only thanks to long-established custom that we sign the text with a single name. In fact it may well be the most collective, co-written literary genre of all, because dozens of people contribute to producing it — the people we meet and talk to on the world’s roads, who tell us stories about their lives, the life of their community, events they have taken part in or heard about from others. These foreign people, whom we often do not know well, are not only among our richest sources of knowledge about the world, but also help us to do our jobs in many other ways — they arrange contacts, lend us their homes, or quite simply save our lives.

  Each of these people, whom we meet along the road and across the world, is in a way twofold; each one consists of two beings whom it is often difficult to separate, a fact that we do not always realise. One of these beings is a person like the rest of us: he has his joys and sorrows, his good and bad days; he is glad of his successes, does not like to be hungry and does not like it when he is cold; he feels pain as suffering and misery, and good fortune as satisfying and fulfilling. The other being, who overlaps and is interwoven with the first, is a person as bearer of racial features, and as bearer of culture, beliefs and convictions. Neither of these beings
appears in a pure, isolated state — they coexist, having a reciprocal effect on each other.

  However, the problem — and here lies the difficulty of my profession as a reporter — is that this relationship existing within each of us, between the person as individual and personality and the person as bearer of culture and race, is not immobile, rigid or static, not fixed inside him for good. On the contrary, its typical features are dynamism, mobility, variability and differences in intensity, depending on the external context, the demands of the current moment, the expectations of the environment or even one’s own mood and stage of life.

  As a result we never know whom we are going to meet, even though by name and appearance it may be someone who is already familiar to us. And what about when we come into contact with a person we are seeing for the first time? So every encounter with the Other is an enigma, an unknown quantity — I would even say a mystery.

  Before it comes to this encounter, however, we reporters are already somehow prepared in advance, usually through reading (in the years when television did not yet exist). In fact, the whole of world literature is devoted to Others, from the Upanishads through the I Ching and Chuang Tzu, from Homer and Hesiod through Gilgamesh and the Old Testament, from the Popol Vuh to the Torah and the Koran. And what about the great medieval travellers who set off for the far ends of the planet to see Others, from Giovanni da Pian del Carpine to Ibn Battuta, from Marco Polo to Ibn Khaldun and Kiu Chang-chun? In some young minds this reading matter ignited a desire to reach the most far-flung corners of the world, in order to meet and get to know Others. It was the typical illusion of space — the belief that whatever is far away is different, and the farther away it is, the more different it is.

  ‘In some minds’, I said, because despite the general view an obsession with travel is not a commonly found passion. Man is by nature a settled creature, a trait that has been fixed in him ever since agriculture and the art of building cities were devised. Man usually only leaves his nest under duress — driven out by war or famine, by plague, drought or fire. Sometimes he sets off because he is being persecuted for his beliefs, and sometimes in search of work or opportunities for his children. But for many people the world outside is a source of anxiety, arousing fear of the unexpected, or even the terror of death. Every culture has a whole set of charms and magic spells designed to protect anyone setting off on the road, who is bid farewell amid outbursts of weeping and regret as if he were about to climb the scaffold.