Ryszard Kapuscinski:For Ryszard Kapuscinski, who has died aged 74, journalism was a mission, not a career, and he spent much of his life, happily, in uncomfortable and obscure places, many of them in Africa, trying to convey their essence to a continent far away.
No one was more surprised than him when, in his mid-40s, he suddenly became extremely successful, with his books translated into 30 languages.
He won literary prizes in Germany, France, Canada, Italy, the US, and was made journalist of the century in Poland.
Kapuscinski was born in Pinsk, now in Belarus, and in 1945 was taken to Poland by his mother, searching for his soldier father.
War as the norm for life was deep in his young psyche after those early years of ceaseless hunger, cold, sudden deaths, noise and terror, with no shoes, no home, no books in school. Decades later he wrote: "We who went through the war know how difficult it is to convey the truth about it to those for whom that experience is, happily, unfamiliar. We know how language fails us, how often we feel helpless, how the experience is, finally, incommunicable."
After university in Warsaw, where he studied history, he found his metier as a 23-year-old trainee journalist on a youth journal. A story exposing mismanagement and drunkenness in a showcase steel factory set off a political firestorm that sent him into hiding. He was vindicated and sent abroad as a treat, to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the first Polish journalist to have that opportunity. Later he moved to the Polish News Agency (PAP), and stayed there until 1981.
In 1957 he went to Africa, and returned there as often as possible over the next 40 years. He covered 27 revolutions and coups, and was exhilarated by the feeling he was in at history in the making.
He and his employers had no money, but he was a dealmaker who often had the contacts to help other journalists who did have the money to hire planes, and thus both arrived at the scene of the latest drama.
In his early years as a journalist he developed the technique of two notebooks: one allowed him to earn his living with the bread and butter of agency reporting of facts, while the other was filled with the experiences he too modestly believed incommunicable, but which became his famous books, such as The Emperor (1978), on the fall of that extraordinary figure Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. Before it, he wrote perhaps his best book, Another Day of Life (1976), a unique account of the collapse of Portuguese colonialism in Angola, which he described as "a very personal book, about being alone and lost".
He was the only foreign journalist in Luanda in the chaotic and fearful summer of 1975. As the Portuguese settlers piled their lives into boxes at the port, soldiers from apartheid South Africa, Zaire and Cuba moved towards the capital in front of or behind the competing Angolan armies, while shady men from the CIA and the Portuguese PIDE fed rumours of imminent triumph for one side or the other.
Among his other books was Shah of Shahs (1982), on the last days of the shah of Persia, and collections such as The Soccer War (1978), The Shadow of the Sun (1998) and, closer to home, Imperium (1993), essays and reportage on the Soviet Union, and five volumes of essays and poems, Lapidarium.
All his writing about developing countries came out of his experience there. The quiet and stability of Europe bored him, and in the last years of his life he spent a considerable amount of time lecturing in Mexico. He is survived by his wife, Alicja, and a daughter.
Ryszard Kapuscinski: born March 4th, 1932; died January 23rd, 2007