‘I spent nearly six years in Africa, and that coincided with the most turbulent time full of the very best – though often too easy – hopes. That was at the cusp of two different eras – colonialism was in decline, and independence was coming to the fore’ — with these words, Ryszard Kapuściński begins his book Gdyby cała Afryka [If the Whole Africa], published in 1971.        

When more than a dozen African countries had won their independence eleven years earlier, the unknown hovered over the political imagination of the era. What would the political reshuffles that had taken place in such a short time and across such a vast geographical region mean in practice? This gave room for two apparently contradictive ways of thinking about the African continent to emerge: Afro-optimism and Afro-pessimism. The optimists were driven by the hope that some kind of new power would resurface – a counterweight to the global political order based on the East-West Cold War dynamics. From this perspective, the independence transitions on the continent were to become not only the end of the era of colonial exploitation but also an opportunity for a new player to enter the game with the North. The pessimists perceived decolonization as a prophecy of degradation which – according to them – had to come afterwards as a result of dismantling the existing structures.

In his book Afrotopia, the Senegalese academic Felwine Sarr writes: ‘The commonly accepted notion spouted by Afro-pessimists was that the continent was already heading in the wrong direction; Africa was a wailing monster whose final agonizing convulsions already proclaimed the approaching end.’ Both views were rooted in a common ideological ground, and the German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s approach to Africa might serve as an example here. In the first half of the 19^th century, during his lectures on the philosophy of history, the co-founder of modern European philosophy presented the concept of a continent inhabited by Black people as a place deprived of History, unhistorical. To Hegel, Africa was a region that remained in and stopped at its natural state, without any development of civilizations. Such an approach was consistent with the politics of conquering the African continent pursued by the Europeans.

Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the colonial system had reached its peak. The six-year conflict, in which the imperial superpowers engaged Africans, conscripting them into their colonial armies, had its impact on weakening Europe and strengthening the struggle for independence on the African continent. The system started to fall apart, and the aforementioned 1960, referred to as the Year of Africa, appeared to be a turning point in the decolonization process. These changes, however, did not eliminate thinking of Africa in utopian categories. The events observed by the West with apprehension and anticipation seemed to be the fuel to propel unrealistic scenarios. 

Kapuściński travels to Africa for the first time in the late 1950s. He visits Ghana shortly after it had gained independence. ‘The town burned with liberation fever, and people flocked here from all over Africa. Journalists from around the world also arrived. They came out of curiosity, uncertainty, and even the fear growing in Europe’s capitals — what if Africa explodes, what if the blood of white men flows here, and, even, what if armies are formed, and then, supplied with weapons by the Soviets, attempt — in a gesture of hateful vengeance — to strike at Europe?’ — he mentions decades later in yet another book, The Shadow of the Sun – an attempt to summarize his reflections on the African continent.

The great unknown, curiosity, and uncertainty that fired the imagination of Afro-optimists and Afro-pessimists of the North created a context that enabled the then thirty-year-old journalist working for the Polish Press Agency and Polityka to become the first correspondent of the Polish People’s Republic in Africa, where every day brought the epoch-making political transformations in other countries. In 1962, he makes it to Dar es-Salaam in Tanganyika, where the Polish People’s Republic had just opened its embassy. As Artur Domosławski states in the biography of Kapuścinski: ‘Tanganyika is the right place: it has declared independence, it is hosting freedom fighters from all over the continent, and acts as an informal center for the conspirators, and its leader, Julius Nyerere, calls himself the first African socialist.’ Things could have turned out very differently, if the Polish writer had not been hanging out in the New Africa Hotel in Dar es-Salaam. In retrospect, this quite pretentious name could be hailed as symbolic. Over a beer, the Polish correspondent gets to know the aforementioned President of Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere, as well as Robert Mugabe, who would become Prime Minister of Zimbabwe in 1980, Abeid Karume, the future President of Zanzibar, and Eduardo Mondlane, the co-founder of the Mozambican Liberation Front who would be assassinated in 1969. Kapuściński listens to ‘scheming Africa.’

In 1963, he publishes his first book on African politics, Czarne gwiazdy [Black Stars], which contains essays that were supposed to be included in the never-completed books about Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and Ghanian President Kwame Nkrumah. The reportage essays collected in the volume Gdyby cała Afryka are a random, almost impression-based record of the political changes taking place in the 1960s. And thus, Kapuściński elaborates on a letter from the Secretary General of the Mozambican Liberation Front, Lourenço Milinga, who asks him for financial support to organize a wedding party. In 1963, he participates in the sessions of the Tanganyikan parliament where he listens to its December debate on the idea of introducing the maintenance obligation into the law. ‘Traditional African law does not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate children. Such distinctions were only introduced by colonialism’ – he writes down an opinion expressed by one of the MPs who refers to the bill under discussion as a ‘reflection of the colonial mentality.’ In the same year, flocking together with journalists from all over the world, Kapuściński reports on the proceedings within the conference of African countries, which takes place in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, in the Africa Hall building, raised in 1961 on the orders of Emperor Haile Selassie. He describes a ‘monstrous ring – a much larger copy of the Pope’s ring’ worn by the priest Fulbert Youlou, the President of Congo-Brazzaville, who appears there, dressed in a cassock. He mentions Somalia’s strives to shift the existing borders and emphasizes that ‘not a single person in Africa is willing to create a dangerous precedent for the revision of borders. Then all borders in Africa would have to be revised – but according to which criterion?’. He quotes the speech given by Hasan as-Senussi, the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Libya: ‘We shall unite the efforts of African nations to remove the last bastions of colonialism in all its forms, such as Zionism and racial discrimination, as well as all kinds of tyranny and colonial rule.’ He elaborates on ‘Nkrumah’s Plan,’ according to which African independence is just apparent and only the creation of one country – a union similar to the United States or the Soviet Union – will set African countries free from foreign capital and stop them from being ‘tools in the hands of neocolonialism.’ As the summit of the continent leaders draws to a close after long disputes over the form of the African Charter, the journalist asks correspondents from France, China, India, the USA, and the USSR for their comments. ‘All of them wrote about the conference with wholehearted approval, making it clear that it was a very positive experience for their non-African capitals […] Africa — the enfant terrible of contemporary world politics – still has a good press […], every non-African political center finds in Africa something good for itself.’ In the summary, the reporter mentions that the conference in Ethiopia proved that on the continent, ‘there is always room for dialog.’

In 1964, the weekly magazine Polityka publishes a classified text that is intended to be read only by policymakers. In his article, Kapuściński writes about the most expensive limousines bought by President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, and about a wedding party with twenty-eight thousand guests, on which Prime Minister of Uganda, Milton Obote, spent 60,000 from the state budget. When the article is reprinted by the Kenyan press, Kapuściński fears that he might get deported. The intercession of the Vice President Jaramogi Ogingi Odingi, who convinces the other politicians that the correspondent should not be arrested for writing the truth about malpractices, comes to his rescue. At the time, Kapuściński is avidly reading The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon, today perceived as one of the canonic texts for colonial studies. The concept that what Africa is experiencing is a ‘false decolonization’ squares with what the Polish author sees and describes, observing the corrupted hostages of the Cold War chess game between the East and the West.

Twenty years later, his book The Emperor has its launch. The text describing the dethronement of Haile Selassie is not so much a piece of reportage as it is an allegory of authoritarian regime. Critics accuse Kapuściński of turning the thoroughly educated emperor who speaks several languages into an illiterate. Polish readers see behind his words and perceive his book as a critical reflection on the courtly lifestyle of government officials under the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, Edward Gierek. As a matter of fact, a shift in the Polish policy regarding Ethiopia was taking place in the background at the time. In the 1960s, the emperor was apologized for the interwar support for the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and received with honors during his visit to Poland. In 1974, when Derg, sponsored by the Eastern Bloc, came to power, views changed, and the end of the authoritarian regime was commonly celebrated.  

Kapuściński’s friend Jerzy Nowak claimed that the author had recognized the political and economic impasse which at some point had increased in the continent – the hopes placed in capitalism had turned out to be disastrous and the socialist promises – incredible. Already then, in the mid-1960s, the romantic faith in revolutionary ideals present in Kapuściński’s writing intertwined with realism and a sense of helplessness. When the author revisited the Africa Hall in the 1990s, the modernist building designed by the Italian architect, Arturo Mezzedimi, with its colorful stained-glass windows created by Afewerk Tekle and symbolizing freedom of the African people, children were playing ping-pong in its halls right next to the stall selling leather jackets. In the late 20^th century, the AIDS epidemic and famine in the region becomes new fuel for European Afro-pessimism and the Polish writer also wallows in it. Kapuściński gives in to metaphors and images that bring to mind Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. ‘Nature on this continent strikes such monstrous and aggressive poses, dons such vengeful and fearsome masks, sets such traps and ambushes, that man lives with a constant sense of anxiety about tomorrow, in unabating uncertainty and dread. Everything here appears in an inflated, unbridled, hysterically exaggerated form. (…) There is nothing here to temper the relations between man and nature—no compromises, no in-between stages, no gradations. (…) From birth until death, the African is on the front line, sparring with his continent’s exceptionally hostile nature, and the mere fact that he is alive and knows how to endure is his greatest triumph,’ Kapuściński writes in The Shadow of the Sun published on the threshold of the new millennium. He begins the book with the statement that ‘except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist,’ and he finishes it with the scene of the middle-of-the-night encounter with a lonely elephant that suddenly walked past the tables set in the clearing in the bush. He writes about Africans that ‘instead of being self-critical, they are full of countless grudges, complexes, envies, peeves, manias. The effect of all this is that they are culturally, permanently, structurally incapable of progress, incapable of engendering within themselves the will to transform and evolve,’ but at the same time, he points to the homogeneous image of the continent vigorously upheld by Europeans: ‘Hunger; skeletal children; dry, cracked earth; urban slums; massacres; AIDS; throngs of refugees without a roof over their heads, without clothing, without medicines, water, or bread,’ which was later mocked by the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina in his article How to Write About Africa. The place which for years was a space, where Kapuściński indulged his passion for writing and which he considered his home, becomes almost mythical, legendary, far from the realm of intellectual and revolutionary ferment that he tried to capture in the 1960s.

In 2001, the American anthropologist, John Ryle, published an article entitled ‘At play in the bush of ghosts. Tropical baroque and African reality in the work of Ryszard Kapuściński’ in Times Literary Supplement. Ryle pointed out several inadequacies in Kapuściński’s The Emperor and The Shadow of The Sun to finally reach the following conclusion: ‘Despite Kapuściński’s vigorously anti-colonialist stance, his writing about Africa is a variety of latter-day literary colonialism, a kind of gonzo orientalism, a highly selective imposition of form, conducted in the name of humane concern, that sacrifices truth and accuracy, and homogenizes and misrepresents people in Africa even as it aspires to speak for them. […] From this place, deep in an imaginary Africa, the writer may return with any tale he pleases.’

During the Cold War, the West wanted to continue its neocolonial business, using the old relations of dependency, cheap labor, and natural resources. The Eastern Bloc was basically counting on exactly the same thing, albeit disguised in the internationalist décor of fraternal struggle for a better future. But what is inherent to utopias is that they never come true. Afro-optimism and Afro-pessimism are, as a matter of fact, two sides of one and the same simplification. The utopian projection that obscures the uncomfortable effects of both years-long colonization and the racist policies of the colonizers, that led to the creation of artificial borders running across ethnic and linguistic regions, as well as the consequences of transplanting the European socio-political concepts onto the continent having its own, very different traditions. The difficulties faced by the continent at the turn of the 20^th and 21^st centuries stemmed primarily from this complicated legacy. The decades-long decolonization process, often bloody, left countries that were difficult to govern within their artificial borders, which were drawn in the 19^th century by people who had never seen a single a piece of Africa in their entire lives. This postcolonial landscape was analyzed in detail by the Nigerian writer and journalist Dipo Faloyin in his book Africa Is Not a Country.

Ryszard Kapuściński remains perhaps the most recognizable Polish reporter abroad; or rather an author writing on the edge of fiction and non-fiction, given his at times quite a nonchalant approach to facts, which many experts have pointed out on numerous occasions. His view of the problems of the African continent, which he visited and described starting from the late 1950s until his death, seems to be stretched between these apparently opposite but equally utopian poles of thinking about Africa. And yet, utopia can also have a constructive power. As the aforementioned scholar Felwine Sarr writes in his book Afrotopia, ‘The future is a site that does not yet exist, but which one can already shape within a mental space. For societies, this nonexistent site must be the object of prospective thought. As such, one works within the present time in order to help to create its occurrence. Afrotopos is Africa’s atopos: the as-yet-inhabited site of this Africa to come. It requires an investment in thought and imagination.’