Ryszard Kapuscinski

Hope in the Heart of Darkness:  Ryszard Kapuscinski’s account of the Angolan Civil War

Few journalists have seen human suffering in the manner famed Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski has.  In 1975, Angola was tumbling into chaos and while beleaguered Portuguese colonists desperately fled, Kapuscinski went the other way.  Leaving behind the comforts of his European home, he flew to Luanda, capital of Angola, and into a madness that is so well captured in his book, Another Day of Life.

Angola, a slave colony later given over to mining and plantations, was a promised land for generations of poor Portuguese.  Having belonged to Portugal for centuries, the colony was cut loose in 1974 after the fascist dictatorship in the mother country collapsed sending the now former colony into a the darkness of civil war.  Into the breach rode Kapuscinski with notebook and camera to try and record the horrors humanity is capable of unleashing on itself.  Interviews with young soldiers from all sides of the nebulous conflict tell the story of a country destroying itself with help from outsiders who want to try and carve out their own little piece of Africa.  Kapuscinski faced death at haphazardly placed road blocks and found friendship from an elderly cleaning lady in his run-down hotel as he tells this story in Angola’s history.

As a journalist and not a historian, the beauty of Kapuscinski’s writing lay in the humanity he expresses in seemingly insignificant details.  It may be a simple look from a little boy desperate for food, or the piles of wooden crates of material possessions waiting to go back to Europe, and in those moments, the reader experiences another facet of what it means to be human.  The following paragraph shows a glimpse of Kapuscinski’s genius:

I locked myself in my room to make a phone call.  The telephone worked.  The concept of totality exists in theory, but never in life. In even the best-built wall there is always a chink (or we hope there is, and that means something).  Even when we have the feeling that nothing works anymore, something works and makes a minimal existence possible.  Even if there’s an ocean of evil around us, green and fertile islets will poke above the water.  They can be seen, they are on the horizon.  Even the worst situation in which we can find ourselves breaks down into elements that include something for us to grab hold of, like the branch of a bush that grows on the bank, to avoid being sucked to the bottom by the whirlpool.  That chink, that island, that branch sustain us on the surface of existence. (page 81)

In the midst of chaos there is hope.  The story of Angola is a story told throughout history by people abused by others and by themselves and to focus on the violence, on the evil in the heart of mankind, without remembering the hope, the branch to reach out to, is to risk falling into an existential abyss.  Kapuscinski was in a desperate situation when he returned to his hotel that night.  Soldiers from who-knows-what faction were descending on the city and the people were terrified because they heard the invaders were going to kill any European still there.  Even veteran journalists feel fear in moments like these and there was good reason to give into this fear.  Yet the telephone worked.  There was hope.  This is the story within Kapuscinski’s trials and tribulations in other countries facing other violence very few of us will experience.  however, the story of humanity is not always dark.  There is hope and even in the worst situations, the telephone will work.

If anyone has another story to share about Angola or any of Kapuscinski’s other works, please write a comment.  We learn more about ourselves the more we engage in community and share our stories.