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Literary Review
PROSE
Ancient frameworks
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
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The story of a journalist’s fiery baptism and life-long career in international reporting.
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Travels with Herodotus, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Knopf, p.288, $ 25.
When he died earlier this year, Ryszard Kapuscinski was acclaimed as the doyen of foreign correspondents, as a man who plunged repeatedly into the unknown waters of the Third World and surfaced just as repeatedly with pearls of reportage for his read
ers in post-war Poland. Travels with Herodotus, it must be said, is not a compendium of his best journalism. Instead, though, it is a primer on his journalistic instincts, and on how those instincts were stoked by a Greek who lived 20 centuries ago.
Coping with infinity
Kapuscinski’s baptism was a fiery one. One day in his early 20s, when he was covering rural Poland for his newspaper and had only sketchy fantasies about lands abroad, Kapuscinski was dispatched to India. He knew no English, he had no specific brief, and from his editor, he received only a book as guidance: Herodotus’ The Histories. Everywhere, like Mary’s little lamb, that copy of The Histories was sure to go. It travelled with him to India, China, Egypt, Sudan, the Congo, Ethiopia, Algeria, and around the Mediterranean, and it seeped into his thoughts and consciousness like rain into parched earth.
To Kapuscinski, The Histories is “world literature’s first great work of reportage.” Herodotus, as tireless a traveller as Kapuscinski himself, conducted his historical investigations as any journalist would — by talking to people, listening to stories, verifying facts, and reading what he could. His book became an inquiry into the causes of the Greco-Persian Wars, as well as a cultural encyclopaedia of his times.
Kapuscinski’s own peregrinations begin evocatively. On reaching India, he is numbed by the scale of the land. “India is all about infinity — an infinity of gods and myths, beliefs and languages, races and cultures; in everything, and everywhere one looks, there is this dizzying endlessness,” he notes. Kapuscinski’s writing oscillates between personal observation and unhurried rumination, often within the same sentence. To this, he adds a keen sense for the telling detail, creating a book that is at once sharp and impressionistic.
Exploring Herodotus
From India, Kapuscinski travels to China, and thence to Africa. In China under Mao, he is unable to see or do anything independently; a too-faithful retainer follows diligently in his footsteps, like night after dusk. In Africa, Kapuscinski hears Louis Armstrong in Khartoum and smokes weed in the desert; he covers The Coup That Wasn’t There in Algiers, hitchhikes through the Congo, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, and attends an arts festival in Senegal.
But as the book progresses, Kapuscinski’s travels with Herodotus take a back seat to his travels into Herodotus. “I felt more deeply about the destruction of Athens than about the latest military coup in the Sudan, and the sinking of the Persian fleet struck me as more tragic than yet another mutiny of troops in the Congo,” Kapuscinski writes. Elsewhere: “The events described by Herodotus so absorbed me while I was in the Congo that at times I experienced the dread of the approaching war between the Greeks and the Persians more vividly than I did the events of the current Congolese conflict.” Africa fades away, and Kapuscinski gives us more and more of The Histories: the wit of the Scythians, the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, the excesses of Xerxes.
These are not mere retellings of Herodotus, however. Constantly, often for paragraphs on end, Kapuscinski questions the choices that Herodotus makes. Why has this detail been included? Why not that one? What did everything look like? What of Herodotus himself? Why does he not tell us more about his own life? What of the everyday man? How does this incessant warring affect him? Why does the fighting never end? Why, Kapuscinski wonders with Herodotus, does it happen?
Faith in possibilities
And out of this questioning is born the framework for Kapuscinski’s own journalism, the skill he practised to such applause for decades after that first trip to India. He learns from Herodotus the questions that need to be asked and answered in his reporting, and the curiosity and persistence that are needed to ask and answer those questions. “What propelled him, fearless and tireless as he was, to throw himself into this great adventure? I think that it was an optimistic faith, one that we men lost long ago: faith in the possibility and value of truly describing the world.”
Kapuscinski has been accused in the past, from some quarters, of racist generalisation, exoticisation, and even the occasional flirtation with fact; in the Times Literary Supplement recently, John Ryle labelled his style “tropical baroque”. He has, admittedly, been more Truman Capote than Carl Bernstein, but Travels with Herodotus suggests at least a purity of motive — a desire to reveal and interpret the world for his readers, precisely as his Greek muse did a couple of millennia before him.
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