Travels with Herodotus by Kapucinski

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Author Ryszard Kapuscinki

Title of the book  Travels with Herodotus

Recently I read ‘Travels with Herodotus’ of the Polish author Kapuscinski. Years ago, I read  his book on Africa, ‘The Shadow of the Sun.’ What about the title? At times the moon has a shadow on earth, hasn’t it? But the sun, does its light breed a shadow on earth? Yes, it does and it provides a wonderful, metaphoric title on top.  It was the first  travel book about Africa that moved me deeply and for a long time. I think it was foremost his style of writing, appealing and seductive, informative and realistic, at times meditative. A reflecting style, one calls abusively literary, which undermines the truthfulness or even the sincerity of the writer. The style, however, is the author, as once a Flemish writer stated.

And he is an authentic reporter.

Apart from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria I never visited this dark continent labeled as a world lost in drought, murder and fatal diseases. Great words for daily miseries of the poor and the sick. My travels to these countries took place at the end of the sixties, when King Hassan I of Morocco journeyed secretly from palace to palace almost as a refugee, the revolutionary Ben Bella was already a prisoner in Algeria and Habib Bourguiba seemed to be the eternal and wise president of the small country of Tunisia. Unfortunately, I never met them personally and to me they remained names of fame, personalities on paper. I have wondered for years why Ben Bella had been put in prison shortly after he became president. He was the revolutionary hero who chased the French and the pieds noirs from his country. Kapuscinski explains the difference between the Mediterranean, liberal Muslim Ben Bella and the sturdy soldier Boumedienne of the desert. He opened my eyes. Algeria got a rigid and strict regime, that missed political flexibility and Mediterranean lightness of existence. In Tunisia I had my first encounter with the past of the Ancient World, when I stepped down from the train and was guided by a young man, almost still a boy, to the remnants of Carthago, the capital of the former empire of the seafaring Phoenicians. The boy showed me the place and afterwards he wanted to make love for money as was usual in those days of Herodotus. Cavafy, the famous Greek poet from Alexandria in the last century, who knew the Hellenistic history almost by heart and wrote many homo erotic poems, would have been jealous. The boy was content with the money I gave him. He could keep his love for a Cavafy.

In those years at the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands, I wrote monthly articles on the politics and economics of North and Western Africa and the Congo’s,  French speaking countries. I read French and English newspapers and bulletins, explored reviews of statistics and listened to the news on the radio. Friends of mine thought I had nothing to do. Reading newspapers in the morning and in the afternoon did not look to be a very serious job. I still wrote with a pen. As said before, my personal contacts and opportunities to test the news on the spot and to get into contact with reality were limited. (Although the travel agency of the Ministry had the idea when one travels to Algeria, it is easy to continue, as I proposed, to Tunisia – actually a distance as large as the way back to the Netherlands.) In this region of Africa, those were the years of Kwame Nkruma, the hero of the struggle for independence and the first president of Ghana, of Senghor, the president of Senegal, the Godfather of the negritude, a (literary) movement to glorify black culture. They were impressive persons, who would guide Africa to a bright and free future and turned out to be misleading guides.

I read Kapuscinki’s book on Africa in the late nineties after my emigration to Curacao, a subtropical Dutch island in the Caribbean with a  past of slavery and slave trade. This kind of ‘African’ environment intensified the experience of reading.  Kapuscinki is an original reporter, a careful observer and  a talented writer who takes the reader as his travel companion through Africa in its roaring years of  independence. Those were nerve breaking years of rebellion, revolution and hope on a new, better life. Afterwards famine and hunger, tribal struggles and border conflicts, dictatorship, bloodshed and refugee camps, diseases got the continent in their grip. Chaos and dictatorship were born out of the fight for freedom. Poverty and war raged the continent. Hope evaporated.

Clearly, Kapuscinki is a reporter who didn’t walk away from these dangers, threats and plagues, always eager and alert to inform himself on the spot and if necessary to endure hardships. He does field work to make inquiries and falsify stories told by people far away or on the spot. After the revolution gossip, facts and myths are difficult to separate. Who are truthful witnesses?  I didn’t realize he was practicing the art of the old Greek reporter Herodotus, whose Histories, written around 450 B.C., I  had read at school. Histories should be translated by inquiries, Kapuscinski writes. They do not guarantee the outcome, but characterize the method and the effort of the author. It underlines the fact finding by Herodotus and the professional appreciation of Kapuscinki.

I remember the book had a dark red, hard cover and at the corners the inside peeped out a bit as helpless, cut off threads of the past. The first fifty pages had dog ears and had changed of color by use and the sunlight in the classroom. We translated the Histories at the pace of a snail in the early morning tracking a silvery trail on the porch. I  do not remember much of the stories but some fragments come back with the help of Kapuscinski.  Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius and Xerses, all these Persian kings excelled in cruelty, abuse of power and lust of war. Deceit, treason and murder. In my memory they were all of the same, despotic kind, a threat to their relatives and mankind, their hands dripping of blood. And the quarrelsome Greeks I remember as permanently fighting each other, only cooperating in case of utmost emergency, on the brink of  final destruction. Later I noticed,  this kind of behavior is still not uncommon in the Middle East, where the art of brinkmanship causes so many misunderstandings and unnecessary bloodshed when the balance is lost. President Nasser was an early example of this kind of fatal politics, Saddam Hussein a more recent one.

When Kapuscinki tells how the edition of the Herodotus’ translation in Polish was postponed by the death of Stalin, I suddenly see my own Dad. He sits at the head of a long table, as usual reading after dinner the (catholic) newspaper. All of a sudden he puts the paper down and says ‘Stalin is dead.’ Nobody at the table says anything. Nobody asks a question. I was fourteen years old – too young to realize what this meant. He was a tyrant, a Greek word for a despot who freely decides about life and death. Like Kapuscinki, two years later I start reading Herodotus, in my case just fragments. I still remember his style, they tell.., they say.., it is said..,  I heard.., I do not believe, but… This style of writing made him truthful in my view. It often promised a sudden change in the story.

Telling about his life as a reporter in  India, China and Africa, Kapuscinki interweaves his daily hardships with the remarkable and at times gruesome stories of Herodotus about the world of the Persians and the Greek and the Phoenicians of  2.500 years ago. He praises Herodotus as the first global reporter who is really interested in the affairs of the whole world of those days. The mix of his own adventures and the stories of Herodotus blot out the distance in time and space and bring the past and presence together as if no technologies have changed the surface of earth or the nature of society. In particular his tireless questioning of Herodotus’ stories transforms history  into actual happening. Kapuscinski wants to know what Herodotus leaves open by lack of information or as a  stand in for the reader to explore his stories about animals, plants and people. About men and women, kings and queens, commanders and soldiers, traditions and customs, cities and architecture, nature and landscape, war and weapons, tricks and lies, illnesses, food and drinks.

Always Kapuscinsky comes up with original questions and remarks about the reasons, motifs, the place and the circumstances, the norms and values, the pain and the hardships. Always he wants to know why and if it is really true or just another story. Never he is fully satisfied with the information or explanation, always he is asking for more. However, it never disrupts or slows down his own story. It is the place of his human interest and his imagination. It adds a  philosophical and practical dimension to the histories and a Socratic approach to life of the individual and the community. Herodotus becomes the steady companion of Kapuscinski where ever he may be during his travels. He calms him down, provides him a background, pushes him to ask questions and supports him when he travels around the world. Herodotus is his buddy, the book nearly always at hand. Sometimes the Histories bypass  the reality of Kapuscinki’s traveling, solve his practical problems by forgetting them, push the troubles of his own life out of sight. Kapuscinski and Herodotus become close, so close that occasionally the reader forgets who is talking about whom. Herodotus is the protagonist of the travels, leaving Kapuscinski behind in his rocking chair on a terrace at the seaside. It is a permanent metamorphosis of Kapuscinski and Herodotus, who trade places and alter into the main story teller. Facts are the basic material, but the witnesses make the story.

And the reader discovers the world has not changed at all. It is still as inhumane, strange, cruel, divers, absurd and merciless as it has been more than 2,500 years ago. It is remarkable to notice we still digest these histories of raging wars and bloody revenge despite their often despicable and gruesome character. I think, only authors as Herodotus and Kapuscinski are able to protect us against  the repulsiveness of  this reality. They know how to alternate on time the bad and the good and the ugly of mankind. As intelligent and honest observers they know how our curiosity doesn’t stop and that we want more even when the story takes a bad turn.. Both authors show an open mind to the world around them, they possess a certain childish naivety and innocence as if what they tell us is true and maybe untrue at the same time. Curiosity breeds science and fables. These authors are both deeply involved in their observations of people and things and friendly listen to the stories. Both  writers behave as guests, Kapuscinki says, in order to get the best and at times the most fantastic stories. Friendliness and politeness are the human virtues to honor your host, who likes to tell his tales and show his hospitality. Silently, both of them invite you as reader to sit next to them and to listen and if necessary to ask questions. That is the moment you do not know  if you are Kapuscinski or Herodotus. They, however, know you and involve you in their telling as if you are the storyteller. You travel with them as a companion. And if you are not there – for a moment - you do not have to apologize. When you come back, they nod and continue their stories.

After all, I see how  Herodotus and Kapuscinki in a way share a historic world split up in two parts, East and West, dominated by two different ideologies of brutal power and a desire for freedom. This is the over arching mind set of both authors, who travel around on the world stage in order to show how outside the circle of the pitiless power struggle, the world is distinct, divers and worthwhile to talk about and to remember. It makes it understandable why and how  Kapuscinki felt akin to Herodotus and his world. Despite all this, Herodotus remains enigmatic, his stories are the tales of witnesses.

A final remark. In the year of 2000, I wrote a booklet, entitled ‘With the Hat shading the Light.’ It is about my travels to Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. (The title is borrowed from the wajang game and a meeting with a farmer far off in a rice field under the blazing sunlight.) As a companion of my travels I had chosen the Japanese haiku poet Bashõ, who lived in the seventeenth century. At times I read in his  haiban book Travels to the North and practiced – at least I tried to – the art of haiku writing. Bashõ was a supporting guide although he never traveled in Indonesia. He helped me to meditate on my daily experiences and to love these moments of intense life in the tropics. I felt close to him like Kapuscinki to Herodotus. The title of my booklet curiously corresponds with that of the last chapter of Kapuscinki’s book ‘We stand in the Dark encircled by the Light.’