33
At the beginning of the 1960s Africa was a fascinating world. I wrote volumes about it (I haven’t mentioned that the press agencies insist on a correspondent’s writing and writing, without pause, without stopping for breath — I don’t want to say without thinking, even though such a prospect is also possible from time to time — that they demand constant telexes, dispatches, some by post or with returning travellers, an unending stream of information, commentary, reporting, opinions and evaluations, because only when the folios full of his collected correspondence are breaking at the seams and spilling out of the cabinets back at the home office can he count on their saying approvingly: That one’s all right. He’s really good). I too wrote volumes of information and commentary, of which not a trace remains. But our job is like a baker’s work — his rolls are tasty as long as they’re fresh; after two days they’re stale; after a week they’re covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out.
34
Some time after sending the ‘Burning Roadblocks’ piece to Warsaw, I received a telegram from my boss Michal Hofman, then the managing editor of the Polish Press Agency. ‘I kindly request,’ I read in the telegram, ‘that once and for all you put an end to these exploits that could end in tragedy.’ The once and for all referred to previous predicaments that I really might not have been able to get out of. My boss treated me with patience and understanding. He tolerated my adventures and my pathological lack of discipline. At my most irresponsible I would suddenly break contact with Warsaw without having told them my plans and would disappear without a trace: throw myself into the jungle, float down the Niger in a dugout, wander through the Sahara with nomads. The main office, not knowing what had happened or how to look for me, would, as a last resort, send telegrams to various embassies. Once, when I showed up in Bamako, our embassy there showed me a telegramme: ‘Should Kapuściński happen to show up in your territory, please inform PAP through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.’
35
In Lagos, when I was ill, I read through Tristes Tropiques. Claude Lévi-Strauss has been staying in the Brazilian jungles, carrying out ethnographic research among the Indian tribes. He is running into difficulties and resistance from the Indians; he is discouraged and exhausted.
Above all, he asks himself questions: Why has he come here? With what hopes or what objectives? Is this a normal occupation like any other profession, the only difference being that the office or laboratory is separated from the practitioner’s home by a distance of several thousand kilometres? Or does it result from a more radical choice, which implies that the anthropologist is calling into question the system in which he was born and brought up? It was now nearly five years since I had left France and interrupted my university career. Meanwhile, the more prudent of my former colleagues were beginning to climb the academic ladder: those with political leanings, such as I had once had, were already members of parliament and would soon be ministers. And here was I, trekking across desert wastes in pursuit of a few pathetic human remnants. By whom or by what had I been impelled to disrupt the normal course of my existence? Was it a trick on my part, a clever diversion, which would allow me to resume my career with additional advantages for which I would be given credit? Or did my decision express a deep-seated incompatibility with my social setting so that, whatever happened, I would inevitably live in a state of ever greater estrangement from it? Through a remarkable paradox, my life of adventure, instead of opening up a new world to me, had the effect rather of bringing me back to the old one, and the world I had been looking for disintegrated in my grasp. Just as, once they were in my power, the men and the landscapes I had set out to conquer lost the significance I had hoped they would have for me, so for these disappointing yet present images, other images were substituted which had been held in reserve by my past and had seemed of no particular importance when they still belonged to the reality surrounding me. Travelling through regions upon which few eyes had gazed, sharing the existence of communities whose poverty was the price — paid in the first instance by them — for my being able to go back thousands of years in time, I was no longer fully aware of either world. What came to me were fleeting visions of the French countryside I had cut myself off from, or snatches of music and poetry which were the most conventional expressions of a culture which I must convince myself I had renounced, if I were not to belie the direction I had given to my life. On the plateau of the western Mato Grosso, I had been haunted for weeks, not by the things that lay all around me and that I would never see again, but by a hackneyed melody, weakened still further by the deficiencies of my memory — the melody of Chopin’s Etude no. 3, opus 10, which, by a bitterly ironical twist of which I was well aware, now seemed to epitomize all I had left behind.
36
Consent for my return home arrived and I went from Lagos straight to a hospital bed on Plocka Street. In the small, suffocatingly, overcrowded ward lay perhaps fifteen people, two of whom died before my eyes. The rest snored, moaned, argued or went on and on about the war. The window looked out on a lifeless courtyard bordered by the wall of the morgue, a grey muslin sky in which the sun never appeared and a bare tree that looked like a broom handle that a janitor had stuck in snow before wandering off for a vodka. Even so, I liked it there.
37
I returned to the editorial offices (it was the beginning of 1967) but had no idea of what to do. I felt smashed inside, shattered; I wasn’t suited for anything; I wasn’t in touch; I wasn’t there. I did not regard my stay in Africa as merely a job. I had gone there after years of having to function as a cog in a complex mechanism of instructions and commands, theses and guidelines, and Africa had been, for me, liberation, where — between 37°21′ and 34°52′ latitude and 17°32′ and 51°23′ longitude, between Rass Ben Sekka in the north and Needle Point in the south, between Capo Almadi in the west and Raas Xaafun in the east — I had left part of myself behind. Africa was a film that kept playing, an unbroken loop, non-stop, in show after show, but nobody around me cared about what was happening in my cinema. People were talking about who had taken whose place in Koszalin, or arguing about some television programme in which Cwiklińska had been first-rate, although others said she hadn’t been, or giving each other merry advice about how you can travel to Bulgaria for a holiday inexpensively and actually make money as well. I didn’t know the man who had gone to Koszalin, I hadn’t seen that programme on television and I had never been in Bulgaria. The worst thing was the acquaintances I would run into on the street who would begin by saying, ‘What are you doing here?’ Or, ‘Haven’t you left yet?’ I understood: they did not regard me as one of their own. Life was going on and they were swimming in its current. Talking about something, arranging something, cooking something up, but I didn’t know what, they weren’t telling me, they weren’t expecting me to go along with them; they weren’t trying to win me over. I was an outsider.