Lessons from the father of lies

Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in January this year, was a literary-minded reporter. As the Polish Press Agency’s only foreign correspondent for most of the 1960s and 1970s, he would prepare for his journeys to Africa, Asia and the Americas by reading extensively. Later, he used his exotic experiences as material for what might best be described as literary journalism. He wrote beautifully phrased books on, among other things, the Iranian revolution (Shah of Shahs) and the court of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie (The Emperor), using these topics to construct anti-authoritarian allegories that passed unnoticed by the censors in Poland. But in writing these stories with the assumed authority of a foreign correspondent, he has been accused of factual inaccuracy. Travels with Herodotus, his last book, seeks to answer these accusations obliquely, and to describe his journalistic motivations and methods. It is Kapuscinski’s apologia and epilogue.

Kapuscinski spent the majority of his life on the road.