What Ryszard Kapuscinski airbrushed out of his bestselling book

I once found myself on a lonely road in southern Ethiopia with the famous Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski. We were travelling through bandit country when we got a puncture. We had a rendezvous at a bush airstrip with an aircraft that had to take off before night closed in. It turned out Ryszard had no clue about changing tyres and, whereas I was quite happy to break open the beers and sleep in a ditch, he fretted about missing tea with the lady relatives of Emperor Haile Selassie back in Addis Ababa. I realised he was scared. We fixed the puncture and reached the flight in time — but later, when Kapuscinski wrote about this trip in his bestseller The Shadow of the Sun, he made it seem as though he was the only one to get scoops — and airbrushed from the story that puncture, his travelling companions and his fit about missing his tea with the Lion of Judah’s family.