Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died in January, was a giant among foreign correspondents. As Poland's man in Asia, Latin America and Africa, he befriended Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba, witnessed 27 coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times. He was a perennial favourite for the Nobel, a unique figure who raised journalism to the level of art. He also moonlighted as a spy - which raises some uncomfortable questions.
Though reporters as spooks have been around since the Crimean War, the righteous indignation that's greeted this revelation about Kapuscinski smacks of score settling, neglecting a crucial point: most Eastern European journalists were coerced into espionage. It was a given that Izvestia hacks were the eyes and ears of the KGB; why would reporters from the rest of the Eastern Bloc act any differently? The archives show that Kapuscinski's reports were perfunctory at best; he harmed no one. By the time The Emperor appeared in 1972 - his book on Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, widely seen as a thinly
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veiled attack on Poland's Stalinist regime - he was his own man, going so far as to openly support Solidarity in the early Eighties.
Wags have noted that the 'Father of History' is also known as the 'Father of Lies'; Herodotus was an outlandish storyteller, the first great traveller-reporter. True; but would Kapuscinski be as memorable a writer if his editor had handed him a copy of Thucydides? In Travels with Herodotus (Penguin/Allen Lane, £20) the young, proletarian-clad Pole feels out of place in voluptuous Rome, overwhelmed by China and India, at home in Africa. There he hears Louis Armstrong in Khartoum, explores the slave port of Dar-es-Salaam, wanders the casbah of Algiers. Wherever he's sent, Kapuscinski makes telling connections between his time and his guide's, the period of the Persian War.
In the last chapter, Kapuscinski arrives full circle, in Halicarnassus, Herodotus's birthplace, bathed in sunlight, his journey at an end but still searching. Wonderful. 
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FIRST POSTED JUNE 21, 2007
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