Joseph Conrad believed that Catholic, Western-oriented Poland was
historically destined to be a mediator between the civilization of
Europe and the barbaric hordes of Asiatic Russia. In a similar fashion,
the Polish-born Ryszard Kapuscinski is ideally suited to mediate between
the First World of the West and the Third World countries of Africa.
Free from colonial guilt and contrition, he told his African friends:
“You were colonized? We, Poles, were also! For one hundred and thirty
years [1772–1918] we were the colony of three foreign powers. White ones, too.”

Like a hunter pursuing a wounded animal, he has followed the trail of
blood through Africa. Frequently risking death, he’s attacked by giant
roaches; is threatened by a cobra that can’t be crushed by a huge, sharp
canister; suffers tuberculosis and cerebral malaria; is ambushed in
northern Uganda; and nearly perishes of thirst when his truck breaks
down in the Mauritanian desert. Like Walt Whitman, he can say: “I am
the man, I suffered, I was there.”

Kapuscinski explains that “the epoch of the fifties and sixties
[was] full of promise and hope.” But in the mid-Seventies Africa
“entered its two darkest decades. Civil wars, revolts, coups
d’état, massacres, and hunger” ravaged and destroyed the
continent. In 1964, on the first of my three trips to Africa
during that optimistic decade, Africans were friendly rather than
hostile to whites, the colonial infrastructure had not decayed,
cities were safe, wildlife was protected. Islam was quiescent
rather than fanatical, AIDS