The legacy of Ryszard Kapuscinski

The Spanish writer and journalist Alfonso Armada praises the political engagement of Ryszard Kapuscinski. "He was not a Communist, but his writing contains the profound moral indignation provoked by injustice. This was neither the sorrow nor the pity that accompanies the Eurocentric paternalism that Kapuscinski so disdained. ... It came from the same fundamental quality that allowed him a sort of mimetic relationship with the subjects he treated. This quality led him to continually return to the same little hotel in Accra, far from the splendour of power and hordes of colleagues who pounce on subjects as if hunting hounds before then abandoning their prey. Kapuscinski stayed on when everyone else had left. He stayed around for the time when stories really begin, when crimes are committed without witnesses, when victims die in silence, in the oblivion constructed for our comfort and maintained by the subject that interests us most: ourselves."

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