From Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life, by Artur Domoslawski (Verso, 2012) Kindle pp. 115-117:
I turned to a reporter friend who writes about the Czech Republic to ask how and where to look, and whether such an account did actually exist. He helped me get in touch with Jaroslav Bouček, son of the late ‘commander’ of the Congolese expedition, and this led me to a radically different story from the one presented in The Soccer War.
It turned out that Bouček Jr had written an essay titled ‘In Deepest Congo’. In it, he compares Kapuściński’s account with his father’s, which he found in the National Archive in Prague, along with his Cairo diary, his letters and dispatches.
Jaroslav Bouček wonders if Kapuściński’s expressive depiction of the dangerous journey to Congo, compared with the ‘civilian’ mood of Bouček’s account, arose from the fact that it was the first time Kapuściński had ever found himself in the dramatic situation of civil war in an African country, and so he took the verbal threats addressed to the ‘suspicious foreigners’ quite literally. As a reporter, Jarda Bouček, on the other hand, was a veteran of several armed conflicts, and ‘verbal threats did not throw him off balance to that extent’.
From Bouček’s account it emerges that the journalists certainly did not have to leave Stanleyville for fear of losing their lives because of impetuous mob law imposed by Africans on whites. The Czechoslovak reporter’s son writes:
Before leaving for Congo, Bouček wrote to his editors that he would be able to stay in Stanleyville for about a month, and then he would have to come back to buy medicine, which in view of some chronic ailments he could not do without. His exit visa from Congo was signed by Louis Lumumba, brother of the murdered prime minister; before his departure, Bouček had arranged a return visa, as he foresaw that he would go back to Congo again.
According to Bouček’s account, the reporters left Congo because their money had run out, they weren’t sure if their dispatches were getting through, and an opportunity had presented itself in the form of a UN plane flying to Burundi. Bouček challenges Kapuściński’s account of the UN staff ’s alleged reluctance to help their group; unlike Kapuściński, he claims they knew from the start that they were flying to Usumbura. Bouček Jr again:
Writing further about how the Belgians were determined to kill them all, [Kapuściński] probably let himself be excessively frightened by the bravado-filled utterances of some young Belgian officers who cast swaggering remarks in their direction, such as, ‘Best shoot these journalists right away!’
In no instance did Bouček feel fear that the Belgians were planning to kill them. Usumbura was a civilian airport; in addition to the soldiers, the civilian airport staff was there too, as well as some customs officers, pilots and stewardesses from Sabena airlines, and passengers who would have involuntarily been witnesses to such a crime.
But above all – what sense would it have made for the Belgians to put to death five journalists who were officially accredited by the UN?
The younger Bouček sums up the situation by saying that ‘the expedition to Congo did not shake’ his father ‘in the least’.
Many of Kapuściński’s friends and acquaintances think he was a catastrophist, in the sense that he could blow up small incidents to unimaginable proportions and present ordinary fears as the end of the world.
‘I divided everything he said by at least two,’ says Adam Daniel Rotfeld, smiling.
The words of one of his friends come back to me – Kapuściński created his own courage in literature; he knew he was different.
Part of the legend of Kapuściński the reporter is based on the several times he avoided execution by firing squad. We know about all those incidents from him alone. In Bolivia, as he tells us, he was saved by a chauffeur who managed to intoxicate the officer who apparently wanted to shoot Kapuściński as a communist spy. In another of his accounts, after a coup in Ghana they wanted to shoot him as a spy working for Kwame Nkrumah, who had just been deposed.
He was also reportedly sentenced to be shot dead in Usumbura at the end of the Congolese expedition, after being locked up in a barred room at the airport along with the Czechoslovak and Soviet journalists. In a 1978 interview with Wojciech Giełżyński, he refers to ‘when I was in prison in Usumbura sentenced to be shot’. ‘I had a death sentence, I escaped shooting by a miracle,’ he says of this incident in another interview, also from the 1970s.
Far Outliers 