Those still alive pack up all their belongings and leave the city in panic. Among their packed possessions, the reporter saw items that are of little to no use, such as artificial flowers. The wealth status of the runaways is determined by the size of the boxes: the big ones, owned by the richest, were the size of summer cottages and built of solid wood; the smaller boxes, haphazardly constructed from plywood, scraps of lumber, and sheet metal owned by the poor, resembled the shacks of slums.
And now the wooden city was sailing on an Atlantic swept by violent, gale-driven waves. Somewhere on the ocean a partition of the city occurred and one section, the largest, sailed to Lisbon, the second to Rio de Janeiro, and the third to Cape Town. Each of these sections reached its haven safely. I know this from various sources.
As a writer, Kapuściński inevitably reflected on the fate of unneeded bookstores. Before leaving for the front, the soldiers bought up pornographic magazines, leaving behind piles of masterpieces mixed with second-rate literature. This is why ‘those who dabble in literature can receive an important lesson in humility here’.
Kapuściński, the author of a series of lectures published under the telling title Cynics Are Not Suitable for This Job, wrote about simple people thrashed around by the winds of history and thrown into hopeless situations against their will. He was a witness to such events many times – for example, during the interrogation of armed Angolan adolescents seized by an opposing military formation.
The next prisoner looks twelve. He says he’s sixteen. He knows it is shameful to fight for the FNLA, but they told him that if he went to the front they would send him to school afterward. He wants to finish school because he wants to paint. If he could get paper and a pencil he could draw something right now. He could do a portrait. He also knows how to sculpt and would like to show his sculptures, which he left in Carmona. He has put his whole life into it and would like to study, and they told him that he will, if he goes to the front first. He knows how it works – in order to paint you must first kill people, but he hasn’t killed anyone.
That is very probable because the tactical capabilities of an average Angolan were limited attempts at chasing off the enemy by exchanging fire to scare them off with endless shooting, because ‘he does not want to harm the opponent, he wants to kill his own fear[1] ’.
Similar ordeals were shared by war correspondents detained at the checkpoints of the ever-changing front. When a reporter’s life or death could depend on a single word, it all came down to intuition – the followers of Agostino Neto reacted positively to ‘Camarada!’, while the constables of Holden Roberto and Jonas Savimbi were in favour of ‘Irmão!’ (‘Brother!’).
The point is that both sides of the conflict were dressed in almost identical uniforms, equally ragged, without any indication of affiliation with a given formation. In this case, a mistake meant only one thing – digging your own grave. However, unlike the majority of journalists of many affiliations and orientations, Kapuściński did not steer away from this extreme risk. Thanks to this, he was able to be at the very centre of the events transpiring on the front, which made his unique correspondence much sought after.
Not everyone had as much persistence and luck as the Polish correspondent. People from MPLA granted him security which pushed even the faint-hearted Lisbon TV crew to take the risk of travelling to the conflict’s epicentre.
