The Other by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Author:Ryszard Kapuscinski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

MY OTHER

The theme of the ‘Stranger’ or ‘Other’ has obsessed and fascinated me for a very long time. In 1956 I made my first long journey outside Europe (to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan), and from that moment to the present day I have been concerned with Third World issues, and thus with Asia, Africa and Latin America (though the term ‘Third World’ could also cover a considerable part of Europe and Oceania). I have spent most of my professional life in these parts, travelling and writing about the local people and their affairs.

I mention all this because here I would like to sketch — of necessity briefly — not a portrait of the Other in general, in abstraction, but a picture of my Other, the one I have met in native Indian villages in Bolivia, among nomads in the Sahara, or in the crowds bewailing the death of Khomeini on the streets of Teheran.

What is his world outlook, his view of the world, his view of Others — his view of me, for example? After all, not only is he an Other for me, I am an Other for him too.

The first thing one notices is my Other’s sensitivity to colour, skin colour. Colour takes top place on the scale according to which he will divide and judge people. You can live your whole life without thinking, without wondering about the fact that you are black, yellow or white, until you cross the border of your own racial zone. At once there is tension, at once we feel like Others surrounded by other Others. How often in Uganda I was touched by children who went on looking at their fingers for a long time after to see if they had gone white! The same mechanism, or reflex even, of identifying and judging according to skin colour also used to work inside me. In the Cold War years, when there was an inexorable ideological division in force between East and West, demanding of people on both sides of the Iron Curtain a mutual dislike, or even hatred — as a correspondent from an Eastern bloc country somewhere out in the jungle of Zaire, I would happily throw myself into the embrace of someone from the West, and thus my ‘class enemy’, an ‘imperialist’, because that ‘devious exploiter’ and ‘warmonger’ was simply and above all white. Must I add how greatly ashamed I was of this weakness, but that at the same time I did not know how to resist it?

The second component of my Other’s world outlook will be nationalism. As the American professor John Lukacs so aptly observed not long ago, at the close of the twentieth century nationalism proved to be the strongest of all the ‘isms’ known to contemporary man. Sometimes this nationalism has a paradoxical nature, for instance when it appears in those African countries where there are not yet any nations. There are no nations, but there is nationalism (or, as some sociologists maintain, sub-nationalism). The

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