The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Author:Ryszard Kapuscinski [Kapuściński, Ryszard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5110-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

From this revolt in Dahomey I drove straight into the fires of the civil war that had been going on in western Nigeria since October. On the road from the Dahomey-Nigeria border to Lagos: barriers, police, troops, searches, checkpoints. Burned cars in the ditches. Burned huts in the villages. Army patrols in trucks. This war was hopeless and absurd, with no end in sight. Hundreds of people had already died, hundreds of houses had been burned and great sums of money wasted.

In the course of one month I had driven through five countries. In four of them, there were states of emergency. In one, the president had just been overthrown; in a second, the president had saved himself only by chance; in a third, the head of government was afraid to leave his house, which was surrounded by troops. Two parliaments had been dissolved. Two governments had fallen. Scores of political activists had been arrested. Scores of people had been killed in political conflicts.

Over a distance of 520 kilometres, I had been checked twenty-one times and subjected to four body searches. Everywhere there was an atmosphere of tension, everywhere the smell of gunpowder.

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