Photo from Agata Pyzik.

Known for his front seat to history, Ryszard Kapuscinski witnessed 27 revolutions and evaded four death sentences during his years working for the national Polish news agency. His method of survival: “I made myself seem not worth the bullet.” There is a basic humanity (and humility) within Kapuscinski’s writings that comes perhaps from his experiencing hard times—as a boy in communist Poland he often went without shoes—or from the fact that his limited budget as a young reporter forced him to get from assignment to assignment in “a hay cart or on a rickety bus.”

Kapuscinski, who died in 2007, gained fame largely through writing about Africa and the countries of the developing world. Most know The Emperor, about Ethiopian dictator Haile Salassie’s downfall, Shah of Shahs, about the Iranian Revolution, and Another Day of Life, about the Angolan Civil War. His distinctive style uses allegory, even tinges of magic realism, with the awestruck quality of a new traveler.

His fresh approach might have its roots in his Communist Poland upbringing, in a closed country where crossing a border he had likened to a “mystical and transcendental act.” In his story “The Open World,” about his first assignment abroad (and a great entry into his work), he writes of descending into Rome at night on his way to India: “I had the impression of a liquid substance, like molten lava, glimmering down below, a sparkling substance that pulsated with brightness.”

In the same story, his descriptions subtly render India’s caste system: street sleepers awakening and servants busying themselves in a Raja’s palace:

In their ardent compliance, in their submissive humility, there was something apologetic, as if sleeping here on the road were some crime whose traces they were quickly trying to erase.

All of them moved about in silence, fluidly, cautiously, giving a slightly fearful impression…. It was as if a Bengal tiger were circling around somewhere…