The New York Review Abroad (30 page)

It has always been this way: there were leaders who sacrificed themselves for a cause and paid dearly; and then, at the crucial moment, those millions who didn’t seem to be on any side supported the just one.

What am I doing?

On August 30, 1980, a Sunday, Cardinal Wyszynski sent a message through a priest asking me to go to the Warsaw Steel Mill, where a strike was in progress in solidarity with the striking shipyard workers. I said mass. I lived through the disorders with the steel workers. I heard confessions from people who, exhausted beyond the limits of endurance, kneeled on the pavement. These people understood that they were strong in unity with God, with the Church.

I suddenly felt the need to remain with them. Whenever I’m about to undertake something, I either decide not to do so at all, or I take it very seriously, and put my heart into it. I stayed with these people. I was with them at the time of triumph, and for this they are grateful to me. I was with them during the black December night. During the trials, I went with their families to the courtroom. I sat in the front rows, and the accused saw that their families were being taken care
of. They wrote me letters saying that they knew about my prayers for them, and that these prayers gave them strength.

Many people have since passed through this house, the church. My monthly mass for the country and for those who suffer for it has become one such meeting place. The masses have become very popular. In my sermons I speak about what people think and what they tell me in private, for often they lack the courage or the means to speak publicly. I speak out whenever I discern in their words a truth I think others should share. This truth-saying in church makes people trust me. I express what they feel and think. The numerous renewals of faith bear witness to how important this is. After many years, decades sometimes, people suddenly have the courage to come to me and ask to be reconciled with God, for confession, for holy communion. It is a wonderful experience for me as a priest, and for those people also. They didn’t dare go to anyone else. Very often the process of conversion, the return to God, to the Church, or simply the discovery of God, begins when someone takes a patriotic stand. Many paths lead to God.

I receive many letters from people saying that these monthly masses for Poland help them live in hope, help them cleanse themselves of the hatred which, despite all, grows in them. This is a great reward for a priest, who really has no life of his own.

The authorities, trying to suppress me, have often attempted to exert pressure on the curia, on the bishops. They have sent letters charging me with various trespasses, often fabricated. I remember a letter in May—signed, incidentally, by a general of the militia—stating that on May 13 I conducted mass in the Church of the Holy Cross and used certain formulations ill becoming the dignity of the temple. But on the evening of May 13 I was sitting in my own church, in the confessional; I have never in my entire life said mass in the Church of
the Holy Cross. If the bishop doesn’t yet have the facts, why not burden the priest with more charges, to finally get him?

Recently the prosecutor’s office published an item in its own internal paper saying that it had begun an investigation of me on the grounds that I abuse my freedom of conscience and of belief.

How can one abuse freedom of conscience? One can limit freedom of conscience, but one cannot abuse it. That is why these accusations are nonsense, but of course I realize that for the truth one must suffer. If people who have families, children, responsibilities, were in prisons, and still suffer—why should not I, a priest, add my suffering to theirs? Because of this they bully me. There have been certain attempts, very crude ones, and no doubt they will continue. For example: At two o’clock in the morning of December 14, after I had already gone to bed, dead tired, the doorbell rang. I didn’t get up. Moments later, an explosion. A brick with explosives had been hurled into the apartment, breaking two windows. I’ve had two sham burglaries. I am under constant surveillance. On my way to Gdansk I was stopped and detained eight hours in a police station outside Warsaw. The driver was detained fifty hours. These are all very gross tactics, but there are larger matters at stake, and I am convinced that what I am doing is right. And that is why I am prepared for anything.

Translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska

—December 6, 1984

Ryszard Kapuściński

Note:
Speaking in April at a rally in Soweto, Winnie Mandela was reported as saying, “Together, hand in hand, with our matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.”
^*
In South Africa “necklaces” is the word used for tires filled with gasoline that are placed around the necks of collaborators and traitors to the cause of liberation, who are then doused with more gasoline and set on fire. Mrs. Mandela later said the press had distorted her speech and she repudiated the statement. But this kind of punishment and this kind of death have been practiced in South Africa for some time, to the horror of some and as a warning to others. Black policemen in flames in South Africa, like witches burning at the stake in Europe, and later, during World War II, Jews set on fire by Nazis in Warsaw and Bialystok, are victims of the same cruel myth, a belief deeply rooted among all fanatics, that fire is not only punishment but the only true purification—that all evil, if one wants to be really rid of it, has to be burned out in an absolutely literal sense.

The vision of fire as the highest agent of punishment and condemnation appears in many faiths and religions. It is one of the most suggestive images of the Apocalypse, a horrible sight, which from childhood admonishes us against temptation and sin—or else we will be hurled into the eternal flames of hell. But there is yet another, “educational,” side of this phenomenon, well known to those who, by putting their opponents to the torch, treat suffering as a spectacle: by passively observing a man being burned alive we indirectly become participants in the crime, take part in it, have implicated ourselves.

What it feels like during the moments before one is set on fire I experienced myself when I was reporting on the first civil war in Nigeria in 1966 (the second war, which erupted soon thereafter, was over Biafra). The conflict I describe here touched off a series of internal
clashes, coups, and upheavals in this most heavily populated of the African countries. They continue to this day and in two decades have claimed more than one million victims and caused enormous destruction. During the past twenty years only one Nigerian government came to power through elections (in 1979, the government of Shehu Shagari, now deposed). At all the other times, those who gained power gained it through coups (1966—Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi; 1966—Colonel [later General] Yakubu Gowon; 1975—Brigadier Murtala Muhammad; 1976—Lieutenant General Olusegun Obasanjo; 1983—Major General Muhammadu Buhari; 1985—Major General Ibrahim Babangida).

Most often these takeovers of power are bloody, and those who stage them either perish themselves soon thereafter at the hands of rivals (as did Aguiyi-Ironsi and Murtala Muhammad), or end up in exile (as has General Gowon). Over the last quarter-century the Nigerian officer corps, rent by tribal and political conflicts, obsessed by an implacable struggle for power, has been decimating itself at such a rate that few of those officers who were in the army when Nigeria gained independence in 1960 are alive today. Whoever wants to understand the history of those battles and the tensions and passions behind them should read Shakespeare’s plays, and keep in his mind’s eye the royal throne constantly dripping with blood.

Translated by Klara Glowczewska

JANUARY
1966.
IN
Nigeria a civil war is going on. I am a correspondent in that war. On a cloudy day I leave Lagos. In the outskirts police are stopping all cars. They are searching the trunks, looking for weapons. They rip open sacks of corn: Could there be ammunition in that corn?

Authority ends at the city limits.

Now the road leads through a green countryside of low hills covered with close, thick bush. This is a laterite road, rust colored, with a treacherous uneven surface.

These hills, this road, and these villages along the road are the country of the Yorubas, who inhabit southwestern Nigeria. They constitute one fourth of Nigeria’s population. The heaven of the Yorubas is full of gods and their earth full of kings. The greatest god is called Oduduwa and he lives on high, higher than the stars, even higher than the sun. The kings, on the other hand, live close to the people. In every city and every village there is a king. The Yorubas are proud of this—they look down on the rest of the world, because no other nation has so many kings.

In 1962 the Yorubas split into two camps. The overwhelming majority belongs to the UPGA party; an insignificant minority belongs to the NNDP party. Thanks to the trickery of the Nigerian central government, the minority party rules the Yorubas’ province. The central government, which is dominated by the NPC (National People’s Congress) from the north, prefers a minority government in the province as a means of more easily controlling the Yorubas and curbing their separatist ambitions. In this situation the party of the majority—the UPGA—found itself in opposition. The deceived and embittered majority went on the warpath. In the fall of 1965 there were elections in the Yorubas’ province. It was obvious that the majority party, UPGA won. Nevertheless, the central government ignored the results and the mood of the Yorubas and announced the victory of the puppet NNDP, which went on to form a government. In protests against the official election results, the majority created a government of its own. For a time there were two governments. The members of the majority government were imprisoned in the end. At that point the UPGA launched an open war against the minority government.

And so we have misfortune, we have a war. It is an unjust, dirty, hooliganish war in which all methods are allowed—whatever it takes to knock out the opponent and gain control. This war needs a lot of fire so houses are burning, plantations are burning, and charred bodies lie in the streets and along the roads.

The whole land of the Yorubas is in flames.

I am driving along a road where they say no white man can come back alive. I am driving to see if a white man can, because I have to experience everything for myself. I know that a man shudders in the forest when he passes close to a lion. I got close to a lion so that I would know how it feels. I had to do it myself because I knew no one could describe it to me. And I cannot describe it myself. Nor can I describe a night in the Sahara. The stars over the Sahara are enormous. They sway above the sand like great chandeliers. The light of those stars is green. Night in the Sahara is as green as a Mazowsze meadow in Poland.

I might see the Sahara again and I might see the road that carried me through Yoruba country again. I drove that road up a hill and when I got to the crest I could see the first flaming roadblock down below.

It was too late to turn back.

Burning logs blocked the road. There was a big bonfire in the middle of the road. I slowed down, and then stopped, because it was impossible to keep going. I could see fifteen or twenty young people. Some of them had shotguns, some were holding knives, and the rest were armed with machetes. They were all dressed alike, in blue shirts with white sleeves. Those were the colors of the opposition, of the UPGA. On their heads they wore black and white caps with the letters UPGA. They had pictures of Chief Awolowo pinned to their shirts. Chief Awolowo was the leader of the opposition, the idol of
the party.

I was in the hands of UPGA activists. They must have been smoking hashish because their eyes were unconscious, mad. They were soaked in sweat, possessed, berserk.