| | Just before the Wall came down in East Europe, a handful of ROAPE editors were invited to a still unreformed Poland to a conference on Africa. The Poles we met - and there were some serious Africanists - would always get around to asking with suitable patriotic pride whether we knew their best known writer on Africa, Kapuscinski. We certainly knew his writings and mentioned how impressive was his short book, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat. This was a study compiled in the immediate aftermath of Emperor Haile Selassie's overthrow in 1975 by long conversations with the middle-level of palace officials, who had not been detained. From this Kapuscinski pieced together a remarkable insight into how this semi-illiterate old man managed to rule the large, disparate territory, and to keep power-holders in the regions and in separate departments loyal to him - a wonderful and evocative glimpse of how secret power worked. Imagine our surprise when our Polish friends agreed that it was a real revelation about the realities of autocratic power - 'the most revealing book on current Polish politics'. They saw his book about Ethiopia as an allegory of autocracy in Poland! So Kapuscinski deserved double respect for this study. |
