The direct cause of his becoming a foreign correspondent was a reportage he wrote in 1955 about the most famous communist investment in Poland, Nowa Huta. Criticism was then, for a short time, allowed, so the young writer got his first award for the reportage but, not to cause trouble at home, he was sent abroad. During his first trip abroad in 1956 he visited India, Afghanistan and Pakistan; in the next year he went to China and Japan. In those times Poland suffered a retreat from relative freedom of 1956 and “Sztandar Młodych” was closed. Kapuściński returned to Poland, spent some time in the Polish Press Agency, PAP, and started to work as a reporter for one of Polish weekly magazines, “Polityka”. For the subsequent four years he was writing about home affairs, gradually blurring the border between reportage and literature.
The 1960s opened a new epoch of decolonisation and Kapuściński was there to observe and describe it. No journalists from socialist countries were at that time allowed in Kongo but he forced his way trough the jungle to see the war and anarchy there. After his return he wrote that the socialist government in Kongo had no chance of surviving the rebellion; as a result he was sent back to writing about Poland, for he “did not comprehend the Marxist-Leninist processes happening in Africa”, as one of communist officials put it.