In 1962 he came back to PAP and was nominated as the first Polish permanent correspondent in Africa. It was his duty to visit places where something remarkable was happening, which then meant virtually the whole continent. His career was interrupted in 1967 by tuberculosis and meningitis; having narrowly escaped death Kapuściński had to be hospitalised in Warsaw. This, however, did not stop his travels: in 1967 he visited Caucasus, then spent five years as a correspondent in Latin America, in 1974 he went to Angola, in late 1970s visited i.e. Ethiopia and Iran, in 1989 travelled through the collapsing USSR.
It was not, however, the number of places he had been to and dangers he had faced that made him recognisable at first and famous later but the way he described everything he had seen. Facts had never been of paramount importance to him; he wanted to look deep into the problem he came across and reach the essence. It was not the just transparent reporting of events; in all his books one can also find the image of the author: often terrified of death, living in desperate conditions, sharing the fate of those he described. Kapuściński himself once described his works as “reporting essays” and placed them not in journalism but in literature. However called, they served as an opening point of for reflection about the world we live in to such an extent that Cesarz, his book on Ethiopia, became the basis for several theatre plays staged in Poland (since 1978) and in London in 1987.
Popularity is another interesting aspect of Kapuściński’s biography. First, in early 1960s he was recognised in Poland, in early 1960s. All his books, from Busz po polsku (1962), a collection of reportages about life in Poland, and Czarne gwiazdy (1963), his first book on Africa, until recent Heban and Lapidarium have been welcomed warmly by the readers and critics. However, Kapuściński remained widely unknown outside his country until late 1970s and early 1980s when he published Cesarz and Szachinszach. Interpretations of both of the books came far beyond what they described, some even read Cesarz as a metaphor of Margaret Thatcher’s rule. The book was chosen “Book of the Year 1983” by British “The Sunday Times”. Since then, it has been published 23 times and Kapuściński has discovered the dark side of being popular. He is constantly invited to meetings, discussions, lectures, etc. He once remarked: “Some time ago a writer used to be expected just to write. Now it’s enough to publish two books which gain some popularity—and you have no time to write the third one. (…) You have to travel, make reviews, deliver speeches. (…) It’s like a fight of desire to write something with impossibility to refuse everyone.”
The story is not over yet, fortunately, and we may expect a few more books. Rumour has it that soon a book on Latin America, similar in its idea to Heban, will be published and that Kapuściński is dreaming about writing a work of that kind about the whole world. The readers can only be patient and look forward to it.