feed is available 
The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski
March 22, 2007 11:34 PM
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Kap, who I got to know a bit in Berlin a couple of years ago,’ these last few weeks. Have been rereading a lot of his stuff, too.
Some of the stuff, reread many years after the initial discovery of this writer, have been a bit of a letdown (cf. The Soccer War). I feel his later works border at times on the atrocious. And I’ve felt deeply ambivalent about the way he has made light of the facts writing about Africa here and there, and nowhere more so than in this book. One couldn’t get away with that writing about, say, Eastern Europe, and keep one’s reputation intact. Africa, though, has always been a special case.
Having said that, even it is not, strictly speaking, journalism, or history, or whatever, The Emperor is great in long, sustained bites. Take this, and then buy it and read it for yourself:
An empty envelope! Mr. Kapuchitsky, do you know what money means in a poor country? Money in a poor country and money in a rich country are two different things. In a rich country, money is a piece of paper with which you buy goods on the market. You are only a customer. Even a millionaire is only a customer. He may purchase more, but he remains a customer, nothing more. And in a poor country? In a poor country money is a wonderful, thick hedge, dazzling and always blooming, which separates you from everything else. Through that hedge you do not see creeping poverty, you do not smell the stench of misery, and you do not hear the voices of the human dregs. But at the same time you know that all of that exists, and you feel proud because of your hedge. You have money; that means you have wings. You are the bird of paradise that everyone admires.
Can you imagine, for instance, a crowd gathering in Holland to look at a rich Dutchman? Or in Sweden, or in Australia? But in our land — yes in our land, if a prince or a count appears, the people run to see him. They will run to see a millionaire, and afterward they will go around and say ‘I saw a millionaire.’ Money transforms your own country into an exotic land. Everything will start to astonish you — the way people live, the things they worry about, and you will say, “No, that’s impossible.” Because you will already belong to a different civilization. And you must know this law of culture: that two civilizations cannot really know and understand one another well. You will start going deaf and blind. You will be content in your civilization surrounded by the hedge, but signals from the other civilization will be as incomprehensible to you as if they had been sent by the inhabitants of Venus. If you feel like it, you can become an explorer in your own country. You can become Columbus, Magellan, Livingstone. But I doubt that you will have such a desire. Such expeditions are very dangerous, and you are no madman, are you? You are already a man of your own civilization, and you will defend it and fight for it. You will water your own hedge. You are exactly the kind of gardener that the Emperor needs.
Learn more about "The Emperor"
Posted at 11:34 PM