![]() ![]() Kapuscinski’s memoir is “not a book about Africa, but rather about some people from there” and, like all the best reporters, the Pole’s greatest quality is empathy. Ultimately, humanity prevailed, but Kapuscinski felt no joy: “I felt sad that that heart, which inhabited the very pit of hell we had all shared only a moment ago, had stopped beating.” ![]() The snake fought back, “thrashing and pounding the ground with such demented fury that the hut’s interior grew dark from the dust”. ![]() With the assistance of a friend, he tried to crush the cobra beneath a heavy storage canister. I know from experience that encounters with cobras force intellect and DNA to diverge: your head tells you to relax and move away slowly because you know for certain that the snake will only strike as a last resort the heart, reaching right back to the Garden of Eden, screams “panic!”, as did that of Kapuscinski. ![]() Collapsed on a bunk, he reached to the floor to stub out a cigarette and came eye to eye with a cobra. He was on his way to Kampala to cover Uganda’s independence celebrations, and was in the first achy days of a bout of malaria. In October 1962 the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski met a snake in a hut on the Serengeti. Sunday May 03 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times ![]()
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