Page "Ryszard Kapuściński" Paragraph 3

In his early youth Kapuściński started writing for the Sztandar Młodych, a nationwide newspaper founded in 1950 as the organ of the central organisation of the Communist youth, the ZMP, of which he was a member.

After publishing, in September 1955, a critical article about the construction of Nowa Huta, a Cracow conurbation built on a site chosen by Soviet " advisors " as the " first socialist municipality in Poland ", which brought to light the inhuman working and living conditions of the labourers involved in the venture — a story which occaioned consternation before eventually winning favour with the Communist authorities unsure at first how to react to a fault-finding depiction of their pet project by one of their own — Kapuściński was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit at the age of 23.

The newspaper article having been a commissioned piece, the outcome of the incident was a function, ultimately, of the infighting of competing factions within the Communist Party, Jerzy Morawski, one of the leaders of the Pulavian Faction and a secretary of the Central Committee, being instrumental in bringing the matter to a resolution successful for Kapuściński.

Kapuściński demanded of his newspaper to be sent abroad ( later in life claiming that what he had had in mind was Czechoslovakia ).

He was sent via Italy to India ( taking in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well ), and the next year ( 1957 ) again to China and Japan.

Beginning with that journey to India undertaken in 1956, at the age of 24, without any foreign-language skills ( he is said to have learned English only afterwards – by reading, with the help of a dictionary, a copy of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls ), he travelled across the developing world, at first producing " essays in frustration and ignorance " ( in the words of Colin Thubron ), though later reporting more knowledgeably on wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas