The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuściński

crap in this world, and then, suddenly, there is honesty and humanity.
25
    I can’t say if there was actually any bartering between the Ethiopians and the paratroopers over our fates. I can say that they didn’t like each other, and they treated each other spitefully. They were competing for the prestige of controlling the Congo.
26
    The next morning we took a Sabair flight out through Fort Lamy and on to Malta and then to Rome. In the great glass block of Fumicino airport, we watched the splendid and—to us, at that moment—exotic world of contented, calm, satiated Europeans on parade: fashionably dressed girls, elegant men on their way to international conferences, excited tourists who had flown in to see the Forum, meticulously preserved women, newlyweds flying off to the beaches of Majorca and Las Palmas; and, as the members of this unimaginable world passed by us (we were adisreputable-looking trio, three dirty, smelly, unshaven men in horrible shirts and homespun trousers on a chilly spring day when everyone else was in jackets, sweaters and warm clothing), I suddenly felt—the thought horrified me—that, sad truth or grotesque paradox that it might be, I had been more at home back there in Stanleyville or in Usumbura than here now.
27
    Or perhaps I simply felt lonely.
28
    The police looked us over suspiciously and I couldn’t blame them. We could not go into the city because we had no visas. The police phoned our embassies, which had been looking for us all over the world. The ambassadors came out to the airport, but it was already late in the evening and we had to sleep there because we would not have visas arranged for us until the next day.
29
    I returned to Warsaw. I had to prepare a note on what I had seen in the Congo. I described the battles, the collapse, the defeat. Then I was summoned by a certain comrade from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ‘What have you been writing, you?’ he stormed at me. ‘You call the revolution anarchy! You think that Gizenga is on the way out and Kobutu is winning! These are pernicious theories!’
    ‘Go there yourself,’ I answered in a tired voice, because I still felt Stanleyville and Usumbura in my bones. ‘Go ahead and see for yourself. And I hope you make it back alive.’
    ‘It’s regrettable,’ this comrade said, concluding our discussion, ‘but you can’t return overseas as a correspondent because you do not understand the Marxist-Leninist processes that are at work in the world.’
    ‘OK,’ I agreed. ‘I’ve got some things to write about here, too.’
30
    I went back to work at
Polityka
, travelling around the country, writing up what I saw. In the Congo things turned out the way they had to, which in the end had been obvious to everyone who was there. A few months later I received an offer to travel to Africa for several years. I was to be the first Polish correspondent in black Africa and was to open a bureau office for PAP, the Polish Press Agency. At the beginning of 1962 I was sent to Dar es Salaam.

M ARRIAGE AND F REEDOM
    What follows is the complete and exact text of a letter sent to me by Millinga Millinga, an activist in the
Frente de Libertaçao de Moçambique
, the Mozambique Liberation Front. Millinga Millinga is a close friend: influential, serious, a figure at political rallies and diplomatic receptions.
    L. Millinga Millinga
P.O. Box 20197
Dar es Salaam
Tanganyika
    Dear Friend,
PERSONAL MATTER
    At this critical moment in my life, compelled by an immense and unsolvable DILEMMA, I feel no shame in revealing deeply concealed problems that I have incurred in the preparation of my future, nor do I feel any shame in revealing them to you especially, a friend whose kindness and assistance have never been wanting on occasions of this kind in the past.
    As you know, I am one of the Freedom Fighters who has devoted all his time to the struggle and receives no compensation. But in view of the fact that a human being cannot escape from his