The Soccer War

A revolution every day...

Although, as a college student, I rarely get to read books for pleasure, I recently finished Ryszard Kapuscinski’s slim (at just over 200 pages) novel The Soccer War. Dubbed by LA Weekly as "the great prose-poet of international disorder,” during his career as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, Kapuscinski covered over 27 coups and revolutions, was sentenced to death four times, and was acquainted with Lumumba, Allende, Guevara and numerous other figures of third-world emancipation. From its modest beginning in Accra the year after Ghana became the first African colony to gain independence from Britain, The Soccer War seamlessly jumps to places as varied as the Congo, Nigeria, Palestine, El Salvador, Algeria, Honduras, and Cyprus in the period between 1958 and 1976.

I wouldn’t normally spend time talking about a book published nearly three decades ago, but since many of us will soon be leaving our small island for disparate parts of the world, I thought that it might be enlightening to revisit an era crucial in shaping the structure of that world. While we, the under 30s, are familiar with the sexual revolution, Vietnam, and the Civil Rights Movement, the massive global political transformation that occurred during the 1960s is far less present in our collective consciousness. It has been lamented that contemporary journalism on the developing world, and Africa especially, is often void of historical perspective. Media coverage may give sparse background as it is directly related to the story, but related historical context is usually skimmed over. For those of us who think we know or care about the developing world, the spirit of the era Kapuscinski documents is perhaps worth revisiting.

As a Polish journalist, Kapuscinski’s perspective has little of the latent self-importance or white guilt which might underlie that of a British, French, Belgian, or even American journalist in the same position. As he explains to some Ghanaians in Mpango towards the end of the book, “My country has no colonies, and there was a time when my country was a colony… There were camps, war, executions… That was what we called fascism. It’s the worst kind of colonialism.” Perhaps this background, and the fact that his roots lay behind the iron curtain, gives Kapuscinski’s prose a humility found rarely with other western writers.

Kapuscinski reminds us frequently throughout his narrative that what he is writing is not a book, but “disjointed fragments;” the plan of an unwritten book fit into the spaces between dispatches and chapters of other non-existent books. Ironically, it is this fragmentation which gives The Soccer War its cohesion; had it dealt with each subject comprehensively it would have quickly grown into a massive unreadable volume; had it focused solely on a few subjects it would have failed to capture the spirit of an era marked global transformation.

The book takes its title from the 1969 war between Honduras and El Salvador; a war which grew from the conflict surrounding a soccer match. Kapuscinski narrates his experience of the war and its beginnings with impassive candor; the war seems at the same time so fantastic and so ordinary that it could be an episode out of Garcia Marquez. In another chapter, Kapuscinski describes driving out of Lagos through enemy territory during the Biafran war.
Each roadblock he passes demands money and exacts a heavy price upon failure to pay. Along the road Kapuscinski passes burning cars and charred bodies. After two road blocks he has been beaten near unconsciousness, doused with kerosene, and nearly burned alive. Knowing that he has no money left, he decides to run the next roadblock, dodging Molotov cocktails and gunfire in a borrowed Peugeot.

Driving out of Lagos a few months ago, it would have been difficult for me to imagine that only 30 years ago, on the very same road, Kapuscinski might have been dodging homemade bombs and speeding over flaming roadblocks. Much has changed, but, although I was not there in the 60s to judge, I imagine that much has also stayed the same. Although driving out of Lagos is a vastly different experience today, there are still roadblocks every few kilometers and often you still have to pay a "dash" to the policemen manning them. Although I was dismayed by the sad state of the roads and the rampant corruption, reading The Soccer War a few months later put these things into jarring historical perspective. I don’t mean to imply that the problems of the present should be written off in light of the past, but rather that a little bit of historical context can go a long way when looking at the contemporary world. Prior to reading The Soccer War, my understanding of the events Kapuscinski narrates existed in a historical vacuum. The Algerian War for Independence, 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Biafran War, the 1973 Chilean coup, the Soccer War, and a host of other contemporaneous events were unconnected in my mind. By jumping unhesitatingly through time and across oceans, drawing philosophic (and occasionally questionable) conclusions about events often difficult to believe, Kapuscinski’s narrative connects events which, to those learning about them from safe inside the Ivy League, would otherwise remain unconnected.

After finishing The Soccer War it is impossible not to wonder what drives someone to put themselves in the near death situations Kapuscinski routinely encounters. Such a person, as one of my friends remarked, “must have a death wish.” While this may certainly be part of the equation, in the subtext of the book Kapuscinski himself offers another explanation. Before he begins the narrative of his death-defying drive out of Lagos, he mentions the inexplicable feeling of passing close to a lion in the wild. “I knew no one could describe it to me,” he writes. “And I cannot explain it myself.” As he cannot describe this or Poland to the Ghanaians in Mpango, so is it impossible to really describe the events covered in The Soccer War. However, Kapuscinski’s blend of personal and political, prose and poetry, fact and (presumably) fiction, makes these events as accessible as is possible to to those of us who did not actually wittness them.