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Wild life

What Ryszard Kapuscinski airbrushed out of his bestselling book

He didn’t include the puncture, his travelling companions or his fit about missing tea with Haille Selassie’s relatives

24 October 2015

9:00 AM

24 October 2015

9:00 AM

I once found myself on a lonely road in southern Ethiopia with the famous Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski. We were travelling through bandit country when we got a puncture. We had a rendezvous at a bush airstrip with an aircraft that had to take off before night closed in. It turned out Ryszard had no clue about changing tyres and, whereas I was quite happy to break open the beers and sleep in a ditch, he fretted about missing tea with the lady relatives of Emperor Haile Selassie back in Addis Ababa.

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