Free The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuściński

would be flying to Juba (which meant to the north-east), but after take-off the aircraft headed south-east and an hour later we found that we were looking not at the monotonous brown-grey of the savannah but at the intense green of the Kivu mountains, awesome and soothing at once. This was Africa the arch-beautiful, the fairy-tale Africa of forests and lakes, of a cloudless and peaceful sky. The change in direction was puzzling, but there was no one to ask about it: the crew was locked in the cockpit, and we were alone in the empty fuselage of the aircraft. Finally the transport began its descent, and a lake as big as a sea appeared, and, then, beside the lake, an airport. We rolled towards a building with a sign that said ‘Usumbura’ (now Bujumbura, the present-day capital of the republic of Burundi, then a Belgian territory).
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    Le Monde
, among other papers, later wrote about what was done to us in Usumbura. Belgian paratroopers were waiting on the airport tarmac. If they are soldiers from Belgium, I thought, they will treat us with humanity. But the units stationed in Usumbura were made up of Congo colonials—rapacious, brutal and primitive. They treated us not as journalists but as agents of Lumumba; they wereelated that we had fallen into their hands. ‘Passports and visas!’ a non-commissioned officer said sharply. Of course, we had no visas. ‘Aha, so you have no visas!’ he rejoiced. ‘Now you’ll see …’ They dumped all our baggage on to the ground and emptied out the entire pathetic contents of our suitcases. What does a reporter carry around the world? Some dirty shirts and a few newspaper clippings, a toothbrush and a typewriter. Then the body search began, with their fingering every fold and seam, our cuffs, our collars, our belts and our shoe soles—all the while pushing, pulling, prodding and provoking. They confiscated everything—including our documents and money—and returned only our shirts, trousers and shoes. The terminal had a central section and two wings, and we were led to a room at the end of one wing and locked up. It was on the ground floor. A paratrooper was put on watch under the window. In normal times our cell must have served as a storage room for chairs—in it there were metal chairs which are, I’ve concluded, the most dangerous piece of furniture to sleep on, since, with any movement during sleep, the chairs slide away from each other and you fall to the floor (concrete), incurring varied and painful injuries to the body. The advantage of the chairs over the floor, however, consisted in the fact that the chairs were warm and not constantly damp. Being locked up is a wholly unpleasant experience—particularly at first, during that transition from a free to a captive state, that moment of the echo of the closing door. Many things go through your mind. For example, after a few hours I had begun to consider the question: is it better to be in jail at home or abroad? The immediate answer should be: wherever you are beaten less. But, if you put aside the issue of being beaten, it is, I concluded, better to be locked up at home. There, you can be visited by your relatives, you can write letters, receive packages and hopefor amnesty. Nothing of the kind awaited us in Usumbura. We were cut off from the world. The paratroopers could do whatever they wanted with complete impunity: they could murder us, and nobody would be able to find out where or how we had been killed. We would simply have disappeared from Stanleyville.
    We were interrogated. The interrogation was conducted by civilians, perhaps colonials from Stanleyville as they appeared to know the city intimately. They did not believe we were journalists. Of course. Nowhere in the world do the police believe that such a profession actually exists, often with some justice given the people who have become foreign correspondents. But we had little to tell them and finally they stopped tormenting us. The guards’ shifts changed