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Vale Ryszard Kapuscinski

Ryszard Kapuscinski's chief metier was Africa and Latin America in the throes of violent revolution. As a roving foreign correspondent for Poland's state press agency for more than two decades, he likely witnessed more tumult than any of his peers.

But Kapuscinski, who died Tuesday at age 74, was much more than a man who took great risks to get the best insights - heading into the bush when colleagues were fleeing on the last planes out.

In the early 1960s, when Africa was shaking off colonialism's shackles, he got frustrated with the limitations of daily journalism and began to write books, establishing himself as a poetic chronicler of the human condition.

Along with the likes of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this charismatic, probing Pole with a philosopher's gravitas and a bon vivant's lust for life has been credited with creating a ``New Journalism'' - literary reportage."

So begins almost a homage to this great reporter and writer in The Guardian - mirrored in newspapers around the world.

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