Education Quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski

A hotel lobby in 1978 becomes a miniature map of the Cold War: two Ugandan army captains, newly important in a country ripped through coups and purges, can only speak to each other in Russian. Kapuscinski is doing what he does best - catching geopolitics in an overheard detail that feels almost too neat to be real, and that neatness is part of the point. The scene is absurd, but not whimsical: it is empire rendered as everyday convenience.

The intent isn’t to marvel at linguistic trivia; it’s to show how power rewires intimacy. These men share a flag and a uniform, yet the bridge between them is a foreign language acquired in a foreign capital. Russian isn’t just a tool of communication here. It’s a credential, a passport into modernity, and a reminder that the postcolonial state is often assembled from parts designed elsewhere. The subtext bites: when local identity is politically charged - “different Ugandan peoples” quietly gestures to ethnic fragmentation intensified by colonial borders and then weaponized by regimes like Idi Amin’s - neutrality is found not in a shared national tongue, but in the idiom of a patron.

Kapuscinski also implicates the listener. The hotel is a place of journalists and officials, where global narratives are manufactured. By staging this revelation in that space, he signals that “Africa” is not an isolated theater but a contested project, with Moscow (and, by implication, Washington and former European powers) underwriting the scripts. The result is a single image of sovereignty that sounds, literally, borrowed.