Daily Inspiration Quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Kapuscinski is doing something sly here: he’s sketching an entire geopolitical order with the bland tone of a roll call. The sentence reads like neutral observation, but the neutrality is the point - a journalist’s “of course” becomes a tell. Who gets to be a “correspondent” in a place freshly unmoored from empire? Not the newly independent locals, not the people whose lives are being narrated, but the emissaries of old hierarchies: British and French (the formal colonial powers), Italians (the informal colonizers via diaspora and commerce), and then, with a thud of inevitability, “a lot of Russians.”

The list is a map of influence disguised as demographics. “Former colonial powers” signals that decolonization has changed flags, not necessarily the flow of attention or authority. The Italians are justified through “communities,” a reminder that settlement patterns - migration, trade, enclaves - extend power without needing a governor’s office. Then the Russians arrive not as colonizers in the classic sense but as the rival superpower presence that rushes into the vacuum. The Cold War doesn’t need to be named; it’s embedded in the casualness of “of course.”

Kapuscinski’s intent feels double: to document a media ecosystem and to indict it. The foreign press corps looks less like a window onto reality than a continuation of contest: empires converting from armies to narratives, from territories to bylines. The subtext is that even “coverage” can be occupation - just quieter, better dressed, and filed before deadline.