War & Peace Quote by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Kapuscinski doesn’t leave room for the reader to hide behind geopolitical abstraction. “Cold War in Africa” is phrased like a filing label, the kind of bureaucratic category that lets superpowers talk about “theaters” and “interests” instead of villages, hunger, and amputated futures. He tears off that label and replaces it with a moral indictment: not merely “tragic” or “complex,” but “darkest” and “disgraceful” - language calibrated to puncture the cool managerial tone of Cold War history.

The sentence works by broadening the circle of culpability. Not “they” ought to be ashamed - “everybody.” It’s a journalist’s refusal to let guilt be outsourced. Washington and Moscow armed proxies, backed coups, and treated African states as chessboards for ideological signaling; local elites and warlords exploited those pipelines; the global public, happily consuming the Cold War as a story about Berlin and Havana, looked away. Kapuscinski’s subtext is that Africa wasn’t a sideshow but a proving ground where big ideas got translated into small, ugly mechanisms: cash, guns, training camps, propaganda, and the normalization of expendable lives.

Calling it a “page” matters too. Pages can be turned, archived, “moved past.” Kapuscinski insists the reader pause and read what’s been conveniently footnoted. The intent isn’t balanced analysis; it’s moral pressure, a demand that contemporary history include the victims of power politics as central characters, and that comfort with that omission be treated as part of the crime.