Ryszard Kapuscinski was the doyen of foreign correspondents everywhere, a master of reportage who brought alive broken, warring African communities and the corrupt, airless courts of dictators. The Polish writer was often imitated but his spare, laconic prose was rarely matched by successive generations of reporters. He transcended his journalistic craft and was sometimes mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel prize for literature.

Born in 1932 in Pinsk, a multinational market town in what were then the eastern borderlands of Poland (now Belarus), Kapuscinski grew up witnessing the horrors of war and of displacement. He kept the same child’s eye for injustice when he became correspondent in Africa for the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

There was scarcely a revolution that he did not witness in the 1960s and 1970s as he reported on the decolonisation of Africa, and the tensions in Central America and the Middle East. His publicists calculated that he had lived through 27 coups and uprisings, but privately, he admitted to dozens more.

To each he brought the view of the commoner; a white man who lived as close as he could to the lifestyle of the downtrodden or hapless locals. He carried his own flagons of water and waited for hours in overcrowded bus stations. In part, this point of view was forced on him by the economic stringencies of his news agency.

Kapuscinski had been recruited from a youth newspaper, Sztandar Mlodych, after writing a remarkably clear-eyed account of life in a steel factory. The agency, wanting to keep abreast of Third World societies that could become socialist allies of Poland, decided to send him abroad. What was required was a regular telex file from exotic datelines, enough to suggest that PAP had an international presence.

So, after watching a new riot, Kapuscinski would roam the streets of San Salvador or Ougadougou looking for a telegraph office with a telex operator willing to accept a bribe in the form of almost worthless Polish zlotys.

The true story — the smells of the deserted city, the psychology of the looters — he would keep to himself. The scribbled notes became polished works of literature, from The Soccer War — about a pointless 1969 war between Honduras and El Salvador — to Another Day of Life, about the Angolan civil war.

But even when these books, first published by Czytelnik in Warsaw, were translated and gained international recognition, he remained true to his methods.

There was no mistaking his irritation when, in later years, he accompanied a British camera team to film in Ethiopia. On reaching high land, the team took out their mobile phones and rang home. This was not Kapuscinski’s way. “In their thoughts, they had never left London”, he complained.

Rarely, if ever, did he make contact with his wife, the paediatrician Alicja Mielczarek, during months of travel. For him, there was only the truth on the ground, a gritty but often magical reality.

On the road in Africa, he asked why the convoy kept halting. It was, he was told, to allow the spirits to catch up with the accompanying tribesmen. He wrote this without mockery or European arrogance: an observation that revealed more about the conflict than any toll of casualties or fire power.

As the representative of a communist country Kapuscinski gained access to revolutionaries: to Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Ben Bella in Algeria, Che Guevara in Cuba. But it was his ability to unlock stories from the servants of the powerful that gave his reporting a lasting, poetic quality.

After Haile Selassie was deported in 1974, Kapuscinski travelled to the country to weave together an account of how the Emperor lost power. A member of the imperial circle told him of the crucial moment when authority slipped away from a man worshipped as a deity: “and know, my friend, that I will take this memory to the grave with me, because I can still hear how His Majesty's voice breaks, and I can see how tears stream down his venerable face. And then, yes then, for the first time, I thought to myself that everything was really coming to an end. That on this rainy day all life is seeping away, we are covered with cold, clinging fog, and the Moon and Jupiter have stopped in the seventh and twelfth houses to form a square.”

Those were the cadences — well reproduced by Kapuscinski’s best English translator, William Brand — of the Imperial Court and they demonstrated the brilliance of his craft.

But when the Ethiopian book was published in Poland, under the title Cesarz (Emperor) in 1978, it suggested more than a literary imagination. Kapuscinski, it seemed, had stumbled on a new way of mocking, and predicting the downfall of Poland’s own communist dictators. Soon, Edward Gierek, Poland’s very own Emperor, was unseated in 1980.

Kapuscinski was fascinated by the Solidarity revolution of 1980-81. Despite working for a communist-steered agency, he was no communist. His father, Josef, had escaped from a convoy that was taking him to certain death at the hands of a Soviet firing squad in Katyn forest. Later Josef fought with the anti-communist Home Army resistance group.

The martial law regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, which attempted to crush Solidarity, could not take the risk of such a powerful voice writing for the press. In 1981 Kapuscinski was banned from journalism. Instead, he contributed to underground publications.

By the time communism in Europe collapsed in 1989, Kapuscinski was financially independent. His works were widely translated and brought him foreign royalties, he moved from a two-room apartment to a book-lined villa in Warsaw. His later works, notably Imperium, dealt with the fall of the Soviet empire. They were more personal — a return to his Pinsk childhood — and less disciplined than his earlier books on the Third World.

At the end of his writing career, he remained gripped by the different sense of time enjoyed by Europeans and Africans. Europeans, he said, were slaves to the clock. He, by contrast, managed to free himself from this most fundamental of tyrannies. So much so that he barely took notice as his life slipped away, stolen by cancer.

He is survived by his wife and daughter.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, writer, was born on March 4, 1932. He died after heart surgery on January 23, 2007, aged 74