The exceptional destiny of Doña Anna

Yves Gacon 

PARIS, 19 May 2015 - This is an exceptional story. That of a journalist of Polish origin who in 1946 in Bogota became the first woman AFP station chief in the world. This is the destiny of Anna Kipper, whose life and journalistic career spanned the turmoil of the 20th century, both in Europe and in Latin America.

Born on 4 September 1908 in Warsaw into a Polish Jewish family, Anna Kipper began her career as a journalist in 1931 in the Warsaw office of the Havas agency. After surviving deportation to Buchenwald, she had to leave Poland at the start of the 2nd World War, travelling through Scandinavia before arriving in France.

She worked at the Havas editorial office in Paris, then in Tours, Bordeaux and Clermont-Ferrand, during the agency's successive retreats in the face of advancing German troops: "The unfortunate Havas agency, which had been one of the most powerful in the world, was dying", Anna would say. The editorial staff was purged by agents of the Collaboration. For an article on the courage of Londoners during the bombings, in which she drew a parallel with the Polish resistance in Warsaw in 1939, Anna was sacked in October 1940.

Her dismissal, which she described as her "supreme journalistic honour", meant exile for the unemployed Jewish journalist. Anna had to leave France. Her destination was Latin America, as was the case for many Jewish refugees who left by boat for the New World. Her journey would last almost a year.

Leaving Marseille in January 1941 on the boat "Alsina", she first went to Senegal, then was held for a few months in a camp in Morocco. Once in Spain, she boarded the "Cap Horn", which left Cadiz for South America. But like other ships carrying Jewish immigrants, the steamer was refused permission to enter the ports of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

- Eleven months and five days of wandering : The "Cap Horn", a Spanish navy ship, was carrying almost a hundred Jewish refugees, most of them from Poland and Czechoslovakia. On two occasions, in October and November 1941, it was refused access to the port of Rio de Janeiro. Described by the Brazilian authorities as "non-assimilable" refugees, the passengers could not obtain visas. Their situation seemed desperate. They feared that the boat would take them back to Europe. On humanitarian grounds, the Dutch colony of Curaçao finally agreed to accept the ship and its exhausted passengers.

The "Cape Horn" docked in Curaçao in mid-November. After a health quarantine in the Netherlands Antilles, Anna obtained an entry visa for Colombia on 20 December 1941, exactly "eleven months and five days after leaving Marseille". She recounted this harrowing journey in a book entitled "Pause exotique, impressions de guerre et d'exil", published in 1943 in Colombia, her adopted country.

In Bogotá, she continued her work as a journalist during the war, contributing to radio stations and American newspapers, and was taken on by the liberal daily El Tiempo. She was in charge of the press service of the Polish legation in Colombia, the local representation of the Polish government in exile in London at the time. She developed a passion for anthropology and went to meet indigenous peoples. In just a few years, she became "Doña" Anna in Bogotá, an affectionate title given to her by journalists, intellectuals and artists.

- She opened an AFP office at her own expense. : After the Liberation, Anna returned to France at the end of 1944. She became a naturalised French citizen, spoke eight languages and worked for a year in AFP's wiretapping department as a "radio service team leader". In March 1945 she was admitted to the Société des Américanistes, alongside Claude Lévi-Strauss, and presented papers on the Chibcha Indian tribes of Colombia and the legend of Eldorado.

But her passions and her private life took her back to South America. She asked Maurice Nègre to open a correspondence office in Bogota. The new Agence France-Presse, founded in August 1944 on the legacy of Havas, had other things to worry about than covering Colombia. Anna persisted. She decided to set up an office at her own expense. For two years, AFP paid her on a freelance basis.

Her Polish origins got her into serious trouble. A Polish ambassador to Latin America accused her of being an "agent" of the Polish government in exile in London. An attaché from the French embassy also campaigned against her, calling her "a journalist of more or less Polish origin, vaguely an ethnographer .... of more than dubious morality".

Colombian journalist Eduardo Mackenzie, author of the book "Les FARC ou l'échec d'un communisme de combat" (Publibook), found a trace of this episode in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay. Following an investigation, the French ambassador certified that she remained outside any political action and observed a totally neutral attitude towards Polish problems. "She did an excellent job as head of the AFP in Bogotá". The embassy attaché was sacked.

- The "Yalta of information": In the aftermath of the war, AFP had just three bureaus in the whole of South America: in Argentina, Brazil and Chile. "Nothing. No one, nowhere else, except in Colombia, where a former Havas employee in Warsaw was working effectively", writes Basile Tesselin in his book "Les chemins du journalisme" (Tallandier). Tesselin was one of the eight journalists who, weapons in hand, occupied the historic building at 13, place de la Bourse on 20 August 1944.

The "Yalta of information", a kind of sharing of the world of information between Reuters, Havas and Wolff that had prevailed at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, had been shattered. The heir to Havas is no longer in a dominant position in the region. Multiple competition is developing with the arrival of Anglo-Saxon agencies, the American Associated Press and United Press International, and the British Reuters.

For the new AFP, this was a period of pioneering euphoria, of reconquering Latin American territory. Anna Kipper was appointed head of AFP in Bogotá in 1946, and obtained a French employment contract in 1950. She was the agency's first female head of post anywhere in the world. Alongside Anna, a number of correspondents arrived in the region, some of whom would go on to have long careers: Gabriel Lacombe in Rio, Robert Katz in Mexico City... Later came Albert Brun in Lima, Jean Maille de Trevanges in Caracas, Michel Iriart in Buenos Aires and Santiago...

- Demonic vertigo: Anna plays a leading role in this reconquest. "Eight hours, twelve hours, sixteen hours a day, she never left her desk, translating twenty thousand or twenty-five thousand words of dispatches from Paris, typing and retyping in a sort of demonic vertigo, repairing a telephone with tropical whims, finding the means between two broadcasts to visit the newspaper editors," recounts Basile Tesselin (L'Agence AFP newsletter - January 1947).

With, he adds, "the nicotine of cigarettes lit from each other's butts and the caffeine of 'tintos' (coffee in Colombian Spanish) swallowed from hour to hour as support". The office was set up in a working-class district of the city centre, near the Gold Museum. 

In the smoky atmosphere and the smell of coffee, young editors who were to become big names in Colombian journalism came to the office to comment on the news from a Europe that was in the process of being rebuilt.

As a European and Latin news agency, AFP seeks to set itself apart by explaining to its clients that they cannot be completely dependent on Anglo-Saxon news sources. The bureau receives news by radio in Morse code. The dispatches had to be translated into Spanish before being delivered by courier to the capital's two major dailies, El Tiempo and El Siglo (Conservative). It was a flourishing period. Newspapers were publishing several editions a day. There was a race between agencies to place a paper before the presses started rolling.

Anna Kipper was to witness a great moment in the history of Colombia. On 9 April 1948, as the 9th Inter-American Conference was taking place in Bogotá under the aegis of the United States, the leader of the Liberal Party and presidential candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was shot several times in the streets of the capital. His killer, the unbalanced Juan Roa Sierra, was lynched by the crowd. Conservative President Mariano Ospina Perez immediately accused "people with apparent communist affiliations" of killing Gaitan.

Supporters of the charismatic leader, who was very popular with the middle and lower classes, attacked institutions. The rioters set fire to public buildings. The insurrection spread, pitting liberals against conservatives. Curfew and martial law were imposed. After several days of fighting, the army restored order. "The riots left "1,500 dead and around 3,000 injured", according to a report published by AFP on 21 April. 

- The trauma of the "Bogotazo": In the streets, another privileged witness, a young Cuban student in his twenties, Fidel Castro, came to Bogotá with communist militants from Latin America to disrupt the Pan-American Conference. Castro acknowledged his participation in the insurrection in an interview given to a Colombian radio station in 1981. But he denied any involvement in the assassination of Gaitan.

This dramatic event, known as the "Bogotazo", has remained a trauma in the memory of Colombians. It was the trigger for "the violence", the term used to describe the long period of conflict between liberals and conservatives until the mid-fifties. These conflicts continued in rural areas, in the form of peasant uprisings that led to the creation of the Marxist guerrillas FARC and then ELN. 
 

A few years later, Anna Kipper was back in the eastern plains of Colombia, near the Venezuelan border, where she witnessed the surrender of guerrilla leader Guadalupe Salcedo. In September 1953, she wrote a report for El Tiempo entitled "A scene that cannot be forgotten", describing the surrender of arms by the liberal guerrillas.

"I saw an army of "outlaws" armed with a wide variety of rifles, including those from the last century, dressed in a wide variety of outfits, sometimes without shirts, barefoot and almost all toothless, performing the military salute before laying down their arms and receiving the embrace of General Duarte Blum, Commander-in-Chief of the Colombian armed forces".

The only journalist from the international press, she appeared in a photo with the revolutionary leader. She was an elegant woman with a long face and short hair. I knew Anna Kipper in the last years of her life. She had retired near Bogotá after leaving the AFP in September 1973. She lived in seclusion in an isolated house in Suba, surrounded by her pre-Columbian antiques and coffee trees. She died in Colombia on 28 March 1989 at the age of 81.

Yves Gacon is director of documentation and publishing at AFP. He headed AFP's Bogota bureau from 1980 to 1984.