TRAVELS IN AFRICA: CONGO, Boat to Léo, 1964

After five months alone in Coquilhatville where he was opening an American Cultural Center, Fred Hunter went to Léopoldville on consultation. Since the Congo River was the main factor in the life of Coq, he chose to go by boat. His report:

Arriving in Coq the Otraco paddle wheeler draws slowly toward the shore. It’s huge and white in the gathering dusk that sets off the wonderful African clouds against a purpling sky. People stand at the edge of the dock watching passengers on the boat and on the barges it’s pushing. Those on board watch the people on the jetty, chattering, waving, calling in that characteristic African screech. In the air a distant sound of music and there’s rhythm and music in the anticipation of these two still separated groups of people for each other. Women crowd the rails, the dusk-subdued colors of mammy cloth everywhere.

There’s the stench of Congolese humanity and fish, smoked absolutely black. Piles of bananas and blue metal footlockers (every traveler has his blue metal footlocker) and the silhouette of a monkey running back and forth leashed to a wire mesh parcel locker. (Every Otraco boat seems to have its monkey.) Now some people have found their friends; they scream at each other back and forth. The boat is now only a long broad jump from shore. I glance over to my right. A Congolese is talking loudly to a friend on board the boat. And my god! He’s urinating into the river. Right into the faces, so it seems, of all those people about to land. Absolutely wild! The real Congo!

You reserve a cabin by getting your name listed in a thin ledger-like book left over from the Belgian days. Then you have to wait until “la communication” is received from Stanleyville. It tells Otraco Coq how many cabins are available on the boat. La communication never arrives earlier than one day in advance.

In my case it arrived after the previous day’s closing hour. I was at the port three times yesterday and this morning at 7:40 am and still had not been able to buy a ticket. No one knew when the boat would arrive or depart. But with that typical African optimism in the face of utter and complete chaos, everyone assured me that I’d get off on the boat. I was learning patience which experience teaches us in a thousand ways.

I did make it! The paddle wheeler pushed three barges full of the most amazing mass of cargo and people. Congolese crowded the open barge decks with all their worldly possessions including ducks, chickens, pigs and a most incredible mass of dried and smoked fish. The barges were to the front of the main boat so that the fish smell poured back against us throughout the voyage.

I watched a crocodile being loaded. Its mouth was tied shut and its body lashed to a long and sturdy pole. But its tail was free and flicked powerfully back and forth. You did not want to get near that tail. It could easily knock you off your feet!

Congolese life went on more or less as normal. Women washed their children from buckets; they prepared food on little cookstoves, fetched water out of the river by dropping buckets tied to long lengths of rope. People sometimes drank directly from water lifted out of the river; that was a reminder of how healthy Congolese are, those who survive childhood. Men sat around and talked, chewing bits of smoked fish or watching women wash clothes in buckets. Off Bolobo, fishermen rowed pirogues out to come along side, cling to the side of the boat and trade their catch.

My fellow passengers: A Lebanese woman whose husband is a douane (customs) expert with the UN at Libenge, north of Coq. A young Congolese army major in the Sureté in Katanga although he participated in the secession; when asked if he thought secession might flare up again once the UN leaves, he only smiled. A young German who claimed to have hitchhiked across the Sahara with a pack on his back, had studied tropical agriculture and had some idea of settling in the Congo and buying a plantation with less than $US 100. He had met two German buddies in Kano, Nigeria, and traveled to Nairobi with them where they were trying to subsist on income from prostitutes with whom they’d somehow connected. These pals had gone off to South Africa. Still the German thought they would support his Congo venture and join him in working the plantation.

My roommate proved to be a young Congolese who seemed more uncertain of me than I was of him. The cabin was tiny, hot and airless at night when closed up against insects, but perfectly adequate to my needs. Our cabin shared a bath with another which worked out well enough except I’d neglected to bring a towel though I had brought bottled water and a bug bomb. So-so food and waiters who pointedly gave whites a bad time. I got sunburned the first day and some the second, too. That sapped my strength enough so that I was content to sit and watch the world go by. And not think of Coq.

What was Donanne doing at this time? In late March, having finished the winter quarter of her senior year at Principia College, she vacationed in rural Indiana with the family of a college friend.

Next post: Back at his slumberous center in Coq, Fred has a visitor drop – almost unannounced – out of the sky: the American Ambassador to the Congo.

TRAVELS IN AFRICA: CONGO, An Ambassador Visits Coq, 1964, Part One

Generally Fred Hunter’s greatest problem in Coquilhatville was isolation. Then, astonishingly when he had been there about six months, a dozen visitors fell out of the sky including the American Ambassador who was virtually running the country. He recounts how he dealt with them.

During my week of consultation in Léopoldville in March, I learned that the embassy had decided to equip each branch post with a single-side band radio. These would facilitate our staying in contact. I returned to Coq in the attaché plane with the team of military men who installed the radio and gave a lesson on how to use it.

It very quickly proved its value. Several weeks later, for example, I was informed via radio that Iwo Pierre, an Equateur Congolese employee of USIS Léo, was to be the Coq center’s first African staffer. He and his family soon arrived.

Then I learned that USIA had decided to upgrade the Congo cultural centers into two-man posts. If the radio and the upgrading were responses to the Kwilu rebellion spreading east across the country, nothing about that was ever mentioned to me. This, however, was probably the case. One of the main reasons for having one- or two-man cultural centers in remote locations was to have a presence in the country if it began to split apart.

Since I was so junior, a more senior officer whom I’ll call Tom Madison was coming on direct transfer from Manila to take charge of the center. My challenge was to get it open and running before he arrived. I did not want there to be any doubt about who had opened the post.

A few weeks later, thanks to the radio, I discovered some surprising news. An excerpt from a letter takes up the tale:

Last Friday morning, began the letter, I was unable to get through to Léo on the radio, but heard Léo talking to Bukavu. (When you talk by shortwave, the beam is shot into the stratosphere and picked up as it bounces back. The bounce from Coq overreaches Léo much of the time and necessitates a relay through a station like Bukavu further away.) I heard Léo say that Coq was going to be surprised on Sunday morning when visitors dropped in to see him. I figured AID people might be coming and would want reservations at the Ancion.

I’d set aside most of the day to get final reports written before Tom Madison’s arrival the following Monday. I wanted to write my monthly report and a short thing on the USIS-sponsored concert given in Coq the previous evening by the Dorian Quintet (which proved that there is an acceptable auditorium in Coq for serious cultural efforts as well as an audience for them). I wanted also to do a piece about the downfall of local Interior Minister Gaston LeBaud who’d masterminded the merchant searches in December and apparently gathered too much power to himself.

Later that afternoon when I could hear neither Stanleyville nor Léo on the radio, I went over to the post office to see if I could find out who was coming. I did. Charlotte Loris [USIS admin officer] and I screamed at each other across three hundred miles of jungle. I discovered that Ambassador [G. McMurtrie “Mac”] Godley and an entourage of 12 people, including the British Ambassador and Tom Madison, would arrive in 36 hours. I would have to bed them down, feed them, and arrange meetings for the Ambassador with local government leaders.

An incredibly Big Deal. How could I possibly be ready?

Next post: Fred rushes to prepare for the American Ambassador’s visit.

TRAVELS IN AFRICA: CONGO, An Ambassador Visits Coq, 1964, Part Two

Generally Fred Hunter’s greatest problem in Coquilhatville was isolation. Then, with only 36 hours notice, he learned that the American Ambassador and an entourage of 12 would descend from the sky for a visit.

On an overheard conversation on the single-side band radio, I learned that Coq would be getting some visitors – very soon. Later that afternoon when I could hear neither Stan nor Léo on the radio, I telephoned from the post office. The USIS admin officer and I screamed at each other across three hundred miles and I discovered that Ambassador G. McMurtrie “Mac” Godley and an entourage of 12 people, including the British Ambassador and Tom Madison would arrive in 36 hours. I would have to bed them down, feed them, and arrange meetings for the Ambassador with local government leaders.

From a letter about the excitement:

Incredibly, M. Ancion had enough room for everyone at the hotel – even enough so that Ambassadors Godley and Rose were given rooms to themselves. (Godley had the one I lived in for four and a half months.) [Obviously I had now moved to the apartment at the Andrés.] The Oasis, despite being closed on Sundays, agreed to give the group a noon meal (which turned out to be the world’s toughest chicken). The Hacienda, the town’s newly opened second restaurant, did the evening meal in real style: tablecloths, bits of greenery and napkins specially folded in the drinking glasses.

USIS Léo said Godley wanted to see US missionaries. So very late Friday afternoon Barbara Farmer and I drove out to Bolenge to arrange an early Sunday afternoon meeting with the Gary Farmers and Dick Taylors. I drove over to see President Engulu [the local governor of Cuvette Centrale Province, always called “President”], but no one was at the Presidential mansion.

Lodging was about the only thing taken care of Friday night, but that was load enough off my mind to spend most of the evening at the Michejdas (he’s a UN doctor, a very nice Pole). Left around 10:00, went home and began writing briefing papers on the missionary visit and the political scene which with LeBaud’s downfall had changed a good deal in the previous week.

Saturday morning I got cookies ordered for a soirée at the center that I’d decided to attempt. Found Mutien Bokele, Engulu’s protocol chief, who took me to Engulu who has begun to use an office in the house where the Ministry of Finances is located. Yes, he would see the Ambassador at 4:30 in the afternoon; he would put off his trip to Léo at least a day and would attend the soirée at the center.

Got André who has gotten me out of SO MANY JAMS here to move the refrigerator in my magasin [pantry] into the center, install a light bulb in the Center’s toilet and get the portable generator working so that we could show movies in the center even if the normal electrical current were too uneven to run a projector.

Mme André checked the wording of the invitation to the soirée. Bokele, N’Djoku, Iwo and I wrote out the invitations, then Bokele and I ran around town delivering them to the ministers in Engulu’s cabinet, the president of the provincial assembly and the premier bourgmestre. (It was the first time I’d met a lot of these guys and I tried to get a really good look at them in order to be able to introduce them the next evening.)

Iwo and I also worked out a list of men who’d been to the US on AID-financed training stages. After writing out more invitations, we ran around to try to find these guys, too.

Saturday afternoon I helped Edouard get the center cleaned up, ran out to Bolenge to deliver an invitation to a fellow who never arrived (police checks, as usual, made it difficult for Congolese to get in and out of town) and to firm up the time of the missionary visit. Saturday evening dined on a moambe [a Congolese dish featuring chicken, palm oil sauce and manioc greens] at the Andrés’ new house out by the river. Left early to return to more report writing, this after pumping the assembled for the story of exactly what happened to LeBaud.

Sunday morning I finished the briefing papers (missionary visit, political situation, biographical notes on Engulu, schedule of the day, and a guest list for the soirée), carried drinks to the center, got the new vehicle out to the airport and returned to town with Nick Sapieha who was still wandering around. [Sapieha, a young Polish-American touring Catholic mission stations on behalf of the church, had been in and out of Coq.] I was starting to wash my car when I realized the plane would arrive in 25 minutes. Frantic rush to get changed. (I greeted the Ambassador with neither tie nor coat!) Got to the airport in time to park both vehicles on that section of the runway where planes are left and stuff briefing papers into individual envelopes.

If I do say so myself, what greeted that group of 14 people was pretty damned impressive for having been informed only 36 hours previously. One man in town and he has two vehicles parked on a runway seven kms from town, lodging and meals all arranged, briefing papers properly prepared. Fortunately, they were impressed. “Normal USIS preparations,” said Deputy PAO Martin Ackerman to the Ambassador.

Next post: The Ambassador’s visit and a soirée at the American Cultural Center.

TRAVELS IN AFRICA: CONGO, An Ambassador Visits, 1964, Part Three

Generally Fred Hunter’s greatest problem in Coquilhatville was isolation. Then the American Ambassador and his party suddenly visited.

Opening a post is an unusual opportunity in the Foreign Service. Especially if you have just come off a training post, as I had, in a different part of the world.

When I learned that Tom Madison would be arriving to take charge of USIS Coquilhatville, I beavered to get the cultural center open and running. Thanks to the help of Jules André and his men, we converted one wing of the center building into a movie theater, complete with exterior projection booth housing two projectors. The center began showing USIS films to library patrons. I got the library collections ordered and ready for borrowing. I began work on a project to get USIS publications circulating, not just in Coq, but throughout the region, to Ingende, Boende, Gemena, Basankusu and beyond. I got two Congolese employees working at their jobs, serving center patrons.

If my sudden discovery of the American Ambassador’s unexpected visit caused a day and a half of frantic preparation, it also gave me a chance to demonstrate that USIS Coq was up and operating and that the American officer stationed there had not simply been twiddling his thumbs.

From a letter about that visit:

The jaunt out to Bolenge to see the missionaries went off fine. We had a briefing before the Ambassador saw President Engulu at his Résidence. Ambassador was inclined to think that Madison and I should attend, but I recommended against the idea, feeling that Engulu would prefer a “high-level, confidential” meeting. Ambassador accepted my appraisal, although I now wonder if maybe his idea didn’t have more merit than I originally thought. Engulu spoke highly of Major Itambo, the local gendarmerie commander, who had arrested some Mulelists infiltrating from Lac Léopold II and the next morning I arranged a meeting for the Ambassador with him.

I guess you can’t blame the Congolese if they don’t know how to act at the kind of party we were giving. I didn’t go to dinner, but stayed to fix up the center and get drinks servers under control. The guests invited for 8:00 arrived at 7:30. We let them sit around looking at picture books until we were ready to do something with them. (I was in the office trying desperately to remember the names and titles of the ministers. Iwo tested me and I did a fair job of remembering. But as one minister came in, I looked at Iwo for help and he said in a fairly loud voice, grinning at the minister (a friend): “Don’t you know who he is?”)

We got as many as we could to meet the Ambassador. (Those whose names I could remember I would take over to meet him.) The Congolese don’t know what to say; they are scared [American Ambassadors have been virtually running the Congo for several years]; they want to run away; they try to melt into the bookshelves. Once we got them inside the theater we were all right. They saw three films. The Ambassador made a little speech. I told the guests after the speech that brochures would be awaiting each of them as they left. And so they did.

All in all, the visit went extremely well. In a way it was better done under extreme time pressure. There wasn’t any time for timid hanging back. We’ve been needing to do something to get the top government people into the center. This was an ideal occasion.

I realize, nonetheless, that I am still tired after all the running around. Had 11 hours sleep last night and could use more now.

A curious postscript to this event: In late 2010 Ambassador Richard Matheron emailed me forwarding something Ambassador Godley wrote to family after visiting Coq. (After I left Coq, Dick and I served together in Bukavu where he was consul.) Godley’s Congo secretary Maggie Conrad Johnston had recently transcribed the letter from long ago dictation. Godley wrote: “Last Sunday, April 19, I set out on my first junket around this fascinating country… Our first stop was Coquilhatville… There we have a one-man USIA office and this poor fellow had only heard of our arrival some 48 hours before. He had, however, done the impossible: gotten us rooms in quite a decent hotel overlooking the Congo River, most of which were air-conditioned… from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., had arranged transportation and even had typed out an elaborate schedule and notes on the person we would be seeing.”

Well, well! Independent confirmation of my Coquilhatville existence!

Next post: With a second USIS officer now resident in Coq, Fred is able to take a trip into the deep and mysterious bush.

TRAVELS IN AFRICA: Visiting Congo Missionaries, 1964, Part One

When a second USIS officer joined Fred Hunter at the American Cultural Center in Coquilhatville, Fred was able to travel. A local missionary offered him a trip to the deep bush and he took it. Here’s his report:

Shortly after Tom Madison took charge of the Center, I learned from Betty Erlewine that Disciples of Christ Congo Mission doctor Bob Bowers would be driving a Volkswagen Microbus, called a “combi” by the missionaries, to a station in the deep interior. I wangled an invitation to tag along.

We drove east from the mission station at Bolenge, following the watershed of the river known variously as the Ruki, the Busira or the Tshuapa. (A Congo tributary changes its name every time a sizable tributary enters it.) We drove on roads once well maintained. Now, three years into independence, they were deteriorating. Rain carved deep ruts into their surfaces. Now that overhanging vegetation was no longer cut back, the orange-colored roads did not dry quickly after rain. Passing vehicles dug holes in them.

The road would rise to a ridge, then descend to a watercourse. Over it lay a bridge of logs. Bob would stop the combi and I would get out to check that the bridge was solid. I would guide him to the other side and we would start toward another low ridge. The rivers we drove beside or crossed were old. They doubled back and forth, changing course. They meandered, formed horseshoe lakes, drained the water from vegetation that was intensely green.

Occasionally we passed through villages, brown clearings where clusters of thatched huts and dirt dooryards lined the roads. Naked children would rush out to wave. Adults would watch, men sitting in dooryards, swept clean of vegetation as a protection against snakes. Women ambled between huts, wearing only strips of cloth between their legs, these held in place by strings or thongs tied at their hips.

At every village animals would dart across our path: goats and chickens, ducks and dogs. It was important not to hit them because then there would be long palavers about compensation. But avoiding them was not easy. Goats seemed mesmerized by the combi as if its motion required an answering one. They would race across the road at the last moment as if testing their daring and their speed. We never hit a goat or dog; chickens were not so lucky. Once three fled into the road just in front of the vehicle, squawking and flapping wings unaccustomed to flight. We hit them broadside. They seemed to be coming through the windshield, feathers flying, the birds landing on top of the roof and bouncing, bouncing backwards, until they landed again on the road, only their dignity damaged.

At lunchtime Dr. Bob stopped the combi at the side of the road. We’d been eating a while, not bothering to converse, when a small man, well short of five feet, appeared out of the jungle. He was naked except for a pair of old, torn shorts. He carried a panga, a long knife, and jumped, startled, when he saw us.

“Batwa,” the doctor said. “Pygmy.”

I looked at the little man. He examined both of us, then started talking.

“Or pygmoid, to be precise,” the doctor added. “He’s a mixture of pygmy and other strains. The Mongos don’t regard Batwa as human.” The Mongos were the main tribe of the area. “Of course, they were here before the Mongos arrived.” The doctor scrutinized him. “He’s been smoking hemp.”

As we continued to eat, the man kept up his flow of words. He harangued us, whimpered, sat on the ground, threw down his knife in frustration, beat the earth. “What’s he saying?” I asked.

“Gimme 100 francs… gimme 50 francs…”

The pleas went on and on. Bob opened a small can of turkey and ate it with a metal fork. “Gimme twenty francs,” Bob said, translating the pgymy’s demands. “Ten francs, five francs… Gimme a shirt.” When Bob finished his lunch, he wiped the fork on a napkin and set the bottom of the turkey can within easy reach of the pygmy. “Lots of uses for a can like that in the forest,” he said.

As we prepared to leave, the man hurried forward, picked up the can, sat down within two feet of the combi door and went on whimpering. When we got back into the combi, he shouted at us. “Hey! Where’s my five francs? You promised me five francs!” We drove off. I watched the man sitting on the road, mumbling to himself and examining the can.

Next post: Getting to know a missionary doctor.

This trip to Congo mission stations formed the background for the story “Elizabeth Who Disappeared” in my collection Africa, Africa! Fifteen Stories, published by Cune Press.

Africa, Africa! is available from Cune Press, www.CunePress.net. Just now Cune is launching ebooks. To test the distribution system, Cune is offering Africa, Africa! in its ebook edition at the low, low, low price of $4.95 . . . less than half the standard ebook price. This offer extends from May 15 to June 15 only. You can’t buy a hamburger for this price. And this will feed you better!

TRAVELS IN AFRICA: Visiting Congo Missionaries, 1964, Part Two

When Tom Madison took charge of the Cultural Center in Coq, Fred Hunter was able to travel. A local missionary took him into the deep bush. There he became acquainted with a missionary doctor. His report:

Missionary doctor Bob Bowers and I drove east all day through jungle and swamp. At Ingende, we chatted up the Territorial Administrator (to whom I presented USIS materials), found the ferry disabled until it borrowed our vehicle’s battery and on the north side of the Ruki rode all the way to Djoa on a kind of dike, impressive engineering for the jungle. (If not well maintained, this road would be lost.) At the turn-off to Bokolongo we headed down to the river and the DCCM mission station at Monieka. We arrived just before dark.

Monieka Station was a string of yesteryear houses with wide eaves and screened porches, a church, a school, a dispensary, a surgery and a high school for missionary children from the entire breadth of DCCM territory.

I had hardly gotten my bearings when Dr. Gene Johnson invited me to attend an operation or two the next morning. Well, why not? I sensed immediately that Gene did not possess the kind of personal warmth that immediately attracted people to him. That’s a kind of warmth that many evangelizing missionaries boast in abundance. In fact, one of the missionary teenagers described Gene as “creepy.”

Talking about visitors, Gene said some Bolenge missionaries had witnessed an operation on a man whose belly was swelling. After cutting into the patient, Gene discovered the swelling was caused by internal bleeding. He released something; blood flowed out all over everything and within two minutes the patient was dead. Hmm. No self-promotion at jungle mish stations. I hoped I wouldn’t see that.

I arrived at the surgery early the next morning after taking a swim in the Busira. (The river was where the missionaries bathed. By the time I rinsed off, I had an audience of fifteen Congolese kids.) The room was perhaps fourteen feet square. Gene was working in a cap, mask and smock, all clean, but none ironed. Underneath the smock he wore a pair of Bermuda shorts, no shirt. Four Congolese nurses assisted him. Three male nurses were with him at the operating table. The lone woman nurse gave me a mask, smelling strongly of disinfectant.

Gene talked to me casually in an English the Congolese did not understand. He commented on the operations (three hernias that morning) and asked about the films I would show that night. He inserted a nerve-deadening agent into the vertebra at the small of his patient’s back.

Gene was not fat, but loose flesh hung over the top of his shorts. The patient was a man older than Gene. But there was not a scrap of fat on him. Gene had the mental development and skill with instruments that the Congolese lacked. The Congolese had the physical development Gene lacked. I had seen remarkable physiques among the Congolese. And no wonder. Paddling pirogues on rivers is hard work. It produces tremendous back, chest, arm and leg development. Women had amazing posture and muscular development at the neck and shoulders from carrying loads on their heads. I watched a woman, naked to the waist, picking potatoes in front of Gene’s house the next day. When she stood, her back to me, I could not tell if she were a man or a woman. “She’s been carrying loads on her head,” Gene said.

When I watched Gene slice open the patient’s lower abdomen, I glanced at the patient. He was awake and looked uncertain, aware that the operation had started, but unable to feel anything. I got woozy – blood, heat, the incision, the disinfectant in my nostrils – and felt annoyed with myself. Gene sensed what I was feeling. He suggested I sit outside with my head between my legs. It was wonderfully cool out on the surgery steps. I stripped off the mask.

I had dinner with the Johnsons. Gene’s wife was shy, reserved, a quietly pretty girl who wore glasses. I wondered if she used them as a transparent shield to hide behind, as a way of removing herself from contacts she did not want to handle. She was cautious with people, not outgoing and open as it behooves missionaries to be. She served tuna casserole to her family at the dinner I ate with them. Gene lightly kidded her about the meal. She admitted to me – and later even showed me – that she had pantry shelves stacked high with cans of tuna. And a small box filled with tuna recipes. So her reserve extended to eating carefully, to living in a place that could easily be seen as forbidding, among people who were not only physically, but also seemed metaphorically, dark. She acknowledged that she worried about her kids. I sensed a disquiet between her and Gene. Perhaps they were too much alike.

I wondered if he knew how to woo her, if there were romantic moments late at night – balmy air moving from the darkness into the screened bedroom, candles, soft music from a radio, the regular breathing of children down the hall, the tastes of kisses on their lips – when Gene lifted the glasses from her and told her she was beautiful. Perhaps. Movies could show a guy how to do that. But in the bush Gene had no occasion to see such movies. And he was too serious to have bothered with them in med school. Sweet-talking, even at so rudimentary a level, did not seem his style. Still, I suspected that a high priority on a mission station was keeping a marriage in good repair. I wondered if they were doing that.

Next post: More about missionary doctor Gene Johnson.

This trip to Monieka and the people met there served as the backdrop of Fred’s story “Elizabeth Who Disappeared,” published in his collection AFRICA, AFRICA! Check it out at http://www.cunepress.com/Africa.

TRAVELS IN AFRICA: Visiting Congo Missionaries, 1964, Part Three

When a second USIS officer joined Fred Hunter at the American Cultural Center in Coquilhatville, Fred was able to travel. A missionary offered him a trip to the deep bush. He took it and got to know missionary doctor Gene Johnson.

After my visit to his surgery, Gene took me on a short jaunt to Bokote. I came to feel a real sense of respect and friendship for him. He told me about his work as a missionary doctor; he spoke without the self-importance that some doctors assume about themselves. Without the self-dramatizing of those missionaries who seemed always to mention that they were serving in a “benighted land,” in “the heart of darkness.” After six years in the Congo he felt he was reaching his maximum usefulness. He handled the doctoring without difficulty, he said. He knew enough of the local language and customs to work effectively with Congolese.

And he liked the people. We stopped at the hut of a Congolese because I said I’d like to see how villagers lived. He and the householder greeted one another affably. I peeked inside the hut. The host asked if I’d like to try my hand at shooting the arrows they used for hunting. I obliged and my awkwardness amused him. I also bought a rattle with bottle caps inside it.

At Bokote Gene introduced me to a Catholic priest, a docile old gray-beard who had been in the Congo almost forty years. He’d just wakened from his sieste, entered sleepily in a threadbare white soutane and reminded me of a teddy bear. He had a gentle, patient sense of humor, a kind of hands-thrown-up attitude toward the Congolese and their future. Catholic priests did not strike me as participating in the life process in the same way that the Protestants did with all their kids. The Congolese for whom procreation and children were such vital parts of life must have felt baffled by the priests.

I told Gene that he seemed perfectly cut out for the work he was doing. I wished I felt as much purpose in my work. He nodded. Then after a moment he said that his wife was lonely. Her life on the station did not give her sufficient social outlets. She worried about the children. So, Gene assumed, the next time they went home on leave, they probably would not return. That likelihood distressed him. He did not want to go back to a kind of doctoring where his professional conversations with colleagues centered on investments, on getting rich.

Distressing, I thought. I wished Gene’s wife were more adaptable, because although I had expected back-country missionary life to be full of hardship, I did not find that to be the case. Yes, real limitations characterized that life, limitations of creature comforts and distractions, of intellectual stimulation. But the stations struck me as places of real interest, of great leisure and sometimes of incredible beauty. The life seemed often easy, certainly not taxing in the sense that the daily grind of city living could be. Nature could bring refreshment, much of it splendid. On the stations I swam in slow-moving rivers, read, played cards and other parlor games, took walks, went canoeing on the river and into nearby swamps, watched monkeys, chattering, playing, feeding in the tall trees just before dusk. For me, strangely, the Congo bush seemed to possess potential as a place of renewal for the world-weary.

What was Donanne doing at this time? In June she graduated from Principia College. She flew to Hong Kong where she met her parents and went with them to Pnom Penh, Cambodia, where her father was assigned as the American Embassy’s administrative chief. Before the end of the summer Donanne and her mother moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, while her father stayed in Cambodia to close the embassy.

Next post: A deep-bush woman and a missionary doctor’s tale.

This trip to Monieka and the people met there served as the backdrop of Fred’s story “Elizabeth Who Disappeared,” published in his collection AFRICA, AFRICA! About the book or the blog contact: FredericHunter@aol.com.

TRAVELS IN AFRICA: Visiting Congo Missionaries, 1964, Part Four

When a second USIS officer joined Fred Hunter at the American Cultural Center in Coquilhatville, Fred was able to travel. A local missionary offered him a trip to the deep bush and he took it. He picked up insights even the last day of the trip.

The next day Dr. Bob Bowers and I drove east again, this time with three girls from the missionary high school at Monieka. It was late May. Their school term had finished. Kay Bowers cuddled Nuisance, her pet mongoose, a funny-looking, long-nosed ball of fur. When we stopped for lunch with Disciples of Christ people in Boende, a plantation town, Frank Coburn regarded Nuisance and mumbled, “I wonder if he’d make good eating.” Then he looked at me and said, “I guess you haven’t been out here long enough to think things like that, have you, Fred?”

Just before Boende the Busira divided into two rivers, the Lomela, flowing south, and the Tshuapa, flowing north. We followed the Tshuapa. It was a long haul to Mondombe Station and the girls kept asking when we’d get there.

As we rode along, Bob Bowers told me a bit about the local language. With Gene Johnson I had wished I could speak it – out of the question! – because the Congolese were friendly. Bob said that if he wanted to show a person respect, he would greet him in Lonkundo by saying: “Olecko.” That means more or less: “What is your proverb?” He used these proverbs: “Go carefully;” “Look on the other side of a fallen tree before stepping over;” and “By and by the monkey came.”

This last refers to a Nkundo folk tale. A bunch of monkeys playing in a tree were warned that a hunter approached. They began to scatter. But a curious monkey decided to stay, Curious George probably. He told the friends who urged him to leave, “You go on. I want to see what the hunter looks like.” The friends hid in trees down the road. They heard the hunter shooting arrows and wondered what had happened to their friend. And by and by the monkey came, ready to make the hunter a nice meal.

I showed movies at Mondombe and the morning I was to leave, the mission plane arrived. It drew a crowd. When the onlookers drifted away, I happened to catch sight of a woman of the sort seen only in the deep bush. She wore a loincloth; that was all. I watched her observe the parked and inanimate plane as if it were a creature as strangely beyond her world as the creatures of her world – monkeys and elephants – were beyond mine. Tall, with scarification designs on her back and braids of tight-coiled hair sticking out all over her head, she scrutinized the metal bird. Slowly on long legs she approached it. She moved near the plane with an instinctive caution about the incomprehensible and unknown. She stopped, absolutely motionless.

Then she reached forward, her breasts hanging like wide, thin flaps. She extended an arm and lightly laid her hand on the skin of the wing, ready to dart away if the creature should move. But it did not move. Neither did she. She let her hand rest on that white and yellow metal bird which would always remain incomprehensible to her. She may have stayed there till it flew off. But the combi was leaving and I had to leave with it.

As we retraced our route, Dr. Bob Bowers told occasional stories. He mentioned a man he’d examined at Lotumbe. The patient complained of leg pains. Bob could detect nothing wrong. Neither could another doctor who was consulted for a second opinion. The patient insisted he was sick; he grew progressively worse. Finally he walked about using two canes, then with women holding him on either side. Soon the women were preparing him special food. He was reduced to sitting all day. At last he went back to his home village, prepared to die.

But he did not die. Instead he consulted a witchdoctor. Bob discovered this months later when he was traveling near the man’s home village. A church member asked Bob for three thousand Congolese francs, at the time about $60. “Who needs so much money?” he asked.

“A friend is badly in debt to the nganga,” the woman said. “Here he comes now.” She pointed to a man carrying a huge log. He was the man Bob had examined. He was now working off the debt he owed the witchdoctor.

“How was he cured?” Bob asked.

“The nganga had him buried up to his neck,” the woman said. “Then he dug holes nearby. He started fires in the holes.”

“And that cured him?”

“He begged to be unburied and has walked ever since,” the woman said.

Bob laughed, driving along. “Get well or get roasted! And he’s walking okay now. We should take lessons from these guys.”

What was Donanne doing at this time? In June she graduated from Principia College. She flew to Hong Kong where she met her parents, returning with them to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where her father was assigned as the American Embassy’s administrative chief. Before the end of the summer Donanne and her mother moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, vacationing on the island of Penang while her father stayed in Cambodia to close the embassy before joining them.

Next post: Donanne reappears!!! She’s off to conquer the world – well, at least college.

This trip to Mondombe and the woman touching the plane serve as the backdrop of Fred’s story “Elizabeth Who Disappeared,” published in his collection AFRICA, AFRICA! For a copy contact FredericHunter@aol.com.

TRAVELS IN AFRICA: Official Visitors, 1964, Part One

Sometimes travels in Africa involve visitors coming to you – even in remote Coquilhatville in the northwestern Congo. Often you’re surprised at who turns up. Three examples in the next two posts:

The first visitors appeared while I was still living at the Hotel Ancion. Into the Oasis restaurant dining room walked four men, obviously American: black trousers, black shoes, white sox. Hmm. The waiter told me they’d been drinking whiskey in the bar. That ruled out missionaries.

I went over to say hello. They were four US Air Force men, two officers, two EMs, crewing General Mobutu’s plane. [This was months before Mobutu became the Congo's President.] When Mobutu had visited President Kennedy, he asked for a private plane. The US offered him a DC-3. Naturally he wanted something grander, but those could not land on short airstrips. The Congo lacked pilots and crew. So Uncle Sam provided two sets. First time such a thing had ever been done, said the crew, still a bit overwhelmed by the assignment.

While the plane itself was worth about $100,000, the interior had been remodeled for almost twice that much. I saw it the next day. The interior was sumptuous and loaded down with gifts: elephant tusks, hides, sacks of flour, boa constrictor skins.

That day I helped the crew arrange a black market exchange of dollars for Congolese francs. The exchange rate in Coq was 400 Congolese francs per dollar in check form. (In Léo 365 to 1 for cash, 350 to 1 for check; 280 to 1 in Brazzaville dealing through a bank.) I’d never changed money in Coq, but presented myself and the major at the back of a Portuguese store where the family lived. As the money and check crossed hands, we talked about the noonday heat. The merchant said it was the hottest spell he’d experienced in 18 years in the Equateur. He sat unshaven in an undershirt, beads of sweat glinting in the light on his arms.

Once refueled with bush-cheap Congolese francs the major and his pals flew off in what may have been the world’s best decorated DC-3, carrying uniquely African cargo. I returned to the tranquility of trying to open what may have been the world’s least likely American Cultural Center.

The next visit occurred weeks later after Tom Madison arrived in Coq. Tom was not happy with being rushed – on direct transfer from Manila – to a remote Congo post, staffed by the officer who’d opened it (me) and two Congolese employees, a librarian and a films man. Eager for his wife to arrive – she was finishing a university degree in the Philippines – Tom could not see how this assignment advanced his career. He grumbled about Coq. Why had the Agency decided that Congo branch posts required two officers?

Two USIS officers in Coq meant that I could travel into the bush. I went off to show movies. During my absence the American Ambassador to the Central African Republic, posted in Bangui north of us, had come through Coq. He had flown in en route to Léopoldville with his wife, the senior USIS man and his wife; there they would attend regional meetings to confer with G. Mennen (Soapy) Williams, the US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. A storm forced them to spend the night at Coq. A Congolese Sureté official at the Coq airport had cited Ambassador Tony Ross over some infraction.

At the Hotel Ancion they had happened on Madison who was living there while the house we’d found for him and his wife was made ready. Madison heard about the disagreement at the airport. Ross shrugged it off as minor. Probably it was minor. That was how colonial officials treated Africans in the old days. African officials now benefited from the example. Tom needed to show that he had taken command in Coq. So, despite his lack of experience with Africans, he rushed off to Governor Engulu to demand both a written apology from him and a public one from the Sureté official. Relating the story to me, Tom seemed pleased with himself. I wondered if humiliating an official and demanding a favor from the Governor advanced our program goals. But I said nothing. Tom seemed to want people in Léo to know that he was on top of things in his new post.

Then suddenly Ambassador Ross, PAO Welch and their wives were back in Coq, bushed from a heavy schedule of meetings and parties in Léo. Once more bad weather forced them to spend the night. Only this time the Ancion was full. An entourage of French diplomats had bought out the hotel.

Where could the Ross party stay? Chez moi! Where else?

There was an available upstairs bedroom in the house I had rented from Thérèse and Jules André. The Ambassador and his wife could stay there while the Welches slept in the living room. The living room offered air-conditioning; the bedroom did not. The Ambassador wanted air-conditioning. So as not to force the Welches upstairs (where I slept happily every night), the Ambassador decided they would all sleep, barracks style, in the living room. I borrowed three beds and enough sheets from the Disciples of Christ Congo Mission. We wrestled an extra bed down from upstairs.

We went to dinner at the Hacienda Restaurant, the town’s only eatery now that the Oasis had closed. The host charmed us, impressed at feeding an Ambassador. Quite graciously Mrs. Ross told him, “Every town has its charms.” A sentiment made true for an evening by diplomatic visitors from Bangui.

Next post: The Big USIS Boss from Washington arrives at the center and Fred and Tom Madison cannot refrain from speaking their minds, not a good idea to a Boss who has materialized out of the sky.

TRAVELS IN AFRICA: Official Visitors, 1964, Part Two

Sometimes travels in Africa involve visitors coming to you – even in remote Coquilhatville in the northwestern Congo. Often you’re surprised at who turns up. The third of three examples:

Headquarters in Washington views the guys way out at the end of a chain as names that turn policy into action. Still, they are merely names on a manning chart. The guys themselves often feel forgotten and unappreciated. But does that mean they want the Big Boss to drop unannounced out of the sky?

Tom Madison and I were in the office one morning. The electricity was out. The center was a mess due to Congolese independence celebrations. Fortunately, patrons were in the library. A generator-powered film show was soon to begin.

A UN jeep pulled up before the center. Out of it stepped three visitors from Léopoldville: Hank Clifford (as I shall call him), the USIS branch post co-ordinator; Martin Ackerman, the embassy’s #2 USIS man; and just in from Washington the Agency’s top man for Africa, Mark Lewis, boss of us all. Just dropped out of the sky. From E Street NW with tie, Ivy League suit and shined shoes. We grinned our surprise, our delight. Lewis beheld us in all our informality: no ties, cotton pants, sandals.

Advance warning? None. Just in for an hour and a half to see us on their way somewhere else. We jumped immediately into a discussion of program problems – though not our befuddlement at the purpose of so tiny and marginal a post. Then personnel matters, future plans. I did not want to discuss my future in the presence of Hank Clifford. He seemed always to belittle my interests; he had urged Madison, for instance, to pull rank and bounce me out of the André house. Clifford was to depart in September. I did not want to discuss my future until after he left.

But we did discuss our futures here, on the fly, when Madison and I had been vouchsafed no time to prepare. Madison went first. He did not disguise his anger at being sent precipitately to this jungle outpost. He noted that while usually the ratio of American officers to local employees was one to five, sometimes one to eight, here in Coq it was a wasteful one to one. He told Lewis that if he were not promoted in January [the promotion list came out once a year in January] he would resign. A civilian job was awaiting him, he claimed, and he would take it.

A letter of mine about the visit noted: “You live with the hardships of this place every day and think you have them pretty well under control. Then a situation like this visit comes along and they spill out forcefully. You’re surprised how close to the surface they really are.” (Madison’s emotion must have encouraged mine.) I told Lewis that Coq was a rough post for a single person, that I did not want to spend my 30s in places like Coq. I must have known that this would be my sole encounter with him, that I would be foolish to let his only recollection of me be of a griper. With preparation I might have finessed it, but not this way.

The discussion continued as we drove to the airport. Lewis noted that I was not scheduled to leave the Congo for another thirteen months. I had hoped for something earlier. Clifford stuck in his kiss-ass two cents, infuriating me. Emotions I thought were under better control kept popping out. [I wonder now, all these years later, to what extent my feelings were influenced by the fact that Madison’s arrival had turned a job that challenged me into one that proved increasingly boring.]

Lewis did seem grateful to hear that Tom and I liked the work. Neither man in Stanleyville did; neither wanted to stay; neither felt the post should be there. Lewis must have found morale low all over the Congo: marginal posts overstaffed; a hiring freeze making it impossible to bring on new locals to extend the work. For example, I was eager to take films into the hinterlands. But Madison nixed that, contending our vehicle could not safely navigate back-country roads.

Once the visitors left, I took refuge in reading. My letter notes: “Paris est une fête (A Moveable Feast), Ernest Hemingway’s account of the Paris years arrived last week. To read about Paris in French gives the book more flavor somehow and left me with a feeling of nostalgia for the time I’ve spent there. I enjoyed it, finished reading it this morning – in French.”

Madison’s morale improved when his wife Sally arrived from the Philippines and they established themselves in a house. But the Muleliste rebellion was already headed our way. It seemed certain to imperil our work at the center.

What was Donanne doing at this time? In June she graduated from Principia College. She flew to Hong Kong where she met her parents and went with them to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where her father was assigned as the American Embassy’s administrative chief. Before the end of the summer Donanne and her mother moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, while her father stayed in Cambodia to close the embassy.

Next post: An anti-government, anti-American, anti-white rebellion spreads across the Congo and menaces Coquilhatville. And the question is: Stay or run?