Travels in Africa

The two families crossed over from Dover on the 
morning hydrofoil. In Ostend they found drizzle in July. Belgium was showing its northern European face. As they drove through flat Flemish countryside to Bruges, Derek acknowledged that he had visited the town before. In fact, he had fallen in love with a woman there in […]

Late in the afternoon after our safari in Parc Albert I left Charley and Paul Wemboyendja at the Hotel des Grands Lacs. I drove out of Goma to the nearby shantytown of Saké. I was hoping to find the turnoff to the DeMuncks’ plantation and, if I was lucky, to meet them. While in Washington […]

Jack Parks liked to talk. The first time I met him, he said: “Moi, I’m a Jersey kid. Officially Jacques. French mother who taught me her language. My first year in college I’m bored stiff. Bugged out. Joined up to see some combat in ‘Nam. Try out the women there. Feel like a man. What […]

To accommodate the “need of the service,’ I was transferred to the northwestern Congo after I’d been in the Kivu about two months. I was sent to establish an American Cultural Center in Coquilhatville. After opening the center, I got chased out of the Equateur by the Simba Rebellion. I had the good fortune to […]

Bureaucratic alarms sounded! I had been in Bukavu on temporary duty only about six weeks. I had just begun to feel that the cultural center was back on track, that the films program was operating effectively once more. The reason for the alarm? It turned out that USIS’ parent, the Information Agency in Washington, had […]

At the end of their retirement trip to East Africa professors Tatiana Poulos and Charles Willson, academics from New York and a married couple, came to Bukavu to stick their toes into the troubled Congo. The trip was presented to them by students wishing to honor their contributions to sociology. A dozen years before, Harriet […]

AS THE USIS FILM TRUCK left Bukavu and the peninsulas stretching into Lake Kivu, I felt pleased with the prospect of the day. Night rain had washed the haze from the air. The morning was clear and sunny. As we climbed toward the chefferie of Kabare, I was happy, wedged between two companions on the […]

At a lunch at the consul’s home, Monsieur le Minstre de l’Interieur Miruho talked so incessantly that hardly any of the rest of us had a chance. Le Ministre waved his arms. As his gesturings increased, so did the rush and tumble of his thoughts. When his momentum increased, his French grew less and less […]

When I arrived in Bukavu, the consul told me, “You don’t want to stay at the Royal Residence. It’s a fine hotel, but you’ll run through your per diem every day by the time you wake up. And then you’ve got meals. My wife and I would be happy to have you stay with us […]

When I arrived in the Congo, a US Information Service Foreign Service Officer who’d just completed a break-in tour in Brussels, Belgium, my assignment was Elisabethville. That was in the Katanga in the southeast. But in the capital, called Léopoldville then, I was told that eventually I would serve in the Equateur in the northwest. […]