Willard Jakes was not quite sure what he was getting into when he accepted an assignment to what his colleagues dubbed 'a shithole with oil', one of the most avoided, pestilential places on the African continent, a place of abject poverty, miasmic slums, brutal authoritarian governance, and malarial climate.
How is it different from _____, he asked, or _____? both places of abysmal poverty, prehistoric tribalism, internecine warfare, and savage barbarity, to which the reply was 'None'.
Yet Willard was determined - it was a matter of machismo, will, and courage. Anyone could take an assignment in more temperate, moderately developed countries, be received courteously, even generously, eat well, sleep in relative comfort, and work in a collegial, cooperative environment. Spending long weeks at a time in his country of choice would challenge mind, heart and soul. It was why Africa existed, said his Errol Flynn colleagues - a bit of panache, devil-may-care bravado, romance, and close escapes.
The continent from North to South, East to West was one vast sinkhole of corruption, misrule, and poverty. Anyone could go to Bali, Sri Lanka, or Manila, but _____?
Where he was going was to the heart of darkness - not Conrad's fictional place deep in the rainforest, the Congo probably or some central African empire - but an actual place of intellectual, social, and spiritual emptiness, a country that had barely budged out of the Paleolithic. There was a bit of hope during the European colonial period, but after independence the country reverted to its former unspeakable savagery.
President Alphonse M'bele was a pariah even among his African colleagues. Despite the endemic corruption and tribalism of South Africa, the autocratic, bullying rule of the likes of Mobutu, Deby, Amin, Kagame, and Mugabe, _____was far worse. Mass public executions were common, political opponents sent to vast rat-infested, malarial dungeons before they were drawn and quartered, mutilated, and burned.
Yet Western donor agencies continued to provide soft loans, grants, and no questions asked emoluments to M'bele thanks to the immeasurable wealth of rare earth elements under the forest cover in the far east of the country. These nations, the United States among them and at the head of the queue fought for palace rights - access to M'bele and his courtiers.
Despite conditionalities, codicils, addenda, and promises, donors looked the other way while M'bele diverted millions of dollars and euros into offshore bank accounts.
Added to the well-known horrors of life in the country, Willard knew that he could not count on his embassy for any help in the likely event of his arrest, imprisonment, and torture. It was a hands-off policy of appeasement, and every shovelful of promethium and samarium was awaited with great expectation and little concern for sequelae or consequences.
So assignments to _____were indeed something else, a real adventure, something out of Mungo Park or Rene du Chaillu, explorers who were enslaved, bought and sold, tortured, and beaten, their lives amongst cannibals only spared because of their barter value.
It is perhaps a surprise that love affairs among those foreign travelers to the country are not only common, but particularly erotic; but much has been written about the association of danger with erotic arousal. The 19th century socio-biologist Hans Dietrich Hammersmith wrote this in the Belgian Breviary of Darkest Africa
The nature of the erotic, as studied and understood by Western scholars, has all to do with the courtly pleasures of the Medieval and the high romantic culture of the Renaissance and nothing to do with the primal, primitive sensuality of the African forest, a place of beasts, savagery, cannibalistic orgy, and sexual brutality; and that horrific primitivism is the engine for the spiritually naive Western traveler. Lust takes on a new, more profound dimension when all around the lovers are the cries of human sacrifice, drug-addled rape, and unimaginable human brutality.
Willard was no scholar and knew nothing of Hammersmith and the writings of his colleagues, but knew of the Freudian intimations of this dynamic. Freud had cited a case of young Serbian lovers on safari who trapped and encircled by unholy, wild savages, found more sexual energy, potency, and fevered desire than they ever had in Europe.
Willard met Hannah Fielding at the bar of the Independence, the run-down, mosquito-infested excuse for a hotel, but the only lodging in the capital city; and immediately the sexual desire was palpable. In any other environment, they might never have noticed each other let alone found passionate interest, but here where they could hear the drumbeats of primitive voodoo-like ceremonies in the hills above, the roar of wild animals in the forest not far from the hotel enclosures, and the gunfire in the streets, a sexual liaison was inevitable. They, like Freud's Serbian couple were insatiable, hungry, and wildly needy.
This sexual partnership was a kind of fortress against the primitive, untamed wildness of the outside world, a redoubt of civilization in a savage world, a bower, an Eden amidst impossible misery and brutality.
Every night they met with the same unmitigated passion and abandon. In the morning they were barely able to wash, dress, and go about their business which seemed irrelevant, incidental, and unnecessary. They went through the motions of 'development', shaking the right hands, congratulating school teachers and nurses, speaking generously and then returned to their hutch, their shelter.
They hardly knew each other, nor wanted to know. There was no love interest in the coupling, only need. Little mention was made of 'back home' and family, friends, and occupation there were almost fictional - my wife, my husband, the back yard did not exist. They were encumbrances, distractions, non-things.
Willard was lucky. M'bele's secret police were everywhere. Every foreigner was a potential informer, spilling all he saw and heard to ears back home, to the influencers who could damage M'bele's reputation, pinch off the money supply, and make his hustling harder. Foreigners were routinely arrested, detained, and questioned, a step away from La Fourchette, M'bele's notorious prison.
Yet Willard never regretted coming; never once gave the secret police or M'bele himself a second thought. His dalliance with Hannah was worth every bit of the secrecy, the insinuations, and the danger.
'So, how was it?', asked a colleague at the World Bank, a project manager for a generous loan to the Philippines. He was responsible for the building of three new bridges in Mindanao, the safest of the safe sinecures for a development banker, worlds apart from the realities of _____.
'Fine', replied Willard. 'The grilled capitaine is to die for'; and so it was that the twain never met and never would meet.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.