Page 36 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Road Kill

than the larger. We, being the largest, had the least to show for our
efforts, but American domestic politics demanded some polite
fabrications concerning the return on investment of millions of
dollars a year, so we continued pouring it in. The major players in
the Cold War (the Soviets and the Chinese and us) all maintained
embassies much larger than a casual observer would expect, given
Jolibana’s unimportance on the realpolitik chessboard of Africa—not
to mention the world. Again, it was the obscurity of the place: no
television or newspapers, one totally self-serving government radio
station, no European or American wire services. Many of the
negotiations leading to Nixon’s visit to China in 1971 were carried
out in Falidougou, far from prying eyes and ears.
The greatest presence, of course, was French. La mission civilizatrice
had not ended with De Gaulle unbundling the Sudan into a crazy
quilt of ill-defined nation-states. The economies and political cultures
of their former colonies remained tied in myriad ways to France, no
matter how revolutionary the rhetoric issuing from their presidential
palaces. So French expatriates manned key administrative and
technical positions in most ministries of Jolibana and her neighbors,
and no African could get far in the government (the primary
employer) without fluency in French. All in all, during my tenure as
administrative officer in the American Embassy (1979-82), there
must have been about five hundred foreigners living in the capital,
the majority French nationals.
My responsibilities included, as well as day-to-day operational
affairs at the embassy, looking out in a general way for all the
Americans in the country. We were so few in number, so far from
home, and so vulnerable to a variety of life-threatening diseases that
an implicit community existed among us. Local medical care was
rudimentary at best. Anyone injured or violently ill upcountry had to
count on word getting back to the capital and a medivac plane
showing up in time to save his or her life. Mental illnesses were also
common, occasionally leading to suicide; Jolibana was not a place for
a middle-class American to bring an unresolved emotional problem
or barely-latent identity crisis. Marriages dissolved and new alliances
were formed, none with much chance of surviving back in the States.
We had an American nurse, and one doctor who covered all the
Sahel countries—an area the size of the continental United States.

35