Page 37 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Road Kill

The chore of acting as duty officer, which fell on certain embassy
and USAID employees in rotation, included carrying around a
powerful portable short-wave radio at all times in order to receive
emergency calls from the field. It was my turn on that fateful night in
July, 1981. Reagan had appointed a minor crony from the Midwest as
ambassador a few weeks earlier. I had held the fort as temporary
chief of mission until Winston Weatherall’s arrival near the end of the
hot season. The man was, not to put too fine a point on it, ill-
prepared to digest his political plum. He had no aptitude for
languages—but a political appointee was not required to obtain a
Foreign Service rating in French (or even, more regrettably, in
English).
Upon his arrival, after getting a good look through the tinted
windows of his air-conditioned Cadillac at the sunbaked dusty streets
of the capital jammed with thousands of people in ragged outlandish
garb conducting their business and personal affairs in a dozen dialects
and trade languages, the man went into culture shock. This in itself
was not unusual, and most foreigners who were there to do a job
(and who, in fact, had the experience and training to do it) simply
went through a period of adjustment lasting from a few weeks to six
months. Those who couldn’t cut the mustard weeded themselves out.
But the ambassador would never go through that rite of passage: he
had the power and position to cut himself off completely from the
“real” Africa. His days would be spent in a cocoon of imported
Americana: the embassy, the residence, the villas of other high
diplomats. The only Africans he would see were his servants and the
handful of ministerial-level Jolibanans doing official business with the
United States.
What this meant for me was more work. Almost everything I had
been doing in the interregnum between Democratic and Republican
administrations I had to continue doing; the chances of Weatherall
getting up to speed in French and up to par in protocol before his
brief tour of prestige duty came to an end were slight, indeed. He
would return to Oshkosh or Peoria able to put “honorable” in front
of his name; his wife, only slightly less insulated, would stuff their
considerable personal possession shipment with local kitsch: garish
paintings on glass and hide, knock-offs of traditional sculpture

36