Jesse asked me where I wanted to be posted. I gazed out the window, and so, looking at the bustle of people moving through the cold February afternoon, I shared with him my dreams and aspirations.
“I have lived in France and French-speaking Switzerland. I speak French almost as well as English. I studied French history and French literature in college. It seems to me that it would be in our nation’s interest to send me to Paris, Bordeaux, Nice, or Marseille, where I could put this experience to immediate use.” I left out our consulates in Lyon and Strasbourg, France, because I knew the winters in both places were cold and wet. My interest in France did not extend to “cold and wet” except for Paris.
My new friend Jesse, the man with whom I had felt such an immediate affinity, and who now held my future in his hands, replied: “Well, son, I think we have just the place for you. It is a little to the south of France, but they speak French there. And you will be able to use your carpentry skills. We have an opening for a general services officer in Niamey, Niger, and I think you would be the perfect candidate for the job.”
When Jesse called me “son,” I knew I was in trouble. General services officer where? I did not have a clue about what he was offering. It had never really dawned on me that I would go anywhere but Europe. Maybe France would not be the first tour for my wife and me, I remember thinking as I had gone into the meeting, but I would settle for Spain or even Italy.
I politely thanked him for the offer but made no commitments, saying I wanted to discuss it with Susan—a holding action to collect my thoughts, and since I really didn’t know what she would think. Leaving his office, I walked around the corner to the third-floor State Department library and searched for an atlas to find out where in the hell this Niamey place was. I finally located it in the middle of the Sahara Desert, in West Africa. To the south of Paris, indeed. I checked out a copy of a State Department post report on Niger to take home to Susan. It contained pictures of adobe-style dwellings, camel caravans, and sand. Sand everywhere: sand floors in homes, sand streets, sand in the eyes of the natives, and, of course, sand dunes. Sand, sand, sand.
I realized then the first truth about the personnel process at the State Department: “career development officer” is really a euphemism for the guy who drives the square pegs into the round holes that are the jobs. The needs of the service are what must be met. And among the most difficult jobs to fill are the administrative ones in Africa. Nobody wanted them, and many candidates refused to take them.
Susan and I looked at the post report closely. Our first reaction was that people assigned there obviously had managed to survive the experience. Our embassy had been there since Niger’s independence in 1961. But our second response was more personal. Though I’d been dreaming of a diplomatic career in European capitals, Susan reminded me that when we’d first started discussing living in foreign lands, we had looked into the Peace Corps because the idea of a foreign adventure appealed to us. Niamey sure ranked as an exotic destination. We were young, without children, and open to challenges in faraway places, so we decided to view this as our “National Geographic” experience and signed up. We did not negotiate, we did not hold out for a better job, we did not angle for something else. We signed up—and we never regretted it.
I came to be eternally grateful to Jesse Clear for having so expanded my horizons—for launching me on what became a lifelong love affair with a continent, its peoples, and their cultures. The only thing I’ve ever found to reproach him for is his comment that I’d be able to use my carpentry skills in Niamey. Niamey is on the edge of the Sahara Desert. Apart from the occasional oasis, there are no trees in the Sahara Desert. Without trees, there is little lumber. Without lumber, people build shelters using other materials. In short, there were few things, interior walls included, that one could drive a nail into. But I forgave Jesse on this score, since I soon discovered that my other handyman skills would be useful in Niger.
We left for Niamey in May 1976, having received our Foreign Service class award for “most exotic” posting. Typically this honor goes to the junior officer sent to Ouagadougou, the capital of neighboring Burkina Faso (then called Upper Volta), but there were no postings there from my class. The award was a pith helmet, fitting for a safari to the heart of Africa.
With more than a bit of trepidation, Susan and I clambered aboard an old Pan Am 707 for the red-eye flight to Dakar, Senegal. This was one of two weekly flights that flew direct to Africa from New York at that time. These flights were typically full of returning Africans—Senegalese, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Kenyans, and South Africans—waiting to be disgorged in their homelands. The cabin was a loud and rowdy place, reflecting the excitement of travelers going home. There was little opportunity to sleep on the long journey across the Atlantic Ocean.
We landed at the Dakar airport shortly before sunrise. Back then, Dakar’s terminal was a colonial-era building designed for fewer travelers than were using it in the mid-1970s. Arrivals strained the immigration and customs capacities. But since Senegal was a former French colony, there was no queuing up. That most quaint of English habits—orderly lines and everybody waiting his or her turn—had not made it across the channel, or to the faraway lands colonized by the French. Pushing, shoving, and squeezing to the front of the line was a common practice. It was only after much commotion that we made our way out and found the embassy car to take us to our hotel in downtown Dakar.
As we drove into the city, the sun rose over a flat barren landscape, revealing scruffy bushes among the rocky outcrops and the majestic Atlantic Ocean crashing onto the beaches below. People were already making their way into town, striding ramrod-straight in their flowing robes (called grand boubous). They were tall, slim, and ebony-colored, and they carried themselves with great presence. An indelible memory is the visible dignity of these proud people.
Several days later, after a stop in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, we arrived at our destination: Niamey. Stepping out of the airplane was like walking into a hot oven. It was so hot and dry that we found it hard to breathe. The afternoon sun beat down relentlessly on the parched, baked clay earth. Hearty shrubs sprung from the hardpan, only to be munched by herds of goats grazing wherever they spied something to eat. The airport balcony, extending the length of the building, was full of Nigeriens and Europeans awaiting the arrival of loved ones. I later learned that airplane arrivals were one of the few “modern” distractions in the capital. Television had not yet come to the country, and there was only one cinema in town—and it operated outdoors.
We were pleased to see that our new home had cement, not sand, floors, as we had half expected from the post report. There was one air conditioner in the living room, ceiling fans to move the hot air around, and a contraption called a “desert cooler” attached to the back of the house. A fan blew air into the house through a moist membrane on the cooler, taking the edge off the stifling heat and providing some humidity in the otherwise extremely arid climate.
The property was located on the other side of town from the European quarter, next to the American Club with its swimming pool, tennis court, and snack bar. It had a large yard, was ringed in flamboyant trees—no candidates for lumber, these—and bougainvillea hedges that were always in bloom, giving our yard the feel of an oasis amid the dust. Across the street were the poorer neighborhoods of Niamey, with their open sewers, dirt alleys, and the adobe-style houses we had seen in pictures.
The two years we spent in Niger were marked by a tremendous American effort to help this impoverished people cope with the ravages of drought. The American presence doubled each year, as we were inundated with assistance workers from the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). AID projects ranged from improving the seed stock of millet and sorghum in an effort to replicate India’s “Green Revolution” of the 1960s, to inoculating the cattle and goat herds against disease. Our growth was such that by the end of the second year, there were often traffic jams in the capital involving only Chevrolet Sub
urbans, the big vehicle favored by American project workers.
I handled logistical support for the growing mission. This involved everything from importing the supplies used by the embassy to leasing houses for our personnel from local property owners, plus providing all the services that Americans are accustomed to, even in one of the most underdeveloped countries on earth.
At embassy receptions, where local politics and the efforts of the Soviets and the Libyans to subvert the delicate political calm were common topics, I was approached with questions about plumbing and requests for new curtains.
Among the logistical duties for which I soon found myself responsible was repatriating to the U.S. the bodies of the two DC-8 crewmen who had died when their plane, later a rusted memorial on the tarmac, crashed at Niamey’s airport in 1977. The corpses were stored at the only morgue in the city, while a team of American forensic surgeons was dispatched from the National Transportation Safety Board to perform autopsies on them. It is the practice in Niger, as elsewhere in the Muslim world—as it is in other religions, including the Jewish faith—to bury the dead within a day of death, so a large morgue was not necessary. In fact, the local facility had room for only six bodies, while serving a city of over 350,000 souls at that time. I had to commandeer two of the facility’s six refrigerator units for ten days. I visited the bodies daily, and once the American surgeons arrived, I found myself assisting in the autopsy, since the morgue staff considered the idea of cutting into the bodies sacrilegious and would have nothing to do with it.
When it came time to ship the bodies home, I wrapped them in formaldehyde-soaked shrouds to preserve them—I hoped—in lieu of embalming, which was not practiced in Niger, and then planned to put them into custom-made coffins. I learned that shipment of unembalmed remains from Africa was often a problem. The coffin, in addition to being lead-lined and copper-sealed, had to have an air-escape valve to allow for the decomposition of the body and to vent the build-up of gases. A coffin from neighboring Chad had exploded a few years previously in the 120-degree heat in an airplane’s cargo hold, spewing body parts across passengers’ luggage. It couldn’t have been a pretty sight.
The one coffin maker in the city was straight out of central casting. He was Belgian, short, stout, with a foul-smelling unfiltered cigarette perpetually glued to his lower lip. He had no more than half a dozen strands of hair left on his head, and he tried to make the most of them. They wrapped around his skull in an elaborate comb-over. But, should a puff of wind come along, what was on top became a long, stringy tail that hung down to his shoulders. Most of the time, he kept his head covered with a soiled black beret. Under my breath, I called him Igor, as he reminded me of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory assistant.
While I struggled with the bodies and the shrouds, Igor welded and hammered together the coffins in the 100-degree heat of the afternoon, near the dusty entrance to the morgue. I vainly tried to wrap the shrouds mummy-style around each of the bodies as they reposed on narrow gurneys. The Nigerien who was supposed to help me was driven away by the overwhelming odor—a combination of decomposing flesh and chemical vapors—coupled with what was to him the unnatural act of wrapping the bodies, only loosely stitched back together after the autopsies. It was all too much for him to bear. Left alone, I had great difficulty maneuvering the muslin shrouds over and under the dead weight of the corpses. I finally gave up and settled for rolling each body onto a length of the shroud, making sure it was covered from head to toe, and tying the bundle together. I then manhandled the rigor mortis-stiffened bodies onto wheelchairs and rolled them out into the bright sun of the desert afternoon toward Igor and the coffins he had constructed. He helped me with the bodies, which were finally placed into the containers and flown back to the grieving families who waited to bury them back home.
Though it was hardly funny at the time, I chuckle ruefully now, thinking of the stereotypical pinstriped ambassador, white wine and canapé in hand, waxing eloquent amid the glitterati of an exotic foreign capital. It is in distinct contrast to the morbid scene that still lodges in my memory: the stench of death mingling with formaldehyde, two stiff specters, each in its wheelchair, and the coffin maker in his ash-and-dandruff-speckled blue worsted sweater. The heady romance of a diplomatic career just cannot be overstated.
The job itself brought me into close contact with the upper strata of Niger society. Since only about 10 percent of the country was in the monetized economy, with the remainder surviving as subsistence farmers or nomadic shepherds, there were a limited number of vendors of essential supplies and of landlords for our burgeoning population of American AID workers. I got to know all the vendors, while also supervising a workforce numbering several hundred, from stock clerks to mechanics to security guards. That made me the face of one of the largest employers in the country, and every local businessman and bureaucrat saw our operation as a cash cow. Despite the embassy’s exemption from local taxes, nearly every hour brought a creative new attempt to extract fees from us. Each day was a negotiation. Leases, tax exonerations, maintenance contracts, importation of goods through customs, and airport fees for our monthly supply flights—these were just some of the daily challenges I learned to meet, speaking French, in a country far from home, with a people for whom our dollars meant their salvation.
Niger is a landlocked country, with only laterite roads linking it to the coast. Laterite is an iron ore-based road treatment that, while not asphalt, at least provides minimal erosion protection. Such roads remain passable during the rainy season as the water drains off, leaving little ridges spaced a few inches apart. However, the washboard effect created by the drainage patterns makes them very uncomfortable to ride on. To survive the unceasing pounding, four-wheel-drive vehicles with stiff suspension are required, and cars must travel at relatively high speeds to “float” over the ridges. Anything less than about forty miles per hour relegates the passengers to a very bumpy ride. For goods coming into the country, the breakage rate was extremely high. I remember seeing entire pallets of toilet bowls reduced to shards from the incessant bouncing over eight hundred miles of washboard roads.
Our solution was to charter a monthly flight from Lagos, Nigeria, where the U.S. government had established a supply depot. We had a contract with a small American company that would fly a DC-6 full of goods to Niamey every month. We negotiated an arrangement with the Nigerien customs authorities to permit us to take delivery directly from the aircraft and submit the paperwork later. We had to do it this way because we never had the exact inventory for what we were going to receive until the plane actually landed. I worked with the head of customs to overcome his bureaucratic inclination to impound all of our goods and supplies until the paperwork had the appropriate stamps from the foreign and finance ministries, a process that would have held up delivery by several weeks at least. He and his staff were invited to check the inventory against the goods delivered as they were coming off the aircraft, just as I did, and to look into every box that was delivered.
The first time we ran the operation this way, it took almost a day to complete the offloading of the aircraft while the local minor bureaucrats asserted their power. They had a tendency to be officious. In the face of this, we cheerfully complied and aggressively opened every box, insisting that they take a look before we loaded the goods into one of the twenty trucks we’d rented for the day. After a few months of this, our cooperation with the authorities had completely disarmed them and we wound up enjoying free run of the airport. The customs officials became our friends and allies, helping to expedite rather than slow the turnaround of the flights, to the point where we were able to take delivery and put the DC-6 back in the air within two hours. It was a great lesson in how to work around the heavy bureaucracy in third-world countries to get things accomplished reasonably efficiently, all without violating the integrity of their procedures.
Susan and I took advantage of our time in Niger to travel throughout the country. In the south, along the bor
der with Benin and Upper Volta, we visited a game park called “W,” after the bends in the river. It was home to many species of antelope, lion, elephant, and hippopotamus in the river and streams. We drove across the John F. Kennedy Bridge in Niamey, along the washboard roads, and finally met the river again at the park entrance. For three days we wandered through the park, searching for game and camping along the stream. At night we heard the lions in the distance, and around our campsite a family of baboons gathered, hoping for some handouts. In the morning when we washed at the stream, we saw the footprints of hippos that had emerged from a pond upstream to forage in the grasses bordering the water. One morning we came upon a troop of elephants and found ourselves caught between a mother and her young. Preparing to charge us, she trumpeted loudly and flapped her ears. I panicked; I could not get our Toyota Land Cruiser into reverse. Finally, as she was bearing down on us, the car slipped into gear and we raced backwards away from the stampeding mother.
One time I accompanied our ambassador, Charles James, to Bilma, an oasis settlement surrounded by sand dunes. Bilma’s location, in the northeastern part of the country in the Sahara Desert, made it Niger’s first line of defense against Libyan aggression. The Nigeriens liked to say that when Muhammar Qhadafi looked at a map on the wall, he saw that Niger was below Libya. He knew that water flowed downhill and assumed the same for oil. He worried that all of his oil was going to run down into Niger and therefore was prepared to take Nigerien territory to keep control of his oil. Bilma, and the airfield of Derkou, some forty-five minutes away, was the first outpost of settled population east of Agadez, the regional capital, south of some recently opened uranium mines, along the road to Algeria. To get there involved a trek of several days in four-wheel-drive caravans across some of the harshest land imaginable.
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