"If you ever intend to have children, and want them to live prosperous lives, you damn well better make sure that we control the African continent."
George Rich's admonition helped me live with myself and tolerate the other U.S. consultants I shared a mansion with in Alexandria in the summer of 1974. His shadow had followed me from Cairo to the pyramids at Gaza; now it hovered behind the Egyptian government official who stood at the head of the massive cedar table that appeared almost too large for the elegant dining room in the house we rented. A colossal residence that harkened back to a bygone era, it had been built by a British merchant who amassed fortunes shipping African ivory, mummies, and jewels snatched from ancient tombs to European museums.
"History proves that Egypt is the head of the dog whose body is Africa," the official said with a smug grin. His eyes roved around the table, taking each of us in—ten men, U.S. citizens, there to develop water, sewage, and other infrastructure systems. He thumped the table with his fist. "Make it easy for our president, the honorable Anwar Sadat, to embrace America, and Africa will follow. Capitalism for the world!" He paused and motioned for the waiters to start serving dinner.
"We're the cavalry," a civil engineer from Colorado muttered, "arriving just in time to save the fort."
"Let's hope we're not Custer," someone mused. It brought a sound of laughter. Convincing ourselves that Egypt was the spearhead for development on the rest of the African continent had become a nightly exercise. We American consultants prided ourselves on our sophistication and on our abilities to quantify, to reduce complex problems to statistics that we could summarize in tables, graphs, and charts. Several held Ph.D.s, the rest a variety of advanced degrees—except for me, a lowly B.S. wise enough to keep quiet on the subject. Typical of development experts, we were headpeople who spent an inordinate amount of time assuring ourselves that our work in Alexandria would generate a new epoch throughout the continent and that by the beginning of the third millennium Africa's most serious problems would be relics of the past.
For most of the team, like the majority of Americans, it seemed an easy sell. Following the examples of preceding empires, these modern-day conquistadors had signed up to transform wayward societies into shadow replicas of their own. The heathens could be saved, if only they would convert to Catholicism, or, in contemporary terms, democracy, if only they would bend to the enlightened leadership of a Caesar or a king—or to a U.S. president.
Although I tried to conform, increasingly I grew more cynical. Whether I heard these arguments in Indonesia, Iran, Colombia, or Egypt, they seemed to carry the religious overtones of my Calvinistic upbringing; in them, I heard the Puritanical preachings of early New England's Cotton Mather. But could I really believe that hell's fires would devour anyone siding with the Soviet Union? Did Saint Peter stand smiling at the gates of heaven with open
arms for capitalists? And even if someone could convince me to answer "yes," could we exclude ourselves from those fires? By what stretch of the imagination would the American Way appear as free-market capitalism? Everything I saw indicated that the small-town entrepreneur was headed for extinction, replaced by the predators at the top of the food chain, the big corporations. We seemed determined to return to the monopolistic trusts of the
late 1800s. And this time around it was happening on a global scale.
So what was I doing? I asked myself this question every single night. I thought about my first trip to the Middle East, those brief days in Beirut, Marlon Brando, Smiley's tour of the refugee camps, the sights, smells, textures, tastes, and sounds. It had been less than four years and yet seemed a lifetime. After dinner, I often wandered down to the Mediterranean, just a few blocks away from our mansion. The dark waves crashing against the seawall took me back to earlier times, to Anthony and Cleopatra, the pharaohs, the kings and queens who erected the pyramids, Moses ... I peered across the waters toward Italy and east to Greece, and then farther east to the land of the Phoenicians—now Lebanon.
These thoughts of ancient empires brought an odd sort of comfort. History was a tapestry of conquest and brutality that we humans had muddled through. The sound of the waves soothed my tormented soul. George Rich stood before me pointing at the lighted map in MAIN'S boardroom; the only thing that mattered was the future for the child that someday would issue from my loins. For his or her sake we had to control Africa and the Middle East. It was t he knowledge that my progeny depended on it that kept me going. That and of course the fact that I was living an adventure, seeing parts of the world I previously had only dreamed about, and doing all of it on a very generous expense account.
Sometimes on those nights down by the Mediterranean I would turn and look back toward the lights of Alexandria and I would see beyond them the great expanse of Africa. I imagined it as the nightmare land depicted in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a sinister, loreboding place where human beings treated each other in unspeakable ways. The violence of Africa was, in my eyes, more ghastly than the violence of other continents, the horrors
more horrific.
Although I had lived in the Amazon, I felt the Congo was something different and this difference defined Africa as a whole. In my youth I had loved the Tarzan books; his jungle had been my paradise. Later, as I traveled in EHM circles and began to comprehend the truth of modern history, Tarzan's home deteriorated in my mind. Where had Edgar Rice Burroughs's hero been when the slavers arrived? The Amazon came to signify a vibrant rainforest, the Congo a malevolent swamp.
I had visited the slums of Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, had recoiled in shock at the Museum of the Inquisition in Lima and photos of Apache warriors shackled to U.S. Army dungeon walls; I knew about the violence of Suharto's military and the shah's secret police, the SAVAK; yet, in my opinion, nothing compared to Africa. What I had not seen I visualized and my visions included innocent men, women, and children snared in nets, hauled screaming aboard slave ships, piled one on top of another, puking, shitting, rotting, trundled off to auction blocks, sweating, bleeding, dying, while back home in Africa their lands, their people, animals, and jungles were ravaged by "civilized" Europeans. All of it so my ancestors could strut in their cotton gowns.
I thought about these things often. Then one afternoon I met a young man and woman who had fled from their home in Sudan. Hearing their shocking story forced me to admit that I was repeating the sins of those slavers.