from Brazzaville, Congo, 26 April 1957 -- "the loneliest man in Africa"

Dearest Nun and Little One ...

Your letters from Brazil caught up with me here today. Somebody had locked them in a drawer. So now I am not as lonely as I was although I am still the loneliest man in Africa.

The WHO people here are about as stand-offish a lot as could be gathered in one building. I have not had an invitation to so much as a cup of coffee since arriving. A car picks me up at the hotel in the morning, swishes me through dodging pedestrians at something like 100 KM per hour and deposits me at the headquarters. Here I sit in a deserted office waiting for someone to come and explain again why it is impossible for me to leave here for a week. I'm apparently stuck here until Wednesday. I've tried to use the time working on my notes but I really can't say I have accomplished much. Maybe it will go better now that I am resigned to spending a week here.

I shall be glad to give Dr. Candou a report on Rio which will conflict considerably with Courtneys and Le
Motte's. I'm especially burned that Smiling Jack did not get a single visa during my stay in Rio. They are needed for every country. I managed to talk my way past the immigration people at the river dock here (the airport is across the river in the Belgian Congo) but I can't visit Leopoldville across the stream, for fear of not getting back in. Incidentally (I might say "Funnily enough") the local people seem most disturbed about my getting through immigration that way. I gather they think I should have asked to be put in jail until they showed up. (They didn't meet me at the airport and showed up half an hour late at the river landing.)

This was probably the movie

I'm in a big hotel on a hill well back from town. It is very expensive. The WHO people say it is the only hotel with malaria screens; I walked into town yesterday afternoon to try to find another, but failed. I couldn't even locate one without screens.

The town itself is like a well-developed village. It has a population of about 125,000, of whom fewer than 5,000 are white. The atmosphere is utterly colonial. Pale faces have all the cars, cafes, etc.; the Negroes get in as waiters and drivers. There are young Negroes on every corner and around the two cafes selling paintings of native scenes. These are reproductions of colored line drawings. I think I'll get one or two, as souvenirs. I was also offered a handsome carving by a man who said he hadn't eaten for three days. It was of a young boy, and it stood four feet high and weighed more than Lane does. So no go.

Last night as I walked back toward the hotel about 8:30 I passed a movie house. All I could tell about the feature was that it had Dorothy Maguire in it. I bought a ticket but I still don't know what the movie was about. It had French dubbed in so expertly that I couldn't get more than the hellos. Some gangster was giving Dorothy a bad time when I left. She doesn't look as much like Phyllis as she used to. ...