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. ...

 

To Eddie and Alice Barnard, 16 May 1957 -- "This is the African bush"

Kaduna

Northern Nigeria

May 16, 1957

Dear Eddie and Alice...

This is a part of the country that I knew almost nothing about before I came here, and if I'd asked to guess what it would be like I'd have missed the mark by from here to City Hall.

Northern Nigeria, to save you a trip to map, lies in the Sudan, south of the Sahara. The people are mostly Moslems, Negro Moslems, and I still find it confusing to see black men in flowing robes of cotton or, sometimes, silk and nylon, with silk turbans or little blue, white or black fezes; or to have them greet you with salutations in which the only understandable word is Allah. Strange it is, too, to cash a traveller's check in a bank and note that the teller, who speaks excellent English, has his face carved in an elaborate pattern of scars, and has a big star tattooed in heliotrope on his forehead. Nor can I easily get used to the sight of a camel train plodding down the street, loaded with bundles of hides from the country to the north. 

This is the African bush, and it is not what I expected. I had expected jungle or desert, but this is in between. The land is mostly flat, like the land in Eastern Washington, around Richland, but it is covered with low green scrub, rather like salal, a yard high. There are occasional trees, thirty or forty feet apart: mangoes, which at this time of the year, the end of the dry season, are hung with lovely, breast-shaped fruit; locusts, large but small-rooted, festooned with black pods two feet long, from which the Africans extract small brown beans about the size of corn kernels, that they make into cakes precisely the shape, texture and taste of mud pies. But mostly the land is scrub. 

It rains here. My God, does it rain. Two days ago it rained six inches in two hours, and yesterday while I was out visiting a leper community in deep bush a storm blew up suddenly and for twenty miles the road was under water. We drove in a Land Rover (British jeep) through country turned abruptly into a lake. We crossed rotting bridges of palm logs, with the water, which was yards below the bridge when we came in, running over the mud-covered boards as we left. Brown sheets of water cascaded back over the windshield, completely blinding us at times. We passed the pagans from the leper village, extremely primitive people who trotted through the rain stark naked, except for the long, silver earrings of the women, and calabashes and wooden carrying bowls which they managed to balance on their heads even as they ran. We braked desperately to a stop as a herd of Fulani cattle streamed across the road, well-fed beasts though this is the very end of the dry season, Brahmas, grey and wide-horned, followed at a run by little herdsgirls, four- five- or six- years old, with pointed goads with which the guided the great bulls. The Fulani are true nomads, following their cattle for thousands of miles -- well, anyway, hundreds of miles -- through the bush, living in teepees made of the stalks of guinea-corn, which grows ten or fifteen feet high. The women make butter and cheese and a kind of yogurt, which they sell in the markets. The men tend the cattle and pick off any stray game they encounter with long, barbed spears or poisoned arrows. They are a fine looking people, tall and thin, with thin noses, thin lips, high cheekbones, looking like Phoenicians. The women wear scarves of dark colors, and blouses of primary colors, and wrap-around skirts of any kind of cloth that comes to hand. The men dress mostly in white, and have funny white or grey leather caps that fold over at the top. They are all most friendly, and if you wave as they pass the women bow and hold their knees, while the men cup their right hands around the back of their necks. They hold the pose until you are past. 

The Hausas, on the other hand, who form the largest tribal group in these parts, salute by raising their clenched right fists above their shoulders. This has no political significance, but one of the Britishers here said that he hadn't had so many of those salutes given him since he stood with Leon Blum at a May Day parade in Paris in 1938. 

Mostly I have been working on a story about leprosy control measures. There are 595,000 lepers out of a population of 18,000,000 in Northern Nigeria, so you can see it is quite a problem. 

The other day I went out, with a Public Works Department man to look at Malaria Control Measures. That's a problem, too. Most of the houses here are made out of mud -- the round, beehive houses you see in old copies of the National Geographic. When they dig the mud for the hut they leave pits. The pits fill up and breed mosquitoes. It is Public Works job to fill or oil the holes. There's just one slight problem. They have a budget of 5,000 dollars a year for the work in a town half the size of Tacoma. 

Yours,

m.