A young man, sent on a mission to the Equateur, the Congo’s remotest
region, finds that it changes his life .
The country was called the Congo then, as it is now once again. I was living in
Coquilhatville, a tiny place, now known as Mbandaka. It was a river port squatting at the
confluence of the mighty, tawny Congo, so wide that some days you could not see the
opposite bank, and a tributary called the Ruki. A Belgian explorer-adminstrator called
Camille Coquilhat had opened a Congo Free State trading post there in the 1890s.
Coq existed outside of time; its only realities were the
sky, the river and the jungle. Living there, it was hard later to comprehend reports of
rebel advances somewhere out in that vast, swampy, and river-laced jungle. It was hard to
believe that Coq was a place those rebels would want to capture on their path to
Leopoldville, the capital.
But it was.
Although in 1964 it was a shrinking island of civilization,
Coq had only a few years earlier served as the capital of the Equateur, one of the Belgian
Congo’s six colonial provinces. So it was deemed important enough by the United
States government to merit an "American presence." Not a diplomatic mission,
mind you, just a US Information Service post, an American Cultural Center.
I arrived in the Congo from a training tour in Brussels just
at the time the married officer assigned to Coquilhatville flatly refused to accept the
posting. He would not take his wife to that remote and lonely and pestiferous place. So I
was sent instead. My job was to open the post. |