“The Last American”: A Diplomat in Zaire

5. You make reference to Conrad's Heart of Darkness in one of your essays, which tells the story of a young Canadian flight attendant, whose plane crashes near Kisangani. The crew was flying to southern Zaire with some mining equipment for a French enterprise. Yet France, Canada, and the U.S. all hesitated to get involved and help the young man who would have died without medical help, which he couldn't get in Kisangani. Conrad's Heart of Darkness, of course, was about the desperate deceitfulness and wickedness of the colonial enterprise. I'm curious how frequently thoughts of this entered your head-both as you wrote this essay and while you lived in the Congo?

I first read Heart of Darkness when in college, some twenty years before going to the Congo itself. Of course, I never dreamed in 1957 that I would go there.

For the record, however, for reasons fully appreciated by those who are fascinated by Conrad's writings, and his own life, I never forgot the "experience" of vicariously living Conrad's sojourn up the Congo River. As uncanny as it turned out to be, I didn't find it entirely odd to be experiencing and witnessing some of the same kinds of things that filled Conrad's senses. Was it "deja vu all over again?" In many somewhat frightening ways, yes. One thing, in spite of a flowering of "civilization" in Kisangani's Congo during the latter decades of Belgian rule, once this "civilization" was shaken to the core by the totally "uncivilized" actions of people much like those described by Conrad, the same natural force of vegetation that also impressed Conrad proceeded, with an inevitability that boggles the mind, to literally swarm over and extinguish remaining traces of this civilization already on its knees. And when the warring armies there now depart Kisangani, that same jungle power will prevail once again, I'm sure.

6. Can you share some of the most harrowing, enlightening, sorrowful, and/or happy moments of your experiences?

My predecessor and others newly met in Kisangani told us upon arrival: "Never get sick here. Never tangle with the police or the soldiers. Never travel alone. Never run out of petrol. Never run out of whiskey. Never turn down an opportunity to visit Kinshasa. Never, never, never lose your cool, and make all the friends you possibly can."

My response to that, in retrospect, is that with

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