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It was called Central African Empire, probably so that Bokassa could call himself an Emperor. He spent a million dollars of French money on his "coronation" in the poorest country in Africa. It made the cover of Time magazine in 1977 or 78, probably the only time that country has ever been in the news. He was a monster who slaughtered school children.
I was there when I was a 21 year old college student, as a summmer volunteer for a fundamentalist missionary group. There were 23 college students who flew over from the US to spend the summer with missionary families in various locations. Mine was the most remote location, deep in the jungle forest. The couple whose home I lived in were missionary stock, with parents and grandparents who had been missionaries- going back to the era when some came across the ocean on a ship and walked into the interior of Africa to bring the gospel.
I became a much more liberal Christian in the ensuing years, but I still have a lot of respect for these people. They were out there in the middle of nowhere, but they knew how to live off the land. They spoke English but were also fluent in French, as well as several African tribal languages and trade languages. The government was oppressive but the missionaries were incredibly good at dealing with them, and after all, besides their religion they brought money, education, and medical care to the region. They also delivered the boat mail to the eastern part of the country. There were occasional Peace Corp volunteers and a linguist from Yale who stayed with us when they visited the region.
I was supposed to be working with a doctor who had practiced medicine in tropical Africa for 50 years, but he didn't arrive there until after I left. I had every vaccine in the university dispensary before I went, and probably saw every illness there including polio and yellow fever. There were no vaccines there at all, and few antibiotics. There were people with tertiary syphillis. The average life span, I'm told, was 43. The only medical care provided by the country was an occasional "maternity" which wasn't even used by most. The missionaries told me that the Pzande tribe had been dying off for 20 years- a 70% loss in population- and they didn't know why. They suspected it was a new sexually transmitted disease. As soon as I heard about AIDS in the 80s, I knew.
The girls were pregnant from the age of sexual maturity and ever after. Some had never had a menstrual period. They had to prove fertility to get a husband. The infant mortality rate was 40% and many women died in childbirth. So children were raised in extended families where they called several different women mother. The missionaries were kind of freaked out by the sexual behavior, but they were cooler than fundies nowadays and they joked about it.
The people there were animistic. They had no trouble believing in the missionary version of Christianity- they just added it to all the other beliefs they already had. They invented their own churches and their own takeoff on the Christian religion which included lots of dancing and getting drunk. I called it the "Church of Mango Beer" but it would have looked really bad if I went to one of those while I was there! :shrug: They saw the belief in boiling water before drinking it as a purification ritual of "white people's religion" but they did it anyway because it seemed to work.
The people were wearing clothes that looked like they came from American Good Will or Salvation Army. I expected something exotic, but I never saw anyone in some kind of tribal dress. They were dirt poor. There was an adolescent girl wearing a very pretty white eyelet dress which was exactly like an easter dress I had. Only it was orange with dirt, and it was the only article of clothing she had. It haunts me still. They slept on the ground in their huts- but there was always fear of snakes and wild animals.
A large donation of clothes from the United States had come over to the capital city, and there were thousands of Mickey Mouse pajamas in the shipment. They used the pajamas as school uniforms. There were schools which basically took people as far as the third grade- a little bit literate in French. The tribal languages were spoken but not written (at least until the missionaries came and had to create a Bible in the tribal languages too!)
We were a mile from the river which separated Zaire from CAE. There were hippos in the river and plenty of elephants in the region. I could hear the hippos stomachs rumbling at night. Somebody had to stay in the gardens at night to protech the corn from the elephants. There were snakes there, but I never saw one the whole summer. We used an outhouse. We had a 2 year old chimp as a pet. There was one bathtub which was a hollowed out tree. I used the same bathwater as the couple's children. All water had to be boiled before drinking or bathing, so keeping everyone clean was quite a bit of work.
In some ways it was a very hard summer- I was lonely and somewhat bored. But I watched an equatorial African sunset every night for 10 weeks. I saw first hand the real human suffering that exists in third world countries. I stepped totally outside of my own culture and never saw it the same way again. And rather than leaving with the feeling that I wanted to convert these people, I wanted to tell everyone just how bad the living conditions were and that the people there desperately needed more than our unwanted clothes.
Thanks for asking!
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