1
Dennis looked like an aging minor league footballer: six feet, dark-eyed, black moustache flecked with grey, a mop of hair to match, and a taste for whisky and women younger than himself. Gregarious, trusting, full of robust energy, he pounded life with a heavy stick and life paid him back with interest. Women loved him and left him, business deals fell through, money that flowed into his hands leaked like water through his fingers. His longed-for payload was ever just round the corner, the next contract, the next cheque, the next subsidy.
Togo was the strangest payload of all. He came to see me in Toronto, bringing with him an American friend whom he introduced as Roger Falsetta. Roger turned out to be vice-president of a real estate development company with the improbable name of Hunter Raven Corporation.
“We’re going to develop and build the first privately-operated free zone south of the Sahara,” Dennis announced.
I asked who would be paying for the work.
“USAID[1] is financing the up-front costs, preliniary studies and so on.” Dennis said, “Then it’s up to us. Or rather, up to Roger.”
Roger nodded.
“Hunter Raven is a big noise in the States,” Dennis said.
My job was to put a team together to study alternative sites for an industrial park, to examine the human and physical infrastructure, and to estimate the start-up costs.
I was sceptical. “USAID is going to pay us to so that?”
“Hunter Raven is a US company,” said Roger.
“Yeah. But Dennis and I are Canadian.”
“They don’t care about that,” Dennis said.
We flew to Washington for a meeting with William “call me Bill” Weinstein, a middle-ranking USAID official. His office, sequestered in the stoney labyrinth of the US State Department, was tiny. Folders, reports and loose papers were piled on the desk, wedged on shelves over books and file boxes, stacked on the floor. Dennis, Roger and I sat on upright chairs in a corridor between desk and twin filing cabinets, while Weinstein’s assistant, introduced simply as Melanie, occupied a stool in the doorway. Weinstein apologised for the lack of space. He wore a permanent frown and spoke with clipped upstate authority. Melanie took notes.
I guess you fellas need to know about the financial arrangments,” Weinstein said.
“You bet,” Roger answered.
I have always gaped - figuratively - at the unabashed pleasure Americans take at the propect of money. Roger, I figured, wasn’t going to weep tears for the poor of Togo. Several hundred grand were on offer and he needed them for his company bonus. After a brief discussion, Weinstein assented to the release of fifty percent of the funds up front “so that you boys can get going”, then he left it to his assistant to deal with what he called the details..
Melanie took up the reins. “We’re glad to have Canadian participants in this important project. But we think maybe the Canadian government could make a financial contribution. We’ve already invested upwars of a couple of million bucks on the Togo project.”
“We thought USAID…” Dennis began, but I stopped him.
“CIDA[2] will play ball, I promised.
Before leaving Washington, we dropped in on the World Bank to ask if there was funding for Togo. An official told us that several million dollars had been set aside for the country several years before, but had remained unspent. If we could come up with something, they would take a look at it.
Back in Canada, Dennis and I did the rounds in Ottowa and Hull, the twin city hosts of the federal government. An expensive dinner with the Togolese ambassador yielded a letter of approval signed on behalf of General Eyadéma, the country’s president.
“Do you know anything about him,” I asked Dennis afterwards.
“He’s a bad boy.”
“?”
“Dicatator. He feeds enemies to his pet crocodiles.”
“Sounds great.”
CIDA’s officials were sceptical. They didn’t fund speculative projects, they didn’t have a program in Togo, it wasn’t a Canadian priority and so on. I wrote a proposal replete with maps, diagrams and imaginative certainties. Togo would benefit hugely from the project; thousands of jobs would be created, lives would be transformed, women would benefti more than men (a requirement of the time). CIDA remained obdurate. Weeks went by. I addresed each of CIDA’s concerns - or so I thought - one by one; to no effect. USAID expressed anxiety. Why wouldn’t Canada cooperate? Roger grumbled; Dennis reassured him. A CIDA official told me sotto voce that nothing could be done without the approval of the Department of Foreign Affairs. He arranged for us to meet with the Assistant Deputy Minister for Africa - a Monsieur Jean-Luc Lemiel.
In M. Lemiel’s office, more spacious by far than Bill Weinstein’s in Washington, Dennis and I laid out our case. M. Lemiel listened in silence. When we had finished, he asked why no Quebecers were involved. “Togo belongs to La Francophonie[3].As far as we’re concerened it belongs to Quebec. If you put the project in the hands of a Quebec firm, there’ll be no problem with finance.”
“What about our role,” Dennis asked.
“You can be sub-contractors. Or maybe we’ll give you a commission for bringing in the business.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Dennis had a short fuse, but he granted me first charge. “You know what you can do with your Quebec company,” I said. That was as far as I got before Dennis erupted.
“You can go fuck,” he said. “We’ll do it without you.”
Outside, in the icy gloom of an Ottawa late afternoon, our anger subsided giving way to awareness that we had drawn a blank. We shared a melancholy drink on the flight back to Toronto, parting on arrival in the certain knowledge that our Togo dream was over.
Next day I telephoned Melanie with the news.
“That’s too bad,”: she said.”Is there nothing we can do?”
“I guess not.”
“Well okay.” After a moment of silence she added, “Would it help if I contacted someone in the Canadian govenment?”
I never claimed to know much about the workings of bureaucracy but experience had taught me that Canadian officials harbour a suspicion that their neighbours across the border might be their superiors in knowledge and expertise. They will seldom admit to this directly. Their prejudice lies buried in a feeling that Canada is a small place - small not in the geography of its landscape but in its timid sense of identity.
Melanie, composed, articulate, the well-turned-out product of a confident nation, had no such doubts. Unlike Bill Weinstein, she didn’t have an office of her own, just a work station, boarded on three sides by accoustic panels, in a room shared with a dozen others. Next week, though, she could be Weinstein’s boss. In the US, where you started said little about where you would end up. She asked whom to call. I suggested the vice-president of CIDA’s Africa Division.
Next day Melanie called me back. “I spoke to that vice-presient you told me about. He asked how much you needed. I told him around three hundred thousand to make a start.”
“What did he say?|
“He said that wouldn’t be a problem. He’d see to it.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. He said it sounded like a real worth-while project. Only thing that puzzles me is why I had to call him in the first place.”
“You mean why couldn’t we deal with it?”
“Uh huh.”
“They gave us the run-around.”
“Beats me how you guys do things up there in Canada.”
2
Blink as you pass over a map of Africa and you could miss the Republic of Togo. Wedged like a stub of pencil between Ghana and Benin, it occupies a sliver of the West African coast known in nineteenth-century Europe as the white man’s grave. Armed with vaccinations and anti-malarial prophylactics, Europeans fare better now, though locals are not necessarily so lucky. A century ago nobody thought to inquire about the longevity of the native population. Darwinian principles were assumed to prevail: adaptation worked, the people of West Africa lasted as long as they should. By the last decade of the twentieth century[4], life expectancy among the Togolese hovered around fifty years which was twenty-five fewer than your average Australian, Canadian or Western European. Ten per cent of youngsters died before the age of five. In the capital, malarial moquitos bred in fetid lagoons. Suffocating heat sapped energy and stifled movement. Poverty provided the coup de grâce.
General Gnassingbé Eyadéma seized power in a military coup in 1967 and ruled until his death in 2005 when his son Faure Gnassingbé took over. The General imported lions from southern Africa to patrol the grounds of his mansion around which he constructed a moat to guard against the creatures wandering into the family home in search of a meal. Elsewhere, those who patrolled in greatest numbers were the unemployed and impoverished, testimony to the great leader’s success in maintaining Togo as one of the world’s poorest countries.
Lomé, the capital city, stands hard by the Ghanaian border and looks out across sand and palm trees to the Atlantic. Several elegant hotels line the shore built originally in the 1970s to accommodate delegates to the international conference that produced the first Lomé Convention.[5] By 1992, they catered mainly to airline staff, diplomats and the occasional aid official. Most travellers to Lomé were from neighbouring countries, traders mainly in search of cheap imports or contraband. Lomé’s fine white sands and sparkling sunlight might have attracted vacationers from further afield were it not for the absence of plumbing in large parts of the capital, one effect of which was that the beaches served as a communal washroom where people defecated beneath the palms and washed in the sea. An excremental odour hovered over the shoreline.
As soon as I stepped outside on my first morning in Lomé, I realised tthat I had forgotten to bring a hat. Exposure to aggressive equatorial sunlight may be a trivial matter to those blessed with a dark compexion and a protective mop of hair, but I had neither. For a bald Anglo-Saxon to go abroad hatless in such a climate would be to confirm Noel Coward’s assessment of English madness. It would also be dangerous, a guarantee of sunburn, dehydration and maybe something worse.
Retreating back to the hotel lobby, I asked the receptionist where I could buy a hat. She looked at me as if I had already spent too long in the sun.
“Well,” she said after a pause,”there won’t be a store.You could try the market. They sell everything there. It’s the biggest in West Africa.” She ordered a taxi and told the driver to take me to the Grand Marché.
“You can get lost in the market,” she said. “It’s special.”
On the way I asked the driver if he knew of a stall that sold hats.
“We don’t wear hats in Lomé, sir,” he said. “But someone will be selling them. There’s nothing you can’t buy in the market.”
“Any idea which way I should walk?”
“Every way is good,”
I paid him in US dollars at his request, shook his hand, and plunged into the fray.
Stalls lined the streets in all directions. One stretch specialised in fruits and vegetables - mounds of ruby tomatoes, gnarled red peppers, dusty cassavas, earth-brown yams, purple aubergines, lychees and spotted bananas, bundles of green leaves, guavas, passion fruit, heap upon heap of other fruits I had never seen before with names in Evhé and Kabiyé that I elicited but - to the delight of the traders - couldn’t pronounce. There were sections for meat, for poultry, for fish, for dry goods. Along some tributaries importers were selling toothpaste and batteries from China, cameras from Russia, radios from Korea, leather sandals and bags from Bangladesh and India. How could a little country like Togo sustain a market of this immense size? Later I learned that every smuggler in West Africa traded in the Lomé market, and that goods acquired there supplied markets in Lagos, Accra and Abidjan.
Through street after street I wandered, turning right and left at random until I no longer retained any sense of where I was. A near impenetrable thicket of shoppers flowed back and forth, making progress slow and location uncertain. From time to time I asked stall holders if they knew where I could buy a hat. Most shook their heads. A few gave me directions in a local dialect of French I found hard to understand. Heat from the sun bored into my head and made me dizzy, though I remained aware of the beauty of the people around me, the men lean and muscular, the women slim, fine-featured, arrayed in particoloured African robes like arrays of flowers.
An hour of wondering brought me at last to a stall with headgear. On display were piles of greyish peaked caps, all of them sweat-stained and dirty. I picked up one and looked inside the rim. Still legible through an overlay of grime was a lable that read in German “Made in Germany”. I examined several others; all were in like condition. They must have been standard German army issue from the early twentieth century. Until the First World War, the Kingdom of Togoland had been a German colony.[6] More than seventy years had passed since the wearers had departed, perhaps to die in Europe on the Western Front.
“Do you have any new hats,” I asked the merchant, a grizzled man with white hair and a face creased like old parchment.
“Désolé monsieur. Mais peut-être…un moment…”
From beneath the display table he produced a half-dozen, wide-brimmed straw hats woven from coarse reeds.
“These are for farmers, monsieur. For the land. Not suitable for town.”
I took one from him and placed in on my head. It felt rough and unyielding, but it fitted.
“Mil francs,” the merchant said. I sensed by his tone that he expected me to bargain him down to maybe half that amount. Gratitude won out. I would have paid him several times that sum with pleasure.
While I fished for a banknote, he held up a mirror - and I froze. The creature that stared back at me looked like the figment of a nightmare: blotchy, pale skin, bloodshot eyes, cheeks swollen by a Western diet of flour and fat; the irredeemable ugliness of a colonial factotum. It was the face of an alien, an unsavoury intruder among children of the gods. For an hour I had wandered alone, part of the throng, part of Africa, subconsciously assuming that I resembled those among whom I walked - lean, smooth-skinned, black. Nothing in anyone’s reaction gave cause for supposing myself to be any different from them. Eyes that looked into mine reflected no more than awareness of our common heritage. Only the mirror told me who I was and what I might represent in the trampled history of a race that still occupied, in a sclerotic corner of Euro-American culture, an inferior place on the scale of human value. I turned away from the mirror, paid the merchant for the hat and moved on, grateful that no one was paying attention to the sweaty, pink stranger in their midst.
While searching for a way out f the market, I emerged onto a square occupied by a large warhouse. Its double doors were wide open, so I peered inside. The interior consisted of aisles lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves laden with roles of cloth. No one was in attendance. Entering the nearest aisle I pulled out one of the rolls - a cotton-polyester blend patterned in the intricate colours and design of West African batik. Printed along the edge were the words “Made in the Netherlands”. I withdrew a second roll; once again the colours and design were West African and the manufacture Dutch. Before climbing the stairs, I checked another half dozen rolls all with the same result. The second floor proved identical to the first and with similar merchandise. Dutch manufacturers seemed to have taken possession of the industry.
On my way out, a man in dungarees stopped me. I apologised for intruding and asked if there were any cloths made in Togo or elsewhere in Africa.
“In here everything comes from Netherlands,” he said.
“How come?”
“Cheaper to make over there.”
I thought the warehouse overstocked for the needs of so small a nation.
“We supply many countries - Ghana, Benin, Nigeria. Traders come form all over,” the man told me. “Here the taxes are low and nobody asks how to pass things over the border.”
“The Dutch own this warehouse,” I asked.
“No monsieur. The Nana-Benz own the Togo cloth business.”
“Nana-Benz?”
“Rich ladies. We call them Nana-Benz because they go round in Mercedes-Benz cars. Very clever ladies the Nana-Benz. It’s we men who are not so smart. We do the work but the women are the bosses. We talk big monsieur, but in the end we have to do what the ladies say.”
“What about the Dutch?”
“Nana-Benz visit them every year and always come back smiling. Everybody knows the Nan-Benz don’t smile easy. But the Dutch make them smile.”
“They’re clever.”
“I think so monsieur.”
He glanced at my hat. “May I ask you a question?”
I nodded.
“Your hat. Where…?”
“In the market.”
“It’s a Togolese hat. From the countryside. You seldom see them in town.”
“Wasn’t easy to find. I had to search for it. At least it’s made in Togo.”
“Yes monsieur. It’s almost a miracle to find something made here. We used to make many things. Not any more. Now we just make poverty.”
3
A middle-aged, bull-necked American - John Morgan - met us at our hotel. We had been told to expect him.
Over a drink at the pool side, Morgan told us how he came to be in Togo. He had been running a steel plant in Panama when the Togolese authorities invited him to revive the country’s moribund steelworks. “I named my price and then doubled it when they blinked. That’s the way to deal with Africans.” He winked at Roger whom he had spotted as a fellow American, then glanced at each of the rest of us in turn. In addition to Dennis, Roger and myself, our team included Manuel, a doctor, who would examine the health situation in Togo, and Mark, an ecologist.
None of us laughed.
“You Canadians should lighten up a little,” Morgan said.
Next morning, he had us chauffeur-driven to the US embassy where the ambassador informed us that our activities in Togo would enjoy his support so long as we made sure to pass everything through Mr Morgan. He was the most important business executive in the country.
“Who is Morgan,” I wondered aloud afterwards.
“CIA. That’s my take,” Roger said.
4
Work began in earnest. There were meetings with governmetn officials, visits to potential sites for the free zone, interviews with owners of the few - the very few - companies with manufacturing capability. Most of the latter were cottage industries employing a handful of people in plants equipped with machinery old enough to pass elsewhere as antique. Best of these, a soap manufacturer, was in the hands of a businessman from India who confessed that he might with advantage have chosen a more dynamic country in which to spend his working life.
Largest enterprise was the steeworks - John Mogan’s operation. A taxi dropped me outside the main gates. I had pictured it as humming with American-style energy and purpose, but what struck me at once was that nothing seemed to be going on. No trucks arrived or left, no noise came from the vast yard beyond the fence, no workers moved back and forth. I had visited steelworks before. They were noisy, bustling places. Not so here. Lomé’s version seemed encased in the tranquillity of a village library.
I rang the bell at the sidegate and, after an interrogation from the guard, gained admission. Monsieur Alfonse Turbot, the company accountant, received me in his site office. I expressed disappointment that the boss was unavailable since I had taken care to make an appointment.
“Mr Morgan seldom comes here,” my host said. “He has many other businesses.
M. Turbot hailed from Belgium. I wondered how he had ended up in Togo. He told me he had answered a newspaper advertisement and the salary was more than satisfactory. I said the plant didn’t look very busy. M. Turbot agreed that this was so but that appearances were deceptive. Business was more than satisfactory.
What did M. Turbot think of the proposed industrial free zone?
He had no opinion on the subject. I would have to ask Mr Morgan.
5
On Sunday, a day of rest in Lomé as in most places where Christians have ruled, Mark and I visited the fetish market about which we had heard enough to arouse our curiosity.[7] It stood on a patch of land in a nondescript suburb. About thirty stalls faced each other in an untidy elipse, each with its own collection of dried birds, reptiles and mammal. In one stall were serried ranks of bats; in another a jumble of chameleons; two held rows of monkey skulls; one specialized in animals from elsewhere in Africa: gorillas, antelopes, a solitary lion; several were stocked with lizards and snakeskins. There were collections of horns and jaw bones, mounds of small birds, mice and rats. Pelts arranged by size and species hung from poles on uprights like washing on a line. In one stall alone we counted 218 mammals, 204 birds, 21 reptiles, 79 amphibians and 77 snail shells. A neighbouring stall displayed heap upon heap of hides, crustaceans and dried fish.
I wondered what it all meant.
“Magic,” Mark said. “Pathways to the spirit world. Animals have sacred properties. They cure sicknesses, protect from harm, bring luck upon oneself and evil on one’s enemy.”
“You mean they work?”
“Possibly. If you truly believe in them. The US president believes God fights on America’s side. It’s really no different.”
The Gulf War of 1991 had erupted just before our departure from Canada. Flying over the Sahara we had crossed the flight paths of a B52 bomber on its way to Iraq. America seemed routinely to be at war somewhere, if not directly then through proxies, and always with God’s blessing.
We had paused beside a row of skulls one of which Mark examined and identified as hyena. The stallholder approached anticipating a sale.“Pour vous dix mil. C’est bon marché.”
“Merci mon ami. Pas aujourd’hui.” Mark returned the skull to its place.
“People don’t understand each other,” he said as we moved on. “We can no longer imagine how anyone could have faith in a fetish. The Evhé and Kabiye people of Togo probably can’t imagine how anyone could live in a world like ours - so devoid of spirituality.”
“Some in the West still believe in God.”
“Yes; we shunt off the dimension of spirit to a single being. Here everything is spiritual, a fish, a chameleon, a tree. Africa lives and communes with the earth and everything in it. We, on the other hand, live outside the world and prey on it for what we need.”
6
Morgan gave a dinner party in the garden of a restaurant he had hired for the purpose. A single table stretched the length of an immaculate lawn. Servants in white livery attended with military precision. Flaming torches on poles bathed us in a warm flickering light. Morgan sat at the head, Julia his young English girlfrend on his left, Togo’s Minister of Industry on his right. Next came half a dozen Togolese trade officials with Roger, the lone Westerner among them, and then the Canadians. At the far end sat a group of clean-cut Americans to whom we weren’t introduced.
Proceedings began stiffly. The Togolese were ill at ease, I sensed they didn’t much like Morgan and that he, in turn, considered their presence tiresome but necessary. They spoke no English while Morgan made no attempt to speak French. Fueled with several glasses of wine, the host spoke volubly while his Togolese guests ate sparingly, drank iced water and said little. I was seated next to Madame Lenôtre, a trade official. Her bright primrose dress, decolleté almost to the point of indiscretion, drew the eye to what it barely concealed, une gorge superbe as the the old French masters would have noted. The minister, seated obliquely on the other side of the table, would cast his eyes on her from time to time. She drew other glances too, snatched fleetingly like shoppers seized by an urge to steal what they lack means to possess. I tried to engage Madame Lenôtre in conversation but she responded solely with monosyllables. Mostly she remained silend, dignified, immune to the shiftly, prurient hommage of countrymen and strangers alike.
Towards the end of the meal, Morgan proposed a toast to the future of what he decribed as “this great little country”. Dutifully we raised our glasses and murmured “Togo” while the Togolese sat unmoved and, I sensed, sceptical. Five minutes later, after the briefest of courtesies, the minister took his leave followed at once by his entourage.
As she stood up, Madame Lenôte turned to me for the first time and shook my hand.
“Mon mari m’attend.”
“Ah oui, bien súr. Bon soir madame.”
“Now we can relax,” Morgan told us when he returned to the table after seeing off his Togolese guests. He called for more wine. “We gotta enjoy life. That’s why I’m in this business. I’ll tell you all a secret. I’m making more money here than anyone else round this table. That’s not a boast. It’s a fact.” He stood up again, swaying slightly. “You’re all here because I want you here. don’t forget that.” He raised his wine glass and signaled to a a waiter who hurried to his side with a bottle.
Unsteady on his feet, Morgan swayed as his glass was being replenished. Despite the waiter’s dexterity, several drops of the precious liquid dripped onto the tablecloth.
“Idiot,” Morgan said
The waiter darted out of Morgan’s visual range.
“Nobody round here knows how to do anything. Biggest problem we have. Some folk can’t be trained.”
Julia, smiling, put a hand on Morgan’s arm and guided him back into his chair.
Pale with short blond hair, ice-blue eyes and the clipped accent of the English upper class, she seemed to have emerged intact from the previous century when English roses were shipped off to the colonies as prospective brides of colonial officers.
“I think we’d do better to shoot them all, take over the place and run it ourselves,” she said.
Her remark signaled the end of the meal. Taxis were summoned to take the Americans and most of our team away leaving Dennis and myself obliged by courtesy to accept Morgan’s offer of a lift to our hotel in his car. On the way, he changed his mind about our immediate destination and instead ordered his driver to take us for a nightcap. We came to a halt in front of a tw-storey wooden structure. Morgan led the way up a flight of stairs into a room furnished with a dozen tables and, at the far end, a bar behind which a bartender was polishing glasses. He greeted Morgan and Julia politely but without obvious pleasure.
“Whisky all round,” Morgan ordered, adding as an afterthought, “that okay with you guys?”
Julia wanted a gin and tonic.
“What is it with English women,” Morgan said. He looked appreciatively at Julia who was wearing a white dress wih a dangerous slit along the length of one leg. He downed his whisky in one gulp and ordered another.
“You know something?”
He fixed Dennis and I with a stare of melodramatic malevolence.
“You know something,” he repeated, slurring his worlds, “Your guys know nothing. Out here you’re just a couple of kids.
Silence. Dennis and I exchanged glances. Julia stared at the floor.
“If I wanted, I could take you two outside and waste you right now. You’d never be seen again. Nobody here gives a shit. You got that? So don’t mess with me.”
“He gets like this when he’s had too much to drink,” Julia said.
Morgan banged his fist on the bar. “You stay out of this goddamit.”
Julia answered something but we didn’t stay to hear. Tumbling downstairs, we hurried past Morgan’s car where the driver sat waiting for his boss, and pressed on through the dark, tropical night. We halted once to check for any sound or sign that Morgan might be in pursuit, He wasn’t. It took us more than an hour to thread our way through Lomé’s unlit streets to our hotel.
“Who the hell is he,” I asked Dennis as we parted for the night.
“The ugly American?”
“Scenes like that only happen in moves, right?”
Dennis grinned, “Also in Togo.”
7
Morgan called to apologise for his behaviour of the previous evening and to invite the team to his home for what he described as a quiet drink. We sat in his living room on deep-piled sofas round a massive, rough-hewn mahogany table. An upright piano stood against a wall at the far end of the room.
“My profit doesn’t come only from steel, “Morgan informed us, “We run a shipping service along the coast - Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast. Sometimes further down. Julia manages the operation.”
“Not an easy job,” Julia said. “The crews are all halfwits, Even the captains are hopelesss. Dishonest too. If you ask me Africa would be better off without Africans.”
“Why don’t you play something, Honey,” Morgan suggested.
Julia sat at the piano, opened some sheet music and launched into a piece I recognized - Mozart’s Sonata in C Major[7]. Her fingers ran smoothly over the keys and with flawless accuracy. We sat silent, mesmerised, the music flooding the room. I wondered at the contrast between Julia’s hard-bitten persona and her artistry. No one can fake mastery of a musical instrument. I knew she would not have been out of place in London’s Wigmore Hall. What was she doing in Togo? How had she fastened onto Morgan, a man twice her age, a bully and hard drinker with an edge of spite to his temperament. Was it his evident wealth that attracted her? Or adventure? Or love? How could contempt for the people of Togo and of Africa sit alongside Mozart in her mind? What - in the end - do we understand of human motivation, of corruption, of greed, of our need of art, or of our will to survive? The culture that produced Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms also conceived Hitler and Dr Mengele.
Shortly after this tranquil scene, General Eyadéma provoked a dispute with his prime minister, and Togo’s brief experiment in parliamentary governance collaped. Troops fired a few rounds at the Congress bulding, the Minister of Industry - local champion of our project - fled to Ghana; we returned in haste to Canada and wrote a report. Before we left Togo, Morgan had handed me his card.
“Look us up if you’re ever in London. I have a house there.”
Printed on the card beneath his name was an address in Grosvenor Square.
“He gave me one of those,” Dennis told me when I showed it to him. “That a good place to live?”
“You have to be mega rich to own a house in Grosevenor Square,” I told him..
“Ok.”
“Makes me wonder what the hell he’s doing in Togo.”.
“Same as us, I guess,” said Dennis, “Making a buck.”
[1] United States Agency for International Development - an arm of the US State Department.
[2] Canadian International Development Agency. In 2013, CIDA was folded into the Department of Foreign Affairs which was subsequently renamed as Global Affairs Canada.
[3] The French-speaking world.
[4] The period of this scene. Longevity has since improved but still lags behind much of the rest of the world.
[5] A trade and aid agreement signed in February 1975 between the European Economic Community and 71 African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries. .
[6] After a subsequent spell under the Leage of Nations, Togoland splintered into two, one portion emerging as a French colony - Togo, the other joining the Gold Coast (Ghana) under British rule. Togo achieved independence in 1960.
[7] See: The Nigerian Field (1992) Vol 57 3-4, pp. 119—125 (https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-3436-1/dissemination/pdf/Vol_57/TNF_57_3-4_119-126_Fetish_Market.pdf)
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