Love In An African Dictatorship - Leaving The Nasty, Immoral Bits Outside The Bedroom Door

Henry Peterson's job was attending to the failing countries of Africa in a last-ditch attempt to right the sinking ships of the continent.  Since independence, African countries have been on a downward spiral, falling farther each year into poverty, corruption, misrule, crime, and civil unrest.  Only few countries have been spared the worst of this trend, but they too have GDPs that are less than even the poorest American state. 

 

In any case Henry, a senior manager of an international bank based in Washington, made thrice yearly trips to the countries under his financial and economic wing.  The most important was a former Portuguese colony, a country which for years had fought a bloody civil war and had emerged badly damaged but still sitting on top of untold reserves of oil, diamonds, and rare earths.  It was ripe for the rise of an African big man, someone with tribal loyalties, Machiavellian purpose, and an indifference to the country itself; and so it was that Henry Peterson swallowed his pride and his bile, and three times a year visited the President in his regal chambers in the capital. 

The President always greeted him graciously and warmly. The Ogre Of The Jungle, an approximate and much tamer version of his native Umbundu, one which suggested mayhem, cannibalism, and animal lust, was nowhere to be seen among the Tiffany, chintz, Chinese silk, and Louis XVI furniture.  The President, dressed in Armani and Gucci was a model of European sophistication and class, and threw most diplomats off the scent.  They had seen financial spread sheets, intelligence reports, and spoken to expatriate dissidents about the depredations of the man, but still when standing before him, arms extended in welcome, they demurred and decided to withhold judgment.

A mistake of course, for the Ogre of the Jungle more than merited his title and took every last cent granted by the international donor community and secreted it securely in personal bank accounts in Switzerland and the Caymans. 

Peterson knew all this and still remained the Bank's envoy.  His mission was not to try to stop the hemorrhaging of dollars out of the country, but to convince the big man to invest at least some of it in the infrastructure, social welfare, and health programs the Bank had featured throughout Africa. 

The Bank had tried for years to at least turn the country towards a semblance of liberal democracy and an equitable distribution of its vast mineral wealth but had predictably failed.  Loan after loan defaulted and renegotiated until Bank senior executives had had enough and the latest unpaid loan was to be classified as 'unperforming' and cancelled without hope for renewal.  

The United States, however, watched the Chinese move in and negotiate sweet deals with the President. A no-condition exchange, below market price oil for infrastructure investments, had been concluded, and with that foothold the Chinese expanded their interests to more essential mineral reserves. 

Henry had no particular qualms about dealing with such a corrupt autocrat.  His job was to work within, around, and on the margins of corruption; to accept it as part of the cost of doing business, keeping the geopolitical house in order.  He had no illusions about such a system and was long past looking for what a Washington bureaucrat had called 'positive leakage' - the dribble of funds that might make it to the village.  Even if some earmarked funds had somehow gotten past the sticky fingers of Luanda, it was sure to be hoovered into the pockets of local administrators. 

So all that was required of Peterson was an elaborate pas de deux, a fanciful dance of  pirouettes and plies where, when the music stopped playing, President and Bank envoy embraced and went back to personal affairs - the President to his mistress on the Peninsula, and Peterson to his suite in the newly-completed five-star Barcelo hotel overlooking the port.  

The war had been over for some years and the city, and thanks to the President's Tonton Macoute secret police and RAB (Rapid Action Battalion) strike force, the banlieus - the same nasty crime-ridden neighborhoods found in the Paris' northern suburbs - had been neutralized, and crime in the capital had been reduced to a normal level for a city of its size. 

 

As a result, Peterson's life was good.  Again thanks to the President, high end French and Portuguese restaurants serving the mulatto elites and the growing international community were now commonplace, so eating out was a pleasure, not a nightmare in the early post-war years where food was scarce.  

As was common among the international development community, Peterson had an African lover - a beautiful mixed-race (Tutsi/Ethiopian) woman whom he had met at a diplomatic function honoring the President and his 'Children Are Our Future' campaign.  She was not exactly to be bought, but welcomed the attention showered on her by her European lover.  Peterson was approaching late middle age, knew that cinq-a-sept romantic affairs were things of the past and only sexual commissions were in his future, and so gladly welcomed the overtures of Lady Fatima.  

 

Each new World Bank 'World Development Report' cited Peterson's country as an example of how a responsive public-private partnership could enhance loan performance but this was only smoke and mirrors to camouflage the cravenly corrupt collusion between international donor and recipient.  The pressure the Bank felt from the United States, to mention only one country desperate for the country's energy and mineral wealth, was 'robust'.  In short, the country was to remain well within the commonwealth of democratic nations, and investment should continue. 

Fatima, although a business-minded, was not without charm and a spirited intelligence.  Best of all in Peterson's mind was her marvelous, morally disassociated attitude.  She cared even less than Peterson about the self-interested maneuverings of the President.  She knew enough about Ethiopia's decades-long political miasma, its wars with Eritrea, and its shameless siphoning off of international humanitarian aid to private offshore accounts.  Her own Tutsi relatives in Rwanda under Paul Kagame were robbing the country blind. 

She was as nonchalant about all this as Peterson who had long since given up any pretense of standing on higher moral ground.  He was complicit.  His hands were as dirty as any in the President's inner circle.  Just because he didn't hand out envelopes stuffed with cash, didn't mean that he and his employer didn't share the blame. 

What made he and Fatima such a brilliant couple was their shared anomie - a Euro-cynicism borne of both millennia of squabbling neighbors and internecine warfare and an African fatalism that came from tribal paganism and later an inured moral fatigue.