Sylvia's Journal

My father died nearly 40 years ago. Yet the last two months I have traveled with him. It is the year 1955. He was 39 years old. He left right after the New Year. It was winter, and was going to be a cold one. He left for a nearly 3 months long business trip through French colonial Africa: French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa and Madagascar, to sort out import processes and constraints on Dutch beer. He represented the interests of 11 Dutch breweries, some of which no longer exist or have merged with a few big ones, like Heineken.

I was just barely three years old when he left, and don’t remember his departure. He left my mom with 4 kids under the age of 10, going to a place that was hardly known and may have seemed quite dangerous to travel to and through. He traveled with a typewriter and a stack of onion skin paper that had his office logo on it (CBK-Centraal Brouwerij Kantoor). He typed letters about his meetings, successes, failures, joys and frustrations nearly daily: 8 weeks of travel and 63 single spaced typed sheets of paper with no margins. These were sent to Holland via Air France. They arrived in just a few days. He also sent cables, which he indicated in all caps in his letters.

He also traveled with a woolen scarf, which he promptly left in the KLM plane from Lisbon to Dakar, tropical dress suits, even a tuxedo, and a few shorts and light shirts. He never used the tuxedo and the dress suits because it was too hot and besides, except for Kenya and the Malgache highlands, everyone wore shorts and their shirts untucked, even senior government functionaries.

Air France traveled daily to all the major cities in its colonies, carrying passengers, mail, champagne, good wines, cheeses, caviar and more ordinary foodstuffs such as meat, chicken and vegetables. As my father wrote to my mother, the French colonials work hard and then enjoy the good life far from home that was probably much better than home. He typed all his letters with a carbon copy and then sent those to my mom with a handwritten note on the back of the copy so that she could read what he had been doing that day or those days plus some private reflections.

He traveled in the planes that were common at that time: DC 3, DC 4, DC 6, and Constellations, all fairly new. He would often lunch or dine with the crew when they had a stopover. He did notice that they consumed abundant beer and wine during those lunches and dinners even when they had to take off right after to the next destination. As a pilot myself, it is hard to imagine these pilots (most probably trained as war pilots – it was after all only 10 years after WWII had ended) traversing 1000s of kilometers over deserts and dense forests with few places, if any, available for emergency landings. That my father survived this trip, between the dangers of flying and tropical diseases, diarrhea and dehydration, now seems a miracle to me.

I have traveled widely myself through Africa and have been to most of the places he went to, even slept in some of the same hotels, Dakar, Conakry, Abidjan, Lome, Cotonou, Kinshasa, Nairobi and Antananarivo. I never made it to Tchad, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo. (Brazzaville). My father had never been to the tropics and the warmest weather he knew was that of southern France. Arriving in Dakar in Januari, he compared it with the French Riviera. But then he went further south to Guinea Conakry, along the Bay of Benin, the edge of the Sahel in Tchad and the humid heat of central Africa. He suffered greatly, and wrote about the weather a lot to his colleagues and my mother.

He had also never been around blacks. At first he is scared to find himself in a place where the whites are outnumbered and he reflects on how they mingle in daily life but then return to their segregated quarters at night. Of course he would only move around the small circle of whites, the colonials, but he had to deal with the black population in their function as servants and staffing the bureaucratic machinery, taxis and the post office. He represents the attitudes of the times regarding black people and this is manifested in comments that make me cringe and which I found hard to transcribe. The language is pejorative and judgmental. Ouch!

Since he was there for beer, he writes a lot about the beers he drinks and sees on the shelves in hotels and cafes. He also writes about the cost of them, commenting about how expensive everything is. That refers to everything that he needs, which is all flown in from Paris, so of course it is expensive. He also comments on the often excessive alcohol use of both blacks and whites.

He writes little about the political situation, except for a few references to the French Mendes-France government that falls while he is in Africa, and the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya which does not seem to interfere with his one and only visit to an English colony.

The economy in French colonial Africa was, of course, entirely in the hands of the French, serving their own interests, with tariffs imposed on foreign imports. French beer was of course not considered foreign, but Dutch beer was. My father spent a lot of time negotiating and navigating the sometimes conflicting interests of the (white) traders (exporting tropical goods, and importing products the whites could not live without) and those of the administration, going back and forth between officials in economic affairs and the chambers of commerce. The trade terminology was foreign to me: quotas, apportioning, duties, but I did get the gist of considerable control that the French exerted about everything. Now and then he writes about liberalization, but that is still far in the future, as is decolonization and independence.

His three days in Nairobi let him to reflect on the difference between French and English colonial Africa. In French colonial Africa, he writes, the blacks are French citizens, while in Kenya they are not British citizens. He writes about the language the local speak, which is of course influenced by the blacks he interacted with: In French West and Equatorial Africa they all speak French. In Kenya they speak their own languages. He also notices how everything in the French colonies is done, as we say in Dutch: ‘met de Franse slag,’ which means doing things loosely, incompletely, informally, and half-heartedly, while in Kenya he is struck by how formal everything is. For example in the New Stanley hotel he is told that after half pas 6 in the evening he is warned by the receptionist that he has to wear long pants, a coat and a tie. in fact, he wears that a lot because of course the weather is cool and everyone else does it.

In Kenya he gets his first real taste of wild animals roaming around free (other than the occasional monkey in the Congo). He is ecstatic about that experience. He also finally finds himself in a place where he can find souvenirs for his kids: a Kikuyu bow and arrow for my older brother, a switch supposedly made from hippo hair for my sister, and a wooden giraffe for other brother. But he doesn’t write about the black doll I had requested (which, as the story goes, my mother bought in the local toy store). I still have an African cloth doll but it is not clear where that came from since it is not mentioned and I surely would not have liked it as a 3 year old – it actually scared me as a child).

Now that i am done with the transcribing and translating, I feel a bit sad because I am back in 2024 and he has left me, again.