I began working at the Checchi head office on “K” street downtown immediately upon returning home in December of 1962 and rented an apartment in Southwest DC. My old boss in Accra, Gene Sawyer, his new English wife and little daughter Margo lived in the same complex.
I already knew many of the Checchi people and it was a stimulating workplace. We were a mix of characters, business school graduates (mostly Harvard), young professionals with some overseas experience like myself, and the senior executives and economists—Vince Checchi, his brother Arthur “Tillie” Checchi, Sol Chafkin, and Harry Handsome Clement, a specialist in the economics of tourism. In the years ahead, I worked primarily with Sol, managing our “teams” in several African countries, and became greatly attached to his family. (Sol later became Assistant Director of the Peace Corps, founded his own consulting firm, and held a senior position at The Ford Foundation).
In 1963, the atmosphere working at the Checchi head office in DC very much reflected the refreshing optimism of the new Kennedy administration and White House. We were convinced that it was possible to effect rapid economic change for the better in “newly developing countries” (parts of the world that once were termed “backward”, then “underdeveloped”, today “third world”). We were idealistic and somewhat naïve in this optimism. What was required we thought, was to encourage “Western-style” capitalism such as good banking, private capital investment, smart development planning based on good research and cost/benefit analysis (our speciality), better infrastructure, education and so forth. It was assumed that that new governments would buy into this approach and that corruption would be manageable. This was the ‘Cold War’ era. The Soviet Union and China were actively promoting an alternative approach–a government-managed economy based on communist ideology–and competing for political influence in the third world, especially Africa.
Right after I joined Checchi, the Liberian government asked USAID to provide a four-man team to prepare a long-term (five year) economic development plan. We were selected to carry out the job and I recruited the “team of experts” then backstopped their work for the next two years.
Often Sol or I would fly to Monrovia to keep the team on track, deal with internal quarrelling, and bolster morale which was required too often in Liberia. This was the pattern of work I followed as Checchi won similar consulting work in other West African countries, as well as Somalia and Ethiopia.
On one lonely Pan American night flight to Liberia, I spent hours talking to a very attractive young stewardess. To our mutual surprise, she was again one of the crew on another Pan Am flight a few weeks later. I couldn’t believe my good luck when she said they would have a three-day layover in Monrovia which resulted in one of my more pleasurable working visits to Liberia.
My most memorable and satisfying job (1963) was in the Republic of Guinea, a recently independent ex-French colony. The president, Sekou Toure, on a state visit to the US was asked by President Kennedy what he would most like from the US to assist his country’s industrial development plan. Toure said he’d like help to develop a palm oil processing factory, so a request for urgent action was sent from the White House to USAID, then to Checchi, then to me. I was to head a research team consisting of an industrial engineer, another economist and a retired Procter and Gamble executive who, supposedly, knew lots about palm oil processing. I was the only one who spoke French, the official language of Guinea.
We were met by high-level staff from the Ministry of Economic Development at the small Conakry airport and put up at an old Conakry Hotel which was the best in town by far. For several days, Ministry officials drove us into interior regions of the country—terrible roads through small towns and villages. We observed lots of oil palms, but widely scattered among broadleaf semi-deciduous forest areas. I remember seeing plenty of wildlife, wild monkeys, a pygmy hippopotamus and domesticated mongooses.
Our retired Proctor and Gamble “expert” was in culture shock and pleaded with me to arrange his immediate return home. I figured he wasn’t much help and did so. His experience with oil palm processing was under entirely different conditions. Most palm oil, even today, is produced and exported from Southeast Asia, processed from huge oil palm plantations that take many years to develop. No such plantations existed then in Guinea or West Africa. (Palm oil is an important, widely used ingredient for use in cosmetics, food processing, and edible oil). I began wondering how to deal with the “promise” of a factory after finding that the fruit from wild oil palms, though plentiful, was nowhere concentrated and often hard to harvest and transport. A processing mill of any economic scale would need raw material (palm bunches and kernels) in enough regular quantity to keep operating for a minimum number of days each month. Otherwise the large investment required for a mill wouldn’t make any economic sense.
(By the way, I loved the local soups in West Africa based on palm oil. In Liberia, a popular song-ditty went, “Chicken is nice, chicken is nice, chicken is nice with palm butter and rice!” The oil palm fruit (unlike larger coconuts) is about the size of a chestnut growing in large tight bunches. The large outer layer is quite soft and reddish in color. This portion can be pressed or beaten to become the basis for the staple soup. The inner kernel is smaller and very hard, and is the source of most “industrial” uses mentioned above. Apart from goat meat, a very common ingredient in West African soups is “stock fish”. This is dried cod, usually imported from Scandinavia which can last for ages in tropical climates and in good soups can be quite delicious).
Back to my dilemma, I remembered from two years before that in Eastern Nigeria a Dutch firm, Stork & Co., had tried to market a small well-engineered hand press that was able to extract enough oil from small quantities of the raw material to be economically feasible. I concluded that their press might hold some promise for Guinea. I cabled Sol and Vince that I’d be stopping in Amsterdam on the way home and I met there with the management team at Stork. They were enthusiastic about the prospect of having a new market opened for their press and showed me the latest version and all the specifications.
Returning to DC, Sol met me at the airport and said we were to meet urgently that same day with officials at USAID who wanted to pass my findings on to the White House. At the meeting, I explained all the obstacles to building a viable factory in Guinea. They seemed crestfallen. Then I told them about the Stork press alternative and they brightened up, wanting to know how much presses cost. When I said $2,500 each, they wanted to know if 30 or 40 could be ordered!
Because of these findings, the US offered Guinea a two-year aid program to demonstrate utilization of the presses. President Toure was delighted with the outcome because the presses could be distributed around the country and create some needed goodwill. USAID selected Checchi to do the job and in addition asked us to provide four specialists for two years (as in Liberia) to propose long term economic development plans. In Washington, then as today, government consulting work was often awarded based on whom you knew in government circles as well as on your good reputation.
We proceeded to hire a resident team leader, Peter Warren, and two young economists (Harvard Business School types) for the Stork press palm oil projects; Gorden Fair and Dick Abbott (recently married to a lovely Dutch woman, Marika); Larry Morrison (married to Greta from Norway); and a genial Italian, Mario Laure. For the next two years, I made numerous trips to Guinea, once staying there for three months. Warren didn’t get along well with the local development officials and I had to act frequently as a “go-between” to keep our studies on track.
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I remember some good times in Guinea as well as many frustrations. Marika Abbott gave birth to a baby girl there under care of a French doctor. I was much involved in the proceedings at their house. The baby cried a lot at first but was better after we gave her bottled water. Dehydrated maybe? I often spent time at the Morrison’s house. Greta’s father visited from Oslo. He remarked once to Greta, “Monty always says ‘see you later’ when he leaves and I wait, and he doesn’t come”.
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I played a lot of tennis with Gorden Fair and friends at a small French club in Conakry. Some weekends we drove into the countryside to a favorite site, “Bridal Veil Falls” to camp overnight. I dated a young Embassy secretary from Texas and remember best her Texas drawl and fear of snakes. I believe it was there that I contracted malaria, which hit me several weeks later (mosquitoes were fierce) when back home in Madison for a brief holiday. I was admitted to Yale-New Haven hospital where they first failed to diagnose the cause of my high fever, then confirmed it was malaria. I recall a procession of interns checking me out because malaria was a rare occurrence there.
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For a multitude of reasons newly independent West African governments have failed their good, impoverished people again and again over the past 50 years. For many of us, African and non-African, this has been a great disappointment. Regional ethnic conflicts, pervasive corruption, rigged elections, military coups, mismanagement of resource exports (corruption again) are just a few examples. Early charismatic leaders like Nkrumah, Lumumba (killed early on, probably with CIA involvement) and Sekou Toure became increasingly autocratic, each proclaiming themselves “President for Life.” This was in stark contrast to the modesty of universally admired Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
As I had met him personally to explain the palm oil project, Sekou Toure became an interesting study for me, for both his good and bad attributes. In 1958 Charles de Gaulle, President of France, offered its (5) West African colonies a choice to become closely associated with France (overseas territories with representation in the National Assembly, Paris), or complete independence. Sekou Toure was the only African leader opting for full independence. France was furious and withdrew all support, destroying documents and undermining Guinea’s economy. Toure turned to Russia for help (but would later become disenchanted with this connection in the late 60’s.) He announced that President Kennedy was his “only true friend in the outside world”, leading to his state visit to the US and my involvement in Guinea.
Toure remained President of Guinea for many years until his death in 1984 (at the Cleveland Clinic in the US where he sought treatment for a heart condition.) Like Nkrumah in Ghana he espoused a one party, Marxist form of government, but uniquely suited to (vaguely defined) African ideals. In 1966 when Nkrumah was overthrown in Ghana, he offered him exile and pronounced him co-President of Guinea. Both leaders envisioned a close pan-African union of newly independent nations, a non-aligned force for good in the world. Eventually Toure could hardly maintain power and order in Guinea itself, thousands fled the country and he became increasingly paranoid about “foreign” plots against him.
Guinea is still one of the poorest countries in the world. Although rich in natural resources—gold, silver, iron ore, and especially bauxite (raw material for aluminum)—foreign investment has been slow to develop. I recently read that new versions of mini-presses for palm oil extraction are available using the latest technology. Palm oil is listed among the Guinea’s current exports along with the materials mentioned above. Hopefully the little presses got some production underway 50 years ago!
Shortly after I began working for Checchi, Vince hired a British economist, Alex Bandy, for a big job in Cyprus involving Checchi and the World Bank. Alex soon became my best lifelong friend. (I’ll be seeing him as usual in Eastbourne, Sussex this June – ages 83 and 87!) Our adventures together over the past 50 some years would require another long book of recollections. At Checchi we were a couple of roaming bachelors. He had come to the US on a Fulbright scholarship to study at DePauw Univ. (Indiana), then briefly at Harvard and Ohio State. His first job was in Cuba as a trainee with Eastman Kodak. He was very good looking, charming, great sense of humour, and a lifelong bachelor.
While I travelled back and forth to West Africa, Alex did the same to Cyprus (he also made a couple of working visits to Liberia.) In Cyprus, he helped organize and establish a development bank (CDP), which successfully brought Greek and Turkish community participation together in a rare cooperative venture. This was deemed a miracle at the time. Later he headed the Checchi office in Manila, the Philippines.
At one point the Liberian government decided it should have a stock exchange (Nigeria and South Africa had one!) and asked our Checchi team for help. Sol and I scratched our heads and eventually decided that my father, Roger, would be a good candidate to do the study. My dad was retired after a career as investment manager/stockbroker (old-fashioned and somewhat eccentric) but much more a dreamy, homespun philosopher, and a proponent of theosophy. He welcomed the idea of spending time in Africa where I’d been. The report he wrote was quite good, praised by Liberian officials but never fully implemented before the years of chaos. He cited the small American Stock Exchange in the U.S., which was long called “The Curb” because shares started trading on the sidewalks near Wall Street. He proposed a very simple operation reflecting the tiny number of publicly-owned companies in Liberia.
In the 1960s and early 1970s interest in Africa spread throughout the US with new African Studies programs started at universities, and NGOs more and more active in the continent. As mentioned earlier, I served on the board of Crossroads Africa, founded by Rev. James Robinson, meeting monthly in NYC. In Washington, DC African affairs attracted a small diverse circle of folks. Dr. Ruth Sloan and her husband, Arthur, were very wealthy patrons of “Africanists” (Arthur headed a successful hi-tech firm in Virginia). At their magnificent penthouse apartment in the Watergate complex Ruth hosted committee meetings, dinners, and functions of all kinds for visiting Africans and interested Americans. I was often invited.
Another prominent, wealthy patron was the industrialist/philanthropist Harold Hochschild, head of American Metal Climax which had operations in Eastern and Central Africa. Years before I had arranged a meeting for him and his wife in Enugu with Premier Nnamdi Azikiwe concerning private funding for the new university in Nsukka. He had built a magnificent estate on Blue Mt. Lake in the beautiful Adirondacks, northern NY State. He invited me there with other guests for a week to talk about Africa and flew us from NYC in a private seaplane. I’ll never forget landing on that placid lake with a huge splashing of water. Hochschild spent summers of his youth in the Adirondacks and later in life built and endowed a museum on the lake to highlight the Adirondacks rustic traditions in art, furniture and steamer train service. (As a young boy, I remember holidays with family, especially my uncle Ernest Whiting, at Mirror Lake Lodge, Lake Placid in the Adirondacks).
Although Africa was always my portfolio at Checchi, I worked on many other consulting jobs won by the firm. At times, I travelled and prepared reports with Harry Clement who was a well-regarded economist in the tourism and travel industry.
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As members of a World Bank study team, we spent time in the old Yugoslavia travelling all along the Dalmation coast from Split to Dubrovnik to Sveti Stefan(Montenegro), preparing a report aimed at promoting tourism in the area—citing the need for coastal roads, better hotels, hospitality services and promotion. President Tito’s government in Belgrade sent two new Mercedes Benz limos to drive us around and I remember one vehicle rear-ended the other on the way down to the coast. I also recall that before every meeting with local officials we’d be offered shot glasses of vodka or slivovitz.
At another point I was asked to join the staff of a task force at the US Treasury Dept. (on loan from Checchi) for six months to prepare a report addressing the troublesome US balance of payments deficit (in 1969 American travelers were spending far more abroad than foreigners were spending on travel to the US.) The task force was headed by Robert McKinney owner of the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper, the oldest paper west of the Mississippi founded in 1849. I had no idea then that ten years later I would move my new family to New Mexico. (Subsequently I learned that McKinney sold the paper to the Gannett Group, then re-acquired it in a lawsuit, during which he was referred to as an “old coot” by some of his journalists.) I did find it hard to work with him on the task force.
Assignments more related to my African experience involved USAID studies in the Caribbean islands. I spent six weeks in Haiti by myself researching possible investments that could be undertaken by a new Haitian development bank. On a separate occasion, I traveled to most of the other islands (at one point hitching a ride on a chartered sailboat between St Lucia and Barbados) on a similar outlook for projects that would be investable and beneficial to local economies.
But I seem to have digressed from the West African story! I was greatly troubled by the Biafran war in Eastern Nigeria. My old friend Douglas Ngube was a refugee with his young family in Ivory Coast with other Igbos I knew, and I sent them money from time to time to help out.
In the summer of 1968 I had my first and last direct involvement in presidential politics. My old friend Rick Haynes, now foreign policy advisor to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, asked me to join a taskforce to prepare policy positions on Africa for Humphrey’s presidential campaign. A major concern for me then was our “do nothing” attitude towards the Biafran war atrocities. (As I write this we struggle how to decide what our role should be in combating the Boku Haram in northern Nigeria, especially the kidnapping of over 300 school-girls). Sad to say our man, Humphrey, a true liberal, lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard Nixon, by less than one percent of the popular vote. Rick, working at the State Department, as a joke, used to leave phone messages for me with the Checchi receptionist from “The Under Secretary of State”, or a senior official at the “White House”, which impressed her greatly.
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My final work in West Africa was in 1973-74 with the United Nations (UNDP) shortly after I left Checchi and Company. The UN had designated several of the poorest West African countries (former French colonies) as priority candidates for assistance, including Mali and Niger. I was contacted by Lev Obalenski, a Pole who was head of UNDP, to work as a consultant in these two countries. To be honest most of the economists and officials at UN headquarters in NYC had plushy desk jobs and preferred hiring consultants to travel and work in the field. The pay, though, was good.
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The UN missions in Niamey, Niger and Bamako, Mali would request assistance in evaluating industrial and agricultural proposals that might qualify for loans or grants from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), an arm of the World Bank created to help the world’s poorest countries. I would do the field work and return to NYC and present recommendations to UNDP/IFC staff. The trips were short, usually two or three weeks, so I rarely wrote letters home. Both Bamako and Niamey are located on the upper reaches of the Niger River as it curls up and down through West Africa; so is Timbuktu, Mali, once a renowned trading and intellectual center, but no longer so as I discovered. The Niger River is narrower here than in Onitsha, Nigeria, but still an important avenue of commerce.
On the first of three visits to Niamey I met a FAO agricultural economist, Maria Tagle. (FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization, UN agency based in Rome). She was on a mission to study the acceptability of non-traditional food in food-aid projects throughout West Africa. I became quite involved with Maria. She was from a prominent Chilean family exiled from Chile (her father a close ally of President Salvador Allende, murdered in 1973 in a coup d’etat led by General Augusto Pinochet). On subsequent visits to Africa I often stopped in Rome to see Maria, getting to know her family and other Chilean activists exiled and living in Rome.
Twenty years earlier, while a graduate student in Geneva, many other friends were members of liberal American communities ostracized from the US during the Joseph McCarthy era. My best friend, Sean Gervasi and I spent many weekends with the dancer Paul Draper and his family at their home on Lake Geneva. We often visited Sean’s father, the well-known American journalist, Frank Gervasi. The Gervasi’s were living in Rome and had a tight circle of friends that found refuge in Europe during this time. Let’s hope that with the current bombastic American first anti-immigrant rhetoric dividing our country, we will avoid such an era again.
I often wonder these days, if my work in West Africa had any beneficial lasting impact. If so, it probably resulted from the many prominent visitors I introduced to that part of Africa I knew and loved so well. Many contacted me for that very reason or because of my official position as public affairs officer and assistant director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Foremost of course were the visits of my mother Jean Kaiser and sister Sue Lynch. My mother charmed everyone in Enugu, including the Prime minister Nnamdi Azikiwe, who two years later asked about her during the Independence celebrations in Lagos. My mother’s relationship with Nebbie was very special and they corresponded for many years until Nebbie’s disappearance during the Biafran war.
I fondly remember the arrival of my sister Sue with her college roommate for Nigerian Independence celebrations and of course her travels with the author Emily Hahn and Afi into Northern Nigeria, that resulted in the New Yorker article and chapter four in her book, Africa to Me.
Another visit that stood out was the great Opera singer, Camilla Williams. I first met her in Liberia and later after a performance in Lagos, she visited me in Enugu.
Others I best remember were the CBS pundit journalist Eric Sevareid who wrote in his column and book, This is Eric Sevareid, such complimentary remarks about my work from his visit to Enugu. Also, I should mention the MIT professor Dr. Carroll Wilson, who invited me to speak at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, to address his class on economic development.
The photographer Ken Hayman arrived in my home in Enugu after being thrown out of Lambaréné by the great Albert Schweitzer. In subsequent years, I often stayed at his townhouse on 55th near Lexington in New York City.
In Liberia and again in Enugu, I encountered ambassador Smith Hempstone, who mentioned me in his book, Africa Angry Young Giant. I met with a multitude of businessmen including George Ball and David and Nelson Rockefeller.
I remember well the visits from athletes like Mel Whitfield and Don Bragg. Another politician I remember meeting was Sargent Shriver who had just been appointed director of the Peace Corps by President Kennedy. At that time, I was on the advisory committee for one of the first Peace Corps programs in Ghana.
Perhaps another legacy of my work are the Stork Palm Oil hand presses that are still used in Guinean villages as well as the Lebac gallery I helped Afi open in Lagos. It later became the Bronze Gallery and is still operating in her home town of Calabar. These are the kind of examples of simple small scale improvements that often have the most lasting impact.
Like many of today’s Peace Corps volunteers, I arrived in Accra age 25, filled with idealism and hope that my work might in small measure contribute to economic and social change in post-colonial West Africa. In retrospect, it was probably a naïve dream, however my years of work there were among the most memorable and happy of my life for the friendships made, and because of the historical context of that period.