Bouar

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There are places that you leave

and they go on

There are places that stay

but decay

If you have left and don’t return, then they remain

embalmed, unspoiled . . . yours.

Bouar, a prefectoral seat in the western highlands of the Central African Republic, remains … in a ruined state. I couldn’t go back, even if I wanted to – the political turmoil and vanished infrastructure make such a return impossible – which is just as well. Better that it should stay in my memory as one of the happiest years of my life.

At the beginning of the ‘75-’76 academic year, I was allowed to select my post for my second year as a high school teacher, working for the Central African government under the auspices of the Peace Corps. There were openings in towns all across the country, but I selected Bouar for the same reason the French made it one of their army bases from which to control their vast colonial holdings under the name French Equatorial Africa. Situated on a high plateau 1000 meters above sea level, Bouar benefited from the coolest climate in the region. The rest of the country lay flat and humid.

Camp Leclerc, built in 1947, was named after the World War Two general who secured French Equatorial Africa for DeGaulle and Free France. After the war, he went on to lead France’s doomed effort to hold onto Vietnam. His part in the effort to save the empire was cut short by an airplane crash which took Leclerc’s life. As a war hero, squares, streets, and other facilities bore his name, but I knew nothing about his name or the history of Camp Leclerc when the C.A.R. allotted one of the bungalows there as my living quarters.

It was cushy for a Peace Corps posting. The original furnishings, made of hardwood from the rapidly diminishing rain forest, hadn’t been looted yet, and the Peace Corps provided its volunteers with mobylettes, a rare but vital mobility in the African bush. The views of the western plateau that I took in on my daily ride from Camp Leclerc to the high school were wide-screen worthy and couldn’t be matched by any other part of the country.

Having lived in the C.A.R. for a year, I had already taken the measure of the various towns and hamlets where the population resided, and they had nothing of touristic interest to offer – flat native settlements of mud brick huts with some colonial-era buildings at the center. Dive bars abounded because everybody drank, but restaurants outside the capital were a rare and unreliable phenomenon.

During its glory days as a French-supported garrison town, Bouar boasted restaurants, multiple European-style bars, a cinema, direct flights to Paris, charcuterie in the more opulent stores, and an outsized expatriate population. The old colons who stayed on after independence (1960) referred to that hallowed time as l’époque and bitterly resented its passing, but they weren’t going to have grand houses and servants back in France, so they stayed put.

All of that was gone or in decline by the time I lived there. Out of the six functioning bars left from l’époque, two closed during my tenure, leaving only the Paillote de la Renaissance as a place that possessed any ambiance or that served food (if you warned them beforehand that you were coming and expected to eat). Since I hadn’t known Bouar in its days of colonial and postcolonial splendor, I didn’t miss the amenities even as I witnessed the fin de l’empire decay. After a year in the flat, characterless town of Bossangoa, I was thrilled by the western vistas, the physical variation of the town’s topography, and the remnants of l’époque – the cracked tile of the bar that used to service the cinema, an empty swimming pool by the shuttered officer’s club – that testified to a history that went beyond subsistence living and military need.

It was, as I wrote, one of the happiest years of my life, but it was a personal happiness, derived from doing my job well, making friends among the Central Africans and some of the expatriates, the camaraderie of other Peace Corps Volunteers, and living in a beautiful place. Our little cohort of Peace Corps teachers inherited Samuel from the previous site’s Volunteers, and he was a *fabulous* cook – only to be expected from the reserves of French-trained servants who could no longer find jobs with the shrinking white population.

When our paths crossed, I was on my way up (in terms of my life trajectory, a young man of 26) and Bouar was on its way down. Even after 1960, the French maintained their interest in Camp Leclerc. The country was independent in name only and could not have survived without French infusions of money and the continuing presence of French administrators to run a central government that had very few educated Central Africans with whom to replace them. (This was a result of France’s policy of educating as few Central Africans as possible to keep the population dependent and amenable to the extraction of resources.)

Predictably, the sham liberal democracy the French left in place as a fig-leaf for continued exploitation of whatever resources the country could provide succumbed to inexperience, weak government institutions, a massive growth of corruption, ethnic and regional infighting. The inevitable military coup occurred in 1966, and for the next 13 years, the country endured the brutal arbitrary rule of Jean-Bedel Bokassa. My time in the C.A.R. coincided with the acceleration of Bokassa’s plunge into world-class megalomania, put on display a year after I left by an obscenely lavish coronation of himself as emperor. (Even this the French tolerated, although grudgingly, but when Bokassa started playing footsie with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 1979, they toppled him.)

This was in the future. I had a wonderful time in Bouar and explored the western part of the country – the diamond center of Boda, the Lancrenon Waterfall – during the school vacations. Great parties amongst Bouar’s expatriates, great friendships with Central Africans, great hanging out with other Volunteers. All of it was doomed, but who knew that at the time?

Once the French abandoned all hope of propping up the C.A.R. as a dependable client state and withdrew its money in the early 1980s, the country entered an indescribable era of violence, civil war, mass internal displacement, and ruthless exploitation from the outside that continues to this day. (The most powerful player extracting what wealth remains is the Wagner Group of Russian origin.)

L’époque is long past; Camp Leclerc is nothing but ruins, Bouar founders as the westernmost outpost in the deadly maelstrom of a long-failed state. Nothing to go back to. And yet in my memory, a young man rides his moped on the paved road linking Camp Leclerc to the town center and marvels at the beautiful views that stretch before him.

— Robert Philipson

Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in How the Harlem Renaissance Marginalized its Best Writers.

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