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Papillon's World
| Article
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20566 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
3,066 Words |
| Author
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Russell Warren Hove
Russell Warren Howe, a foreign, diplomatic, and defense
correspondent, is the author of sixteen books. They include
Mata Hari--The True Story and the forthcoming sleeping with
the FBI, on the Richard Miller spy case. |
Cayenne, which gave its name to red pepper, looks much as Libreville in the Gabon looked when this reported went there in 1954, before the colony discovered oil. Just as Libreville basked in the memory of Trader Aloysius Horn--his store, Hatton & Cookson's, was still in business--so the somnolent capital of French Guiana preserves a café on the place des Palmistes, where W. Somerset Maugham, in the twenties, would take his café-croissant in the morning. It was from there that he set off for the penitentiary and penal camps strung along the Maroni River from Saint-Laurent in the country's north. Just as Libreville was less known than the Ogowe River trading post of Lambarene, where Albert Schweitzer ruled over sycophantic nurses, mutinous doctors, and patient patients, so Cayenne is today only a way station for Kourou, which has become the civilian spacecraft capital of the world, launching 60 percent of all commercial satellites.
French Guiana, the last colony on the American mainland, is no longer, strictly speaking, a colony, but a part of France. Not only may its inhabitants move freely to France to work and live, but also to anywhere else in the European Community, from Dublin to Athens. There are only forty-five thousand of them, including Wayana Indians, the true natives of the country-who never go anywhere. The rest of the population is made up of about five thousand Europeans, of whom the vast majority work for or depend on the Spaceport, plus a roughly equal number of foreign legionnaires, who spread out into the countryside before each rocket launch to guard against shoulder-fired missile sabotage.
Because a native son or daughter who went into commerce would have to extend credit to his extended family, commerce in colonial Africa, was invariably confined to others--Europeans at the highest level, other expatriates for the rest: the Mauritanians in Senegal, the Syrians in the rest of West Africa, the Greeks in the Belgian colonies, the Indians in East Africa. In French Guiana, similarly, commerce is largely Annamite.
Annamite? You have to have some gray in your beard to remember when Vietnam was called Cochin China and Annam; together with Laos and Cambodia, they made up French Indo-china. Annam--north and central Vietnam--resisted colonization by France just as it had always resisted China; so the French built a complex of Annamite penitentiary camps in a la Guyane for the nationalist.
Louis-Napoleon, the prince-president who later became the Emperor Napoleon III, invented la relegation (banishment) nearly a century
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