On the Scent of a Continent: Memories of Africa

By Martin Baenninger

On the Scent of a Continent: Memories of Africa—a young, recent college graduate brought up and educated in the United States finds himself travelling on his first business trips through Africa on behalf of a Swiss-based multinational fragrance corporation, encountering, and doing his best to cope with situations, people, and challenges that he never imagined, and learning lessons that he did not even know were there to learn. At the same time, a travel memoir and a coming-of-age story, On the Scent of a Continent recounts a series of captivating vignettes that are instructive and often funny and give an interesting insight into what this unique and entrancing continent was like fifty years ago. Interwoven in the text is also much aviation lore with absorbing and extensive background information about some of the airlines and airplanes of the mid twentieth century. The diverse and eventful episodes recounted in the book are both charming and informative, and seventy-four illustrations bring the witty and lighthearted text even more to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781645448563

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On the Scent of a Continent

Memories of Africa

Martin Baenninger

Copyright © 2019 Martin Baenninger

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2019

Cover art created by Christopher Baenninger

ISBN 978-1-64544-855-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64544-856-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Figure 1. A terra-cotta Yoruba sculpture of a noble’s head, probably fourteenth century.

The continent of Africa in 2015¹

Figure 2. A British Overseas Airways Corporation Vickers VC-10-1101, G-ARVF, of the type that flew daily between London and Lagos, Nigeria, via Kano from 1964 until 1980. The RAF used their four-engine VC-10s to transport the British royal family and other VIPs on international missions. The aircraft above is the same as the Nigeria Airways VC-10-1101 (see Figure 17) that crash-landed in Lagos in November 1969 while I was there, killing all eighty-seven aboard. In 1970, a BOAC Super VC-10-1151² airliner (G-ASGN) was hijacked by PFLP Palestinian terrorists, and along with a Trans World Airlines 707 and a Swissair DC-8 blown up at Dawson’s Field, an abandoned RAF base in the desert at El Khana, Jordan. All 310 hostages were ultimately released unharmed.

The VC-10 with its elegant T-tail was a fast, quiet (inside!) aircraft that, although loved by both flight crews and passengers and achieving much higher load factors than the American Boeing 707, nonetheless failed to realise the commercial success it deserved and only fifty-five were manufactured (compared to over one thousand 707s). It was late on the market and comparatively expensive to operate. But the British-built VC-10 still retains in 2015 the transatlantic flying-time record for a subsonic airliner of five hours and one minute, set in 1979 between JFK and Prestwick. Margaret Thatcher appreciated "VC-tenderness" and insisted on flying the VC-10 whenever possible.

Having flown over thirteen million passengers without an accident since 1964, including my new wife and me to New York in late 1970, British Airways retired the VC-10 from scheduled service in 1981.

Figure 3. A sixteenth-century ivory mask from the kingdom of Benin in Nigeria.

Introduction

My first travels to Africa were in autumn 1969 and spring 1970, when, at the age of twenty-four to twenty-five, I made two ten-week business trips to the continent, visiting sixteen countries and calling on dozens of prospective customers—soap and detergent manufacturers, cosmetics and perfume companies, and other related industries—in my keen, novice’s efforts to sell fragrance compounds and raw materials manufactured by my employer, a large, Swiss-based multinational corporation supplying perfume ingredients to businesses all over the world. The company had never sought to actively develop the African market, and so they assigned me together with another freshly trained Swiss colleague to be the young Turks who might, with a bit of luck, crack this promising, largely unexplored territory.

For the uninitiated, it may seem odd to learn that Africa is a substantial consumer of perfumes, but Muslim countries utilize large quantities of fragrance because of its important part in the religion’s liturgy. To pray and worship (five times a day), one must be washed and/or perfumed.

Moreover, most African lands, Muslim or otherwise, are preoccupied with cleanliness in their hot and dusty climates and are thus hefty producers of soaps and powdered laundry detergents. These bulk items, although perfumed at a very low dosage and with inexpensive fragrances, nonetheless represent a large potential because of the massive volumes manufactured.

Also, as most societies progress, however gradually in terms of living standards, personal care products such as shampoos, creams, toilet soaps, and shower gels become more and more widespread. Because of the intimately personal rewards interrelated to vanity offered by the use of these products, they often figure among the prime items on the shopping lists of new consumers spending their first, however modest disposable income.

Ten weeks seems today like a long stint for an efficient business trip, but flights to and from Africa in the 1960s were very expensive and within Africa often few and far between. This meant one had to allocate an inordinate amount of time for layovers and downtime in the course of a multicountry trip. Just because you wanted to fly to Douala on a Tuesday did not mean that you could fly to Douala on a Tuesday. And cancellations and no-shows were frequent. I factually heard a public address announcement once at Accra’s Kotoka International Airport that stated: Ghana Airways Flight 2 is cancelled due to inability to locate the aircraft. Need I say more?

I had been born in Montreal and brought up in the United States, just outside New York City. When I graduated as an art history major from Hamilton, a small, rural, men’s liberal arts college in Northern New York State in 1967, I had lived through John F. Kennedy’s assassination and found myself surrounded by race riots, the Vietnam War and the accompanying threat of the military draft, Richard Nixon looming on the horizon, and, if I survived Vietnam, the prospect of commuting to New York City for the rest of my life as I had with no great enthusiasm while working for a Wall Street bank during summer breaks.

I therefore, decided to try to find something better, and although Canadian by birth, I chose to make use of the Swiss nationality I had inherited from my father and move to Europe. There I hoped I could pursue my interest in languages, hopefully meet a European beauty, and then together with her set out to lead our own version of an unconventional, peaceful, and glamourous life.

My father was the secretary-treasurer of the American subsidiary of the Swiss-based company with which I found employment to finance my dream, and although I had intended to be an art critic, demand in Europe for English mother-tongue art critics was not exactly keen at the time. And so I figured what the hell, being a businessman was not so bad. What I did was not all that important in the end; it was where I did it and how I did it.

After two years of technical and olfactory training at the company’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland,³ and further development of my French conversation skills, I was judged adequately equipped to undertake an initial foray into what was essentially unchartered territory. For the company, there was really nothing to lose, after all, and, who knew, young Baenninger and his pal might actually manage to land some business. And by this time, I had become genuinely enthusiastic about the perfume industry.

Figure 4. The face page of the now expired, cancelled, and perforated Swiss passport issued in 1969 with which I travelled to Africa. In their federal system, Swiss are citizens of a commune or community (Zurich City), a canton (Zurich), and thus the country. It is a bottom-up approach to nationality. Célibataire was altered to Marié in April 1970, when I married Celia Kinnear, from Edinburgh, Scotland, in Geneva at the Auditoire de Calvin, where John Calvin had preached.

And so one sunny Tuesday in the early fall of 1969, I boarded the four-engine Swissair⁴ Convair CV-990-30A-6 Coronado jet carrying the moniker Schaffhausen and registration HB-ICF⁵ that would take me and ninety-nine other passengers nonstop from Geneva to Accra, Ghana, overflying the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert in about six hours. To prepare for the journey, I had been taking daily anti-malaria pills⁶ for a week and had been vaccinated against typhus, cholera, yellow fever, tetanus, and typhoid fever. I was dressed in the de rigueur white, long-sleeved shirt, summer-weight glen-plaid grey suit, and conservative rep tie of the time, and was carrying one suitcase with my personal belongings for ten weeks, plus a leather satchel holding three hundred to four hundred samples of perfume oils, carefully selected by me and packaged in plastic-stoppered, minuscule glass bottles aligned in hinged, compartmentalized, leatherette-covered cases bearing the company logo and called "trousses." The samples weighed about twenty-five kilograms.

Figure 5. Swissair Convair⁷ CV-990-30A-6 Coronado, HB-ICF Schaffhausen that flew me to Africa for the first time in 1969. The one-hundred-passenger plane, which was fast but had high operating costs and was not a commercial success, was one of eight that had been delivered to Swissair between 1962 and 1964. A total of only thirty-seven aircraft of this model were made. This one, photographed at Haneda International Airport in Tokyo, was scrapped in 1975.

I was also laden with small corporate publicity gifts (keychains, Swiss penknives, decorative smelling blotter holders, gift perfumes, etc.) and about $12,000 in American Express travellers’ cheques to cover the costs of my trip. For such a long period, more money would normally have been needed, but many of my expenses were covered by local agents as a means for them to export currency. My employer would credit them in Europe for their local expenditures on my behalf for hotels, meals, taxis, etc. This was often the only way for residents of African countries to circumvent sticky financial regulations and convert their otherwise practically worthless local money into hard currency safely stashed abroad. I had already seen visiting clients from Africa arrive in Switzerland with suitcases full of local cash that they exchanged at a Swiss bank for the best rate they could get. Anything was better than nothing, and in the meantime, I am sure the Swiss banks made a pretty penny in the course of these illicit transactions.

Credit cards were not yet in common use in Africa⁸ and cash machines, or ATMs, were still a thing of the future.

The next ten weeks in the fall of 1969 and a subsequent ten-week