Laissez-passer

CCXI

The rainy season. Near the town of Mongo, in Chad

The Earth was as unforgiving as it looked here. While taking off from Fort-Lamy Amelia had inadvertently bounced the Electra on the bone-hard runway. Immediately, the controllers at the airport advised her that she had bent a landing gear strut. Although they assured her that it didn’t look too serious Amelia was deeply troubled, remembering the strut that had catastrophically collapsed putting an end to her first Worldflight attempt back at Luke Field in Hawaii. 

That time, they had been lucky; there had been no flames and the plane had been repairable. Out here, in this vast emptiness, it was likely that a wreck would lead not only to the failure of the second Worldflight --- and she knew there could be no third attempt --- but of the abandonment of the Electra altogether. Her beloved plane would bleach in the desert sun to be picked over for spare parts and anything else useful to the airport mechanics --- if they were able to land fairly intact --- at their next stop, El Fasher*, an oasis in the midst of what was then known as Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 702 miles distant.

She tried to put such thoughts out of her head. Instead, she and Fred marveled as Chad** unrolled beneath them. The bleak landscape that met their eyes wasn’t all there was to Chad, but it seemed endless and empty and without a single definitive landmark, a hypnotic realm of rock and sand. A few dry lakebeds spotted the ground, evidence of life during the rainy season. Signs of human habitation were rare. 

The Electra at El Fasher, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, on the morning of June 13, 1937

“There were times I couldn’t have bet a nickel on the accuracy of our assumed position,” Fred Noonan later wrote to his wife. Being just slightly off course might mean their deaths; even were they able to land the plane safely, how could they send for help? How could they specify a location? We are down five hundred miles from --- where?  Noonan compulsively checked and rechecked his calculations.  They couldn’t even tell when they crossed from the French territory of Tchad to the British territory of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan***. It was a country of no borders.

El Fasher had been conceived of as a “gas and go” stop, a mere waypoint in a land notoriously bereft of them. Of course, George Putnam had ensured that mechanics with a cache of spare parts were at El Fasher in case of an emergency, but no one had considered that they might be called upon to make a major repair.

There was another problem, as well. Amelia had been warned to avoid making an unplanned landing in remote Muslim territory. The British government had issued her laissez-passer specifying that she was on a special mission for King Edward VIII, but such documents might be disregarded when presented by an assertive short-haired woman wearing pants. While El Fasher was on her flight plan, it was just remote enough that there might be --- might be --- problems with the locals (she would later be warned to avoid unplanned landings in the Dutch East Indies and in New Guinea for much the same reasons, with the added concerns of headhunters and cannibals). 

Though much of this worry could be put down, in retrospect, to ignorance and racism, there is no doubt that at least some natives might present a very real danger to any strangers, and a mob is a mob, whether in New Jersey or on New Caledonia.

In the event, the landing at El Fasher went smoothly, the bent strut held up under the strain, and it was quickly and competently replaced by the mechanic on site. Just a few hours after she landed, Amelia Earhart was airborne and on her way to Khartoum.

El Fasher today

*In the Middle Ages, a much more verdant El Fasher was a major trading center between Saharan Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. The once-wealthy city was the capital of a local Sultanate. The name El Fasher means “The Courts.” Today, El Fasher is a city of nearly 300,000, and serves as the capital of the province of North Darfur. As such, it has been central to the Darfur famine and to the political upheavals that led to the cession of the nation of South Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of refugees live in squalid Displaced Persons Camps just outside of the city proper. Given the dessication of the region, this massive population center is chronically short of food and water and other necessaries.

**Most Americans have never heard of Chad. Even among those who have there is a tendency to refer to the country as if one were addressing Muffy’s boyfriend at the country club dance. The correct pronunciation more closely reflects the fact that one is wearing shoes.

***Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was one of the oddities of the British Empire. After the building of the Suez Canal in 1869, the British colonized the much more ancient land of Misr --- Egypt --- in the early 1880s (even though it remained a nominal province of the Ottoman Empire until 1914). The British soon found that direct management of the country was impracticable. They granted Egypt limited “independence” under a puppet monarchy in the mid-1890s. At that time, the vast north-to-south territory of Sudan (not to be confused with the east-to-west climatic region of the Sudan) was an ungoverned realm of supposed “savages.” In 1899, the British established a joint “Condominium” with Egypt over the area through which Great Britain and Egypt shared rulership of the territory. In effect, this meant that Sudan was under full British control, even while titular Egypt got to share the responsibilities and criticisms that went along with governance. The British thus could always point to a place where Africans (of Sudan) were ruled by Africans (of Egypt) and blame any failures of function on native incompetence. Egypt was given its full independence in 1922; the Condominium endured until 1956.