Word: harmattan
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Liberia never had much of a chance. Founded by the American Colonization Society as a home for freed slaves from the U.S., it got its independence in 1847 chiefly because nobody was looking. It was ridden by sleeping sickness and plagued by the Harmattan wind from the Sahara Desert, whose parching breath cracks furniture and leaves books curled up. Some 15,000 freed American slaves and their descendants had established a ruling class. As late as 1930, a League of Nations commission discovered that Liberia's Vice President Allen Nathaniel Yancy himself was head of a ring of slavers...
From June through September western winds dump great rains on Dakar and the adjacent Senegalese coast. Then the harmattan (from the French-Arabic for evil) starts to blow from off the scorching Sahara. By November Dakar's lush greenery begins to parch. The sky is so blue that it looks black. Roads are heavy with dust, but passable for military travelers...
Heat, dust, fever, mosquitoes, mud towns, mangy camels, the hot ever-blowing harmattan, absinthe, loneliness, monotony, forced marches through the desert sand, Africa, loneliness, loneliness, is the dirge of the legionnaire. "J'ai le cafard," announces the soldat and he is amok with a little beetle running round and round in his brains. Sometimes he slices off his sergeant's head, sometimes he wets his jowls with his own red blood, oftener he deserts...