A $3.5 billion pipeline will probably be built in West Africa from Chad through Cameroon to the Gulf of Guinea. Exxon Mobil, a participant in the venture, is the lead company requesting up to $200 million from the World Bank as a hedge against political uncertainty. "You make the World Bank a shareholder," said Korina Horta, a senior economist with Environmental Defense, "and no government is ever going to nationalize it."

I once lived in West Africa. I flew there more than 30 years ago, in the summer of 1968, on a Pan Am flight that landed briefly in Dakar, Senegal. As we taxied to the terminal, there was an announcement for those continuing on that passports would be inspected and that South Africans, as citizens of an apartheid state, risked arrest should they decide to get off to stretch. While supportive of the sentiment, I felt uneasy with the threat and stayed on board, trying to sleep.

The Liberian airstrip where we landed was cut from dense forest. While the heat and humidity that greeted me, as I walked down the steps to the tarmac, were unbearable, I was more worried about Customs’ infamous irascibility and greed. But officials just waved us through, since Peace Corps volunteers were considered to be penniless and innocent of imperialism.

I contracted conjunctivitis by the time our bus reached Monrovia, the capital city where William V. S. Tubman, an Americo-Liberian descended from liberated American slaves, had been President for the preceding 25 years. As we entered the city, pus obscured my view of the tall, tarnished Hilton-like structure housing government offices which loomed over squalid, tin-roofed slums, glinting in the sun, that flowed around the building like a silver swamp around a rusted pole.

My visit to the doctor within hours of my arrival seemed to be a bad omen.

Then, as now, one did not lightly travel to parts of Africa. We had all read Fletcher Knebel’s "The Zinzin Road", written in 1966 about Kalya, which was obviously Liberia, where there was only one major road. Paved from Monrovia to Tubman’s farm, it then became a red laterite washboard road, twisting tortuously through the hills to Gbarnga, where it split in two, one leg continuing on to Zorzor. Knebel had changed Zorzor to Zinzin in his melodramatic, overwrought Peace Corps tale driven by love, sacrifice, political intrigue and snakes — especially snakes.

The lethal black mamba, so ubiquitously present in his story, was uncomfortably similar to under-the-bed, around-the-corner, inside-the-closet monsters of my childhood. That first evening in Monrovia, in a large, stifling room in which only our exhaustion made sweaty sleep possible, I awakened everyone with screams of, "Snake! Snake!" as I tried to escape the predators of my dreams. Everyone had a good laugh at my expense.

But as I wandered the fetid, seething streets of Monrovia, where it felt as though the city might be consumed at any moment by a conflagration of political unrest, I never saw a mamba. And during the two years I lived with wonderful tribespeople upcountry in the bush, far from the city, venomous snakes were more a nuisance and source of food than a threat. Dysentery, malaria, schistosomiasis, and tuberculosis were the real killers. And all of these may soon pale in comparison with HIV, which is estimated to infect as many as one-third of West Africans.

In the long run, though, even more catastrophic were American slaves, who returned to Liberia beginning in 1820, USAID workers and Peace Corps volunteers who contributed to the destruction of Liberia just as European colonialization had rent most of the rest of Africa. While I was there to do my best, I unwittingly participated in a process of westernization that drew poorly educated, indigenous people from their tribal homes to Monrovia, where there was no work and where children wielding automatic weapons would terrorize the city 12 years later.

West Africa may be so far gone that an oil pipeline won’t make any difference. Additional revenues will certainly flow to corrupt officials and Africans will continue to suffer and die. Obviously, West Africans have lost or killed much of their tribal culture and residual tribal differences fuel internecine warfare. Perhaps we should just write off West Africa and its people as a cost of doing business.