When encountering the “Dig Up the Sun” map created by Roger Peet in 2022, it became obvious that it would have to be featured on the cover of this issue. A few years before us, Roger mapped the interconnection of the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Euro-American colonialism, and the extracted colonized land, in particular in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In this text, he provides us with the context in which this cartographic research was done, following the path of his father, Terry Peet, who worked for the CIA in Congo in the 1960s.
On September 29, 1965, my father, Terry Peet, awoke before dawn. He left his wife and two young daughters sleeping and drove to the Welsh coast, where he inflated a raft he’d checked out from the Royal Air Force base where he was a military helicopter instructor. He loaded scuba equipment into the raft, left a note in his car about going on one last dive even though it was getting dark, and then pushed the raft out into the cold dark swells of the Welsh channel. He watched until the tide caught it and then walked up to the road and hitched into town.
He caught a train across the country to London where a connection in the Belgian Embassy gave him a ferry ticket. He took another train to the ferry and boarded it. During the crossing he struck up a conversation with a young Canadian medical student and, when the ferry arrived in Ostend, they went to the same hotel. They spent the following week together, before he received orders to board a flight to Congo.
That woman was Joan Milner, and she would eventually become my mother. She had the same first name as my father’s first wife; the one he left asleep in the dark before dawn. They spent a week together in Brussels, a whirlwind romance in the company of gangsters and post-colonial adventurists, before he was seconded on to Congo. She returned to Canada and began the correspondence that kept them connected for the next three years.