Nancy Hatch Dupree, 1927-2017: the preserver of Afghan culture

Nancy Hatch Dupree died in Kabul on Sunday, 10 September. 

Nancy Hatch Dupree is sitting in the Gandamak Lodge, the Foreign Correspondents hang-out in Kabul. Most of the other diners, and almost all those propping up the bar, are shaven-headed, gym-going young men in their twenties and thirties: a scrum of adrenalin-surfing hacks and cameramen who grew up watching movies like Salvador and The Year of Living Dangerously and who now fill the bar room with their tales of derring-do in Helmand and close-shaves in Lashkar Gah.

None of them, however, have half as good a seem of stories as this tiny, bird-like 86 year old woman, picking at her burger at the corner table. Over the course of dinner, Nancy tells a series of tales that would shame the storyline of most Hollywood movies: of her passionate affair in 1960’s Kabul with a handsome, Harvard-educated ex-paratrooper and archaeologist, whose life made that of Indiana Jones seem positively suburban; of her expulsion from Afghanistan at the Communist takeover and her husband’s arrest and interrogation as a CIA spy; of her meetings with Bin Laden, and her trips as a solo American woman into Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.