‘Grandmother of Afghanistan’
When she first arrived in Afghanistan in 1962, Nancy Hatch was a young American diplomatic wife with an unorthodox résumé - including a childhood in rural India and a master’s degree in Chinese art - that suggested she might not relish spending her time at embassy teas.
She soon escaped from that cloister, defying scandal to separate from her husband and marry Louis Dupree, an adventuresome Harvard-trained ethnographer and archaeologist who divorced his own spouse to be with her.
For the next 50 years, she navigated and chronicled every Afghan crag and calamity - through communist rule, civil war, the death of her husband and the Taliban regime - with wit, grit and passion.
When Nancy Dupree, 89, died Sept. 10 at a hospital in Kabul, she was still putting the final touches on her dream project: a massive archive of documents from recent Afghan history, housed in a majestic new building on the campus of Kabul University.
A spokesman for the Afghanistan Center, which Dupree founded in 2006, said she died of chronic heart, lung and kidney ailments.
Dupree was widely known as the “grandmother of Afghanistan,” the rare American who became part of the life and lore of a harsh, tumultuous land that had exhausted so many foreign ambitions. Hers was a rescue mission to preserve shards of Afghan experience and culture - even as her own life was tossed by successive waves of conflict, exile and repression.
For a while, though, it was mostly a lark. The Duprees were married by a Muslim cleric who set her brideprice at 10,000 sheep. They basked in Kabul’s brief fling with Western modernization, hosting cocktail parties known as “five o’clock follies” and traveling widely across Afghanistan; she wrote entertaining guide books while he excavated ancient sites.
In 1970s Kabul, “there were bowling alleys, and skiing in the winter and jazz concerts,” Dupree told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2001. “There were numerous parties, with drugs under every bench. It was wonderful fun. When you are having a good time, it is easy to overlook that there is something bubbling underneath.”
A communist coup in 1978 was swiftly followed by a Soviet invasion, and Louis Dupree was briefly imprisoned by the Soviet-backed Kabul government as a suspected spy. The couple repaired to a more sedate academic life in North Carolina, where he taught at Duke University.
But in time, the lure of Afghanistan drew them to Peshawar, Pakistan, a wartime magnet for Afghan refugees, intellectuals and rebels. Dupree set up an information and resource center, collecting Afghan documents that would eventually form the basis of the Kabul University center. Her husband, a former paratrooper, sneaked into Afghanistan to witness rebel attacks.
At one point, Dupree met Osama bin Laden, the alQaida leader, who was recruiting supporters in Peshawar and looking to buy some bulldozers.”He was very polite,” she told Newsweek in 2013, “and very shy.”