The historian who became ‘Afghanistan’s grandmother’

Nancy Hatch Dupree spent most of her life working to preserve the heritage of Afghanistan. Known as “Afghanistan’s grandmother,” the American historian spent decades collecting thousands of documents and photographs, and used her contacts and charm during Taliban rule to persuade government officials not to destroy cultural artifacts. The Afghanistan Center at Kabul University, which she founded, is now a renowned archive of 60,000 books, maps, and folk music samples she amassed over the years. “So many young Afghans know more about the histories of the countries where they lived as refugees than their own country’s history,” she explained. “It makes me sad because their own history is so rich.” Born in India to American parents, Dupree “arrived in Kabul in 1962 as the wife of an American diplomat,” said The Washington Post. She had an affair with an archaeologist from North Carolina, and the two split from their spouses and got married. Obsessed with her adopted home, Dupree wrote guidebooks while her husband excavated ancient ruins. They became a fixture of Kabul’s social scene, “famous for throwing cocktail bashes known as five o’clock follies.” Forced to flee Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion, the Duprees resettled in Pakistan and collected cultural artifacts from Afghan refugees, said The New York Times. Dupree continued this work after her husband died, and she lugged a trove of material to Afghanistan in 2005, beginning work on the “state-of-the-art” Afghanistan Center three years later. At Kabul’s National Museum, a line by Dupree is inscribed in stone as a tribute. It reads, “A nation stays alive if its culture stays alive.”