U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria James Entwistle ’78 greets Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and First Lady of Nigeria Patience Jonathan.
Something New Every Day A Q&A with one of America’s most seasoned diplomats
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By John Syme
IM ENTWISTLE ’78 has been a U.S. foreign service officer for almost 34 years. Entwistle and his wife, anthropologist Pam Schmoll, met and married in Niamey, Niger during his second foreign service assignment. They brought up two kids in the foreign service: Jennifer is now a social worker and Jeffrey is an aspiring actor. Entwistle’s career has taken him to Cameroon, Niger, Thailand, the Central African Republic, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand (again), the Democratic Republic of the Congo and now Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa.
What role did your Davidson undergraduate experience play in your decision to join the foreign service? I should tell you that the foreign service was a lifelong ambition and that I tailored my Davidson education towards that goal. But, of course, that wouldn’t be true. I saw a flyer on a bulletin board at Davidson about the foreign service exam, which I thought sounded interesting. I flunked the written exam the first time and took it again out of sheer cussedness. The rest is history! I really got the overseas bug my junior year at Davidson when I took a seminar on the European Union organized by Professors Earl Edmondson and Randy Kincaid, which included a couple of winter weeks in western Europe. I met some English relatives on that trip who I continue to visit until this day. After I graduated I went to grad school for a week and realized my future wasn’t in the halls of academia. At that point, I went to western Kenya and taught school in a rural girls high school, through a very informal program a Davidson faculty member had arranged with a Kenyan professor. So, that’s where the Africa bug started. I reconnected with a number of classmates there. Dave Keller, Peter Clifford and I had some great driving trips around Kenya in a claptrap VW van. And I taught at Musoli Girls School outside of Kakamega with Liz Holmes ’79. Of course, there are myriad Davidson connections to Africa. During my second assignment in Niamey, Niger I reconnected with Davidson classmate Jeff Metzel who was working on a development project. We and our wives (Jeff also met and married his wife in Niger) became great friends. Jeff perished some years later in a plane crash in West Africa. He had grown up as a missionary kid in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. During my last assignment as the U.S. ambassador there, I had the privilege of putting flowers a number of times at a memorial
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oreign Service Officers are stationed at the more than 270 embassies and consulates—in hostile, war-torn nations and amicable, peaceful countries. Broadly defined by the Department of State, the mission of a U.S. diplomat in the
Foreign Service is to promote peace, support prosperity and protect American citizens while advancing the interests of the U.S. abroad. A significant number of Davidson alumni have answered the call to service and are currently occupying posts all over the world.
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