Congo (84 page)

It seems hard to believe, but while I was spending those three hours in a cold Paris studio, amid female groupies in big, flashy winter coats, waiting fruitlessly for my interview, Werrason was nowhere to be found. Kakol and Héritier, the drummer and singer, did all the work. They instructed the background singers, operated the panel, and made the tough musical decisions. “We were so naive,” Kapaya sighed. “He wanted musicians who weren’t on to him. If you were, he didn’t want you around anymore. Music is the passion of all young people, but he misused that. What it really boils down to is people’s exploitation of other people. That’s why I left. I don’t want young people to go down that same road. They need to know their rights.” With his fingers he did a little drum roll on the edge of his chair, looked at the river and then said: “Werrason is a businessman and a politician. Lots of the women who danced on stage with him stayed in Europe. People paid him to be allowed to go along to Europe as a member of the band.”
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And Bralima just kept paying for dozens of tickets when Werrason flew to Paris with his “band.” His colleague Papa Wemba was sentenced in Paris to a few months in prison for similar practices. Frontier running, the French court ruled.

C
OMPANIES ARE NEVER NEUTRAL PLAYERS
, particularly not in defective nation-states. With a promotional budget many times that of the local ministries of education or information, they reach more people than the government does. Kinshasa today is infested with billboards for multinationals like Nestlé, DHL, Vodacom, and Coca-Cola. The concrete walls around factories, stadiums, and army barracks are daubed with commercial slogans. Television stations spew more publicity than programming. The Primus songs performed by Bralima’s artists are seen on a number of channels all year round. They often last ten minutes or more. The dividing line between advertising and entertainment is fading. Kinshasa dances to promotional tracks.

The message is hammered in at other spots as well. Mobile-phone operator Tigo, a multinational active in sixteen countries and with its head offices in Luxembourg, was generous enough in 2006 to perk up the national airport’s dilapidated arrival hall; all big companies have their charity programs (scholarships, hospitals, teaching materials: anything as long as it’s visible). For the first time in decades the drab walls at Ndjili received a new coat of paint, but anyone coming off the plane into the hall today might think he has ended up in the Tigo stand at a trade fair rather than in a public building. The walls are festooned with dozens of the GSM operator’s banners and plaques, and there is no other advertising. And in the midst of that whirlwind of glitter the traveler stands, passport in hand, cursing the sluggish state.

Concerns such as Bralima and Tigo do, of course, pay taxes, more than they would like, for in a corrupt country new taxes are invented each week. But if things seem to be getting out of hand, they threaten with the ultimate sanction: closure. And that would mean not only unemployment for all their personnel, who are paid very reasonably, and poverty for those small-scale sellers of beer or phone vouchers, but above all a stop to the fiscal revenues for all those officials. No hungry tax inspector relishes that thought. Multinationals are the country’s biggest taxpayers. Governments therefore have a tendency to listen to them.

Back at the Berlin Conference of 1885, it was decided that the Congo Free State was to be open to international trade. Competition between market and state still exists today, in fact more than ever. In those days the focus was solely on the purchase of raw materials, today it’s about the selling of products as well—even in a desperately poor country, there is a great deal of money to be made with the trade in little commodities like phone vouchers, bottles of soda pop, or bags of powdered milk. To win the souls of all those dispossessed, foreign companies colonize the public spaces of the destroyed country with a temerity only thinly disguised by the bright smile of slick marketing.

In October 2008, for the period of one week, I became a minor celebrity in Kinshasa almost without lifting a finger. Strangers came up to me on the street, saying they recognized me from my pictures and were surprised that, despite my status, I had no car of my own. Dolf van den Brink had called me a few days earlier. “We’re organizing a concert with Werrason in the
cité
. Feel like going along?” The performance was to take place in Bumbu, one of Kinshasa’s poorest neighborhoods. As we drove there in convoy, he explained things to me. “Bracongo has started playing dirty. They’re running spots saying that Bumbu has ‘fallen,’ and that Primus is no longer market leader there. That’s patently untrue, but we’ve been forced into the defensive. Now we’re going to demonstrate the opposite with something big. Not a commercial, not a campaign, but a free Werrason concert! It’s the first time he’s ever played in Bumbu. I’m expecting a big crowd.”
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The air-conditioned SUV swerved around potholes. Dolf told me that Primus had gone through different phases in its marketing. At first the baseline had been
Pelisa ngwasuma
, freely translated as: get the groove started. The emphasis on ambiance went down well in a war-torn country. Then they changed the color of the label to match Congo’s national colors: blue, yellow, and red. Now that the war was over, Primus had to manifest itself as the national beer, bar none. The state was rotten to the core, but national pride was apparently still intact. Bralima took skillful advantage of that. Meanwhile they had arrived at a new baseline:
Primus, Toujours leader
—Primus, Still the Leader—because the point was to make the newly won market leadership seem unshakeable. The desire for dominance was an important issue among the people, Dolf believed; they needed to know who is “the strongest.” He was going to Bumbu to make that clear.

Interesting, I thought; GSM operator Vodacom hammered on precisely the same themes: national feeling and leadership.
Un réseau, une nation
had been their baseline in Congo for years: one network, one nation. Now they are presenting themselves as
Leader dans le Monde Cellulaire
, leader of the world of cell phones. Their Congolese website states that “our best is better than the best of all the rest. Losing is not an option. We are one team, and competition is our sport.” Which company is the most Congolese? And who is the leader? Weren’t those also the central themes in the electoral battle that was rolled out between Kabila and Bemba? In July 2006 the elections were ready to take place and the two favorites for the presidency were at each other’s throats like pop stars. Bemba, still more warlord than statesman, accused Kabila of being a quasi-Rwandan without the necessary
congolité
—a bizarre claim when one realizes that Bemba himself is one-quarter European. As president, Kabila tried to rise above the tumult by saying that “he who carries eggs doesn’t bicker”—a statement that would haunt him for months. The reference was to the street children who went from bar to bar, balancing a box of hard-boiled eggs on their heads to sell as snacks. But after that comment, all of Kinshasa thought the president was a mean bastard. The brusque accusations back and forth resembled the rivalry between Werrason and Mpiana, or between Bralima and Bracongo. In the struggle for the country’s highest office, the notion of leadership was linked directly to national identity. Commercial and political slogans were cross-pollinating back and forth.

As we pulled into Bumbu, Dolf peered out the window. The working-class neighborhood was dark, but the bars and sidewalk cafés were packed. Contentedly, he noted that about 80 percent of the bottles on the tables were Primus. A little farther along we saw Bracongo trucks parked along the streets: the competitor was bound to be passing out thousands of bottles of Skol during and after the concert. Dolf even wondered aloud whether Bracongo might not have hired a few youth gangs to stir things up. Bralima, in any case, had brought along its own security. And that was no unnecessary precaution; the young people of Bumbu—in fact the only generation present—had turned out in force. The closer we came to the concert grounds (the band was already playing, we could hear them from far away), the more young people began recklessly clinging to one of the cars at the back of the convoy. It was an SUV with tinted windows, painted in the Primus colors. They seemed convinced that Werrason was inside it. After we had been forced to a halt for a moment amid an ecstatic crowd, we were able to take a detour to the rear of the podium. The cars parked facing out: all the better to drive away quickly if things got out of hand. We climbed out and walked to the podium, shaking a few hands along the way. In the half-light backstage, with the basses thumping so hard you felt it in your midriff, I didn’t recognize him right away. He looked much more normal than I remembered from the pictures, more timid too. “Monsieur Werrason,” I said, “
bon concert
.” “Mmm,” he replied. And there it was, my shortest interview ever.

We climbed onto the podium. A row of dancers, behind them a row of musicians, all wearing Primus T-shirts. A wall of sound. I waved to Kakol, the drummer. Behind him, the back wall of the stage was covered by a huge banner:
Primus, Toujours Leader!
I shielded my eyes with my hand to look out at the audience. The podium had been set up at a broad intersection. In all three directions: hundreds of meters of people all crushed together. I tried to count one section, in order to extrapolate. Thirty thousand people? Forty thousand? Someone handed me a bottle of Primus. Cameramen filmed the two white men on the podium. And then, then the seemingly shy man with the goatee came up the steel steps to the left of the podium. Slowly, almost listlessly, he stepped up to the spotlights. He peered out into the restless darkness. Thousands of arms were raised, fists crossed at the wrists.
Igwe! Igwe!
was the deafening sound.

After the show, Dolf van den Brink was delighted. Not only had Werrason pulled little teenage girls up onto the stage to dance the
ndombolo
for him, but on two occasion, between songs, he had held a bottle of Primus aloft to tell the crowd that Bumbu was still in the hands of Bralima. Invaluable brand promotion. The show had cost ten thousand dollars. That was peanuts. The footage would be broadcast on TV nonstop in the next few days. Bralima paid thirty or forty thousand dollars a month to Antenne A, one of Kinshasa’s biggest broadcasters, which used that in turn to pay its personnel. Bralima, in fact, owned the station.

“But I know you,” a number of Kinois said to me a few days later when I sat down beside them in the backseat of a dilapidated taxi. “You’re the white guy who was up on stage at the Bumbu concert. Don’t you have a car?” It says something about Bralima’s clout. In a city of eight million, where I happened to be staying, I was suddenly more famous than in the city of one million where I had been living for the last ten years.

I
USUALLY BUY MY MOBILE PHONE VOUCHERS
from Beko, on the shadowy Avenue des Batetela, one of the few truly pleasant streets in Kinshasa. Beko, who is in his early twenties and holds a degree in education, sits beneath a parasol from six in the morning until eight at night, selling prepaid cards for Tigo, Vodacom, CelTel, and CCT. Every day. On Sundays, however, only from eleven o’clock on, for he attends mass first. That is his only diversion. The tree-lined footpath along the Avenue des Batetela has a little street market. Sitting beside him is a female money changer, beside her an old woman who fries little fish that, for reasons I still don’t understand, are referred to as Thomsons. A little farther along is a boy who sells pocket diaries, ballpoint pens and shoelaces, beside a young woman deep-frying beignets over a charcoal fire. A beignet is the only thing many people eat here in the course of a day. Tasty and filling.

On a good day Beko has a turnover of one hundred dollars, but less than eight dollars of that go to him. For every five-dollar voucher he sells, four dollars and sixty cents goes to the GSM operator, sometimes even as much as four seventy-five. “And it’s only the good customers who buy a five-dollar recharge,” he clarifies. All right, an eight-dollar profit, on the best of days. But Beko lives far away from the Avenue des Batetela, very far away. He is one of the 1.6 million people who commute to the city center each day in exhaust-belching, packed VW buses.
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His ride costs him hours of his time and one dollar and fifty cents. If he wants to eat something during the day, even if it’s only a chunk of manioc loaf with a little slice of fish, that easily costs him another dollar and a half. When he gets home he gives one dollar to the aunt he lives with, because his parents are dead. He is the sole breadwinner for his brothers and sisters. Of those eight dollars, he has already gone through more than half. And he is still not finished.

While we are talking, a loudmouth comes by and begins shouting at him and the other vendors. Without protest, Beko hands him two hundred Congolese francs. A little farther along is a man in a police uniform. “Officially, we’re not allowed to be here. He’s supposed to give us a fine, but he never does. Instead, he sics that man on us. If we give him two hundred francs, he leaves us alone. The only thing is, he comes by three or four times a day. If we don’t pay, he takes our wares. This way it only costs me a dollar or a dollar fifty.”
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Call it extortion or a form of ultradirect taxation, as long as the government doesn’t pay the policeman’s wages it won’t stop. Which is not to say that a police uniform is no longer a highly valuable asset. It guarantees its wearer a regular income, not from on high, but from the bottom up. No wonder that a trade has arisen in positions with the constabulary. Rumor has it that one can purchase a job with the police for a lot of money, the way one might take over a business.

Seven days a week, a little later on Sundays, the best years of Beko’s life are going by. Tigo has introduced another new service, he sees. For a pittance customers can receive a daily text message that, the company claims, will “brighten up your day.” Using Tigo Bible, you are sent a Bible verse each day; Tigo Foi provides religious counseling; Tigo Amour gives advice on your love life; Tigo Riche tells you how to make money. If you want cheering up, you can get it. The company offers no service with news flashes.