Congo (96 page)

A printed sentence in Lingala is hanging on the wall: “svp Ndeko awa ezali esika ya mosala” (Dear friend, this is a place of work). “I printed that out and hung it up there,” Georges says, “because otherwise the Congolese come in here and want to chew the fat all day.” The Congolese in Guangzhou are incredibly industrious. One of the traders I called for an interview told me: “Today I’m much too busy, but tomorrow I have forty minutes for you. Will that be enough?” Vastly different from Congo, where almost everyone is available all the time, and where most people are disappointed when you make moves to leave after only four hours.

When the two cargo personnel are done with their weighing and stacking, they suggest we go out for a beer. Right next door is a snack bar with a few chairs out on the pavement. Darkness has already fallen, but in Guangzhou nighttime is a relative notion. We sit on the sidewalk and watch the girls from the massage parlor across the street. They wear white robes and a red ribbon draped over their shoulder. They are experts in the traditional techniques of Chinese massage, and they are trying to draw in customers. For a real massage, César explains, not “the very special one.”

César is in a class all his own. His eyes are bloodshot and his voice vacillates between mirth and blues. In Congo he was a police commander for years; “Commandant César” was what he still liked to be called. He served under Mobutu, Kabila
père
, and Kabila
fils
.

You still had the tough training back then. I once spent two days standing in a pool of water, up to my chest. Dirty, filthy water, if you fell into it you were dead. Or four days’ guard duty, on your feet the whole time, without sleeping, no problem. But in 2002 I’d had enough. My whole family had taken off, all six of them. My parents were the only ones who stayed behind, with my sister to take care of them. I went to Thailand and from Thailand I tried to get to Germany. A friend of mine who was already in Germany sent me his passport by DHL. But when I got to the German border, the immigration people saw that something was wrong. I was thrown into jail for a month, then put on a flight back to Thailand. From there I traveled around to all the countries: Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Korea, the Philippines . . . I had to move every month to keep my passport valid. That’s how I ended up in China, but my visa has already expired. They could come and pick me up any time.

He puts down his glass and shouts to the proprietress in Cantonese that he wants another beer. The alleyway is drab. On the ground beside our plastic chairs is a fat rat that doesn’t move but keeps chewing on something the whole time. “I met a beautiful woman here, a woman with long black hair. She came from western China. She didn’t look Chinese at all, more Indian or Russian, I don’t know.” Uighur, probably, but I don’t interrupt him. Timothée is plucking at the label on his beer bottle. César starts in on his second draft. “It was all going wonderfully. We ran a phone shop together and we did good business. She wanted to have children, but I already have eight in Kinshasa. Then she started trying to corner me. She demanded that I sever all ties with my friends and family. It had to be just her and me.
Mais je suis un africain!
” He shouts it out, but the rat still doesn’t budge. “I felt so imprisoned, I was ready to kill myself. But she was such a beautiful woman, everyone looked at me when I went out with her. The phone shop was doing well. Then, after hesitating for a long time, I broke up with her; it was really hard. She kept the shop, but she blackmailed me: if I ever went into the phone business again, she would report me. So here I am. No job, no visa; all I can do is a few odd jobs for Georges.”

The rat is gone, and Timothée suggests we go out dancing. Have I ever been to Kama? It’s really something special. In the taxi on the way over he fills me in on the disco’s history. “The owner of Kama is Chinese, he’s married to an Arab woman. But the DJ is Nigerian.” When we enter I see that the disco is housed in a pitch-black temple, there are both Asians and Africans walking around. The DJ plays Chinese techno, Asian beat, and, of course—what else, it is after all the country’s major export product after copper ore—Congolese rumba. We find a table and order our beers. Commander César is starting to perk up. He swings along with Magic System’s “Bouger bouger” (Move, move), the catchiest number to come out of Africa in this third millennium. No Western music is played; pop and rock are irrelevant genres from the far corners of an old world. A band is setting up to play. The DJ makes way for a female Cape Verdean reggae vocalist; her backup band comes from the island of Mauritius. The go-go girls are three Philippine singers whose latex boots are four times as long as their skirts.

There are all kinds of side rooms one can rent for a karaoke party. César doesn’t understand why you would want to go off and croon on your own when you could watch such an, um, interesting performance. Cutting back and forth between the tables is a gorgeous Chinese girl selling flowers; she even has a teddy bear for sale that’s almost as big as she is. That, too, is puzzling to César. “Les chinois,” he sighs.

After a couple of hours we head off for a beer at an outdoor café in the African neighborhood. There we’re able to hear each other again, although our ears are still buzzing. The traffic leaves red and yellow trails as it zooms past, neon signs scream for our attention, ladies of easy virtue float up and float away again. Timothée, who hasn’t said much all evening, begins to loosen up as well. “I’ve started discovering all kinds of new flavors,” he laughs. “Russian, Chinese, Thai, Tanzanian, Rwandan . . . whoa, no, no Rwandans, I hate them! But the most expensive women are the Africans; there aren’t a lot of them. For an African girl with a nice butt you easily pay two hundred RMB for one go. That’s thirty dollars!”

“Or four hundred RMB!” César chimes in. “For one go!”

“I always pay 150 RMB for two goes, sometimes only a hundred. The Chinese girls only get thirty RMB, less than five dollars. What do you expect? They’ve got nothing, and they do nothing!”

“In Bangkok I saw some weird things,” César laughs. “Boys who turned into girls, no kidding! Their . . . their . . . how do you say that? Their thingamabob was cut off, their penis, yeah, that’s it. And then they had a hole drilled in it.
Vraiment!
” Once again he shakes his head at this remarkable Asia where a twist of fate has brought him. And to think that he had been planning to live in Germany. He turns to watch the girls as they walk by and smiles at them. His eyes are red, his face is weathered, but something vulnerable comes over him. Is it the alcohol? Is it lovesickness? The nostalgia of the exile? “I don’t want women anymore. On very, very rare occasions I’ll take a girl home with me, but almost never. I usually just go into the bathroom at night and take some douche gel. I rub it on myself and that’s how I relax.”
⁵

I
T IS NO LONGER THE SOUND
of the slit drum that spread the news from village to village, no longer the dull thump of the tom-tom, no longer the crack of the whip, not the pealing of the mission bells, not the thunder of the train or the rattling of the drill in the mineshaft, no, it is no longer the ticking of the telegraph, the crackle of the radio or the cheering of the people that sounds the nation’s heartbeat today. It is not in the stamping of manioc in the mortar, not in the slap of water against the canoe’s hull. The heart of this country is not in the rattle of weapons in the jungle, not in the table pounding against the wall while a woman screams that she never wanted this, no.

It is night, but that is not the way it feels.

The new Congo reverberates to a different tone, the new Congo sings in the arrival hall of an airport thrumming with noise. It is the sound of tape, brown rolls of tape around packages and boxes, tape that screams as it is unrolled and grunts as it is torn,
grrrreeeeee . . . clunk
, tape that scrapes and shrieks and bawls, tape, meters and meters of tape in the airport arrival hall, a quiet wailing around the baggage trolleys, as in an incubator. Everywhere people are swaddling their things in brown plastic. And once the goods are packed, they are inscribed in magic marker with name and district and street.

That shrilling sound is no complaint, but the cry of new life.

I
HAD NOTICED THEM ALREADY
during boarding: two women with bleached-blond hair, no, with bleached-blond, bobbed wigs. They were chattering happily, slapping each other on the back, laying their heads on each other’s shoulders and giggling wildly. Their suitcases and bags were in the hold, their names scribbled on the tape. They were both wearing the same brand-new outfit, pants and a blouse with a floral motif. With the labels still attached. Just wait till the people saw them in Kinshasa! When you have something new, you flaunt it. The men didn’t cut the label off the sleeve of their new suit, did they? Children didn’t take the plastic wrapping off the brakes of their new bicycles, did they? Well then!

The atmosphere on board was festive. The two bleached-blondes had put on headphones, they were watching a cartoon and commenting loudly on what they saw. We were flying back to Central Africa. This was only the second direct flight between Guangzhou and Nairobi, the first had left two days ago. No stopover in Bangkok or Dubai, just straight across the Indian Ocean in one shot: it felt like a historic happening.

In Nairobi I saw two young Dutch tourists with sunburned faces sprinting for their gate. They were wearing short pants and sandals and carrying a big wooden giraffe, a souvenir wrapped in local newsprint. I didn’t know what exactly, but something about the scene irritated me. In the last few days I had felt as though I were being granted a glimpse into the third millennium, but now I was being tossed back rudely into the last century, the century when Europeans bought wooden giraffes in Africa. My reasoning wasn’t completely lucid, but I was too tired to worry about being consistent.

During the last stretch of the journey we flew straight across Congo. The bleached-blond women lay sleeping, their mouths open. Through the little window I saw the huge, moss-green broccoli of the equatorial forest, crisscrossed on occasion by a brown river glistening in the sun. That Congo’s natural riches have helped lend hue to the world’s economy is a familiar enough story. From billiard ball and rubber band by way of bullet casing and atomic bomb to the cell phone. But that purely utilitarian jingle seems to me too limited and too cliché, as though Congo, this wondrously beautiful country, were only the world’s storehouse, as though—with the exception of its raw materials—it had not contributed much to world history. As though its subterranean layers were important to all mankind, but its own history merely a domestic matter, richly permeated with dreams and shadows. While I, in my conversations and reading had so often seen the exact opposite. In the early twentieth century the rubber policies gave rise to one of history’s first major humanitarian campaigns. During both world wars Congolese soldiers contributed to crucial victories on the African continent. In the 1960s it was in Congo that the Cold War in Africa began, and that the first large-scale UN operation was held. The point is not whether those were achievements on the part of the Congolese themselves: the point is that Congolese history has helped to determine and form the history of the world. The wars of 1998 and 2003 prompted the biggest and most costly peacekeeping mission ever, as well as the first joint military effort by the European Union; their conclusion produced a unique combination of multilateral and bilateral diplomacy for the purpose of minutely monitoring agreed policies. The 2006 elections were the most complex ever organized by the international community. The International Criminal Court is currently establishing invaluable jurisprudence with the prosecution of its first defendants—three men from Congo. Clearly, the history of Congo has on any number of occasions played a crucially important role in the tentative definition of an international world order. The contract with China, accordingly, is a major milestone in a restless world in motion.

They walked out in front of me, across the tarmac, on their way to the yellow airport terminal. A few planes were parked haphazardly here and there. The jet engines of one of them ripped the world in two like a giant buzz saw. In the midst of that extraterrestrial roar hung the odor of burned kerosene, mixed with the odor of smoldering plastic from the nearby slums. The air sizzled in the heat and it was not yet noon. I had been too tired to approach them, too tired from traveling and from my attempts to understand. But I saw them walking, still in high spirits, clearly proud of the journey they had just made. I saw the blond hair of their wigs bounce with every step they took. I saw how the wind tugged at a few strands of it. And while they stepped briskly across the crumbled tarmac on the way to their homecoming, I saw the labels on their sleeves flap and spin in the morning air, frisky and playful, as though they had something to celebrate.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book arose one evening in November 2003 at Café Greenwich in Brussels. I was sitting alone at a table having a drink. In the years that went before I had traveled a great deal in Southern Africa and written about that; now I was about to visit Congo for the first time. In preparation for my trip I had just visited a few bookstores in Brussels, without really finding what I was looking for. Maybe I should write it myself, I realized then, for apparently I belong to that genus of writers who happen to write the books they themselves would like to read. At the time there was no way I could have known that, with that playful brain wave, I was embarking on a project that would take years and result in countless unforgettable encounters. But even at an early stage I decided to surround myself with a few of those whose judgment I value highly: Geert Beulens, Jozef Deleu, Luc Huyse, and Ivo Kuy. According to good Central African tradition I referred to them as “my uncles”: I could call on them whenever necessary, and enjoyed their confidence even before I had proven myself worthy of it. The sense of their silent involvement meant more to me than they realized.