The Writer and the World (36 page)

The curtains of the
cabine
hang ringless and collapsed.
“C’est pas bon,”
the
garçon
says. Many light bulbs are missing; they will now never be replaced; but the empty light brackets on the walls can be used to hang things on. In the bathroom the diseased river water looks unfiltered; the stained and leaking wash basin has been pulled out from the wall; the chrome-plated towel rails are forever empty, their function forgotten; and the holes in the floor are mended, like the holes in a dugout, with what looks like mud. The lavatory cistern ceaselessly flushes.
“C’est pas bon,”
the
garçon
says, as of an irremediable fact of life; and he will not say even this when, on an over-cast afternoon, in a temperature of a hundred degrees, the windows of the
cabine de luxe
sealed, the air-conditioning unit fails.

The bar is naked except for three bottles of spirits. Beer is
terminé
, always, though the steamer is full of dazed Africans and the man known as the maître d’hôtel is drunk from early morning. There is beer, of course; but every little service requires a “sweetener.” The steamer is an African steamer and is run on African lines. It has been adapted to African needs. It carries passengers, too many passengers for the two lifeboats displayed on the first-class deck; but it is more than a passenger steamer. It is a travelling market; it is, still, all that many of the people who live along the river know of the outside world.

The steamer, travelling downstream from Kisangani, formerly Stanleyville, to Kinshasa, stops only at Bumbe, Lisala and Mbandaka. But it serves the bush all the way down. The bush begins just outside Kisangani. The town ends—the decayed Hôtel des Chutes, the customs shed, the three or four rusting iron barges moored together, the Roman Catholic cathedral, then a large ruin, a few riverside villas—and the green begins: bamboo, thick grass spilling over the riverbanks, the earth showing red, green and red reflected in the smooth water, the sky, as so often here, dark with storm, lit up and trembling as with distant gunfire, the light silver. The wind and rain come; the green bank fades; the water wrinkles, the reflections go, the water shows muddy. Jungle seems to be promised. But the bush never grows high, never becomes forest.

Soon the settlements appear: the low thatched huts in scraped brown yards, thatch and walls the colour of the earth, the earth scraped bare for fear of snakes and soldier ants. Boys swim out to the steamer, their twice-weekly excitement; and regularly, to shouts, the trading dugouts come, are skilfully poled in alongside the moving steamer, moored, and taken miles downstream while the goods are unloaded, products of the bush: wicker chairs, mortars carved out of tree trunks, great enamel basins of pineapples. Because of the wars, or for some other reason, there are few men here, and the paddlers and traders are all women, or young girls.

When the traders have sold, they buy. In the forward part of the steamer, beyond the second-class w.c.s, water always running off their steel floors, and in the narrow walk beside the cabins, among the defecating babies, the cooking and the washing and the vacant girls being intently deloused, in a damp smell of salted fish and excrement and oil and rust, and to the sound of gramophone records, there are stalls: razor blades, batteries, pills and capsules, soap, hypodermic syringes, cigarettes, pencils, copybooks, lengths of cloth. These are the products of the outside world that are needed; these are the goods for which such exertions are made. Their business over, the dugouts cast off, to paddle lightless upstream miles in the dark.

There can be accidents (a passenger dugout joining the moving steamer was to be overturned on this journey, and some students returning from the bush to Kinshasa were to be lost); and at night the steamer’s searchlights constantly sweep the banks. Moths show white in the light; and on the water the Congo hyacinth shows white: a water plant that appeared on the upper Congo in 1956 and has since spread all the way down, treacherously beautiful, with thick lilylike green leaves and a pale-lilac flower like a wilder hyacinth. It seeds itself rapidly; it can form floating islands that attract other vegetation; it can foul the propellers of the steamer. If the steamers do not fail, if there are no more wars, it is the Congo hyacinth that may yet imprison the river people in the immemorial ways of the bush.

In the morning there are new dugouts, fresh merchandise: basins of slugs in moist black earth, fresh fish, and monkeys, monkeys ready-smoked,
boucané
, charred little hulks, or freshly killed, grey or red monkeys, the tips of their tails slit, the slit skin of the tail tied round the neck, the monkeys bundled up and lifted in this way from the dugouts, by the tails, holdalls, portmanteaux, of dead monkeys. The excitement is great.

Monkey is an African delicacy, and a monkey that fetches six zaires, twelve dollars, in Kinshasa can be bought on the river for three zaires.

On the throbbing steel deck the monkeys can appear to be alive and breathing. The wind ruffles their fur; the faces of the red monkeys, falling this way and that, suggest deep contented sleep; their forepaws are loosely closed, sometimes stretched out before them. At the stern of the steamer, on the lower deck, a wood fire is lit and the cooking starts: the dead monkey held face down over the fire, the fur burned off. In the bow, among the goats and hens, there is a wet baby monkey, tightly tethered, somebody’s pet or somebody’s supper (and in the lifeboat there will appear the next day, as a kind of African joke, a monkey’s skull, picked clean and white).

So day after day, through the halts at Bumbe, Lisala and Mbandaka—the two-storeyed Belgian colonial buildings, the ochre concrete walls, the white arches, the green or red corrugated-iron roofs—the steamer market goes on. On the riverbanks bamboo gives way to palms, their lower brown fronds brushing the yellow water. But there is no true forest. The tall trees are dead, and their trunks and bare branches stick out white above the low green bush. The lower vegetation is at times tattered, and sometimes opens out into grassy savanna land, blasted-looking and ghostly in the afternoon heat mist.

The river widens; islands appear; but there is no solitude in this heart of Africa. Always there are the little brown settlements in scraped brown yards, the little plantings of maize or banana or sugar-cane about huts, the trading dugouts arriving beside the steamer to shouts. In the heat mist the sun, an hour before sunset, can appear round and orange, reflected in an orange band in the water muddy with laterite, the orange reflection broken only by the ripples from the bows of the steamer and the barges. Sometimes at sunset the water will turn violet below a violet sky.

But it is a peopled wilderness. The land of this river basin is land used in the African way. It is burned, cultivated, abandoned. It looks desolate, but its riches and fruits are known; it is a wilderness, but one of monkeys. Bush and blasted trees disappear only towards Kinshasa. It is only after nine hundred miles that earth and laterite give way to igneous rocks, and the land, becoming hilly, with sharp indentations, grows smooth and bare, dark with vegetation only in its hollows.

Plant today, reap tomorrow: this is what they say in Kisangani. But this vast green land, which can feed the continent, barely feeds itself. In
Kinshasa the meat and even the vegetables have to be imported from other countries. Eggs and orange juice come from South Africa, in spite of hot official words; and powdered milk and bottled milk come from Europe. The bush is a way of life; and where the bush is so overwhelming, organized agriculture is an illogicality.

The Belgians, in the last twenty years of their rule, tried to develop African agriculture, and failed. A girl on the steamer, a teacher, remembered the irrational attempt, and the floggings. Agriculture had to be “industrialized,” a writer said one day in
Elima
, but not in the way “the old colonialists and their disciples have preached.” The Belgians failed because they were too theoretical, too removed from the peasants, whom they considered “ignorant” and “irrational.” In Zaire, as in China, according to this writer, a sound agriculture could only be based on traditional methods. Machines were not necessary. They were not always suited to the soil; tractors, for instance, often made the soil infertile.

Two days later there was another article in
Elima.
It was no secret, the writer said, that the agriculturists of the country cultivated only small areas and that their production was “minimal.” Modern machines had to be used: North Korean experts were coming to show the people how. And there was a large photograph of a tractor, a promise of the future.

About agriculture, as about so many things, as about the principles of government itself, there is confusion. Everyone feels the great bush at his back. And the bush remains the bush, with its own logical life. Away from the mining areas and the decaying towns the land is as the Belgians found it and as they have left it.

APERIRE TERRAM GENTIBUS:
“To Open the Land to the Nations”: this is the motto, in raised granite, that survives over the defaced monument at Kinshasa railway station. The railway from the Atlantic, the steamer beyond the rapids at Kinshasa: this was how the Congo was opened up, and the monument was erected in 1948 to mark the first fifty years of the railway.

But now the railway is used mainly for goods. Few visitors arrive at the little suburban-style station, still marked “Kinshasa Est,” and step out into the imperial glory of the two-lane boulevard that runs south of the river, just behind the docks. In the roundabout outside the station, the statue of King Albert I, uniformed, with sun helmet and sword (according
to old postcards, which continue to be sold), has been taken down; the bronze plaques beside the plinth have been broken away, except for an upper fringe of what looks like banana leaves; the floodlamps have been smashed, the wiring apparatus pulled out and rusted; and all that remains of the monument are two tall brick pillars, like the pillars at the end of some abandoned Congolese Appian Way.

In the station hall the timetable frames swivel empty and glassless on the metal pole. But in the station yard, past the open, unguarded doors, there is a true relic: an 1893 locomotive, the first used on the Congo railway. It stands on a bed of fresh gravel, amid croton plants and beside two traveller’s-trees. It is small, built for a narrow gauge, and looks quaint, with its low, slender boiler, tall funnel and its open cab; but it still appears whole. It is stamped
No. 1
and in an oval cartouche carries one of the great names of the Belgian nineteenth-century industrial expansion:
Société Anonyme John Cockerill—Seraing.

Not many people in Kinshasa know about this locomotive; and perhaps it has survived because, like so many things of the Belgian past, it is now junk. Like the half-collapsed fork-lift truck on the platform of one of the goods sheds; like the other fork-lift truck in the yard, more thoroughly pillaged, and seemingly decomposed about its rusted forks, which lie in the dust like metal tusks. Like the one-wheel lawn mower in the park outside, which is now a piece of wasteland, overgrown where it has not been scuffed to dust. The lawn mower is in the possession of a little boy, and he, noticing the stranger’s interest, rights his machine and skilfully runs it on its one wheel through the dust, making the rusted blades whirr.

The visitor nowadays arrives at the airport of Ndjili, some miles to the east of the city. Zaire is not yet a land for the casual traveller—the harassments, official and unofficial, are too many—and the visitor is usually either a businessman or, if he is black, a delegate (in national costume) to one of the many conferences that Zaire now hosts. From the airport one road leads to the city and the Intercontinental Hotel, past great green-and-yellow boards with Mobutu’s sayings in French and English, past the river (the slums of the
cité indigène
well to the south), past the Belgian-built villas in green gardens. A quiet six-lane highway runs twenty or thirty miles in the other direction, to the “presidential domain” of Nsele.

Here, in what looks like a resort development, flashy but with hints of
perishability, distinguished visitors stay or confer, and good members of the party are admitted to a taste of luxury. Muhammad Ali trained here last year; in January this year some North Korean acrobats and United Nations people were staying. There are air-conditioned bungalows, vast meeting halls, extravagant lounges, a swimming pool. There is also a model farm run by the Chinese. Nsele is in the style of the new presidency: one of the many grandiloquent official buildings, chief’s compounds, that have been set up in the derelict capital in recent years, at once an assertion of the power of the chief and of the primacy of Africa. In the new palace for visiting heads of state the baths are gold-plated: my informant was someone from another African country, who had stayed there.

So the Belgian past recedes and is made to look as shabby as its defaced monuments.
Elima
gives half a page to the fifteen-day journey of the Equator subcommissioner to Bomongo; but Stanley, who pioneered the Congo route, who built the road from the port of Matadi to Kinshasa, has been dethroned. In the museum a great iron wheel from one of the wagons used on that road is preserved by the Belgian curator (and what labour that wheel speaks of); but Mount Stanley is now Mont Ngaliema, a presidential park; and the statue of Stanley that overlooked the rapids has been replaced by the statue of a tall anonymous tribesman with a spear. At the Hôtel des Chutes in Kisangani the town’s old name of Stanleyville survives on some pieces of crockery. The broken coffee cups are now used for sugar and powdered milk; when they go the name will have vanished.

The Belgian past is being scrubbed out as the Arab past has been scrubbed out. The Arabs were the Belgians’ rivals in the eastern Congo; an Arab was once governor of the Stanley Falls station. But who now associates the Congo with a nineteenth-century Arab empire? A Batetela boy remembered that his ancestors were slave-catchers for the Arabs; they changed sides when the Belgians came and offered them places in their army. But that was long ago. The boy is now a student of psychology, on the lookout, like so many young Zairois, for some foreign scholarship; and the boy’s girl friend, of another tribe, people in the past considered enslavable, laughed at this story of slave trading.