Barks and Bites

We chose the flat because it was in a nice quiet area and had a little garden in front for the dogs. We pictured them lolling around under the palm tree, occasionally chasing the odd lizard or ambling off for a snooze in their kennel. This is, after all, a hot country and dogs are very good at dozing all day long.

To make this all possible the landlord built a metal fence, nicely painted in municipal green. The only problem was that we had suggested it should be at least shoulder height: he seemed to think that one metre was enough.

Their first morning, stressed out from the plane journey as well as being stared at by curious customs officials for hours why we struggled to get them released, we put the dogs in this little leafy enclosure to relax. All their needs were addressed. One of their airline boxes, complete with a double-thick blanket on the floor, was their bedroom. Outside was a huge bowl of water. They could marvel at the Congolese butterflies and birds, listen to the bleats of a nearby goat being held in readiness for a feast, and relish the fact that they were reunited with their owners.

Is that how it was?

For some doggy reason they decided that not only was the little garden their exclusive property, but the whole block of flats and the car park as well. It was clearly their duty to defend this place against all invaders, of which there were many. There were gardeners, security guards, policemen, and a number of very important people who live upstairs. Furthermore, the dogs decided that anyone who did not respond to warning barks should get the full treatment – i.e. should be eaten.

The very important people are not used to being barked at. So unused are they that they see it as an affront to their personal dignity. It was no comfort to them to be told that, however much the dogs wanted to eat them, they couldn’t because the fence was too high for them to jump over. They also didn’t believe that it’s actually all pretend, and if you were to challenge the dogs they would melt into instant submission.

So there we were. Terrified people standing outside, not able to get into the building because they were scared of the dogs. Two cross dogs who couldn’t understand why people were just staring at them and arguing.

The situation obviously had to be dealt with, so we give the security guards little lessons in how to approach a dog and let it know that you are a friend. We gave them dog biscuits to keep the dogs quite when people wanted to get in and out of the block.

But alas, too late. The security company had been summoned and two military looking people – who claimed to be dog lovers – had arrived to sort the problem out. They said the fence was too low, and you couldn’t blame people for being scared. They had a point, but we told them that we were going to make it higher.

“That’s not enough”, they said, “you’ve got to take immediate action. You should keep the dogs inside”.

That had never been the plan and the idea took some getting used to. It meant that dogs would have to be taken out regularly to do their business, that the house would soon become a filthy mess and so on and so on. But we were outnumbered, and reluctantly had to agree to do it.

And the dogs? They would obviously hate being locked inside, since they are genetically programmed to hunt and run wild, surely?

Not a bit of it.

“At last”, they said, “you’ve got the message. We told you it was too hot outside, but you wouldn’t listen. Sorry about the barking but a dog has to do what a dog has to do.”

So now it’s air conditioning 24/7 for them. They drape themselves on the tiled floor like a Spanish Princess, congratulating themselves on the fact that now the air is a sensible temperature. What is more they have the 24 hour-a-day company of their devoted human, who will, at the drop of a hat take them for walks and feed them. Gotcha! What heaven!

Welcome prize

I’ve moved around a lot, and have come to expect a period of feeling lost: knowing no one, and not knowing where to go to buy things, not knowing the restaurants, etc etc.

In the end matters sort themselves out, and before long you have completely lost the helpless feeling which characterised the first few months.

Kinshasa, that strange place that has been hit by human and economic disasters, presents an even more difficult face. Traditional signs of economic prosperity and decay are intermingled in a way that makes it impossible to interpret. Many of the roads are not signed, and the maps use names which were changed several years ago. It is not, in brief, easy.

But never in my life have we had such a welcome as we have received from the people of Kinshasa. A friend of a friend has given us a contact for the International Women’s Club. The voice at the other end exudes warmth and friendship, and urges us to join them for a charity dinner in two days. She sends an email with the directions and more friendly, chatty, comments about what to expect.

It’s Saturday evening. The dinner is held at a smart Lebanese restaurant – we arrive early to allow our hostess to greet us and introduce us to some other people. To our surprise the evening is sponsored by a bank a friend has recommended for its arts programme, another sponsor is our landlord, a third is South African Airways, and there’s Nando’s, as well. (If you don’t know South Africa, Nando’s will mean nothing – but it has become a symbol of SA enterprise for its chicken peri-peri).

I’m pleasantly surprised to find four people there that I’ve met before, but the welcome we got from total strangers was totally amazing. I’ve been to many new places before and never before have I come across people so genuinely friendly. Some are expatriates, so are locals, some are diplomats and some are business people. Before long, we have met a wonderfully varied assortment of new people.

In some places, especially ones which can be difficult to live in, expatriate talk is a boring list of moans about how difficult things are. There’s none of that here – yes, of course everyone knows that things are difficult, but they are discussed more in a spirit of making the most of a difficult situation. Life is discussed more in terms of jokes than gloom and doom.

After the dinner there is a raffle, for which we have bought two tickets. The second winning number is ours – the first time ever to win a prize. It is an original Congolese painting, in black and white and an interesting, almost picassoesque mixture of symbols and people. If ever we were looking for a propitious sign for our life in Kinshasa, this must be it.

Music starts, the lights go off, and brilliant red blue and green laser disco beams fill the room. We dance until the music becomes heavy techno duff-duff stuff. It is after midnight and we decide it’s time to leave.

An Indonesian woman from the Dutch embassy asks us for a lift home. She’s one of the organising committee, and throughout the evening has exuded enthusiasm and joie de vivre. It comes as a shock that she’s leaving because she her back is giving her excruciating pain. We welcome the chance to talk to her, and give something back in return.

We have met only a few of the people attending, but we really feel among friends. And just to confirm our lucky day, as we leave we receive bottles of Nando’s delicious sauce and beautifully leather bound pocket diaries from the bank.

Ave Maria

It is said that the only threat to security in Kinshasa are the forces of law and order.

Rather a bold statement, and one which many would deny. But the fact is that some bad things go on, and many people feel more fear than hope when approached by the police or soldiers.

But I’m not going to write about that: it is getting rather heavy. But it is an unarguable fact that officials, whether in law and order or any other role, occupy a very special role in Congolese society. That’s because, in a land of scarcity, they have the power to grant or deny things.

Interestingly enough, this is not considered such an appalling thing by the man in the street. Traditional society was run on authoritarian lines, and in traditional settings the chief requires to be shown respect. How this is done may vary, but traditionally it would be by giving him something which is proportionate to the favour required.

What I found very interesting in Ghana is that there is a standard first (but necessarily final) step in approaching a chief: giving him a bottle of schnapps. Yes, schnapps. Not whisky or brandy or vodka, but schnapps. Then if it is a really big deal, it can be followed by a cow, your daughter in marriage, or whatever.

In Swaziland it is normally a chicken or goat. But wherever you are these traditions are strong that no one thinks twice about it.

So, in the Congo, whether in the rural areas or urban areas if I want something, let’s say a driving licence, or an electrical connection, I must decide what is an appropriate contribution, which I then make very discretely.

BUT THAT IS BRIBERY. Yes, of course it is, but it’s worth it. To the ordinary man in the street it is not seen as a crime at all: it is simply the cost of doing business. So while we make complain bitterly about, for example, transfer duty when selling a house, we nevertheless pay it: it is part of the cost of the transaction.

In a country where the resources are so few, transactions must be prioritised, and Congolese officials are open to suggestion in these matters. Is this so different from the politicians in the US whose suggestibility is the focus of the army of lobbyists? And these same lobbyists, who get paid more than the politicians, have only one motive. Getting priorities and values and even principles changed. They have a whole panoply of inducements, both subtle and somewhat less so, to achieve their ends. How different is this to the supplicant at a municipal office who wants a water connection?

This is where it gets interesting. The Congolese man in the street, particularly where the transaction is a big one, will also employ a lobbyist. Well you could call it an intermediary. If he is too junior to speak to the man himself, let’s say a Minister, then he will employ or persuade an acquaintance to do it for him.

Much the same applies to expatriates when their car is stopped by an apparently irate policeman for a minor infringement. History tells us that if they don’t have an interlocutor, the whole scene can drag on for hours. And that’s got nothing to do with the French – native French speakers have the same problem. What they need is, of course, a Virgin Mary who will approach the deity (well, policeman, but he likes to see himself as the deity) with respect and humility without either side losing face. And the Virgin Mary’s represented, of course, by the driver who is inured to the ways of the law and who knows when to talk and when to shut up.

However hard it might be to see it from the other side, we should try to do so. The policemen get paid $20 or $30 a month. And not regularly – sometimes pay is months late. They have wives and children to support, and being a state employee are expected to behave with largesse whenever rural family members come to town, with school fees, with funeral costs and so on and so on.

So can you blame them when they ask for a little something? A colleague recently had a confrontation of this sort. The policemen tried all sorts of angles – threatening her with imprisonment, refusing her permission to move, the threat of huge fines and so on. The whole dialogue seemed to last about an hour. When he realised his strong arm tactics weren’t working, he suddenly changed his tactics. “If you give me a little something, I’ll let you go,” he said. He dropped his mask of power and in a flash became a softly spoken family man who only needed to feed his family. It was curiously touching, and reveals more about what is going on than he realised.

Service with a smile

One of the diseases of modern life is fear of missing something. Not just news, but good programmes on the box, films, articles in the papers and magazines. We fill our lives with information and entertainment. It gets so bad with me that I’ll have the radio on at the same time as the TV, and even then start channel hopping. Then there are the ritual events: Monday night is this, Tuesday night is that. Saturday afternoon is the other. There a confortable ritual about some of it, so that even if you have a device to record programmes, one still watches them live. It just seems more exciting that way.

The same with the Sunday papers, or certain radio shows. Then there’s the occasion of going out to the Cinema, still fun. Not to mention the occasional totally indulgent visit to the video shops (well DVD shop really) and getting six hours of total rubbish.

Well, if you want to be cured of that disease, try Kinshasa. There are satellite services, yes. A French one which is free: Canal +, dubbed bad American films with sport thrown in, and TV5, earnest documentaries, silly game shows and 1950s style news. And if you want to lash out there’s the South African system, which has got a huge variety, but is very expensive. No doubt we’ll succumb to it in due course, but meanwhile, no TV.

And if you want to go to the cinema? Good luck – I haven’t found one yet, although the hotel put a projector in the pool area for the African Cup of Nations: that was like the drive-in cinema without the cars. Same story for video shops. They must exist, but I haven’t seen any yet.

Newspapers? Yes, there are dozens of them, typically put together by a tiny band of journalists who haven’t got the money to collect news, so instead write gossip. Some of it is virulent political gossip – it’s not well enough informed or considered to be comment. The rest of the paper is made up with reader’s letters and wire service material.

The flip side of this situation is that getting oneself featured in a newspaper is easy: you pay. No self-respecting journalist in the DRC will write something about you if you don’t. This is not considered unethical, but the straightforward need to survive.

And then, quite by chance, twiddling the car radio I come across an English station on FM. The radio screen says BBC WS. Yes, the real thing: BBC! Auntie Beeb herself, being broadcast on a local frequency. Gone are those days of hunting for the best frequency on short wave (desperate twiddling from 9.75 to 15.40 Mz, or 6.005 to 17.04 Mz), and trying to hear the content through the crackle.

There is a downside. Part of the day is in French, which probably explains why it is being broadcast in the DRC at all. But the French is beautifully clear. Anyway, I try and maximise my exposure to French, so this is wholly a good thing. But there are times when the strain of trying to digest a foreign language gets too much, and you feel like just listening – not working at the same time. And in the evenings, and some of the week end, they have the most wonderful programmes. They discuss the news in an intelligent way; evaluate political events, get ideas from people who can think. What a wonderful respite from the sound-bite world of television news. And philosophy and science programmes. Unbelievable. All conducted at a comfortably measured pace.

I think a lot of our stress these days comes from the constant battering our minds receive from the media, and especially advertising. But if I have to choose between the Beeb, sensible, informative, peaceful, even clever sometimes; and a crazy show like CSI on the box, I would probably choose CSI. That’s certainly not a rational decision. But for now I don’t have a choice, so I’m making the most of it, and really loving it.

A Tale of Two Cities

The centre of Kinshasa is not a place of beauty. Empty and very run down buildings are everywhere, and an apocalyptic edge is provided by messy roadworks. Add to that a love of argument which seems to be a characteristic of the Congolese, and you have a scene which is stressful and stressed.

(I can’t leave the reference to arguments without recalling a scene at the airport when I had just arrived. We were waiting for our baggage at the carousel. It took an eternity. Suddenly, just behind me a ferocious argument broke out. There were about five official looking people, maybe customs or police, I wasn’t sure, and a member of the public. He was being harangued so noisily that I couldn’t even hear what the man next to me was trying to say in polite chat. He was being pushed around, and eyes were bulging in apparent anger. But he wasn’t cowed by this behaviour, and was shouting back just as noisily. It was clear that there was a major incident in the making, and I pictured him being carried off to the cells in handcuffs, one man at his head, another at his feet, his arms and legs waving helplessly in the air. Probably still shouting in outrage.

Just as suddenly, it all stopped. The officials wandered off, looking, if not amiable, at least not angry at all; and the victim (or whatever he was) wandered off too, quite relaxed. No one seemed in the least bit disturbed by the incident. To a newcomer these scenes seem quite frightening, and in the street one can never be sure whether a riot is starting or it’s merely a squabble over the price of a banana.)

But there’s another Kinshasa, so completely different that it is hard to imagine that it is only a five-minute drive away. There the roads are under a canopy of huge verdant trees and more or less empty of traffic. And on the road, every day after about five p.m. the expats come to walk or run, to play with their children, or to exercise their dogs.

This is not the typical colonial Henry, marching out with his walking stick in search of new parts of the world to include in the empire. It is ordinary people from Bangladesh and Ecuador, Cameroon and Italy, Korea and Norway. Young people, old people. People in Burkhas, and people wearing skinny little pairs of shorts and very little else. They come by car and on foot, and they come in their hundreds. Correction it’s not just expats: everyone comes. There are Congolese of all sorts as well: secretaries, football players, lovers.

They stroll or run along this leafy avenue and then turn northwards where, one block away, is the mighty Congo River. You can walk along the banks here for about two kilometres and admire the brown swirling waters, eddying around small islands; or look across to the other side of the river to Brazzaville, capital of the other Congo. Indeed, although the river is very wide it’s not so wide that when someone in Brazzaville has a very noisy party you can’t hear it in Kinshasa.

Because it is an international frontier, and, I suppose, because there are presidential offices and presidential houses very close, the place is full of soldiers. It’s quite unnerving at first, as they sit there under the trees by the river bank, with their machine guns on their knees staring at you as you walk past. Then you realise that they see the same thing day in and day out, and have long lost any actual interest in you or anyone else. They’re only thinking of the time when they can knock off, or hoping that they will get paid this month. I have started to say bonjour to them: their eyes light up with delight, and, they respond with smiles and cheerful bonjours.

Not everything is bucolic. Yesterday I saw a truck, parked where no soldiers could see it, unloading very dented body parts of cars, like bonnet, roofs etc, and carrying them the few metres to the river bank. A little way off shore was a small boat which, I presumed, had come to collect them, and would sell the metal in Brazzaville for a higher price. That’s a first for smuggling.

Maybe it’s because it is such a popular thing to do, or everyone sort of gets to know everyone else that no one says “Bonjour”. Or is it that the diversity is so great, no one assumes that you would want to greet them. I haven’t worked that one out. One thing I have decided: it’s much nicer than being in a sweaty gym trying hard to pretend that you like it.

French computers

Anybody who learned French at school knows all about the accents. But at school you use a good old fashioned pen, so accents are no problem. But have you tried typing them in MS Word, on an English language keyboard? You have to hunt for the individual letter with its accent under “symbols” which takes, to use an understatement, time.

Naturally the French don’t want to do that, and they don’t have to. They have a totally different keyboard, so that accents are as easy as pie. The logic of the layout is, I suppose, the same as the QWERTY keyboard that we all use, which means that the commonest French letters are in the centre. In brief, it’s totally different, and takes a lot of getting used to.

Those of us who don’t have French keyboards have quite a struggle. The first is, of course, to know what to write in French – i.e. get the words right. That can be very intimidating. Mistakes in spoken language are quickly overlooked, and one is given the benefit of the doubt (“maybe I misheard”), as well as admired for even trying. But committing these mistakes to the cold hard page is very different. The worst thing is that it looks childish, which immediately gives the reader a sense of superiority. Within the office this doesn’t matter much, though let no one assume that there isn’t competition and an intellectual pecking order which is greatly influenced by the written French. But if the same letter is sent to someone in the Government or other person in authority this is not necessarily the relationship that you want.

The situation is worse with emails. Most systems designed for the American market allow you to change fonts, use bold, italic or even more fancy variations, but no accents.

In a way this is an advantage, because it is easy to put accents in the wrong place, or forget them altogether, or use the wrong one. So if one has the excuse that the system wouldn’t let you add accents, that can be quite handy. Indeed, it can save quite a lot of time burrowing in the dictionary.

It was about three weeks ago when an email from one of the staff arrived which was written in a style considerably more florid than her typical I’ll-use-the-minimum-number-of-words-because-that-way-I-run-the-risk-of-making-less-mistakes style. But, above all, it had accents. Lots of them, in all the right places.

I’m not in any position to say I recognise the style of a French speaker, but in spite of its apparent fluency the language somehow did not ring quite true. It was sort of French in drag: with all the outside attributes, but somehow not quite right underneath.

But to criticise it for that would be very mean, and I immediately resolved to start competing. This was now serious: the stakes had been raised and if she could do it, so could I. Before sending anything, I checked every sentence for tense, gender of words, agreement of the verbs with the subject and so on. It was painstakingly slow work. And even then I knew that there would be fundamental mistakes which would be glaring to anyone who knew the language, but which had I had totally missed. And, for fear of making mistakes, I too kept the wording to the simple minimum. The end result: I’ve no doubt it looked like the translation of an English communication into French, not a communication in French.

I don’t remember how I heard it, or maybe I just spotted it on a Google page, but there it was. Translate anything from any language into another. Done instantly, free of charge, by Google. They call it Google Translate. You simply type your words or phrases into a box and the translation appears underneath. You can use it for whole documents – just download them on line, then copy them back into your file. Easy peasy. And, of course, you get all the accents in the right place, absolutely free of charge. So before you write you email, you simply type the text into Google, and voilà: paste it into your message.

As soon as I had discovered this I was quite excited, but you’ve got to be very careful. Some of the translations are a complete joke. I recall using something similar in Google to translate French web pages into English about two years ago. At that time the results were truly ridiculous, not unlike the silly notices you find in Chinese hotels. Presumably someone in Google found out about that and they have put a lot more time into it since.

But it's not perfect by any means. How about this for a breathtaking error? I recently had a lot of meeting transcripts to translate and took the lazy - Google Translate - way out. Here is an example of the results:

Original: Il dit non. (He said no)

Translation: He said yes.

This wasn't a quirk that happened once because of some intangible digital virus: most times "non" was translated as "yes".

In spite of that, when I don’t mind being laughed at, I use Google Translate so that at least I pay respect to the language by including the accents, though I try and check it carefully for idiocies.

My new year’s resolution: to be at least as good, if not better than Google by July.

Hopefully, by then, I’ll have got a French keyboard.

My first car in Kinshasa: The Quickstep

1.

In a city with very few, and very expensive taxis a lot of people when they first arrive resign themselves to being housebound, or hotel-bound. I suppose that there’s often so much to absorb that it doesn’t matter to begin with.

But freedom calls: a car must be bought.

Mind you that’s not easy: everything is so expensive, and there’s no system of bank loans or other financing. Cash is king. And how do I find the $30,000 that it costs to buy one? And where can I buy it from? New ones are truly exorbitant, and most of the rest are wrecks. We talk despondently about sharing a car and driver, knowing that that will never work; or hiring a local taxi for two hours a day to take us to and from work, and a bit of shopping or dining out.

The angels smile: an e-mail reaches me to state that someone who has lived here for four years is selling his car; just the right sort, a 4x4 with huge wheels and sturdy body. I can’t afford it, but I reply instantly. In due course it is mine, and we have a solemn handing over ceremony.

I’ve driven on the right hand side of the road often, so when people ask whether I’m scared, I say of course not.

But that is not in Kinshasa, because people drive on both sides. There’s a sort of official way of doing it – which means that you try and keep towards the right most of the time. And there’s the actual way of doing it, which is that you take the smoothest art of the road – whether it’s on the left or the right, it doesn’t matter. And if the pavement is smoother than the road, you use that. Now, is that scary or not?

Quite the opposite: it’s very liberating. It brings back a feeling I haven’t had since dodgem cars. You zoom from side to side with a song in your heart: thank god – no rules. Slow, slow, quick quick slow. Quickstep driving. A car comes directly towards you. If you’re on his side of the road, you just get out of his way seconds before he’s onto you. If he’s on your side of the road, the same. If you’re both in the middle, no worries, you just make way for each other. OK, there may occasionally be a bit of tension: some drivers are bullies and like to see whether they can push you off the road. But usually it’s a case of live and let live.

There are very few places where the roads are good enough to speed, so that’s not a problem: instead it is mostly a matter of concentrating on obstacles as one navigates the potholes, pedestrians and hand carts.

There are times when it is scary. The new road through the centre of town is now an eight lane superhighway with no road markings, and in the evenings and at week ends some people really go over the top. And the public transport minibuses: they are totally without fear. They don’t care about scrapes and dents as they have so many already, and will pass you in totally ridiculous situations, often on the right (=wrong) side.

The nice thing about having no rules is that the absurd ritual which one was taught at driving school of stopping at road junctions (“hand brake on, look left, look right, look left again, etc”) can be totally thrown out of the window. In fact, the best thing is to accelerate a little when coming to a T-junction so that one can squeeze just in front of oncoming vehicles. Roundabouts are the same. Charge straight in.

The funny thing is that rule-less driving happens even when policemen are directing traffic. Picture this. I am turning left at a junction manned by a policeman, who stands on a miniature band-stand. I do what most would consider the correct thing, stop just past the policeman and then when he has stopped the oncoming traffic I make a neat left-hand turn. But do other people do that? No way - if you spot the gap as you near the policemen you can just zoom across at the diagonal, far before reaching him. He might even smile nicely at you – admiring the natty piece of opportunistic driving.

But: if he has his hand out for you to stop and you don’t? Whoa!! That is a capital offence for which you will be given a very nasty lecture and be expected to pay for big time. But that’s another story.

Travelling to Kalemie

Kalemie is , or should be, a not inconsiderable port on Lake Tanganyika. Previously called Albertville it was designed to be the Congo’s port to the East.

We thought it would be an interesting opportunity for development, and decided to go and have a look at it. If things worked out it would be one of the 12 places that would have the privilege of receiving our attention . . .

I have a nice vision of it: a compact old-fashioned sort of place, perched on a slight hill, with delightful views of the lake. A small fishing harbour gives it local colour.

The old hand in the office seemed to think it was a good idea, so we put it on the list. But yesterday, a younger person, possibly with a somewhat more objective view of life, related his story to us.

He had been supposed to go to Kalemie in December. He had an air ticket from Lubumbashi, one that, like all airline tickets gave a date and time for the flight.

At the airport he was met with a wry smile. “I don’t think it’s going to fly today, try again tomorrow”.

For many of us this would be like a red rag to a bull. How come you didn’t inform me, I’ve got an essential meeting, how do you expect me to manage – I’ve got no hotel bookings, how will you compensate me, etc etc. The cries of anger which rang round the check-in counters during the dreadful winter in Europe and the US this year. Then the anger turns from the wretched bringer of the bad news to the system: how come they can’t keep us informed, I’ll never fly them again, why can’t they make provision for these problems etc.

Our Congolese colleague tried none of these tactics: he knew such outbursts would not only be futile, but also would hurt the poor woman whose job it was to break the news. He nods, politely and retires to mull over his options.

Tomorrow, the same story.

He asked when the last flight had been. “Oh, about a month ago.” When will the next one be? “I don’t know.” Clearly, many of the options he might have been mulling over yesterday have suddenly become unattainable: he needed to think out of the box.

There is a train. Part of the track is, as they say, severely degraded, so the train goes very very slowly – it takes about two days. Some times it doesn’t get there, because the track is out of order. For a distance of about 300 kilometres that makes about 25 km an hour. The problem is that you don’t know when it’s going to leave. Or, indeed how long it will really take.

Road? You must be joking. The latest figure of surfaced road is something like 1,500km for the WHOLE COUNTRY which is, as a matter of fact almost one quarter the size of the USA. And about half as much gravel roads. To add to the misery, this is about half the amount twenty years ago (though the Chinese have started a huge road-building programme which will make a big difference). Anyway, for now, there’s no road.

Of course there’s MONUC: that’s the UN peace-keeping service which operates planes which certain development agencies may use. BUT there are no reservations: quite properly, UN personnel get priority. One is, in effect, a standby passenger at all times. To and from Kalemie, the chances of getting on, we are told, are tiny.

We’ve all heard these stories of being stranded from time to time, but what boggles the mind is that this isolation is not an occasional event: it’s permanent.

Now this is very interesting. We hear from time to time about self-sufficient communities. Some go so far as to have their own currencies. But we know that they are not really as separate from the world as they pretend to be. But Kalemie is, without any shadow of doubt, really isolated, and whether it likes it or not has to be self sufficient. The people there effectively live in a world of their own, and they might as well have their own currency as far as the rest of the Congo is concerned. If I were an economist, I would love to track how their economy works.

Of course it has one life-line: the lake. There is presumably some trade with Tanzania and other countries round the lake. But being so cut off from the rest of the Congo, the trade must be pretty limited.

In fact what it reminds me of most is the little villages the huddled on the fierce Atlantic coast of western England and France which, until the 20^th century were isolated as much by the fearsome waves of the ocean as the steep cliffs and tortuous little donkey tracks which were the only means of reaching the decent roads. The difference with them is that their isolation was a few miles – let’s say half a day’s journey at the most. Not days.

Scary Movie

It's not everywhere that boasts a restaurant in an empty building, but tonight we have booked and plan to experience it first hand. We’ve been warned that it is a bit strange.

It is in the very centre of town, and as we approach it the buildings get grander and more interesting. One of the most beautiful is a two storey building on the corner fronted by a very elegant arcade. The arches are so well proportioned that it could have come from the hand of an Italian architect in the Renaissance. Truly special.

But wait. The arches are there, and there is a building behind, but it stares at us with the empty eye-balls of the derelict. And at the end, a tree has taken root on the roof, a tree that is famous in Africa for being able to root out of the soil. Its roots clasp the last arch and its columns in a grotesque sculpture of an alien plant, half octopus, half Medusa. The roots twist and turn over each other as they head for the ground, and then bury themselves deeply into the tar of the pavement.

The road must have been the classiest of all in earlier times: the Kinshasa equivalent of Bond Street. It is beautifully paved with concrete stones, and even now one can feel the pride with which shopkeepers in that street looked out onto the tree lined Avenue and admired the classy ladies window shopping.

At night, however, it has no glamour, only the sadness of a defeated place in which decay and abandonment have won.

Shortly afterwards we see the neon light of the restaurant, and are deposited at the front door. Not of the restaurant, because it is on top, but of a dirty, echoing passage which leads to the lifts. A man who looks, as far as the dim light reveals, rather like a beggar, jumps up and shows us to the lift. One small light reveals him in more detail: his beggarly appearance derives from a strange attempt to dress him up as a Rajah. Around us is nothing but abandonment – no paint, no notices, just dirt and dereliction.

He ushers us into the lift. I think it takes more than a little courage to get into this lift: if everything is so run down surely the chances of the lift getting stuck are pretty high. But the alternative is worse. The building has a menacing atmosphere made far worse by the lack of light. This surely is a perfect setting for a horror movie. Every corner has within it the potential to house a dreadful monster, or, to be more practical, a knife-wielding thief.

The lift is one of these without an inside door. They’ve made a tentative effort to decorate the inside of the lift with some vaguely exotic wall paper, but it is dirty and torn, so one wonders whether a clean coat of paint might not have been more effective. The beggar gets in with us, and presses the button for the top floor. No words are exchanged, as we glance uneasily at the lift, the lift man and each other. Suddenly it lurches to an abrupt stop. We know that the restaurant is on the top floor, but this isn’t the top floor, it is the one below. The heart sinks. But no problem. Whether this is a device to fool bad people, or a fault that only a long-lost Belgian can repair we do not know. But the lift man does not share our anxiety: he presses the button for the top floor a second time, and voila: we’re on the move again.

The lift door opens onto another scary dark passage, but at the end is a light! Joy, pure joy, to see light, and quite bright light as well. We forget the scary movie monsters lurking in the shadows and make hastily to the doorway. A flight of stairs and there we are, in normalcy. A restaurant with nicely laid tables, and big bar (rather empty of interesting bottles, but the bar itself is there) and an outside terrace.

From here we can see the whole of Kinshasa. The noise and hassle of the streets do not matter up here: we can sit in the lovely warm darkness of the tropical night, exchanging all the clichés about the hardships of life in the tropics, as we sip our gins and tonic. And what is even better, we’re so high up here, there’s definitely no malaria.

The plug

Plugs are not normally things which one carries with one. By plug I mean that black rubber thing which stops water escaping from a wash basin.

But trivial as a plug might seem, when there isn’t one, life gets tricky. You can, of course, just let the water run and not care about wastage. But that goes against the grain, especially in a country of shortages. So if you haven’t got a plug in your room what to do? Complain, of course, very politely, to the reception desk.

“But of course, we shall fix it immediately.”

But that evening there’s nothing. So improvisation must be tried. Use a water bottle, which is quite heavy. No – it doesn’t fit well enough to stop the water going underneath. Put a face cloth – this the hotel thoughtfully supplies – underneath the bottle, and thereby make the joint more watertight. Yes, not bad, until one uses the water, which is when the water bottle invariably totters and falls. How about my metal shaving cream can? That’s a quite good fit.

Then the thought hits me. I’m paying $180 a day, and have to use my shaving can to keep water in the basin. It’s not without some sense of outrage that I go back to the reception and remind them that nothing has been done. They smile sweetly and promise to get one tomorrow. I don’t share their confidence: I’m pretty sure that they have no idea what I mean. My sign language is obviously inadequate, but I give up for the sake of sleeping patterns. Life’s too short to get upset about mere plugs.

The next morning, I’ve looked it up in the dictionary and explain the problem in several different ways. I think I have made it very clear what the problem is and why they should do something about it. They smile sweetly and promise that the technician will deal with it that day. No problem.

That evening it is not without a little excitement that I open the door to my bathroom, expecting to find the named object, neatly fitted into its hole, or maybe placed delicately next to the soap. But no. Nothing.

Has the hotel run out of money? Do they not understand that plugless basins don’t work? Or is, dreadful thought, the plug a colonial imposition which the Congo has now rejected?

There are times in life when one begins to wonder whether cultural differences really really matter. It’s politically incorrect, of course, to even talk of them, as to do so often implies some sort of value judgement. My way of life/my culture is so much better than, er, yours.

I remember when we were young being taken over to France for the holidays. Talk about cultural imperialism! The French were considered so backward: nice bread, yes, but they (a) didn’t have Kelloggs Corn Flakes, and (b) had very smelly and/or strange loos. No toilet paper, just telephone directories. I ask you. Yes, we could allow ourselves a small smile of self congratulation. At least we had mastered plumbing. Spain was much the same: the drain smell seemed to be a signature flavour of the South.

So is the plug reawakening my old prejudices against foreign parts, or should I accept their standards as OK, and say and or do nothing in spite of paying $180 per night? What can you expect . . . it’ the Congo. Is that hypocritical? Well, if you ask me, being unable to supply a plug in a hotel is simply bad management, and no amount of excuses will make up for it. So forget about double standards.

But, in fact, I found out the reason a few weeks later when I was put into another room. The plugs were not a standard size: the basins – indeed the whole hotel – were Chinese, and they arrived with clever pop-up metal plugs. You pushed it down, and it stayed down; you pushed again, and it popped up enough to allow the water to get out. These are, of course, very common in most parts of the world. But it was clear that in Kinshasa the technology, and or the spare parts, had been too much. So if some clever guest had nicked the plug – maybe he had the very same basin at home – there was no way that they could mend it without, possibly, importing something from China.

Maybe they did import the part, or even a whole basin– history doesn’t tell us. But I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the management offices when my daily requests came for a plug.

Driving

1. It’s a Tuesday afternoon and I have to go to an airline office in the centre of town. To be more precise along the Boulevard 30 Juin, 30 June being the date of Independence of the DRC from Belgium.

The Belgians are no one’s favourite colonialists, but like most colonialists they liked to make a statement when it came to their Capital City. In fact, if you compare Kinshasa with Nairobi or Lusaka or Accra, I would say that the Belgians were much better at it than the British.

So the Boulevard which sweeps from the main railway station from the heart of the city was a fine example of what the word Boulevard suggests: a wide, tree-line avenue, with a mixture of gracious buildings on both sides, some fine public buildings like the Post Office, many shops, large and small, and offices and blocks of flats.

That, at least, is my reconstruction. Today many of the building lie unused and even derelict, even pock marked by bullet holes. Paint is a commodity that is not used. Many shops are closed, and the pavements are nothing but dusty cart tracks. Interspersed with the old are a few buildings which look, and maybe even are, new, to house the banks, cell phone companies and similar products of international capital.

So the Bouelvard is not what it used to be. But it isn’t just because the economy has been shattered and recovery is slow. It has lost the essence of its meaning as a Boulevard: its trees.

The President, Joseph Kabila, has decreed that one of his national priorities is to turn the boulevard into a new superhighway – four lanes in each direction. In this he has been ably supported by the Chinese who have adopted it under a barter deal. This is part of a five-part project in which China builds infrastructure for which they will receive copper and other minerals from the DRC in return.

Maybe in the future the Chinese will redeem themselves, but so far the results have been dismal. All the trees have gone, and in their place is only a massive strip of asphalt, wider than an airport runway.

But that is no help today, because the work isn’t finished, and half of the famous Boulevard is closed for road works. The closed side is the inward bound section, the side on which we need to go.

No problem. My doughty driver knows the answer. He seizes a gap in the traffic to cross the road and drive onto the pavement on the left hand side of the road. Once on the pavement he heads into town.

There’s a small problem with this plan. All the other drivers have done the same – no only the ones who are heading into town, but the ones coming out as well. Once on the pavement, by a fluke we move forward about three car lengths, but then come to an intersection.

This intersection has clearly been identified as a problem. The cars coming out of it are totally stuck because the Boulevard is also stuck. The side road is narrow – not an important road – but nevertheless is part of the total blockage. That is why there are about twenty policemen trying to get a gap in the traffic so that cars can leave the intersection. They manage it for a fleeting moment before a car drives from the pavement on the other side and ends up head on facing a car on our side of the pavement, thereby blocking the intersection once more.

At this point my driver gives up and tries once more to get onto the right side of the road. This involves shoving his way, car by car, across the flow of the traffic. Someone is just in front of us, and slowly (everything is a matter of inching forward minute by minute) runs over a market woman’s maize bags. The poor woman protests, and the driver (also a woman) tries to reduce the damage by reversing, but by doing so actually bursts the bags. The car behind hoots. The driver of the offending car can do nothing and eventually just drives off. Maize everywhere.

Meanwhile the many policemen are entreating drivers to hold back. They stand in front of cars to block their way, they argue with the drivers, but ultimately seem to be powerless to control anything. Once there’s any easing the blockage cars surge forward, and the police can do nothing other than blow their whistles in frustration. Their normal response – taking offending drivers to one side to negotiate a bribe – seems to be futile in these circumstances, and possibly it is this realisation that frees drivers of any good sense that they might otherwise have.

After a time we get through, and drive slowly on the right side of the road towards our destination. Suddenly an opening occurs and we zoom to the other side and resume our drive on the pavement. Some blockhead of a driver has had the same idea, only he’s coming from the other direction, and we end up, head to end, with nowhere to go as there are parked cars on both sides.

I get out and walk, and I suppose the drivers must have found some resolution of their confrontation, because when I had left the airline office about five minutes later, the driver was a little bit closer and his opponent had vanished.

Leaving was much faster, as the road was fairly empty. But when I asked why there had been such a traffic jam today, he just shrugged his shoulders – it’s like that every day.

House hunting

House hunting in a place like Kinshasa sounds rather difficult. After all, it’s not exactly a destination of choice for most of the world.

But it is, of course, the headquarters of the UN’s biggest peace keeping operation, and has multiple other UN and other international agencies there. You name it they’re there.

And where the UN and international donors are, there’s money to be made in housing.

This fact has not escaped the notice of the Kinois (residents of Kinshasa). They have built big time. Indeed I think they’ve been rather hasty in building so many new houses. It’s great for the person looking, and not so good for the person trying to let it out.

Unfortunately the market is not working as well as Adam Smith might have predicted. The first thing to note is that the Congolese have built according to their taste, not that of the market they are hoping to participate in.

Anyone who has seen photos of Mobutu’s palace in the bush will know what I mean when I call the style Congo-Versailles. Actually, I can sort of understand the ambition of Mobutu, Emperor Bokassa of Congo Brazzaville and Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast to have their own Versailles, or Paris, or whatever tickled their fancy. After all they had (in their understanding) the money, so why not?

But when you transpose those values and that sort of design to rooms of little more than ten square metres, it gets a bit absurd. And have houses with some many tiny rooms that you get lost. And then stuff the same rooms with furniture as massive as any that Mobutu would have enjoyed. Throne furniture, I suppose you could call it. That’s when it doesn’t really attract the moneyed classes from overseas.

The care that went into the design, such as multiple layers of ceiling, each of which with hidden lighting, is astounding, and this in a house squeezed between many others of indifferent design, served only by a deeply pitted dirt road and occasional services such as electricity and water.

As interesting as these little palace-in-slums houses are, the people who showed us around were even more interesting.

As soon as word had spread that we were looking for a house they would turn up at the office, and wait around until one had time to go with them. As often as not they had no transport, so we had to hijack an office car. They put on a mien that can best be described as gangster cool: gold chains, baseball hats etc. One of the more sophisticated ones had a digital camera to show pictures of what he had to offer.

As soon as we were off the hyperbolic language beloved of estate agents would start. Lovely big house, very close, delightful garden, etc etc. These were interspersed with obviously desperate calls to persuade the owners to allow us to enter the said gems.

In fact some of the houses we saw were quite nice, and with limited changes in design could be made very pleasant. Nearly all were new, and came with new appliances etc. All were surrounded by high walls and guarded by a watchman behind a huge solid steel gate.

But what hurt the most was that when we occasionally met the owners their eyes glowed with pride, and to tell them that we didn’t think it was quite what we were looking for was very difficult. Their faces would be transformed from – what shall be say, “glowing with pride?” – to a near suicidal sense of total helplessness and despair.

But here again Adam Smith failed us. Not only did the market not work in terms of style – it didn’t work in terms of price either. How come all these houses were lying empty, but still the prices were as high as an apartment in New York? Of course, how silly: the market soon finds out what housing allowances are, and surprisingly pitches the rent to match them exactly.

Then we found out about another style of house agent, who catered for the higher end of the market. She drove – or rather her driver – drove a very unreliable and very old BMW. The door handle falls off regularly, and her excuse for being late was usually something to do with the car. The trips are marred by a stream of verbal abuse of the driver, mixed with multiple phone calls to and from a huge range of different business dealings, and lists of the different places she had on her books. No one could call her anything less than a total enthusiast who piled five times as much stuff onto her plate as she could properly handle.

She finds us a lovely place. It’s expensive, but worth it. Very safe, near several embassies, and with day and night security guards, and thick thick burglar guards over all the windows. Very suitable, we decided. There’s even a small garden that we can use for the dogs.

But wait, what is that door?

The house is a flat, in fact, in an apartment block which has a typical entrance with double glass doors onto a lift lobby and staircase. But behind the glass doors is a solid steel door, about two inches (50mm) thick which can be locked and barred, with two huge swinging levers, from the inside. “It’s for when there are riots . . .”

But some might think this is not enough. What if they come when you’re sleeping? Don’t worry: there’s a door within the flat which is exactly like a safe door, and which cuts off the bedroom wing. Totally impenetrable. In a word, bombproof. You can lock that too when we go to bed. Trivial? We joke about it, but then someone from the British Embassy reminds us that they installed those doors after the riots about four years ago. They were so bad that all embassy staff were evacuated for months.

I suppose it give the term “safe house” a somewhat different twist.

Shopping

1. Shopping

I’m stuck because my furniture hasn’t arrived and I need a chair and a table.

We’ve been out to look at a market where there must be about 100 carpenters, each of whom has staked out a piece of stony ground to make and show off his wares. Some lucky ones have a tree to keep them cool. Plenty of choice here.

As we walk past, each one shouts after us, offering their goods at what seems like the highest price imaginable. One tentative approach to look more closely is treated as a shotgun sale, and immediately you are locked in uncomfortably earnest negotiations. “But I’m just looking” counts for nothing. No one is “just looking” otherwise why would they be there.

But if you are genuinely interested, then there’s good stuff to be found. No plywood here, just beautiful solid chunks of wood. Badly put together sometimes, but solid yes, and beautiful, usually.

Design is not the strong point. Most of it starts somewhere around coronation of Edward the seventh. Which I suppose is something like the time when King Leopold of Belgium cast the shadow of his ghastly rule over this part of the world. And it has never recovered since – in the field of taste anyway.

But for those to whom anti-macassers are not de rigeur, and massive red velvet is not the upholstery of choice, and gilt carving fit for a paris brothel is somewhat over the top, for these puritans there are other options. Pages cut from magazines and furniture catalogues are there for one to choose – anything can be copied. Even stuff like Charles Rennie Macintosh chairs, or early shaker chairs can be made. As long as it is in wood, or wrought iron.

But for today the hassles of that market, the haggling over price and the uncertainty about whether what you think you’ve ordered is the same as what he thinks you’ve ordered just seems too much. So I take the easy way out.

“OK,” I tell the driver, “we’ve got a lot to do today. We need a plastic table and plastic chairs.”

Little did I know that I was heading for one of the most famous shops in Kinshasa, with a crowd to match.

The shop stands out from far off. In a street thick with litter, many shops either closed for the day or totally abandoned, we see this stretch of pavement piled high with plastic chairs of all colours, surrounded by the sort of crowd you normally expect at the entrance to a football stadium. Pavement might be a somewhat misleading term – it’s a piece of potholed asphalt next to the road, about three meters wide, so good for the display of merchandise.

Getting near the shop, let along into it, is difficult. Everywhere there are people jostling to look or get attention from a shop assistant. Everything has a price written on it in very large numbers, which I find quite reassuring. There are four different table shapes and sizes, and I choose the middle size square one.

I don’t have trouble getting served because I am white. We discuss the options. I want white. “Sorry, no white”. OK then, I’ll go for a maroon, and chairs to match. The shop assistant is a small man with somewhat ragged trousers, but in spite of the heat he’s not sweating. He pushes into the shop to inform someone behind the counter that there has been a sale. This person then makes out the bill. Next to her is the owner, a Lebanese who, while standing up, dealing with a cell phone in one hand and showing someone something with the other is also trying to eat his breakfast – a large tortilla-type object with a vegetable filling.

The bill is made out and passed to my driver for payment. I give him the money, and he stands next to the cashier, who’s behind a thick grille, waving the money and bill in an attempt to get noticed. Five minutes later I get my change.

Then, “so sorry, but no red tables, only red chairs.” This is too much. I can’t have chairs and tables a different colour. So what to do? They have a revolting powder-blue colour in the tables, but no matching chairs either, and in dark blue they have both, but the chairs are a different quality. “OK, lets have the dark blue.”

But now we’ve changed the order because the price for the chairs is different, and a new bill must be prepared. Money must be refunded. While all this is going on, I hear a little squawk of surprise next to me. It’s a very heavily pregnant woman from the office who’s come to buy baby essentials. She’s cross because I didn’t ask her to take me there, but secretly quite impressed to find me in such a low end of town. I look around, and start to see the huge variety of plastic stuff there. Laundry baskets, vegetable baskets, potties, jugs, bowls, stools – all sorts.

But now, the transaction is done. From the back emerges my table, and from one of the four metre high stack of chairs on the pavement we extract four chairs. We are done.

I suppose it took half an hour in all. But what I loved about it was that there was never any sense at all of annoyance or impatience from anyone. Was it cheap? What do you expect? – its Kinshasa – so the whole deal cost $75. But if you try anywhere else, as I was repeatedly told, it would be much more.