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.