Agent Orange

Some enterprising people prepared a guide for newcomers to Kinshasa which advised people to “smother themselves” with anti mosquito cream “at all times”. This suggests a scene where one is surrounded by a cloud of desperate mosquitoes, each looking for a piece of the action. Indeed, in some places I’ve been to, as often as not, one of the said mosquitoes will be sufficiently desperate to overcome the toxic smell of the anti-mosquito cream, or strong enough to insert its proboscis through one’s clothing, and have a suck. So this sounded like good advice.

But, that’s not the real picture. It was a huge surprise to find that there are hardly any mosquitoes in Kinshasa – at least that part where the hotels and restaurants are, and one can often eat outside without even hearing a mosquito.

That’s not to say that there is nothing which bites. There are little things which emerge from the lush vegetation round the swimming pool: they love biting and leave a nasty itch. There are nasty spiders – I’m sure it was a spider which bit my hand and almost paralysed it for several days. There are snakes, which we come across on our walks near the river. AND, there’s a harmless-looking centipede about 30mm long which we found wandering (apparently without any intent to harm) through the kitchen.

I picked it up on a piece of paper with a view to restoring it to its natural habitat, which is presumably the garden. One of the army of police/security guards saw us carrying it out. “Drop that quickly,” he said, “that’s dangerous.” And without further ado he stamped on it with a viciousness not at all required to kill the little thing.

He explained afterwards that their bite is very serious – worse than a scorpion, and as bad as some snakes. If it had bitten us, he said, we would have to go to hospital immediately.

To return to mosquitoes. We had a clue as to why the air isn’t full of them when we were staying in a hotel. As we were having an evening drink someone was walking around the garden area with a huge backpack spray, dousing everything in sight. Maybe this is what is done everywhere.

One Saturday morning some men came to the door of the flat and announced that they had come to fumigate. They showed me an official-looking paper which I took to mean that they were from the city of Kinshasa. I had found a few dead cockroaches, and although we certainly weren’t infested I thought it was good to make sure. So I let them in, and before long all the inside walls house has been saturated with what one had to assume was a toxic substance. Then they started on the cupboards paying particular attention to the kitchen.

“That,” they said, “will be $200.”

“What???”

“Oh yes, and this covers another spraying in two weeks and then you will get a guarantee for three months, and you will have no infestation for a year.”

“Anyway,” they said, “everyone else has paid,” and showed me a school notebook in which my neighbours had apparently signed to confirm their payments. Of course, the signatures could have been faked, but I paid.

They came back a second time and then a third. “This time,” they said, when they had finished, “you must pay another $200”, and showed me the exercise book again to demonstrate that everyone else had paid a total of $400. This was the last straw. By now I had worked out that they were just a private company using the Kinshasa letterhead to legitimise themselves, and my suspicions were aroused. Maybe the spray was just water with a touch of some smell added? Who knows. One thing was sure: this was not what we had agreed.

I refused. “Oh,” they said, “if you pay, and if we spray once more you’ll get a guarantee.”

“What about the guarantee that you gave me last time?”

Then they went into a long explanation about how the $200 was just part of an instalment plan, and actually the price was $400 all along etc etc.

After hours of haggling, for the sake of peace I agreed that I would pay $100 more if they did it once more and I got an official receipt.

Was it worth it? While it’s true to say that there are no mosquitoes in the house, that’s because the windows are covered in mosquito netting. I’ve found only a couple of dead cockroaches which might be because the spraying worked, but using the ordinary household sprays might have been just as good. After all, a can of cockroach spray costs $10, and I can’t see one using 40 of them in a year.

Anyway, that’s water under the bridge. But I’ve got two questions: what is the spray, and when are they going to invent something to deal with lethal centipedes?