Rumble in the rubbish

The scene: an open air amphitheatre which had been the scene for grand concerts in Mobutu’s day. James Brown and other icons of the pop world performed to the glitterati in this very place. It is set in the garden of the former presidential palace, and to this day you have to pass through a military check point to enter. It has now been restored and makes a beautiful setting for a performance.

A classical orchestra is performing Beethoven, Grieg, Strauss and Handel. The audience includes people of all ages, mainly people from the immediate, relatively poor, neighbourhood, attracted by a free concert. A young woman walks listlessly in front of us, noisily dragging her flip-flops. Two young men, seriously cool, jeans falling loosely over their bum and baseball hats the wrong way round amble across the stage, maybe checking the sound system. A baby behind us keeps up a running commentary, mainly, I think, about how hungry it is. But such distractions don’t matter. The orchestra is used to such interruptions and as they finish their party piece, the Halleluya Chorus, the audience comes to its feet clapping furiously many bars before the end. The conductor turns round to take the bow: he’s a famous German who has been here giving music master classes.

The orchestra is the very same one that we saw about nine months ago: the Kimbanguiste orchestra, renowned for the fact that so many musicians are self taught and have even made their own instruments. At that time they had already had been subject of a film which is currently doing the rounds of the art-house circuit and picking up prizes at film festivals.

Thanks to the film, Germany decided to give them support, and sent a conductor to give them master classes. It was at the end of his stay that they gave the final performance we attended. The verdict? The conducting was very good: you could tell how he managed to shape the music, and bring out the musicality of different instruments. But overall, I’m sorry to say, he had killed the enthusiasm and excitement which used to permeate their music. It is as if now they are playing by the book, pedestrianly. Maybe it is a learning stage they have to pass through.

Four days later we were at another Mobutu icon: the stadium built for Mobutu’s biggest triumph: the Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in October 1974.

Word had got around the Embassy that the pop singer, Damon Albam, of Blur/Gorillaz (who is here to record an album with Congolese musicians, the proceeds of which will go to Oxfam) was going to join in a football match between the British Embassy and the United Nations. Don’t scoff: they are quite serious these embassy footballers – they play every Sunday, and have their own red strip with British Embassy Kinshasa neatly printed in white on their chests.

So, curious as to what this celebrity would be really like, we bravely drive to the wrong end of town and arrive at this sad decaying monument. This is very different from the spruced up amphitheatre at the other end of town. It is surrounded by mountainous rubbish dumps between which people have cleared football pitches. Many of the players are in coloured jerseys, so clearly they are not just fooling around.

Inside, the stadium looks deeply forlorn. The once splendid marble floors of the VIP stand are broken, the roofing has vanished, and the smell of the latrines under the stand drives us to stand at the edge of the pitch which is, as it happens, a beautifully constructed astro-turf pitch, carefully graded to drain to the sides and almost brand new.

We stand around, as the teams limber up, vaguely wondering whether HE will turn up. Children play, and the opposing team are putting on their bright blue strip. The officials, two linesmen and a referee, arrive, armed with corner flags. We look at each other with raised eyebrows: this is really getting serious.

Damon Albam doesn’t come, and at half time the UN is winning by one goal to nil. It’s all a bit disappointing.

The referee interests me. He is so thin, with legs like sticks, that it’s hard to imagine him last longer than a few minutes, but he keeps up pretty well. During half time, he takes the British captain to one side. “Get one of your boys to fall over in the penalty area and I’ll give you a penalty,” he says, with a knowing look.

But his ploy comes to naught. We equalize soon after half time, and since this is the first match that Her Majesty’s representatives have not actually lost, honour is restored and spirits are high.

But at the end, the referee shakes his head in disbelief. “They could easily have won,” he said to himself, “how stupid can they be?”

Veg. Growing

Here’s a good news story, which blows the cover which Congolese seem to have cultivated of being feckless, ignorant and lazy, because (one suspects) that’s how they get more foreign aid. The fact is that there’s a love of growing things and a love of order which is completely different from what I have seen in Zambia, South Africa and Kenya.

The problem here is not will or skill but getting inputs (seed, fertiliser and pesticides), and markets. Poverty, bad roads, a lack of commercial infrastructure make food growing a difficult exercise which is made even worse in many parts of the country by bandits who rape the women and steal the crops.

Partly because life in the rural areas is so hard, the towns are growing day by day. Kinshasa, in particular, is now over 8 million, and is the third largest city in Africa.

So what do the newly-urbanised peasants do? They grow vegetables. For someone used to the sad efforts at food growing on the outskirts of cities like Johannesburg (a scattering of weakling maize plants) or Accra, (small clusters of peanut beds) what you see near Kinshasa is totally different. There’s an area we drive through quite regularly near a good strong river. On the small hills alongside this valley are tier upon tier of vegetable beds, each the same neat rectangle in size, just narrow enough to allow weeding. (That’s right, the same type of raised beds that the hapless missionary in the Poisonwood Bible decried as being ridiculous). On these beds are carrots, onions, spinach, radishes, cabbages, peppers, aubergines, tomatoes in various stages of growth. Clearly, they have access to irrigation and there has been some technical assistance in getting the scheme going. But the products are truly a delight, and are on sale along the road below the farm.

Recently I came across a report about an urban agriculture project, which is truly a success story. It showed that given an opportunity, and protected from harassment, people in the Congo can be very productive. Farmers who previously were scraping by with incomes of $500 a month are now getting between $2500 and $3500 a month. Some of the vegetables sell for $4 a kilo. The nutritional status of the families of these urban farmers has improved due to the consumption of vegetables, but they only consume ten percent of their production. The project in question cost the Belgian taxpayer about $2 million a year over five years, but produces 330,000 tons of vegetables annually, with a value of about $400 million. A total of 16,000 people are farming, and a further 60,000 are gaining from the project through linked activities.

Nature has been kind in some ways. The land around Kinshasa and Lubumbashi is relatively flat and the fact that it rains during ten months of the year helps enormously.

But this doesn’t explain this success which was to transpose the basic agricultural skills that rural people enjoy into an environment where they can use them productively. It has added to those skills by giving them a more sophisticated understanding of soils, fertilisers, crop rotation and marketing. And the result? BINGO!

If only we could do something similar in democracy and governance.

Power displays

Over many years in Africa one has watched with dismay that symbol of power – the Presidential motorcade – become bigger and more threatening by the year. There was a time when it used to drive at a steady speed through the streets, so that the President could give friendly waves to his happy subjects. As tyranny increased, which was the unfortunate trend, not only did the speed increase, but the number of vehicles grew exponentially. Now it was not a matter of mingling with the people, but avoiding assassination.

The most unpleasant members of these motorcades are the policemen which drive up front. They aim straight for you, and if you don’t stop immediately right at the edge of the road you’ll be pulled out of the car and roughed up. Here we’re not talking about the behaviour of mad Bob’s people in Zimbabwe – or the excesses of equatorial Guinea: it even happens in South Africa. And as the number of cars increases, the cars also become more expensive.

There was one exception to this trend: Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who used to be driven in a Peugeot 504. He would sit in the front, next to the driver, and travel at a dignified and safe 50km an hour. One vehicle would follow him.

As these things go, the Congo’s motorcades are relatively small and not very threatening. Indeed, President Kabila enjoys being away from the pomp and circumstance of office, and sometimes drives around on a quad bike, followed, of course, by his retinue of soldiers and aides in their cars, trying hard not to look embarrassed by the antics of their boss.

His father was a different story. So obsessed with power was he that the road had to be completely cleared before he travelled anywhere. Cars were made to stop and the drivers had to to stand in front of their cars with their hands up. Apparently it used to give him a real thrill to see the once rich and powerful foreigners, especially Belgians, standing in that pathetic and subservient pose.

We’re all hoping that history doesn’t repeat itself.

Goating in Kinshasa

(Written about six months ago, and just dusted down from the shelves before it becomes totally out of date)

We all try and make the most of our situation, which some people find quite difficult in Kinshasa. So it was with amazement that we recently heard a woman in her late thirties say that her two favourite places in the world were Beirut and Kinshasa. She’s been in the DRC about two years in all, with less than half of that in Kinshasa. When asked why, she gave reasons which I didn’t find at all convincing – about the fascinating politics and stuff like that.

Funnily enough, I had a curiously similar feeling about the place a few days later. I suddenly wondered where in the world can I do this and feel so content?

To elaborate on what “this” is: we had agreed at very short notice (30 minutes) to join some Congolese friends at an open-air restaurant which consisted of nothing more than about forty tables and a very large built-in barbeque. It occupies a mini-square created by three buildings, off the pavement in the centre of town. We were told that the speciality is goat, and we were not invited to choose anything else.

The catering was not exactly flawless. The beer was not very cold, as there had been a power cut for the whole day, but one of the party took the warmish beers to another bar and swapped them for cold ones. They didn’t serve wine, so our host rushed home and brought back four bottles which the management allowed us to drink with no objections – all done in twenty minutes or so.

Drinks sorted, two huge plates of meat, cut into little pieces that we could pick up with toothpicks, were put in the middle of the table and the grazing began.

It was then, as I enjoyed the warm evening, listening to the hum of people having a really good time, that I suddenly felt really at ease. Where else could I do this? There are joints in Nairobi which are a bit similar (but rather grotty) and the night weather there is cold; there are many cities with delightful open-air eating places, but this totally unpretentious (though clean and decent) place is very different. There are cities with glamour and cities with interest: Kinshasa comes very far down the list on both of these topics. But this place was easy to get to, you could park right in front, and it was welcoming.

So was that all it was – nice climate and no hassle? Maybe it was simply relief that you can lead a comparatively normal – if not ideal – life here. And to feel, as we have done on several occasions (to the horror of the security brigade) that one can pass a very nice evening on the Congolese side of town. It was also nice to share a meal with Congolese people and know that their preoccupations were not so different from ours. Talk inevitably drifted to the police, who are, in most people’s experience, the true DRC criminals. We discussed where the worst policemen situate themselves, and what horrors they try and perpetrate on us.

I don’t know the real reason. But somehow, I feel that that night was a turning point in my relationship with the city.

And the goat? They teased us by making bleating noises before we started, and giving a fictional life story of the animal. The meat itself was tough with plenty of gristle, which we were supposed to simply throw onto the ground whence it would be removed by . . .? But in spite of that, it was really nice. Coming from me, a vegetarian manqué, that’s high praise indeed.

A life of ease

Civil society: that’s a good thing, isn’t it? I remember a book which linked the decline in civil society activity in the US to an increase in crime and anti-social activity. Civil society in this context can mean anything from boy scouts and the Red Cross to the Women’s Institute, bowling clubs, Save the Children and Oxfam. Most of those participating in civil society do so as volunteers. Some get paid but gladly accept lower than normal salaries because it is in a good cause.

In the Congo civil society has a somewhat different ring to it. As we move from the neglected and dirty government offices to those of Non Government Organisations (NGOs) which is development-speak for civil society, the contrast is immediate. The office grounds are neatly maintained, the lawn is watered and the flowers well tended. Is this just because the good people of civil society take pride in their environment?

Inside the offices the contrast is even stronger. Modern computers sit on the desks, files are kept in modern steel cabinets, and as we engage in discussions about the good works they are doing for the poor, we hear the ping of emails arriving through their high-speed internet connection. To counteract the impression of prosperity, NGO clothing is aggressively egalitarian: short sleeved check shirts and jeans. Sometimes even sandals. But this belies the most important symbol of the difference: the huge 4 x 4 vehicles parked outside.

How come?

It was all a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Donors in the DRC tried giving friends to the new government after the 2006 elections, to the government which had pledged a fresh start with zero tolerance of corruption. Alas, either the funds were spent on something else, or vanished completely. The news travelled like wildfire, and very soon no donors was giving money to the government.

Clearly a different model had to be found, and what could be better than using the opportunity to help civil society by passing funds through them? No one was more surprised than the NGOs who suddenly found themselves being entrusted with responsibility for implementing projects worth many thousand dollars, if not millions. Initial experiences were mixed. For some the temptation was too much: new houses and suchlike were evidence of misspent funds; but many showed that they could administer the money quite well and provide a service which was better than government’s.

Finding the skills within the NGO community was tricky, but NGOs soon developed a chameleon-like ability to change their colours to the fashion of the day by recruiting token experts. Agriculture – of course, we are the experts. Health services, we know it all. Small business – that’s our bread and butter. Orphans and vulnerable children – we’ve been doing that for years. All the same, donors often had difficulty finding enough NGOs to implement their work.

So it was that the market became less and less competitive as the need to spend funds became more important than the availability of experience and skills within the sector. The NGOs could ratchet up their costs and no one minded. At least the money was being spent and accounted for.

The icing on the cake for NGO types is that it often gives them an opportunity to enter politics. For example, they can claim to be the ones bringing school books to the District, digging wells which allow irrigation, or giving loans to small businesses. At each project site, their name is writ large. The NGO boss takes every opportunity to be participate, with Governors and Provincial Ministers, in high level opening ceremonies which are shown on television. The logical next step is to stand for parliament. Being much better paid than the government functionaries, the NGO man can also afford good suits*, a mark of leadership which, curiously, attracts admiration and support among the voting public. So not only does he have a better car and office than the public functionaries, he’s able to claim that he has brought more development than government has; not a position that particularly endears them to the powers that be.

So, when you next meet a senior member of the government of the DRC, don’t say “How lucky you are to have such a vibrant civil society movement.” You just might have a violent response.

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* Or woman, in which case read dresses, though the contrast is much less evident between woman.

Rough Trade

The Embassy has to upgrade the security: this involves rebuilding the entrance gatehouses and visa facilities. Of course, working on Embassy property cannot be done by anyone – remember the US embassy in Moscow which was full of bugs? No, you need British workman, with security clearance, working for a properly accredited contractor.

And so it is that the gang arrives. They arrive in trickles: starting with the site foreman, concreters and bricklayers, and as the work progresses carpenters, electricians and plumbers. Within two months there’s a crew of about 12.

Unassuming and uninterested though these men are in the weighty affairs of the Embassy, they’ve made quite an impact. They noticed the bar in the Embassy club which serves drinks and food at lunch time and a barbeque every Friday. Why not, they asked, open it for us every evening? So not only they, but also some of the hard working embassy types now sit around with a cold beer as the sun sets. The barman is happy, as he gets extra.

The knees of the embassy ladies also weaken as they surreptitiously glance at the bronzed torsos of the men going about their work. So much more interesting than the pasty embassy types. One of the workers is particularly good looking, and at 25 is quite a catch. An embassy wife had been flirting – some would say shamelessly – with him, but was deeply hurt when she found out his eye had drifted elsewhere. News of this came when he didn’t come back one night and his friends phoned the embassy asking for advice. It transpired that he had been out with his local girlfriend – until then a well-kept secret – and they had had a row. He had been camping out at her front door all night, trying to get forgiveness. As for the embassy wife, she was devastated, and could only try to console herself with another glass of wine.

The builders are used to this type of goldfish bowl life: they have worked in embassies all over the world. But they make no concessions to the polite world of diplomacy (though they did put on ill-fitting jackets and ties when invited to dinner by the Ambassador) and the patter of foul language and coarse jokes continues without shame. And they work hard – there’s no doubt about that.

They fling themselves into the local life with enthusiasm and innocence about the risks of life here. The foreman, on his first night with a car, had his door pulled open by an enthusiastic tart. When she was rejected by him, and he tried to throw her out, she tried to grab his wallet. Eventually, she was so persistent he paid her $200 to get out. She took the money but staid put. One thing led to another, and in a final attempt to frighten her, he bit her arm, but she bit back – his ear. In the end he jumped out of the vehicle and ran away, throwing the car keys in the drain as he ran. Bystanders – probably her accomplices – give chase, but he escaped. When he went back to the car an hour later, the Embassy’s Gurkha guards in attendance, the car was still there, and so were the keys. The worst part was that he had to take anti-retrovirals for a month due to the risk of getting AIDS from her.

Another man chose to walk back to his flat alone through some dark streets and was mugged. The muggers got nothing, but obviously he was shaken.

What is fascinating about these men is that they work like this all over the world, and throughout the year. Their conversation is all about Jakarta, Damascus, Kabul, you name it they’ve been there. I spoke to one, an electrician, and he said in 40 years of doing this work he’s only been without work for one week. They get well paid, of course, these building mercenaries. One has five houses in Spain. One lives in Turkey, another in Holland. One has a house in London and two in the West Country – all rented out.

To get paid so well, of course, you’ve got to be good, and their workmanship is truly a delight. The other day we went to see some houses that an entrepreneurial friend of ours is building. By comparison with the embassy building, the workmanship on his houses was enough to make one weep, though it was not so bad as to be heart-breaking. We’ll leave the heart-break to the good ladies of the embassy.

Elections

November brings to an end Joseph Kabila’s first five-year term as President, so of course there will be elections. He’s had plenty of time to plan his campaign, and last year huge billboards went up proclaiming his success and showing the prestige projects that had been developed by him. Most of the billboards carried futuristic pictures of the new airport, and massive roads which have not been started. Then a new organisation was announced: The Friends of Joseph Kabila which held rallies in his praise all over the country. Now, even though officially electioneering has not started, things are hotting up.

The politics of the DRC are crazy. A huge number of parties have registered for the election, and even in the current parliament there are 70 parties represented, not to mention over 60 independents.

Elections here are a far cry from the gentlemanly affairs of Westminster: success means access to undreamed of riches, failure means relegation to the dump of has-beens. If the stakes are so high so are the measures taken to deal with opposition. Recently in Kinshasa, the main opposition party was to hold a rally at the national football stadium. It was well publicised, thus giving an opportunity for sabotage which was duly taken: the entrance gates to the stadium were welded closed. Luckily, the party got wind of the ruse, and was able to cut open the gates in time for the rally. But this is nothing: as things heat up we can expect harassment, arrests and even killings. It has already started in the East (where fighting has been going on since the Rwandan genocide). The agent of one of the parties was killed in cold blood in Bukavu last week. Villagers in that area are being warned by armed gangs about which way to vote. The warnings are not subtle: if you don’t vote for X you’ll all be killed. In Katanga – the would-be secessionist province – the President of the Provincial Assembly has been warning people that if they do not vote for Kabila they had “better get back to where they come from”. That this threat was made in Kolwezi, the site of a terrible massacre in 1978, may not be a coincidence.

More recently, people marched to the offices of the electoral commission in the centre of Kinshasa to submit a letter of complaints about the registration of voters. Grievances include some people having more than one voter’s registration card, children as young as ten years old being registered, and registration for Kinshasa being terminated before everyone has had a chance to get their card. They were met be a veritable army of riot police who battered and tear gassed them mercilessly. Many people were injured and one killed. “All we were doing was delivering a letter”, they pointed out. “In any normal country the post office would do it.”

On the political party front things are really hotting up. Coming back from work the other day we were passing the offices of Kabila’s party, which are in a large house standing in its own grounds. There was a huge crowd waiting outside the gate which, (luckily) before we reached it, surged around a departing large black car with dark-tinted windows, followed by Land Rovers filled with armed guards and policemen on motor bikes. A hand appeared from the back window and threw out pieces of paper. “What a bad example – throwing litter like that,” one thought.

How wrong can you be? Not litter at all: money.

The cars sped away leaving crowds going through a three-phase struggle. The first phase was to scrabble for the money on the ground, the second was to fight people who had grabbed more than you, and the third was to wander away in deep disgust and disappointment at the tiny spoils. The elector’s loss was, of course the politician’s gain. The largest note in the DRC is worth only $0.50 which allows politicians to seem incredibly generous by scattering dozens of notes while actually giving practically nothing.

On that occasion it was the Vice-Prime Minister, but the President is also very fond of this tactic. Three days later I saw something similar. People had been told where to wait, and before long there was a massive crowd standing ten deep on the roadside in the hot sun. We missed the moment when he arrived, but our driver found the whole thing ludicrous. Make no mistake. They weren’t desperate to catch a glimpse of a much-loved leader: they were waiting for the money.

It made me recall a time in Kenya when we happened to find ourselves behind President Moi’s motorcade as we drove through the rift valley. He liked to appear to be a man of the people by driving in a VW Kombi, and wearing a golf shirt and trainers. Wherever he saw people, the procession would stop. He would get out, shake hands and say a few words, following which a minion would be instructed to bring gifts from the Kombi, which Moi gave to his admirers before speeding on his way.

We were intrigued, and stopped to ask the lucky recipients what they had been given. Interestingly enough the value was not that different from what Kabila gives: a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum. The difference was that Moi gave them out personally and I expect that many of those packets were treasured.

Kabila has already announced his slogan for the election, which is something like “You’ll get more of the same”. He probably thinks that thanks to the new roads and the occasional rehabilitated public building people will give him an enormous Obama-like “Yes, we can” affirmation of support. What he possibly hasn’t grasped is that for most people things haven’t changed at all, and for many they are worse.

Nice or nasty?

Readers may remember a remark made by a South African mine manager: “The Congolese are the nicest people I know.” That’s been my experience as well. Decent, friendly and interesting, particularly if you make the effort to speak French to them and treat them as equals. Which, I’m sorry to say, most foreigners don’t. It is not made easier by the obsequious conduct of working men to any expatriate: “Bonjour patron (boss)”. “Oui patron”. “Bien sûr patron”. Etc.

But as we all know, generalizations are dangerous, and for every such generalization there’s the opposite.

We were recently talking to some people, over breakfast, who were about to leave that evening. The previous evening they had said goodbye to the maid who had worked for them for three years. They had been showering her with gifts of clothing, toys, food – you name it: all the little things that are not worth packing, and you no longer need. Now the time came to give her her final pay packet.

That was when it all unraveled. She claimed that they owed her an extra month’s pay in accordance with the law of the land. They disputed that. The husband was furious, but in the face of her stubborn refusal to agree he eventually gave in, even though he knew she was wrong. “OK,” he said to her, “I’ll give you what you say you should be paid by law, but you’ll have to give us back all the stuff we’ve just given you.” She was caught in a corner, as the goods were worth more than the extra money, but to avoid loosing face she agreed. He was so angry he physically bundled her out of the house.

“They,” the husband said when he had told the story, with an air of finality, “they are the worst people in the world. Ungrateful, exploitative, untrustworthy cheats.”

After they had left, our breakfast host said, with an air of confidentiality, “He was wrong and she was right. It was lucky that he gave in – if not they might have been arrested at the airport.” This actually happens to people who have infringed some minor rule: it is truly amazing how family connections can be used to impose maximum pain and suffering on offenders, especially if they are foreigners. It brought to mind a situation I experienced in Mogadishu, Somalia. I had bought something in the craft market. When I took a colleague to the same market the next day the woman who had sold it to me said she had charged me the wrong price, so I gave her all I had (let’s say $5), which was nearly enough to make up the difference. That evening a troupe of more than ten, stick waving, shouting people came to the gate of the American guest house threatening to kill me because family honour had been threatened by me not paying the full price. Not only had they taken the trouble to find out where I was living – information obtained from our driver – they had amassed a gang to deal with me. We got so scared that we had to call the marines to rescue us.

Back to the DRC. There are good and bad people everywhere, but if you need evidence to support your case about the Congolese being bad you only have to look at driving habits. Traffic jams are the plague of Kinshasa, and it is easy to blame road works and potholes for them. But that’s not the full story. Congolese actually enjoy confrontations on the road, and will deliberately create one. Here’s an example. We are driving along a narrow road through a market, with steep ditches on both sides. There’s just enough room for two cars, but I have to wait for a car coming the other way, as there’s a car parked on my side. It is just about to pass me when another car comes behind me, and “overtakes”, thus putting himself on the same side as, and face-to-face with, the car coming from the other way, which happens to have three cars behind it. It is just possible that the car that “overtook” me didn’t realize that I was waiting for the car coming from the other direction, and didn’t see the oncoming car. But since no one can drive more than 15km an hour on that narrow road, with people milling all over the road, that is very very hard to believe. So why did he do it? To show that he was more powerful than the other car.

They waited, bumper to bumper, for more than ten minutes, neither blinking, in a scene which would not be out of place in a wild west, High Noon movie. The longer they blocked the road, the more difficult it became for anyone to reverse, due to cars coming up behind. This gave the protagonists even more moral courage, because they couldn’t give in even if they wanted to. Eventually, the car which was going the same way as we were started to reverse, everyone managed to jiggle here and there, and soon the traffic cleared and we were on our way.

Fair enough, you might think, that’s just one incident. WRONG! That, unfortunately, is normal.

So where does that leave the debate about good and bad? I prefer to believe that most Congolese are decent people, but get them behind the wheel of a car and they become manic, unprincipled and power-hungry thugs.

Department Stores

Welcome to the new Mobile Department Store of Kinshasa.

I have something for everyone. You have children? Then I have just the thing: a globe, a beautiful globe, made in Korea no less. For you a good price, very good price.

You’re not interested? Maybe you would like a new pair of shoes? See here: I have just the thing for you – a pair of very good white and red trainers, size 43. Just feel the quality – isn’t it a pleasure? And for this day only, I can offer them at a special price, half the normal.

Wrong size? I’m so sorry.

Then I think I have just the thing for you. A nice light brown suit, size 58 large. Everyone is wearing light brown this year, and just see the subtle yellow check in the background.

You don’t like brown?

Isn’t it hot today? Just see this fan. Open it up – see this beautiful decoration, it transports you to the misty hills of China, so cooling. You like it? Then I will give you the best price in Kinshasa, but before you take it, just look at this.

It is the new heel balm that everyone is using. If you take one of these together with the fan, I’ll give you a double discount.

But wait – I forgot. You haven’t seen my sunglasses. So cool, you’ll feel like a rapper in them. I’ve got two pairs – genuine Raybans. This one here, with the metal rims – that’s what everyone’s buying. Or maybe these tortoiseshell ones – very smart. Try them on.

How about a chest expander? This is the very latest thing from Europe. It will make you strong and attractive to the women. Ha! Ha! That made your eyes light up. Only $20, and you can be a new man.

So what can I give you? Nothing? Please buy something. I’m hungry. Just a few francs for me and my family.

Thus it is that Kinshasa’s hawkers tout their extraordinary collection of trinkets. The logic behind their choice of wares is hard to understand – maybe, the idea is that you may not meet someone who wants a brown suit, but everyone’s got children, so why not have a globe to get their interest? And even if some people do not have size 43 shoes, there must be a lot who do. Surely one of those will see my very special trainers, and fall for them. And my prices – they are to die for. But I must never put them on display, because then my competitors would be able to undercut me.

Just a few paces from these mobile stores is the official opposition. Mostly run by Lebanese the supermarkets stock an extraordinary range of stuff, especially in the food department. The most startling is the imported fruit and vegetables. Lettuce from Holland, cherries from Italy, potatoes from South Africa . . . yes the whole range: carrots, chicory, ginger, tomatoes, onions, parsley, all imported into this poor nation. Importing stuff like that into Dubai is one thing, but Kinshasa?

If you like deserts, you can get imported sorbet in cut-glass bowls; if you’re into charcuterie, fifty or more different salamis, pates, hams and the like; cheeses from all over Europe, and some middle eastern ones as well. And the yoghourts – rows and rows of different flavours and types.

The funny thing is that some of the products are cheaper here than they are in Europe or South Africa – especially cheeses. But for the most part the prices are tear-jerkingly high. Iceberg lettuce: $10, kilo of carrots $4, etc. But from time to time you succumb: “Look darling, I’ve brought you a treat – a lovely lettuce. It is a bit brown at the edges, but at least it’s a lettuce.”

Of course, you can buy locally grown vegetables which in most cases are ugly with blemishes but actually taste much better.

So there you are: a tale of two department stores, two economies, two societies with incomes so far apart that one doesn’t dare think about it.

Making love not war

One of the inexorable problems for ambassadors is what speech they should make at the annual cocktail party to celebrate their national day. There’s unspoken competition to see which party is best, and the speeches are an important part of that.

At the end of the year the ambassadors can compare notes: which party was boycotted by the Government (that’s bad news, and can lead to an ambassador being recalled, unless it is part of a deliberately confrontational strategy), who made the most gaffs, whose speech was the most boring, and whose was longest. In truth, the best received speeches are probably the minimalist ones: welcome, tonight we celebrate the friendship between our two great nations, here’s a toast to us both, thank you again for coming. But the ambassadors of the more important countries aspire to more.

Last year’s speech at the America’s July 4^th celebration was considered by some to be in rather poor bad taste: the speech implicitly attacked the government for the killing of a human rights activist a few weeks before. The Congolese shook their heads in embarrassment while purloining another burger topped with a little US flag.

This year’s was different and ingenious. The new ambassador chose a completely different tack. He said (and I paraphrase) you mustn’t be so hard on yourselves. You may look like a failure, but I would like to remind you of the history of the US. Even though our declaration of Independence was in 1776, it took 13 years to agree on a constitution, then we had to create a supreme court, then we had a terrible war over slavery, and it was 89 years before we settled down as a nation. So give it time . . .

Of course this went down very well: even the other ambassadors could be seen to be raising an eyebrow in praise for its originality.

But how seriously did any one take it? Drawing clever analogies is one thing, but was this really the message which the US wanted to give? If so why is it ploughing so much aid to help the Congo implement “good governance”, why is it supporting the UN peace keeping force to such a degree, and why is it pressurising the government to keep to its election commitments? Because, in truth, the US is very worried about what has happened in the DRC in the last few years. Much of the promise of Kabila’s early years seemed to be evaporating as mining licences are withdrawn without following due process, and the conflict in the East is showing no signs of abating.

But not so the media: they had no such doubts. On the local news the following day there was one of those min-trailers – “Don’t go away: hear what the American Ambassador had to say”. This announcement was followed by excerpts from Mel Gibson’s film about the civil war in the US, lasting several minutes and mainly consisting of bloody war scenes. Then a bright young reporter, full of smiles, breaks the news about how the ambassador has said that the US had also had bitter civil wars and government had taken a long time to get its act together. And, in brief, that the DRC that they are doing better than the US did.

But enthusiasm in the local media is not matched in the corridors of the US Embassy and the USAID. There aren’t many people there saying “give them time”. They’ve done that before, and nothing has changed. Rather, they may be saying: that was smart diplomacy. As a result, the Congolese government will maybe think we are really really friends and take our bitter medicine without complaint. Maybe.

Chips with everything

Chips with everything

It’s odd that the Americans call them French Fries, because if you ask me the Belgians make much better ones. I suppose the term Belgian Fries doesn’t have the same ring to it, so maybe the Americans have a point. But for the Belgians, cooking chips is a matter of high expertise, a fine art comparable to bread-making. And, they have the wonderful idea of having mayonnaise with them. There’s something particularly special about a packet of chips on a winter’s evening after a visit to the bar. The Germans and the Dutch come a close second, though the Germans are truly best at sausages.

Of all the colonial legacies, chips must be the most enduring one in the DRC. When I compare the standard offering of chips at a British-inspired Kenyan or South African take-away place with its Congolese equivalent, I marvel that anyone would even eat the British equivalent. Maybe it’s what you’re used to.

Here they’re almost as good as the Belgian ones, even in tiny unsophisticated little restaurants: very hot, slightly crisp on the outside and with a perfect flavour. That’s pretty amazing considering the difficulty they have here of growing potatoes, which do not like hot climates.

After my last medical check the doctor looked at me with concern. “You’re cholesterol’s up, and it looks as though you’ve been having a very salty diet.”

Yup – it’s the chips. The problem here is that they use palm oil which has high cholesterol. And the salt – well that stands to reason. So now I have to cut down a bit on the chips.

But how? The highlight of the week is a trip with the dogs to a man-made lake. After about an hour’s drive, we walk all round the lake – a distance of about six kilometres. After that, obviously, one needs lunch, and what better than a large beer and chicken and chips, which we have at the little lake-side restaurant? It has become such a feature of the week that on the odd occasion when we can’t do it we feel deprived.

It’s not only at the lake that we have chicken and chips. There’s a very famous restaurant in the heart of the African part of town. The street is always full of pedestrians trying to decide which little bar to go to, honking cars, and neon lights. If you don’t know exactly where to find it you never will, as there is no sign and the entrance is an unassuming small doorway. It gives us expatriates a frisson to go there and feel that, unlike the area we live in, we are in the REAL AFRICA. So typically we ask our driver to take us there, and boast about the experience afterwards. A few real know-it-alls (like us) know the way and drive ourselves, which puts us very high up in the boasting stakes.

When they take your order they ask how many you would like. Assuming that they are asking how many people want chicken one will say, for example, five chicken, one steak and one fish. Mistake! What they’re asking is how many whole chickens you want. It’s not just the chicken and chips which is good. The beer is cold and the ambience is nice and homely and the service is pretty good. It also boasts a bar with a band where one can dance until the small hours.

The same restaurant has since opened a place in the respectable end of town, where you can eat in a bushy garden. The attraction of this one is (a) that you can find it and (b) that you feel secure. The gamble has paid off – as soon as you get near you see the phalanxes of 4 x 4s which show that you’re not the only one interested in chicken and chips that evening.

Whenever the subject of chicken and chips comes up there’s a lively debate as to which is best. Because, on Friday nights the French Cultural centre serves the very same, and many people swear that theirs is the best and will make sure to keep Friday evenings free just for that. There, there’s no issue of how many chickens you want though the orders are taken in exactly the same way, because the price is the same whether you have quarter of a chicken or two or ten.

Then there is the club at the British Embassy which hosts special quiz nights and shows big sporting events on its big screen TV. The food served, as a special attraction? Yup, the same.

Not surprisingly, the Embassy decided to show the Royal Wedding on 29^th April. In view of the widespread interest, it was open to everyone. Since the wedding was in the morning, and the customers would feel a bit peckish after three or four hours of toasting the happy couple, food had to be served. Chicken and chips? Alas, not this time. A statement had to be made. Something British. Of course, fish and chips.

Paved with green not gold

Copper is everything that matters in Katanga, and especially Kolwezi, the biggest mining town. Copper employs the people and pays for the services. It’s a pretty metal but the scars that the mines leave on the landscape are the very opposite. The mine dumps are a dead grey in colour, and tower over the small mining townships at their base. At closer quarters one can see the massive holes of opencast mining: impressive in scale, but botanically completely dead. Scattered between the mine dumps and opencast holes are the rusting remains of the old operations, with nothing more than a few workers maintaining the works until a rich uncle buys the place and gets them running again. Even driving to the new mines, with their newly painted offices and even some lawns, the landscape remains dead.

You don’t see much copper outside tourist markets, where it is sold in the form of bas-relief pictures of women carrying water pots, or nursing children. Another favourite is a plaque in the shape of the country, with a few geographical references or the odd picture of an elephant or buffalo engraved on it. The sister product of copper is malachite, a bright green stone of great beauty, which is tortured by curio makers into the most absurd shapes in a misplaced effort to make something beautiful. Malachite beads can be quite nice, but the ones available locally are neither nicely polished nor well shaped. Nice as a souvenir, maybe, but special – no!

Of course the mines are proud of what they produce, but the offices of most of them are very utilitarian. There’s one exception: a Lebanese-owned company whose offices are an enticing seraglio-like warren. The rooms have all-round friezes of copper panels depicting mining operations, and are separated by low arches framed in malachite. In the walls are aedicules housing mining scenes also made of malachite, with toy bulldozers, cranes and lorries busy about their work. No space is free of either copper or malachite. It sounds awful, but has, in fact, the attractive oriental feel of a carpet bazaar.

One of the charms of driving around is that one can spy large green stones poking from an exposed cutting, or come across green stones in the gravel of the road. The streets of the towns may not be paved with gold, but they really are paved with malachite. The availability of malachite, of course, allows crazy paving fans to have great fun, because green paving is basically the same price as grey or brown. So in front of the town hall, or by our (modest) hotel pool – anywhere where there is crazy paving – there it is: malachite. Usually it is in a thin layer, too thin to be used for anything else, over the local grey stone. Occasionally you see cadmium too – a delightful vivid blue.

So if you’re coming to Kolwezi bring a big suitcase.

Water

I’ve never been a fan of bottled water, though I remember the fascination it held when we went to France in the old days. But now it has become a strange fad that so possesses people that they don’t dare try anything else. I was truly shocked to find that, at a meeting in the Ministry of Water Affairs in South Africa, we were offered bottled water – that in a town with the highest quality tap water in the world.

The funniest story was Coca-Cola’s attempt to con the British public into drinking bottled water. They used tap water from Sidcup, called it Dasani, and sold it for more than a pound for a small bottle. The absurdity started when their (American) advertising gurus came up with a campaign in which it was called "bottled spunk" and featured the tagline "can't live without spunk". Any schoolboy will tell you that that is not a word you hear without an embarrassed snigger. Then the word leaked out about the source of the water – Sidcup?? Hardly a highland spring, is it? To make matters worse, government inspectors found an unacceptable level of a carcinogen in the water which had been added as part of their high-tech “purification” process. Never has the mighty company been so humiliated, and they shut down their operation in record time.

Kinshasa, of course is different: we know the water is likely to be polluted, and we should take precautions. All the same, some people take this to ridiculous lengths. Many won’t use the tap water to even clean their teeth. Washing vegetables is one thing, but someone won’t even allow their baby to bathe in tap water. Luckily for such fanatics you can get large bottles of purified water so it is not ridiculously expensive, but buying and lugging around these things is a pain.

For those who think that Kinshasa’s tap water is undesirable, it might be salutary to go to the outskirts of Kinshasa and observe what a precious commodity it is for those residents. The problem is that there is not enough of it, and the ration which suburban areas receive is both unpredictable and tiny. When there is water in the pipes, word spreads like wildfire: our driver talked about being woken up at 2 a.m. when water started coming out of the taps. Everyone gets up and must queue for hours, and hoping against hope, as they watch those in front of them filling buckets and plastic bottles, that it will still be running when they reach the front of the queue.

Mind you, Kinshasa at least has a system. It is old and badly maintained, but it works after a fashion. Mbuji Mayi, with 2.3 million people, is the second largest town in the Congo. It has the distinction of being the largest town in Africa without a piped water system.

Curiously, in areas of Kinshasa which do have a relatively reliable water supply, people waste water in shocking ways. No one seems to see the connection between wasting water in one place and not having enough in another. They wash cars with hosepipes, which are left to run on the ground even when the water is not needed, they wash the roads with it, they water their lawns with it.

Suddenly, there’s a new angle: cholera has spread from Brazzaville to Kinshasa. What everyone knows is that cholera thrives where there’s not enough water, so there’s a real risk of an epidemic. For the bottled water brigade, of course, even washing the dishes in tap water becomes a risk, and their paranoia is now proved justified. But for little Brian, the dogsbody husband of the ever-nagging Priscilla, maybe this offers him the chance he’s been waiting for: “How about a nice glass of water, my darling . . .”