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.
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