Two weeks in the life of . . .

Anyone who’s heard Gerard Hoffnung’s story about the bricklayer, which he told to the Oxford Union in 1958, will remember the helpless laughter created by the absurdity of the situation in which the man is caught in a sequence of extraordinary and inevitable accidents. The fact that one is laughing at the man’s expense, and can’t help doing so, seems to make it even funnier. Hoffnung’s trick, in telling the story, was to tell it in a dead pan way.

Well, there are stories of horror coming out of the Congo every day, but it is the dead pan way in which they are told that would be very funny if only it wasn’t true. Here, (see also Stability, 18^th October, for other news from Bukavu) I am quoting from the fortnightly report written by the head of our office in Bukavu.

“We received a little alarm from notables living in the Shabunda district about butchery which had lasted several days culminating in the events of the night of 3^rd/4^th January. They talk of 42 dead, throats slit by machetes and knives, many women raped and others carried into the forest like looted goods or as instruments of sexual satisfaction. It was reported that a pregnant woman was disembowelled and her dead baby thrown into the bush. Today there are reports that the people carried into the forest were killed. The motivation for this carnage is revenge for attacks against the Interahamwe (the Rwandan Hutu genocide army who are still operating in the Congo), and that the local people voted for Kabila.

“About 40 people who were injured in the attack are in Bukavu hospital in harsh conditions due to the number. They can only eat thanks to Christians who take it in turn to feed them.

“From 18th December until 5th January there were about 18 killed in ethnic clashes in Mwenga District. Six customary Chiefs have come to Bukavu to plead for help from the Government. This area is outside the control of the government and the guns of demobilised soldiers are now on the shoulders of shepherds and cowherds.

“Soldiers in Bukavu started a sit-in on 6^th January, in protest at not being paid for three months, and had blocked all cars and pedestrians during the afternoon. By the small hours of the morning they had been paid, but continued to protest, demanding to be officially pardoned for their strike action. On 9^th January other troops were brought in to end the protest and three soldiers were injured.

“On Saturday 31^st December one of the high profile prisoners in Bukavu prison, who shot a human rights activist with a hail of bullets five years ago, escaped with two others. He was dressed as a beautiful woman, complete with make up on his face and a wig. The next day, a gang came to the front gate of the prison with a hand grenade, hoping to blow down the gate and allow a mass escape. Unfortunately for them, the grenade went off too early and seven of the gang were killed and 49 were wounded.

“Meanwhile cholera is rife, and in the same District where the massacres took place, 370 cases were reported on Friday 13^th January, with 32 dead.

“Impact on our work

“We had to stop our office meeting on 5^th January because our hearts were in our mouths due to shooting by rebellious soldiers. Otherwise work continues normally.

Going to the movies

“Going to the cinema? Are you joking?” That’s the normal reaction from expatriates and locals alike, because the few cinemas that Kinshasa used to have were trashed during the pillages of the 90s and no one thought it worth while rebuilding them. But yes, there is indeed a cinema. Not a reinvented gaudy rococo monster with gilt plasterwork and red plush curtains, and not a modern art-house boutique version either.

This is different: a new interpretation of the concept.

It sits strangely on the top floor of an unfinished office block. There are no signs either on the building itself, nor in the entry hall, so first timers, as they walk up the stairs, mutter “this can’t be right.” You reach the top of the stairs on the third floor and even there the only clue is a solitary film poster stuck on the door.

Once inside, you buy your ticket from a woman sitting behind a little wooden table. She has a form in front of her where she carefully writes the name of the film and number of tickets sold. That’s a slow process, so those waiting in the queue will surely be tut-tutting and looking at the ceiling in exasperation. But there’s no queue. We’ve never seen more than ten people. The next step is to get a drink – coca cola, Fanta, beer or sometimes even wine. There’s none of that nonsense about not being allowed to take alcohol into the show.

You can sit where you like. The seats are little thrones – built of solid wood, with red plush padded seats, each wide enough for an American policeman. Each row has seven seats and there are a mere seven or eight rows, built on a gentle rake.

A few weeks we were there to see a Congolese film. Yes, directed by and acted by Congolese, and shot in Kinshasa, it is called Viva Riva! With dialogue mainly in the local language Lingala, and French subtitles, it is a gangster movie which brings out the squalor, violence and daily struggles of life here. As the American trailer puts is “Kinshasa, where they struggle all day and party all night.” European taxpayers will be interested to know that it received part financing from the European Union. But this is no worthy documentary. It is a gripping and very good story.

A week later the same film was used to launch the European Union Film Festival, with the director on hand to introduce it and answer questions. The festival is an annual event in which member countries get to show interesting films over a period of about two weeks. The venue selected for the Festival was a grand old theatre which belongs to the Jesuits. Unfortunately, the night before the festival was due to open the Bishop had seen the premiere in New York. He was totally shocked by the violence, the sex, the corrupt priest and the homosexuality, so issued an order that the film should not be shown on their premises. So, at seven hour’s notice the whole event had to be moved to the French Cultural centre. There they kept us waiting, and waiting, and waiting. The room was getting very hot and smelly (it was anyway far too small for an event of that importance) and tempers were rising. I’m sorry to say that the interpretation that most people put on the delay was that the Congolese Director was late. That was so untrue – he had been there since well before the start time: no it was the Ambassador of the European Union who was so late . . .

Back to the cinema: they are right up to date with other films. For example, Black Swan was being shown here at the same time as its release in South Africa and the UK.

One has to ask how the cinema can survive if most people don’t even know that it exists, and if they have such tiny audiences. One clue must surely be that the films sometimes carry announcements in mid-scene such as “This film is the property of Weinstein Productions. Released for preview only. Not for public exhibition.”

It’s run like a repertory theatre. On any one day they will show three different films which rotate so that each is shown at different times and different days over a period of two or three weeks. Each Friday after a showing of the most interesting film of the week there is a discussion: apparently those events are comparatively well attended.

But normally, it’s just us. And if, after you’ve watched the first ten minutes or so you decided that you would rather watch another film, you can just ask the projectionist. He’ll scrabble in his heap of DVDs, give you the choice, slot it in, and off you go.

Their attitude to public relations is clearly mixed. They send out their programme by email every Monday. But anything more public is considered, one must be sure, too dangerous because either they’ll get slammed for taxes or royalties. What a waste!

P.S. We have just received an email informing us that unfortunately, due to "a transfer abroad" the cinema will be closed with immediate effect.

Dark Clouds

As everyone returns to Kinshasa it has an air of normality. But conversations around the coffee pot in the office are far from normal. People bring stories of nightly fighting in provincial towns during the election and post electoral period; of secret police picking up people, apparently randomly, who are never seen again; of bodies being washed up on the banks of the Congo river. Those who have stayed in Kinshasa during the election and Christmas period talk of sudden and apparently arbitrary lock-downs in certain areas, and an atmosphere of distrust and anger. The Government closed down the official French broadcaster Radio France International for three weeks because of its allegedly biased coverage of the elections.

We are still waiting for the election results for the National Assembly, which are supposed to be announced very soon. Although the electoral commission, in an attempt to legitimise itself, has invited American experts to observe and assist in the counting process, most people think it is too little, far too late. If opposition candidates don’t get a good showing, then the violence may flare up again. The EU has threatened to withdraw all its aid, which is a lot, because of the possibility that it will be officially found to have violated democratic principles in the conduct of its elections.

To add to the prevailing atmosphere of gloom and doom, we have just heard that the DRC is at the top of the World Hunger Index – i.e. has the most malnourished people, skinniest babies, and worst prospects for babies in the world. For a country with highly fertile soil, generous rainfall and massive mineral wealth this is a truly damning indictment.

To add salt to the wound, late last year the Government decided to introduce VAT. In one fell swoop, this would add 16% to the price of EVERYTHING. This was not the way it was supposed to be. The IMF, which was behind the idea, had proposed a carefully phased system, by which, in the first phase, VAT would replace import duties, and would only apply to manufacturers, thereby having a minimum impact on inflation. Instead, it seems that in a decision taken in a matter of a few hours, the whole plan was abandoned (“imagine the riches that this tax will bring”) and Government decided apply VAT to all goods and services in one single phase. Within a few weeks the tax collectors had been trained, and it was all go.

And sure enough: come 1^st January all the shops and restaurants added VAT to their prices. The result was confusion combined with money-grubbing: the usual Congolese mixture, some people will say.

But how are the poor going to cope with it? In a hurried climb-down, five days later the Government announced that VAT wouldn’t be applied to flour, fuel and bread. But it’s unlikely that this will be enough, and people talk about this being the tipping point at which the acquiescence of the poor will evaporate into riots.

Sanctity and savagery

If there’s one quality in the Congolese that I truly admire it is their patience. They can sit for hours and hours, just waiting. They have the patience of a saint.

Take the case of our consultants who had a confirmed seat on a flight leaving at 7.00 a.m., for which they had had to get up at 4.00. When they come to check in they are told that the flight is overbooked, so they’ll be on the next flight. With nowhere to go, (and in the domestic terminal in Kinshasa there you can get literally nothing – not a cup of tea, not a Coke, NOTHING) they must just sit around for five hours. This they do. Then it’s the same story – the midday flight is also overbooked, so they must go on the last flight of the day which leaves at 7.00 p.m. They sit around for another seven hours and eventually get on. And when I see them the following morning in Lubumbashi, are they boiling with rage? Demanding compensation? Threatening riots? No, they smile nicely and say they had a good flight, though it was a bit boring waiting 14 hours before it took off.

Another unfortunate person was booked to come home on 23rd December. All he can get from the airline is a “Sorry: the flight is cancelled”. When he asks when the next flight is he gets a brush-off: “Try tomorrow. We might have a flight then”. Did they? No, but very luckily he got a seat on another airline.

And the traffic jams. People create totally unnecessary traffic jams by driving on the wrong side of the road, and refusing to get out of the way. Do people get out guns, and shoot each other, as they would in South Africa? Do they drag the offending motorist out of his car and beat him up? No, they just sit. Sit and wait. After a long wait – let’s say 15 minutes – they might get out of their car and remonstrate with the culprit, shouting loudly, waving arms and so on. But fighting? Never. Meanwhile the jam can continue for literally hours.

And waiting for attention from government officials. After a day of waiting and receiving hardly any acknowledgement of one’s existence, the citizen will have to come back tomorrow, and maybe the next day and the next. The process can drag on for weeks, and will only be abbreviated by a serious inducement. But do they complain? I’ve been here hours and no one has taken any notice of me? Who’s in charge here? Take me to your supervisor? No: nothing like that. They sit, apparently neither angry nor impatient, just waiting. For us, so quick to start blaming someone and raising hell about some perceived failure in service, it is incomprehensible. But then we don’t have the patience, as they say, of a saint.

The roots of such patience must derive from decades – indeed all living memory – of powerlessness. First it was the Belgians, then it was a system that didn’t work, and finally it is a system that doesn’t want to work unless paid to do so. And even that doesn’t always help.

But patience doesn’t extend to politics. That’s a totally different story. The tiniest incident can trigger violence. What has made a lot of people justly angry recently is that the government has used its armed forces effectively to prevent the opposition from holding rallies. Then it, the government, blames opposition parties for turning violent.

But no one can justify the violence that expatriate Congolese have been up to. In South Africa they attacked the Embassy and beat the Consul so badly he had to be taken to hospital, where he died three days later. In Paris last week they attacked the Head of the Senate who had stood as a Presidential candidate. They said they attacked him because (even though he had got a pathetic 4% of the vote) he had split the opposition vote and thereby denied victory to their candidate, Tshisekedi. It didn’t matter that Tshisekedi himself had refused to talk to any opposition candidates to form an alliance.

And what did they do to this harmless old Senator, whom we see every day walking along the river banks in Kinshasa? They beat him up so badly at the Gard du Nord that they broke two of his teeth, and he had to be hospitalized for four days.

We’ve been discussing this remote-control violence in the office. The cynical view is that the real source of fury for the thugs was that they had aligned themselves with Tshisekedi and thought that, when elected, he would give them plum jobs. Even if this is untrue, they’ve certainly got reason to be angry at the way their leader and his party have been treated.

But whatever their motives were, this is clearly a case where patience is not a virtue. Electoral fraud needs to be dealt with without delay, but can you think of worse tactics?