The Good Old Days - Don't Cry for Me, Likasi

Almost a year ago I wrote of a mining township on the edge of Likasi which one of my colleagues described as paradise: it had a civic grandeur, it was clean and there was a timeless sense of order. It was set in beautiful rolling green countryside. A combination so rare in the Congo that my colleague was tempted to somewhat exaggerate.

In massive contrast to that paradise, the next day we were taken to see the municipal swimming pool – abandoned for almost twenty years since the pillages.

How much more poignant it is to see jolly places in ruins than government buildings. The design speaks of afternoons of gaiety and fun. One imagines the delicate colonial wives in the one-piece swimsuits sitting under the broad veranda drinking lemonade, with their little children running around boisterously.

At week-ends a band would play on the little stage, and the careworn population would let their hair down, metaphorically, in the form of a thé dansant. During the holidays the youth would spend most of their day there, playing basketball, swimming and eyeing the opposite sex with a great deal of interest and hope.

This pool was long and deep enough to allow serious swimming and diving competitions, and one imagines that every three months or so they had galas, which everyone who was anyone attended.

It was a place of escape and fun.

After Independence, the clientele changed in colour but the pool retained its role as a popular spot, especially at the week-ends. That was then.

And now? Hens play on the bar, a couple of pigs root around on the basketball field. The walls are crumbling, the windows are all broken. Goats feast on the grass growing along the front. Four rusting vehicles adorn the parking lot in front: tyres flat, windows broken. Ghosts, like everything else, of times gone by. Squatters inhabit the staff accommodation.

But yesterday we held a session to invite private investors to redevelop the place, and bring it back to its former glory. The process had been a long time in the making – feasibility studies, training on public private partnerships, advertising for expressions on interest and so on.

And now was the moment when these hard headed businessmen were going to be shown the project, and sneeringly turn away, muttering “what do you take us for?”

Could or would they see the possibilities for making something really fun, an absolute first in the cultural and entertainment desert which is Likasi. Were they willing to take the risk?

“Yes, we love it,” they said, not just one, but all of them.

There’s hope yet.