It makes a change

Kinshasa is not the most exciting place, and most people spend their leisure time, and much of their work time too, planning their next trip away. The conventional wisdom is that you need to get away every three months. Not everyone has it that tough: the British officers in the UN peace keeping force have six weeks in the DRC followed by two weeks of home leave. It’s a hard life.

So when something does happen, it is truly an EVENT. There aren’t very many of them. Of course last year was different: we had all the excitement of the election, and numerous days off work “for security reasons.” For a lot of the people, of course, it was an excuse to get out anyway. But that year was definitely full of events. This year, by contrast, has been virtually event free. Until last Friday.

Partly because there isn’t much else happening, news seems to play a disproportionately big part in our lives. Our diet is mainly BBC, CNN and Sky News, (but with regular trips to Al Jazeera which covers some things much better). So for the past month we’ve been getting a diet of wall-to-wall London and that little event that it is hosting.

When the British Embassy invited all citizens and all diplomats to a big-screen showing of the opening ceremony, everyone came. The street outside the Embassy was blocked with parked cars as far as the eye could see. In the Embassy, the garden was full of tables, and large screens had been put up in the bar and the tennis court.

But what was such fun was the atmosphere. In fact less than half the people were watching the event: it seemed that just to be there was fun, no matter whether you watched the show or not. Even the people watching couldn’t follow it properly because there was such a noise of happy chattering, broken only occasionally by cheers when, for example, Daniel Craig appeared with the Queen, and Rowan Atkinson did his Mr Bean trick on the piano.

There was a raffle of Olympic memorabilia, but there was so much noise that I don’t think most of the winners heard their lucky ticket being announced.

In spite of this huge turnout, the normal Friday night barbecue went without a hitch in spite of the massive demand, and the booze didn’t run out.

But one couldn’t help thinking of the contrast between this carefree scene and the war in the East. The British Consul had sent a message at 6.30 that evening warning all British citizens in Goma to evacuate, as the rebels were only 20km away, and had announced that they would invade the town. The fact that they didn’t do so makes little difference: there seems to be a very real escalation of the conflict which is making many people nervous.

The origins of the rebellion are a bit fuzzy, but it seems that the rebels are Tutsi (as in the ruling tribe of Rwanda) who mutinied because a peace accord under which they had been integrated into the Congolese army had not been honoured. Their name, the M23, derives from the date of the accord, 23^rd March, three years ago. As their success grows, so do their demands. Now they are demanding the resignation of President Kabila. Their discipline and generally sensible demands contrast vividly with the behaviour of the Congolese Army itself. There is, in some people’s view, the possibility that it can grow into something much bigger, especially as they are being supported by Rwanda itself.

The next day we met a left wing Spanish couple who had come to the show, but had left before the event started. They pride themselves on being on the side of “the people” and I think they decided that the atmosphere was maybe a little too patriotic, even though only a tiny proportion of the people there were British. So they had gone to a restaurant which also happened to be showing it.

Their comments: it was just a Disneyworld denigration of the struggles of the working classes. Denying the importance of events by writing them off as history.

Well, it takes all sorts, doesn’t it?