Through a series of coincidences we are invited to lunch by
the food and beverage manager of the Club
Nautic de Kinshasa. She’s a warm hearted Congolese women who decided it was
time to have some friends around to share a meal, and show off her cooking.
It’s not very far from where we live – fifteen minutes by
car on a Sunday, but 45 minutes during the week – along the triumphal Boulevard
around which the city was developed, and then turning South towards the
airport. But the last stretch is something else: we turn left to enter a
densely packed market and drive nervously over thick layers of rubbish. If we
hadn’t been warned we would have thought, without doubt, that this was the
wrong turning. But it wasn’t, and before long we see the entrance to a green
and calm space, protected from invasion by a boom and a suspicious security
guard.
Beyond the car park is a long low building through which one
can just see a patch of river. We find our way to the wide verandah overlooking
the river and join the other guests. Unlike most other occasions, when English
is used, this is a French-only occasion, which is very good for us.
We’re so used to mixing with development people, like me
that it’s good to meet a different set: these were people in business. There’s
a bank manager, whose wife we’ve met before, and she’s the interesting one.
Rather than sit around, doing nothing, as so many expatriate wives do, she
started a little business making purses, wooden trays, and a variety of such
like small useful objects. She has a full time staff of nine, who work in her
house, and sells everything she makes without difficulty. The other two were running
a new hotel. He, the Manager, said they had deliberately positioned it as a
three start establishment that would appeal to foreign NGO workers. It had,
above all, to be clean, with good service, and although it’s in a part of town
that we consider dodgy they are doing very well. His wife runs the restaurant.
This keeps them very busy, but they know that unless they are on duty 24 hours
a day standards will drop.
That’s when the discussion became truly racist. In spite of
a recognition that there are amazing opportunities available in the Congo if
you are willing to take the risk, the guests spent most of the meal talking
about how difficult it all is; how the workers are like children; the absurd
mistakes that they make; and how to boss them around in such a way that things
don’t go wrong.
It’s true that there are huge differences between our
cultures and that of the Congolese, and sometimes these lead to funny or
disastrous results. But the other guests raised more than an eyebrow when I
talked about our amazing team, about 70 of them, people who are comfortable
discussing deontology as a pressing training need. (Do any readers know what
that is? I didn’t), or who get really excited discussing political and economic
analysis techniques, or theories of change. In fact, I find their enthusiasm
for what seem to me to be futile abstractions quite frustrating, but you can
never say that are not thinking about their work.
The meal was a proper three courser: prawn cocktail, then prawns
fried in garlic butter and chips, followed by fruit salad and ice cream,
accompanied by wine and beer.
The view from the verandah could be more beautiful than it
is. In the foreground is a small marina, beyond which is a narrow creek leading
to the main river. But on both sides there are towering rusty wrecks of once
fine river steamers, now occupied by poor squatters. The main flow of the river
itself is only a strip on the horizon. I had thought that because the river
flows so fast and is so wide that it’s level doesn’t change much, but
apparently it is about two metres below the level it used to be. In the old
days, they said, the water was almost lapping up to the verandah.
Whatever the level of the river, it was like a breath of
fresh air to be able to sit there, in almost total silence, and just absorb the
view. Hopefully we’ll get invited again.
