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?

Getting away from it all

There was a time when people measured their time here in terms of how long it was before they could leave. Life was, as they saw it, miserable – only compensated for by the extra pay that they received for putting up with it.

Lots of people have been away recently, what with the evacuations and Christmas. It’s very interesting to hear their reactions when they come back. And what do they say? “I dreaded the moment that the plane touched down”? or “All good things come to an end”? or “I thought of going AWOL”?

No: they said “It’s so good to be back” or “I’ve missed it” or “I couldn’t wait to get on the plane”.

What’s happened? We know all about the “absence makes the heart grow fonder” effect, of course, but that doesn’t explain it all. Things are definitely better: the roads are hugely improved, the police are generally less likely to try and nail you for an offence that you didn’t commit, and the choice of restaurants and shops improves daily. Derelict buildings are slowly being restored or replaced and it seems that power and water shortages are less common. And as survival tensions reduce, people seem less scared and more social than they used to be.

But that’s not to say that it isn’t good to get out of Kinshasa from time to time. It’s definitely rather limited as a town, and diplomats suffer more than ordinary mortals because they are not allowed (for security reasons) to venture beyond the embassy quarter and the main shopping streets.

The classic get-away is to go out on the river, and people love to boast that they go out regularly. Some of the embassies have their own boats, so there’s a chance of added cachet if you can claim to go out on one such. Which is what we did this week.

The ritual is that you go to an island for a picnic or barbecue, accompanied by lots of booze. The islands are not the romantic rocky outcrops with secret coves and golden sands of Treasure Island: they are simply sand banks. Some have a few trees, and some even a fisherman’s hut or two, but they are neither permanent nor beautiful. Nevertheless, it’s so nice to get out of the town that it feels very special.

At this time of the year the river is very high, and on our trip we struggled to find anywhere to land. When we eventually did so, our territory consisted only of a small, and very wet patch of sand, abutting a marshy reed bed. But that was enough, and we set up our barbecue and made the most of it. Luckily it didn’t rain, and people could frolic in the water and sunbathe on the soggy sand.

But it was the name of the boat that brought it all back to me. One had puzzled before about why Embassies need boats: would national budgets really stretch to buying pleasure boats for their staff? Not at all: these are the means of escape when things get really really hot, and all else has failed. When the airport is closed and rebels are controlling the streets how do you evacuate the Ambassador and his last few loyal and fearless staff? You put them in the boat.

(Indeed in the last few weeks a colleague had to use one to get to Brazzaville as the road to Kinshasa’s airport was too dangerous.)

The Germans are best placed for this: their ambassador’s residence is on the road along the river, and on the opposite side is a concrete slipway. During the election period their boat was prominently parked in the driveway with a large German flag flying from the stern.

Politically things seem to have settled down. Electoral protests have stopped. The ban on text messaging, which had been imposed to prevent an anti-Kabila Congolese Spring has been lifted.

What really proves that stability has returned is that the German boat has been put back into storage. Because now there’s no need to get away, is there?

Joyeux Noel

Kinshasa’s something of a ghost town at Christmas. And the Pope will surely be delighted when he observes, next time he’s here in December, that it definitely is not commercialised. Sure, there are a few plastic Christmas trees in hotels and supermarkets. And hawkers, ever optimistic, are selling bizarre blow-up Father Christmases. Otherwise the commercial scene is oddly untouched.

But when we drive into town on the morning of the 24th we notice an instant change in comportment. The police come to attention when we stop the car, and salute smartly, hoping for a Christmas present. In every shop that we enter they wish us Joyeux Noel. And I’m sure they mean it.

But, as you might expect, there are plenty of social orphans. Almost all expatriates have gone home. Many combined their evacuation with Christmas holidays to have a seven week break. Out of the total expatriate staff of the embassy of about 40, there are only five left.

On Christmas Eve we, determined to make the most of things, went out with four single women to a restaurant which was laying on a Christmas Special five course dinner. It was typical of these sort of things: we didn’t know some of them at all, and others very little, so had no idea how the evening would turn out. We needn’t have worried – they were funny and fun. We got home at 1.30, and had made four new friends whom we would invite to our party on the 26th.

On Christmas Day we were invited to the Ambassador’s Christmas lunch. We had been forewarned that it would either be deeply dreary and stiff (by someone who had turned down the invitation), or a sort of American pot luck suburban party where everyone brings a different dish. Both were wrong. Yes it was formal, with 26 people sitting around the table, with crested place cards, china and cutlery, but the atmosphere was very relaxed and the wine flowed freely. The ambassador’s wife who isn’t English, and is puzzled by the standard Christmas Dinner, had just got back from evacuation and brought back lots of food from France so we started with pate of foie gras and magret de canard.

But no amount of socialising can remove the isolation that a lot of single people feel – opening their presents alone is probably one of the most poignant things. A couple of days before Christmas one such person was looking a bit rough. “Hello,” we said, “have a nice time last night?” “Oh yes,” he said, “I was at the Ministry of Defence Party.” “Oh,” we said, surprised, knowing that everyone was away, “who was there?” “Me.”

All's well with the world

“A l’Epoque,” as they say here, “we gave our houseboys food every week. After all, if you gave them money they would just waste it.” This system still survives in some households, but not ours. We, considering ourselves progressive, think it’s patronising to deprive the people right to choose how they want to spend their money.

Last year, when she who must be obeyed gave our maid – sorry, we must be pc, “household helper” – her Christmas bonus she was met with a thunderous boot face. “Where,” she said, “is my gratification?”

“And what,” my beloved demanded, “is a gratification?”

“Oh, some chickens, a sack of rice, sugar, tea and other things.”

How dare she ask for more than the very generous bonus we had given her? Within a second, a friendly and trusting relationship collapsed into fury and acrimony.

After some reflection, we thought it might be wise to find out what other people did. Yes, a gratification was, indeed, customary. So we reluctantly did the right thing and gave her what she wanted.

Forewarned is forearmed, and this year when we hear about an establishment which specialises in Christmas parcels we decide to investigate. It is in a remote industrial area, and once we’ve been let though massive unmarked steel gates into a warehouse compound we were shown to a small office which surprisingly has examples of local art on its walls. In front of us in the queue are some men clutching thousands of dollars, ordering their parcels by the hundreds.

The process reminds me of choosing Christmas Hampers from Fortnum and Mason, as there are more than forty different combinations to choose from, ranging in price from $10 to more than $100. We place our humble order of two and are told to come back on the 22^nd.

These are no ordinary parcels – as the photo shows they are Santa sacks. They weigh a ton. As we hand them over we experience the same warmth that the lord of the manor must have felt when handing his peasants their annual sovereign.

But there are also two gardeners and six security guards. They don’t work for us, but we give them a little Christmas something.

We are out for several hours, and when we come back, one of the guards gives us a lovely bouquet of flowers, and our front door is flanked by two small vases and decorated with shrub cuttings. The next morning we get two Christmas cards: one from the guards and one from the gardeners.

God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. And our palm tree Christmas Tree is looking very pretty.