To Hellholes and Back Read online

  In addition to the principals, Team Congo will be supplemented by a taxi squad of sundry specialty types who’ll move in and out of our orbit for the next two weeks without their official role or connection to the mission ever being formally declared. One such functionary is lounging on the hood of the car—a round, bald-headed, evil-looking dude named Jacques whose chunky baritone voice is the aural equivalent of wet cement. Henri tells me that Jacques maintains connections at every level of Congolese society—from shoeshine boys to government ministers—though over the next two weeks the man will fail at every single opportunity to distinguish himself as a results-oriented worker. If Gilles is worried about competition within the organization gunning for his gig, he’s not sweating Jacques.

  “How are the roads to Mbandaka?” I ask, beginning to stress over my crumbling itinerary. “Can’t we just drive there?”

  All the Africans laugh.

  “There are no roads to Mbandaka,” D. B. says. “This is Congo. Mbandaka is eight hundred kilometers from here. Between us only jungle.”

  “There’s got to be another way,” I say.

  “Perhaps,” Henri says, taking another meaningful huff on his cigarette. “Either way, it will be settled.”

  Planning a trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo is like going through puberty. For all the mystery, anticipation, and terrifying rumors, there’s a startling lack of hard information about the whole experience. It seems to take forever for anything to happen, there’s a troubling number of uncomfortable and unexpected procedures to deal with (buying a jock strap, getting a yellow fever shot, signing up for the selective service, finding a visa sponsor, etc.), and for a long time the more over eager the greenhorn is for action, the more elusive action seems to be. A week into my largely gridlocked research back home, I’d figured out enough about the Congo to realize that landing there without contacts would put me roughly where I’d been at fifteen—anxiety prone, angry at my inability to be taken seriously, and jerking off alone somewhere wondering why I wasn’t getting invited to any of the cool parties. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

  I didn’t want a tour guide in the Congo—few things aggravate me more than being prisoner to someone else’s schedule—so much as I needed a friend. Or at least someone who knew the difference between deep bongo and survivable Congo. For two months I surfed the Net, called “We go everywhere in Africa” travel agencies, scanned guidebooks, followed bum steers in adventure magazines, wrote to the Congolese embassy in Washington, e-mailed friends with Africa connections, attempted to worm my way into the graces of religious and human aid agencies with ongoing missions in Africa, and talked to guys like Sam Kiley, all of whom gave me some version of the same story: “Nobody goes to the Congo.”

  Finally, a guy who’d stopped running Congo tours years ago—“Too bloody dangerous”—e-mailed me with the name of a European expat living in Kinshasa known to hire out his services to visitors. A “fixer” in the parlance of Africa freelancers, Henri wasn’t just my first break in the already extremely frustrating Operation Congo, he was the first person I talked to about the DRC who didn’t scoff, hang up, or accuse me of having a death wish. Instead he asked, “How much can you spend?”

  “About two thousand dollars.” This seemed like an extravagant sum for two weeks of insta-friend in one of the world’s poorest countries.

  This is when Henri scoffed.

  “How does five thousand sound?” he asked.

  Even in the midst of the battle to chisel him down to four thousand, I’d sensed that Henri was my kind of Euro, nothing like the mismatched gang of bloodless Europeans with whom I’d spent the preceding two weeks on safari, a group so concerned with not offending anybody (at least not to the Germans’ faces) that they couldn’t work up a therapeutic session of America bashing even after I’d lied and told them I was a Republican. Believe me, when it’s 105 in the shade in Namibia and no one’s spotted so much as a dung beetle for three hours, you do what you can to shake things up.

  Traveling in poor countries, I’ve often found it useful to carry small gifts to give as thanks to helpful strangers or just to make friends with potential photo subjects. Candy bars or gum generally do the trick. To the Congo I’ve hauled a bag of Starburst singles, an assortment of individually wrapped DayGlo squares I’d picked up back home at day-after-Halloween prices.

  Driving through Kinshasa—the congestion is so bad it takes two hours to get from airport to hotel—I realize what a sad and inadequate gesture a bag of candy is in the face of the city’s desolate millions, many of whom, D. B. tells me while the Team Congo Mercedes slogs through traffic liked a drugged rhino, often go two or three days without eating. The moment I’d walked outside of the airport terminal child beggars had appeared and I’d known at once that breaking out the candy would set off a pint-sized riot of outstretched hands and open mouths. I’d walked through heartbreaking Third World poverty plenty of times, so it’s startling to ponder the well-intentioned delusion I was operating under when I bought that bag of Starburst back home. It’s true, I’m often as clueless about travel as many of the people I complain about.

  Kinshasa is a reeking slum of heroic dimensions. Between the airport and city center stand relentless miles of street-to-street squalor. Hills of garbage spill into the banks of filthy drainage creeks. Shanties fall apart like bad alibis. People are everywhere. And children. God, the children. You’ve never seen so many. Children, children, children, children. Dressed in dish rags. Thin as sparrows.

  “They are happy at this age of life,” D. B. notes of a group of five- and six-year-olds laughing and running down the street playing tag, completely unsupervised, completely unaware of the broken glass, mongrel dogs, and Olympic filth that surrounds them.

  There are 6.5 million people in the capital, most of whom will die before age fifty. My fear of walking into a French-speaking country with no greater familiarity with the language than a fleeting though personally rewarding Serge Gainsbourg period is ameliorated by the fact that about half of all Congolese receive no formal education and thus speak little more French than I do. This doesn’t stop people from referring to Kinshasa as the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, after Paris. Judging by the way Gilles takes his nicotine, however, the locals do smoke cigarettes just as joylessly as the French.

  According to the World Bank, the Congo is one of the top five countries in the world with the largest number of children out of school. At least 50 percent are completely outside of the school system. Henri tells me only about 15 percent advance beyond primary school; less than 1 percent attend university. Schooling at all levels is dominated by males. This means you’ll probably never meet a Congolese woman with a college degree—and if you do you should regard her odds-beating with Powerball awe. You have a better chance of spotting a leopard or bonobo in the wild than chatting up a female Congolese high school graduate.

  As for the DRC itself, it’s a massive country bordering nine nations and encompassing as much land as the entire United States east of the Mississippi. Despite vast natural resources—copper, cobalt, diamonds, gold, rubber, oil, timber—mismanagement, corruption, and war have conspired to lock the country in perpetual poverty. Per capita annual income is ninety-eight dollars. Despite this, more than seven million people, even impoverished ones, carry cell phones.

  Incidentally, I’ll continue to let Catherine Zeta-Jones seduce me, but does the fact that my monthly cell phone bill nearly equals the annual personal income of a highly cellularized country suggest to anyone else that we may be paying criminally inflated prices for our technology? Or just that I need to finally break down and switch carriers? Just thinking out loud here.

  The most fascinating Congo stat is that of the country’s 58 million people, only 230,000 work in private-sector jobs or are enrolled in the national social security system. The most current figures available are from five years ago, but the situation scarcely appears to have changed. The black market and �
�informal” untracked economy overwhelmingly dominate every aspect of commerce.

  As we drive through the city, I ask Henri how these millions survive with no salaries, no businesses, no goods to trade, no plots of land, no financial safety net. After a while he says, “The truth is, I don’t know. I have no idea how so many of them manage.” A decade and a half in the city and the mystery of Congolese survival is as complete to him as it is to me. In response to the same question D. B. and Gilles just shrug, then continue gazing blankly out the windows.

  I’ve seen the worst of Manila, Bangkok, Baltimore, and Newark, and up to now these have stood as my personal standard for the kind of societal devastation that leaves you dumbstruck. In terms of communal wreckage, however, Kinshasa easily surpasses any city I’ve ever been to. A more desperate collection of humanity I never expect to encounter again. Of course, I still have India and Disney World in my sights.

  “The UN guys walk around scared shitless.” Henri says this as we pass a barbed-wire compound with machine-gun towers looming over the streets. “But the organization can be helpful at times, such as when we need to get somewhere.”

  There are eighteen thousand international peacekeepers stationed in the Congo, the largest UN force anywhere in the world. In fact, the organization is the first thing you notice when landing at N’Djili Airport, where a fleet of airplanes with the large UN logo in impotent blue (coincidentally, a Martha Stewart Colors shade) sits wingtip to wingtip on the tarmac. Henri raises the possibility of hopping a UN flight to Mbandaka. Jacques, the evil baldy from the airport, is supposedly on the case.

  “Aren’t UN flights reserved for official personnel?” I ask. It seems weird to be able to hop onto a UN jet with no credentials.

  “Officially, yes.” Henri lowers his eyelids in a Rick’s Café way. “But if they have space, they will allow humanitarian workers to fly.”

  Henri explains that Jacques has contacts within the UN and that the pygmies whose villages we’re scheduled to paddle through will unwittingly support a ruse that we’re international relief workers.

  “The pygmies are treated like slaves by the local Bantu population,” D. B. says in an attempt to get me onboard with the plan.

  I nod and say, “Just as long as nobody asks me to man a machine-gun nest.” Nobody laughs. I can’t tell if this is because they don’t understand sarcasm or simply that, as at airport security, witty rejoinders about automatic weapons aren’t what pass for humor in Kinshasa.

  Henri was meant to be my insurance against the kinds of hassles I’d been fearing for the past three months—cancelled flights being a good example—but even from the States I could tell he represented the highest odds on the table in my Congo roll of the dice. Crafty, surly, offensive, unpredictable—these aren’t qualities I normally look for in friends, but I’d already seen enough out the window of the Mercedes to appreciate that they might come in handy here.

  By the end of the first day in the presence of his weird, chatty energy, I’d begun to compile the Gospel of the Congo according to Henri:

  “The Congolese are far more afraid of Ebola than AIDS. It’s why many have stopped eating monkey. No one has stopped having sex.”

  “Tourism in Kinshasa is a married man taking his girlfriend to a pool at a hotel on the weekend, having a swim, a meal, then back to the room for fucking. That is the extent of tourism here.”

  “When the husband goes off with his girlfriends, the wife is not jealous. She is angry because he is spending money on girlfriends that should be coming into the household to buy food and clothing for the children. The fucking is not the issue; it’s the money that angers the wife.”

  “Married or not, African men are going to have a lot of partners. That is just how it works and it does not do any good to protest.”

  “If Africans could be paid for all the dancing and fucking they do, Africa would be the wealthiest continent on earth.”

  “I would never spend my holiday in Congo.”

  “The Congolese are a gentle people. There is no safety issue here at all. There is very little crime.”

  “I am not interested in the country itself. I am here because I love the daily fight. I need that adrenaline. When I go back to Europe for a visit, I am bored without anything to fight over.”

  “The Congolese are begging for the Belgians to come back as rulers. With the Belgians at least there were schools and hospitals and government employees were paid.”

  Henri is proud of the fact that he’s been able to keep his clients out of trouble: “So far, none of my clients have been arrested. Well, one guy, from the UK. He was found taking pictures of young boys and girls. But I had some discussions with the right people, and he was let go and sent home.”

  Henri himself was arrested several years back, he says, on false charges of stealing money from his company. “I have no investors. It is a company of one person. How can I be stealing from myself?” He spent eleven nights in jail before buying his way out with five thousand dollars.

  So what’s it like inside a Congolese prison?

  “I had money, so it was no problem. I had my friends bring me food every day and also food for many of the others inside, so I was popular and allowed to sleep peacefully each night.”

  The subject of poverty finally stirs Henri’s scant sense of public relations.

  “Congo is one of the richest countries in the world,” he insists. “Here you have oil, uranium, diamonds, gold, all in abundance.”

  “Well, potentially, one of the richest countries in the world,” I interject.

  “Yes, right, one of the richest.”

  Henri has been in the Congo fifteen years. Living in France in 1992, he tried to import tropical fish from the Congo to sell to aquarium owners around Europe. He found a supplier and set up a large order. Between the fish, shipping fees, insurance, customs bribes, dock and loading charges, taxes, agent commissions, and other costs associated with the maddening world of import/export, Henri sunk twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of francs into his first shipment.2 All of his fish arrived on time. All were dead.

  “My supplier had no idea how to pack fish for shipment,” he tells me. “The insurance company refused to cover my loss because it turns out this guy had faked his paperwork. He was not even a licensed vendor.”

  Outraged and nearly broke, Henri flew to Kinshasa to confront his vendor and was quickly consumed by the country. He moved down for good a couple years later and has been here ever since running a variety of businesses, mostly exporting various goods including, for a while, tropical fish. Now he’s a jack-of-all-trades who sees a future, of a sort, in tourism. Which is why he’s agreed to act as my escort. Since 2002, I’m only the third American client he’s had, but he remains bullish on his chances.

  “I have been in jail, survived Mobutu, and two civil wars,” he says. “I love this country. Every day is different. You cannot compare yesterday to today. In Europe and America, you already know what tomorrow will be like. You know what next year will be like. Here, you have no idea. We are now driving freely down the road. In one hundred meters we could be arrested for no reason. Probably not, but we would not be surprised if it happened.

  “In Europe, I have never been arrested. I need this country. You want some company for the night? With a condom it’s no problem.”

  I can’t tell if this is a rhetorical question or not. Just to be on the safe side I say, “No, thanks,” and explain that even if I wasn’t married I wouldn’t have casual sex in a place known as the cradle of AIDS with a triple wrapping of latex, aluminum foil, and burlap with a sealant of waterproof caulk around my dick and a coating of marine-grade polyurethane over my nut sack for safekeeping. Henri looks at my crotch and says, “I am married also; I was just asking for you. If you change your mind, it’s not a problem to arrange.”

  There were available to me, of course, options beyond hooking on with a group of strangers for an ad hoc tour of the Congo’s more desolate corners. The
classic outing in this part of the world is the barge expedition up the Congo River past Mbandaka and into Joseph Conrad’s mythic “heart of darkness.” Since it’s impossible to come to the Congo and not confront the gloomy shadow Conrad still casts over the place, I’ll dispense with the subject up front.

  Most writers who visit the Congo, and just about everyone else, invariably get sucked into the “Conrad’s footsteps” deal and, worse, feel obliged to mimic not simply the man’s century-old journey but his mournfully obtuse style: In the pilot house the helmsman, filled with drink, eyes the color of smoke, stoically matriculated our solemn passage with an oppressive oath as the damp vessel snaked through a greasy waterway into the green-black forest bruised with a noxious fog of sorrow, hunger, desperation, abandonment…death like a widow’s shroud assembled its proxies with hungry certitude at each moaning bend, the enveloping presence of unspeakable secrets an intolerable weight hovering above the sepulchral gloaming that stalked like sluggish murmurs this apiary of malignant pilgrims. Etc.

  There’s no disputing Conrad’s rank as a master, but every time I read him I find myself wishing that just once he’d pull out of his mood, walk into the equatorial sun, wipe the sweat from his brow, and break up his constipated labor with something like “It was hotter than two rats fucking inside a wool sock.”

  I have no interest in traversing a well-worn literary rut, and not just for what should be the writer’s obligatory aversion to exhaustively covered ground. Harper’s, Travelers’ Tales, and other high-minded publishers are credible institutions, but I’ve always disliked that “following in Hemingway’s footsteps” or “retracing the Silk Road” gimmick publishers like to keep alive out of some half-noble duty to posterity. What’s the point of these self-indulgent exercises? To demonstrate how some things have changed over time and some haven’t? Well, no shit.

  I mention Harper’s because just before I left the States, the magazine ran a very good, thoughtful piece called “The River Is a Road” by a writer named Bryan Mealer describing his Congo River journey and inevitable encounters with the merchants, fishermen, vegetable traders, soldiers, and everyday river folk who ride the slow-moving barges not out of a sense of adventure but out of economic necessity. It all came across colorful as hell, but if you have any experience on Old World ferries and can read between the lines a little, it becomes obvious that the main problem with seven days on a slow boat is that almost nothing interesting ever happens on them. That’s why you end up acting like quotes from the guy with four teeth and two coops of chickens amount to the type of wizened pronouncements that “It takes a village” bozos back home eat up like mashed cassava.