To Hellholes and Back Page 4

  By the way, if you really think villages are so great, spend a year in an African one and see how you like starving, washing in a river the guys upstream dump their shit in, and having your neighbors up your ass seven days a week. For more on why “Let’s bring the lessons of the Third World back to the States” is pure idiocy, see page 154.

  The Harper’s story included the observation that Conrad saw so much hell in the Congo “that he was inspired to write Heart of Darkness, a description the country has yet to live down.” My immediate reaction to this was, “Absolutely right and to hell with Conrad and his septic analysis of everything Africa put in front of him.” Old Joe pinned the tail on that donkey in 1902. Sure, the country has its horrors—admittedly more than most—but it’s not like the natives are attacking up and down the river and ivory is being hauled out of the jungle by the Kurtzload. It’s a great book, but perhaps one reason the Congo can’t shake its gruesome reputation is that no one is willing to let it. Would it be too much to ask to allow the Congo to get on with the twenty-first century already?

  Conrad himself had a monstrous time in the Congo. He saw more than his fill of death. He fell ill with fever and dysentery and was further hindered by what modern cubicle culture would call a “personality conflict” with his boss, a turf-guarding dickhead who denied Conrad the steamboat captaincy he’d come to the Congo to assume. Conrad left Africa broken and defeated. And then wrote his nasty little piece of revenge filled with hate, misery, fear, madness, massacre, and party starters like, “Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.”

  Ruminations such as this one went on to inform a century of Africa travel writing, but they also inspired an international allegory I don’t care to perpetuate. Flat as the Kinshasa investment market and brown as a turd, that river belongs to others and I’m happy to let them keep it. I’ve come to the Congo to confront fear, not create it.

  There are hundreds of great books and travelogues that recap historical horrors in Africa, and I prepped for my trip by reading a handful of them. I found most to be excellent and exceedingly dour, tinged with the inevitable influence of Conrad, as though written by people who, the minute they set foot in the place, tightened their jaws and became good and goddamned determined to approach their subject (and not coincidentally themselves) with immeasurable gravity and battle-hardened seriousness. One of the requirements of visiting Africa seems to be casting off your sense of humor somewhere over the Atlantic.

  I get that in the face of disease, famine, and war the last thing you want as a visitor is to come off as an insensitive, hooting bonehead. In addition to being personally unattractive, this seems like a fast way to get on shit lists of organizations like the Congo’s Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, whose name literally means “Those who stand together,” but which has also been interpreted as “Those who kill together.”

  Even so, I’m a guy who likes a laugh now and then and I don’t see why Africa or, more specifically, people reading about Africa should be deprived of a little levity. Maybe one reason we’re so intimidated by Africa is that every image we get from the place involves hospital misery, rural starvation, angry mobs, and eight-, ten-, and twelve-year-old boys with AK-47s. After a few weeks in Africa I’d seen far more laughing and joking than shooting and stabbing, and I began wondering why Westerners so often come away from the continent with such long faces.

  The more I thought about it, the more I began blaming Conrad for the anxiety I felt about Africa. I didn’t come here as an aid worker, diplomat, anthropologist, epidemiologist, peacekeeper, election observer, war correspondent, or colonial river pilot. I’m a tourist. Why should that obligate me to confront the worst parts of the place? Without close contact with societal ills have I not experienced the “real” Africa, as opposed to the sensational continent exploited on CNN, BBC, and other bastions of global fearmongering? Weren’t the friendly and trustworthy African guides I’d met on safari as bona fide as militia rebels in the field?

  And if as a traveler with a social conscience I’m required by some invisible authentication board to amass what my friend Glasser calls “phantom university credits,” are visitors to such “most livable” cities as Portland, Oregon, bound by the same requirements? Does experiencing the “real” Portland mean joining the army of homeless ghosts who line up each morning outside the city’s most notorious shelters? Should they be shown the place where sewer lines pour filth into the once pristine Willamette River, making it unsafe for drinking, swimming, fishing, and just about anything else a river is useful for? Should tourists hoping to form a valid perspective of San Francisco line up at 5:30 a.m. in front of one of the city’s methadone clinics—as I did with a junkie friend one deeply depressing morning years ago—to bear witness to the sad string of refugees from one of our country’s many ill-defined wars? Do junkies represent the “real” America any more than the Grand Canyon or Yosemite; any more than Kinshasa’s slum dwellers and AIDS clinics represent the “real” Africa vis-à-vis my organized safari or the thundering thrill of Victoria Falls?

  Wherever you go in the world, most people are pretty nice. They’re eager to show you the best parts of the places they live. What gives interlopers the right to riffle through their dirty laundry?

  Having made the choice to shove sad Joe off the heights of Mt. Sacrilege, I proceed full bore into my Conradian antipathy by deciding to devote the rest of my trip to a search for the funniest joke in Africa. Had I stopped to consider the ill will I was likely to provoke by wading into such an impolitic swamp—“After slaughtering a village full of women and children, three Hutu Interahamwe walk into a bar and say…”—I might have aborted the plan to mine the Dark Continent for laughs before it had time to gestate. Luckily, D. B. happens to know two illuminating Congo jokes that he’s happy to share.

  “Two grasshoppers leave Egypt for a trip to the southern tip of Africa,” D. B. begins, stone-faced as ever while I whip out my notebook with cub-reporter excitement.

  “They are determined to see the entire continent. The grasshoppers have a good time sightseeing in places like Kenya and Uganda, but when they reach Congo they stop at the border. They discuss the matter and after a few minutes decide to end their journey and head back to Egypt.”

  Yep, that’s the punch line, folks. And if you aren’t choking with laughter it’s presumably because you’ve never had a grasshopper wing stuck in your throat.

  “This joke we tell on ourselves because people in Congo love to eat grasshoppers,” D. B. says, clearly bummed by my tepid reaction. I pass along the best advice I ever got about jokes—“Never repeat ’em; never explain ’em”—and scribble in my notebook something earnest about the “Western concept of jokes juxtaposed with Congo’s lack of ready hilarity.”

  Concerned that my brilliant “Funniest Joke in Africa” idea might be tougher to pull off than I thought, I nevertheless ask D. B. for his follow-up. Fortunately, his second joke turns out to be a little better than the first, proving yet again that the warm-up act is a reliable downer in any culture. D. B. squares his shoulders and says (believe me, this works better paraphrased):

  When God was creating the world he reached into his pockets and began dispersing blessings around the planet—mountains and plentiful water to North America, abundant farmland to Asia, magnificent cities and culture to Europe, and so on. When he got to the Congo, however, he realized that he had too much left over, so that when he emptied his pockets the country received the most riches of all—a mighty river, endless forests, lush hills, magnificent wildlife, fertile plains, oil, gold, copper, and every mineral known to man. Noting this disparity of resources, one of his angels came to him and said, “God, it is unfair to the rest of the world. You have bestowed too much wealth upon the Congo.” To which God replied, “Ah, but you haven’t seen the people I plan to put there.”

  Although everyone but me has heard it before, this one gets a pretty good laugh in the car. Even the alo
of Gilles flashes me a catlike smile.

  “This joke we tell on ourselves to explain Congo’s poor condition in the world despite our great potential,” D. B. explains, turning left onto another impossibly disorganized stretch of road and, not for the last time, ignoring the gift of my finely honed Western wisdom.

  2

  In This Way Children Are Fed and Girlfriends Kept Happy

  Before I can function as an adult in the DRC, I need my own stash of local money. This requires a visit to the money changers who do business in rows lining either side of a narrow dirt alley deep within the markets of downtown Kinshasa. Here, I’m told, I can get a fair rate turning dollars into Congolese francs, a currency worth less than a drunken promise outside the country.

  After tossing and turning all night in a concrete bunker of a hotel that smells of embalming fluid, I meet Henri, Gilles, and D. B. in the lobby restaurant for the money errand. In that innocuous way of morning courtesy, I ask how everyone’s getting along.

  “Not so good,” Henri says, and I can see he hasn’t had much sleep, either. “Three armed militia men entered our neighborhood at one thirty this morning. They were in our courtyard, but entered another house. Even so, the commotion frightened my house girls.”

  “What were they after? Were they thieves?”

  “By the time I grabbed my machete and looked outside, they had gone.”

  I’m normally skeptical of self-promoters who pepper their personal anecdotes with phrases like “By the time I grabbed my machete.” And I’m skeptical of Henri, anyway. Even so, I ask him a few leading questions.

  “It was a restless night,” he continues. “There have been two armed assaults in my area recently. A girl of twelve was raped.”

  A rifle barrel had apparently been put in her vagina. Or else that was a story from a refugee who had recently arrived from Kivu. Either way.

  During Henri’s story about the armed hooligans, I’d been planning to throw in his face yesterday’s assertions about the Congo being a mellow place with an excellent safety rating. But this business about the twelve-year-old girl and the gun barrel shuts all of us up while we crawl through traffic.

  Our slow progress through the polluted streets further dampens the mood, but it provides an excellent opportunity for the city’s policemen, one or two of whom are stationed at nearly every major corner, to put their sophisticated training and crime-fighting skills to use. When D. B. slows at a curb to let Gilles and me out of the car, a pudgy policewoman rushes up with a wild barrage of hand gestures and Lingala invective. In one hurried motion, she opens the passenger door, grabs Henri by the shoulder, jerks him out of the car, and deposits herself in his seat, all while berating D. B. like he’s an insubordinate stepchild.

  From the front seat, D. B. turns to me with an apologetic grin and says, “It may take time to fix this problem. You go now with Gilles.” Then he resumes bellowing in Lingala at the policewoman in the seat next to him. Another cop arrives and shoves his baton through the open window. Gilles grabs me by the shoulder. Surprisingly, neither cop bothers to look at us when we get out of the car and take off down the street.

  There’s no pretense of procedure here. No one is asked to produce ID or account for themself in any way. It’s a straightforward shakedown, a display of power and intimidation of the type that supposedly keeps Congolese society in line and, more importantly, Congolese cops in business.

  Gilles and I snake through a maze of alleyways jammed with people, garbage, and all manner of shanty shops—radios, fabric, dried fish, electric fans, CDs. The usual Third World bazaar, though this one is spaced at regular intervals with clusters of mean-faced young men with guns sitting behind rickety wooden tables piled high with cash rubber-banded in bundles the size of bricks. Millions of francs, everywhere, sitting in the open just like the pig shanks and untied sacks of rice teeming with flies.

  It’s unsettling amid Kinshasa’s ocean of destitution to see the lifetime income of forty or fifty families stacked on every corner like a Great Wall of Mammon. Imagine fifty card tables at your local Saturday farmer’s market, only instead of shiny apples and bunches of asparagus, each one leans under the weight of four hundred thousand or five hundred thousand dollars in tens and twenties. When I reach for my camera to take a photo, Gilles places a gentle hand on my wrist and lowers it to my side.

  Gilles instructs me to keep one hand on my wallet and to turn my daypack around so that it’s pressed against my chest. This makes me feel like a more obvious mark than a guy walking into Tiffany’s on Christmas Eve, but then I notice Gilles and every other Congolese have assumed the same defensive position as they dodge and shimmy through the relentless tide of human traffic. Gilles presses ahead, but wheels around every two or three seconds to confirm that I and my forest green JanSport pack are still behind him.

  On safari in Botswana I spent several nights lying in my tent while hyenas and elephants sniffed around camp. One afternoon I awoke from a nap to find a large, male baboon sitting on its haunches three feet away calmly staring at me through the mesh window. But the money changers’ alley is the first place in Africa I feel at risk. Still, what the hell, I haven’t seen the inside of a gym in months and it’s nice to get my heart rate into the fat-burning cardio zone with so little effort. I’m nothing if not a seeker of silver linings.

  We stop in front of a money changer who looks exactly like the inmate that runs the entire prison black market and decides which guy will receive the evening’s punitive ass rape. The money changer takes my ten fifty-dollar bills and looks at Gilles as though some eight-year-old just broke open his piggy bank and brought in a load of pennies and nickels to be changed. Gilles shrugs. The money changer grins at me—if you saw Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland you know the smile—and grunts an order to one of his lieutenants.

  The young guy begins stuffing bricks of francs into a plastic shopping bag. Carrying a king’s ransom through Serfville will be nerve-racking enough, but unbeknownst to Gilles I’m holding an additional two thousand in unchanged dollars—as well-hidden on my person as possible without engaging a major orifice. This is emergency cash I’ll be hauling as a hedge at all times in a country where credit cards, traveler’s checks, and ATMs are largely theoretical outside the capital.

  Meanwhile, Gilles makes a side transaction, handing the money changer about three thousand dollars in euros—Henri must be doing better than the piece-of-shit Mercedes suggests. He receives in return a quantity of bills that you’d normally strap to the back of a mule in saddlebags booby-trapped with scorpions and dynamite.

  With the house take of Monte Carlo pressed against our chests, Gilles and I thread through the carnival of despair back to the car. We arrive to find the policewoman gone and two tall male cops smiling and chatting with Henri and D. B. Henri is lighting a cigarette for one of them. The other offers Gilles a friendly greeting as we roll up.

  While Team Congo ties up the final details of our little traffic kerfuffle, four or five beggars approach me with pleading eyes and outstretched palms. In The Third Man, Graham Greene wrote, “Humanity is a duty.” I love that line, but the situation here argues more for the street smarts of Bison Welles. With the cops still nearby, opening my plastic bag of cash seems like a very stupid idea. I ignore the beggars and turn back toward our group just as Henri slides one of the cops twenty-five hundred francs (about five dollars). Henri shoos the beggars and orders us all back in the Mercedes.

  “That is how they do it here,” Henri explains as we pull away. “They see you slowing down, they jump in your car, and invent an infraction.”

  “In this case, the lady officer said we are not allowed to exit the car at that particular corner,” D. B. adds from the driver’s seat. “This is nonsense, but police can make whatever rule they please.”

  “What was she saying when she got in the car?” I ask. “She seemed pretty angry.”

  “She demanded one hundred U.S. dollars to begin with, but you must alw
ays refuse their intimidation and threats to arrest you until they arrive at a reasonable price,” D. B. says.

  I ask if we were targeted for being white. Henri says no, police harassment is applied equally to everyone in Kinshasa. This appears to be true. I look around as we drive and see motorists stopped everywhere, cops sitting in front seats, haranguing like evangelists. But later I ask D. B. the same question and he says, “When the lady officer got in the car her first words to me were, ‘You are with white people, so I know there is a lot of money in this car!’”

  Traveling with white people in Africa is a burden I’m already well acquainted with. Before arriving in Kinshasa, I’d spent sixteen days circumnavigating the world-renowned Okavango Delta in a modern, open Land Rover truck with twelve docile European tourists, a German translator-assistant, a camp cook, and a freakishly competent African guide. Covering parts of Botswana, Zambia, and Namibia, most of the trip had lived up to the promised wildlife bonanza. A single afternoon along the vibrant Chobe River, for example, had included spiritual near brushes with hippo, giraffe, crocodile, impala, zebra, cape buffalo, antelope, fish eagles, vultures, and, the coup de grâce, eight lions feasting on a rotting elephant carcass. All in all, a triumphant orgy of Planet Earth–worthy encounters.