To Hellholes and Back Page 7

  With the soldiers and motley security types gathered a few feet away, the mechanic informs Henri that the difference between his original estimate and the actual cost of the repair differs by about 400 percent. This touches off one of those high-comedy French arguments in which all participants wave their arms in a blind fury and make faces that suggest the accidental intake of German wine. Between outbursts, Henri regards the mechanic with icy glares and sucks in soothing lungfuls of cigarette smoke. Eventually, he motions to Gilles, who reaches into his bag and hands the mechanic a wad of cash the size of a Jack Daniels bottle.

  Once final details have been wrapped up and the mechanic departs, Henri turns to me and says, “I like that guy. He’s the only honest mechanic in Kinshasa.”

  Two hours later, sailing down a smooth, Chinese-built highway, Kinshasa fading like a bad memory, a brilliant late-afternoon sun setting the jungle colors ablaze, Henri, D. B., Gilles, and I get into a discussion of colonialism. Henri is a trip-hammer of opinions—worse than me, if that’s possible—but this is the first time I’ve managed to draw out more than stunted conversation from the African contingent of Team Congo.

  “The Congolese would love nothing more than for the Belgians to return to power.” Henri repeats this for the third or fourth time in as many days, but this time I’m surprised by D. B.’s reaction.

  “Life was easier with the Belgians in charge,” he agrees. “There were good roads, hospitals, free public schools, government employees received their salaries on schedule.”

  Born during Belgian rule, which ended in 1960, D. B. is able to offer firsthand perspective on his country’s five-decade decline. Like most Congolese, he blames the nation’s woes on the disastrous Mobutu kleptocracy. “With Kabila now in office, things are getting better,” he says.

  Gilles, who’s thirty-one, suggests that D. B.’s problem is that having been born during colonial times he’s really Belgian-Congolese. Born after independence, Gilles himself can claim pure Congolese status. This is a bit of a joke and both men laugh, but I sense that it’s also an important dividing line. Even so, Gilles agrees with most of what D. B. says.

  “For several years I ran my own boat-repair company,” Gilles says. “But there were always complications, and I had no one to turn to for help. Bribes and harassment from officials and difficult employees and theft. The situation became so bad that I had to give up my business. Without a network of support, the Congo is impossible. Now I work for Henri. I can turn to him if I have a problem.”

  D. B. and Gilles agree that the Congo would be better off if the Belgians returned as rulers, but they stop short of saying they actually want this. After several days of saying almost nothing to me, Gilles hits a nerve by thanking me for having the courage to come to the Congo. He asks me to spread a positive message about the safety and stability of his country, a prerequisite, he believes, for much-needed foreign investment.

  I tell him I’ll do what I can, but I feel a little sick to my stomach while making this promise. The whole conversation reminds me of the famous quote, not quite a joke, from Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president: “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”

  As a rule, I’m bored with discussions of race relations. This isn’t because I don’t consider the topic to be an important and ultimately defining point in any review of U.S. history. It’s just that in my view the problems always get framed in the most irrelevant terms imaginable—how a talk-show host defamed a certain ethnic group, why an offhand remark made by a politician betrays racial insensitivity. Such obvious red herrings. You want to fix racial inequity, focus 100 percent on education. Overhaul the school system, give all groups equal access to equally funded schools, and stop wasting time griping about racist jokes and the 10 percent of prejudiced Neanderthals who will always be with us, and you’ll get to the mountaintop a lot faster.

  I’m not a bullhead about this. I’m willing to admit, as with most issues, to a lot of gray territory and to the limitations of my typically reductive logic. I’m also willing to concede points to those more familiar with the tribulations of living in a racially divided world, particularly to any nonwhite person in the United States. Still, after a couple decades of discussion, debate, and spittle-filled shouting matches, this pretty much sums up my core position: it’s all about education; if you want to change racial discrimination, discussion of any other point is a waste of time.

  That said, it’s pretty much impossible to tool around Africa and not reflect on the incredible history of African Americans. It sounds naïve, but it’s startling to travel across the continent and see so many American faces. Judging strictly from appearances, D. B. and Gilles might have been raised in Mobile, St. Louis, Tucson, New York, or Los Angeles. Right down to Gilles’s Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap.

  History really does come into clear and unsettling focus when you come face-to-face with the people whose ancestors we know primarily as terrible statistics from history texts and disturbing cinematic re-creations of the slave trade. All across Africa, I was consistently moved by the familiarity of the people and the instant “American” kinship we shared. In a weird way, this often made me feel at home in a very foreign place.

  In Botswana, I came across a guy in a market who bore an absolutely uncanny resemblance to the late rapper Tupac Shakur. (Jay-Z and Kanye are amazing, but for me, hip-hop as art form begins with the Sugar Hill Gang and ends with Tupac, so I’m sort of partial to this story.) I was so taken with the similarity that I actually followed the guy around for a few minutes, trying to get in position to snap a surreptitious photo to show to friends back home. Seriously, you could start an entire “Tupac lives” cottage industry with a couple pictures of this dude. Alas, the guy never emerged from the crowd near the fresh goat section, and I felt too awkward to approach him with my bizarre request for a photo.

  All of this felt a little impolitic; it’s strange to wonder if a future rapper’s people had been snatched from the very acre of earth you’re vacationing on. Nevertheless, I mentioned the Tupac doppelgänger to Kap, the sometimes philosophical, twenty-six-year-old safari cook I’d accompanied on the market run. It turned out he was also a huge fan of the man he referred to in reverential tones as “the late, great legend.”

  “There was also a guy at my school, near here, who looked so much like the late, great legend that we only called him ‘Tupac,’” Kap told me. “His real name was discarded. He became known as Tupac, even to his parents. So maybe those infamous genes can be traced to this place.”

  It’s staggering to stand in a barren landscape still dotted with circular mud huts and grass roofs and ponder the historic calamity that led from an unfortunate bushman or woman taken away from southern Africa to the likeness of a martyr sanctified on T-shirts around the planet. Not to mention the immortal lyric, “Even as a crack fiend, mama, you always was a black queen, mama.”

  Because restaurants are few and literally far between in the countryside, we stop at an industrial complex where Henri has connections and have dinner in a workers’ cafeteria decorated like a Hong Kong banquet room circa 1975—naked fluorescent lights, cheap paper lanterns, wall calendars with Oriental babes in silk dresses, and, naturally, an assortment of ceramic good luck kitties. With public works projects all over the continent, the Chinese have been buying goodwill and UN votes in Africa for decades, so, like the paved roads, this bizarre tableaux of midcentury Cathay in the deep countryside isn’t as rare as you might think.

  One thing I like about the Congo is that the steak always arrives well done. I’m no connoisseur and well done is the way I like my meat, even though most waiters back home treat me like a simpleton and nearly always defy me to send my steaks back by bringing them to me medium rare—as though they’re the ones, not me, paying thirty-five dollars for the goddamn things. This is actually a big i
ssue with me, so I mention my happiness with the well-done meat to Henri.

  “It’s done completely for hygienic purposes, not because they like steak prepared that way,” he says. “All the beef you eat here has worms and other diseases. It’s just local cattle that wanders all over the place exposing itself to the same parasites as everything else. They overcook the meat to kill those things. But don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe.”

  As I’ve noted to the dismay of many a self-styled barbecue expert, it’s possible to cook a piece of meat thoroughly without destroying the flavor. Tonight’s entrée, however, might as well be a flank of rhino. I struggle through five bites, leave four chunks of angry, half-chewed gray flesh on the plate, and wait for the trichinosis to set in.

  Inspired by his earlier candor, I decide this might be a good time to draw some personal details out of D. B. On several occasions, Henri has bragged up our driver’s ass-kicking skills and from time to time I’ve written for WWE Magazine, so I figure a discussion taking advantage of our mutual interest in knockin’ skulls might loosen him up.

  “So, a six-dan black belt in karate,” I say. “That’s pretty impressive.”

  D. B.’s face darkens, the way Bruce Lee’s might in the vicinity of a winnable fight that a vow of nonviolence he’s sworn to uphold over his mother’s grave prevents him from entering.

  “I still keep up my training, but not at the same level as in my youth,” D. B. says, staring into his plate.

  “How about a demonstration?”

  D. B. laughs off the idea, but after five beers I’m pushier than usual.

  “Let’s say a drunk in a bar attacks you like this.” I make a mock grab for his throat, no doubt emitting a poisonous fog of Primus beer breath in his face at the same time.

  The moment my fingers graze D. B.’s neck, I realize my mistake. Responding with lightning reflexes honed through years of Mobutu-brother bodyguarding, D. B. whips both of his hands behind his head, latches onto my pinkie fingers, then rolls both of my hands over his head while twisting my digits like dried spaghetti. It’s funny; you go through half a lifetime without thinking about how much pain can be focused in your little fingers until someone is about to turn them into a pair of mismatched chopsticks.

  I howl like a badger in a trap—which is amazing, since at the moment it’s almost impossible to breathe. D. B.’s eyes widen as though he’s just been awakened from a nightmare. This is good because I actually am in the middle of a nightmare. In mine, I begin whimpering like a five-year-old. What’s the safe word in a situation like this? Mobutu? Kabila? King Leopold’s beard?

  D. B. drops my hands and begins apologizing profusely, almost as embarrassed by his reaction as I am by mine. Freed from his grip, I reach for my beer. D. B. buries his face in his iced tea. After a moment of penitential reflection, he says, “I reacted poorly. Grab my throat again. I will show you more ways of stopping an attacker.”

  “No, no, it’s cool, really. I’m sorry, I just wanted to…”

  “Please, I insist,” he says. “Attack me again.”

  “No, seriously, I just thought…”

  “I am serious also. Please. Attack me.”

  The edge is still on, but in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation with a former presidential bodyguard trying to make amends, you do what the man tells you. Like an archaeologist handling a priceless Ming vase, I place my hands on D. B.’s neck. Lifting one arm up from his waist, D. B. snakes a hand between my arms and applies a twisting pressure on my elbow, then breaks my grip by gently wrenching my shoulder. Even in tender stages I can feel the devastating potential.

  “Your instinct is to grab an attacker’s wrists and try to pull them away, but if he is stronger than you that will not work,” D. B. says. “It is better to apply leverage to the joint.”

  I simulate more assaults—bar drunk wielding bottle, bar drunk attempting blindside tackle, bar drunk attempting old-fashioned kick to the balls. I don’t attack well, but I do “bar drunk” with impressive accuracy. D. B. demonstrates the most effective method of countering each attack while graciously not crushing my windpipe in his Gila monster grip, although he lets it be known that he could. I like D. B., his inability to smile notwithstanding, but he’s got an annoying way of making you feel more dickless than the collected works of Air Supply.

  Mindful of the dozens of broken promises that have already marred the trip, I’ve been silently dreading whatever accommodations might be scared up in Matadi. But the Hotel Metropole is an unexpected jewel—a five-story, dark-stone, Venetian-style palace of porticos, archways, ornamental palms, patios, and balconies overlooking an enclosed tiled courtyard. The hotel was built by the Belgians in the 1920s as a vacation spot for privileged whites; along with Chinese businessmen and government dignitaries, the same clientele keeps it in business today.

  After our late check-in, Henri and I convene in the courtyard for a midnight closer. He has a Primus. I order Fanta. My inability to face alcohol at this point in the day is as good an indication as any of the bone-aching fatigue of car travel through rural Africa.

  As soon as we sit down, four women barrel through the lobby door and beeline for our table. Standing in a circle around us, they smile and pitch massages and “girlfriend fucking,” billed as a better and more convincing lay than normal professional fucking—which, while plausible, would depend on the girlfriend and what stage of the relationship you’re talking about. The girls react to this observation with blank stares. Yet again my rapier wit goes unnoticed in Africa.

  Two of the women could be grandmothers, which here means they’re probably in their early thirties. There’s a beer-goggle chance the tall one in the blonde wig is a tranny. The fourth, in baggy cargo pants and loose-fitting tank top, is good-looking in an aggressively conventional way—like the local weekend news chick who can’t quite work her way onto the weeknight team.

  The weekend coanchor motions to the empty chair next to me. I nod and say, “Sure, go ahead.” She sits down and slides the chair over so that our shoulders touch.

  “Now she thinks you are going to sleep with her, you know?” Henri says through a haze of freshly lit cigarette.

  “What are you talking about?” I say.

  “You asked her to sit down. That was your invitation to fuck her.”

  “I didn’t ask her to sit down. She invited herself. I just said OK.”

  “Aren’t you familiar with prostitutes?”

  “It depends what you mean by familiar.”

  The woman asks me to buy her a beer.

  “If you buy her a beer it really means you are going to fuck her,” Henri says.

  Even in the interest of journalistic research I’m too tired for this game. Rising and saying goodnight, I leave the bartender money for four beers, a round for the table on me.

  Henri fills the elevator with smoke as we ascend to the fourth floor.

  “Typical American, paying for something and getting nothing in return,” he says. “This is Congo. You do not have to pay for anything here unless you get fucked.”

  Which strikes me as perhaps the most honest thing Henri has said since we’ve met.

  Even for the devoutly hitched, sex in Africa cannot be ignored, but already, wow, this is more than I bargained for. African women are sensational. Blinding white smiles. Proud, graceful chins. Long, elegant necks. Thrusting breasts. Sir Mix-a-Lot asses. Calf muscles you could write entire sonnets about. A continent of track stars. And that’s just the Atlanta airport!

  I’m kidding here (sort of), but Africa’s infamously freewheeling attitudes about sex and its bottomless well of urgent, extroverted beauties pretty much demand attention. These days, of course, the ribaldry comes at the price of the worst of the world’s four-letter words. Despite a continent-wide media barrage offering free advice on everything from condom use to abstinence, however, the problem does not appear to be abating. In the words of the director of a Kinshasa AIDS clinic, quoted in Alex Shoumatoff’s
African Madness, “Sex is a big part of Africa; take it away and there is nothing.” Though his book was published in 1988, Shoumatoff’s observation seems to be holding as true as anything Stanley or Livingstone discovered when they passed through the area.

  In a society as open as the Congo’s—most African countries maintain what anthropologists call a “sex-positive culture”—AIDS is the ultimate cosmic joke. A Congolese man told me the story of a village whose people believed in the sacred commingling of semen and vaginal fluids not just as a means of procreation, but for attaining divinity. So anxious were the villagers to please both their God and their government that they dutifully wore condoms during sex…but not before cutting off the tips.

  Disease, however, is just one of several potentially fatal byproducts of unguarded relations in Africa. Henri tells the story of a Belgian who owned a bar in Kinshasa. During one of the recent civil wars—he didn’t specify which one—there was no electricity in the capital. Because the Belgian owned one of the few large and reliable generators in the city, his bar had lights and, more importantly, cold beer.

  “For a while he was making a lot of money and a lot of friends,” Henri says.

  Running low on fuel one afternoon, the Belgian gave his trusted Congolese assistant money to buy gas. Instead of going to the gas station, however, the assistant bought fuel at a reduced rate from a black-market dealer, then pocketed the leftover cash.

  The gas turned out to be diluted—“Water, alcohol, beer, they put anything in it to make it go further,” says Henri. The black-market fuel ruined the generator. It ran for twenty minutes, then stopped forever.

  The Belgian’s business quickly declined. He fell out of favor with the local cops and soldiers who had served as his protectors, and, worse, began fighting over money he no longer had with his Congolese girlfriend. Eventually tiring of the drama, the girlfriend attempted to resolve the entire matter by killing the Belgian with poison.