To Hellholes and Back Read online

  “Without the support of Mr. Thompson’s president, you might not even have a job,” Henri finishes in a crescendo of indignation worthy of the Taiwanese Parliament. “So do not go fucking with your country’s strongest ally!”

  This is the first time any kind of favorable alignment has been conceived between me and Kommandant Bush, and it feels pretty slimy.6 But a sidebar with Henri just now will get us nowhere, especially since the director seems to be taking the threat of international scandal seriously. After a moment of contemplation, he announces that this extremely tricky situation requires an out-of-office consultation.

  “Please remain comfortable for a few minutes,” he says, walking out of the office with my passport, vaccination card, and plane ticket.

  For thirty minutes Henri and I sit side by side, barely speaking. Waiting like this is usually like waiting for a guy to finish in the gas station bathroom—the longer he takes in there, the worse it’s going to be for you. When the director finally returns, however, he’s a new man, a man who might well have been out sucking the kindest bud from the biggest bong on the entire African continent.

  “I want you to know that I have reviewed this matter thoroughly and I do not believe there is any dishonesty on your part and that you are not a terrorist,” the director assures me. “The mistake in your passport is the fault of a negligent official with airport immigration. I am happy to make a note of this and let you go. At no charge to you.”

  Henri beams, but we’re far from done. Placing my passport on the desktop, but not exactly handing it over, the director pulls a sheet of paper from his desk. For my benefit, he begins breaking down the grim economics that force a nice guy like him to hassle a nice guy like me.

  “Do you know what I make in salary each month?” the director asks me.

  When I say I haven’t the foggiest, he shakes his head plaintively, scribbles on the paper, and turns it around for me to read: Par roi 22,000 FRC = $45

  “That’s not much of a salary,” I say.

  “It is a crime that a man in a position as revered as yours is not remunerated more fittingly,” Henri chimes in. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen him switch emotional gears with such disturbing ease. Henri would make a terrific game show host.

  “I am forty-five years old,” the official continues morosely. “Do you know how many children I have?”

  I shake my head. Like a coroner filling out a death certificate, he scratches another line on the page: Pere de 10 enfant

  “Ten kids? Wow!”

  “It is a terrible burden,” Henri adds. “Life is truly unfair to the Africans.”

  Next, the director jots down his monthly rent: $120. Then figures covering other expenses. School for the younger children. University for the older ones. Food. Electricity. Gasoline and car maintenance. All told, the guy needs about $250 a month just to keep his head above water.

  “So,” I ask, the guileless lamb being led into the room where they shoot the pneumatic bolt between its eyes, “how does a man in your position make up the difference between such a tiny salary and such massive monthly expenses?”

  “My friend,” the director replies, spreading his arms and grimacing in a way that suggests a recent viewing of Braveheart being stretched on the rack. No one sneers like the French, drinks vodka like the Russians, deceives like the Born Agains, or takes bribes like the Africans.

  Ten dollars later, my passport comes back across the desk. That evening, Henri will say to me, “When guys who have nothing become important government officials with access to bribes and foreign aid, they go from fucking their girlfriends in ten-dollar hotels with two bottles of beer to fucking their girlfriends in three-hundred-dollar hotels with two bottles of champagne. That is the only difference between the government official and the guy on the street.”

  Like guests lingering after the party, Henri and I stick around for some polite parting conversation in the lobby. This is the now-we’re-chums portion of the payoff process, and it feels like as good a time as any to mention my quest to find the funniest joke in Africa. The director seems honored to be asked for help and obliges with gusto.

  “Yes, ha-ha, there is so much to laugh about in the Congo,” he begins. “For instance, do you know that in the DRC it is against national policy for visitors to make cell phone calls from inside a government office?”

  “I had no idea,” I say.

  “Yes, it is true,” the director continues. “It is a punishable offense. No cell phone calls. Visitors are, however, allowed to smoke. This means that according to the government, ingesting cancer-causing cigarette smoke into your lungs is less dangerous to your health than calling your wife to check on the status of your dinner. For many husbands, this is quite literally true. Ha-ha-ha!”

  Government buffoonery provides the mildly amusing setup, but it’s the last line, the hint at marital difficulty, that’s the real kicker. Henri coughs out an appreciative cloud of smoke. I force a laugh. The director’s guffaw sounds like an extended fart and leaves him just as satisfied.

  I’m not sure if the director has just made up this joke or if something’s been lost in the retelling, but it reminds me of one I heard in South Africa, also disparaging bureaucratic inanity.

  As in many countries, South Africa maintains a “TV license” system, a tax that requires every household with a television to cough up 250 rand (about $30) each year for a TV license. The South African government is unusually efficient in enforcing the law, regularly sending inspectors to peoples’ homes to check on licenses. The fine for being caught owning a television without a license is 2,000 rand ($250). Meanwhile, with capital punishment having been abolished and a recent trend toward lenient prosecution of violent crimes, murder suspects are routinely released on bail of 500 rand. The moral of the story? If you have no license and the TV inspector comes around, your cheapest option is to shoot him.

  Again, not exactly a knee-slapper, but if you lived in a country with 40 percent unemployment, you might get a laugh out of it.

  On our way out of the most beautiful city in the Congo we’re required to stop at the state security office, a plywood hut where we’re told to wait outside until an official who can authorize our route to Boma—through the sod-eating Inga Dam site—can be found. After a few minutes of horse-lather sweating in the midday heat, I move to a cinder block that occupies the only bit of shade in the yard. As soon as I sit, the receptionist, watching from a plastic chair in the dirt outside the hut, asks me to please go back to standing near the doorway.

  “If my boss sees you sitting in the shade like an animal, he’ll accuse me of mistreating you and it will bring trouble to me, so if you wouldn’t mind,” she says sweetly.

  I leave the cinder block and reclaim my position in the baking heat so as not to give the impression that I’m being mistreated. It’s two o’clock. Two hours past our planned departure. The sun bores into my forehead like a laser. I find a PowerBar in the bottom of my bag and lick melted chocolate off the wrapper. Back home it’s November 22, Thanksgiving Day.

  4

  We Have a Winner

  Congo towns are inarguably poisonous, but there are crooked cops, shifty expats, purse snatchers, felons, disease, filth, poverty, and pocket-lining bureaucrats in every big city in the world. To confront the white man’s grave that Africa is truly renowned for being, you have to get into the countryside. By now it was past time to go see it.

  In the States we have a collective understanding of “urban” and “rural” and the fundamental differences between places like Los Angeles and Wagontire, Kansas. Yet few Americans live more than an hour from the interstate and almost everyone has the means to get to a metropolis—or, going the opposite direction, to reasonably empty country—pretty much whenever they want. To our universal mobility, add the homogenization of print, broadcast, and Internet media and the strip-malling of America and you’ve got a country in which the steak quesadilla tower is as popular a menu item at the Applebee’
s in Mishawaka, Indiana, as it is at the one in Times Square.

  No such consistency exists in Africa, where country means country, as in deep bongo, no electricity, no TV, haul your water out of the river, shit in the woods, life’s about as cheery as a baby’s coffin country. Just getting to rural Congo requires prodigious effort, so Henri is in an even more pessimistic state than usual on the morning after our Matadi misadventure.

  “We have a small problem,” he says between slurps of Corn Flakes and drags of cigarette. “It seems the road to Boma is in bad condition.”

  “How bad?” I ask. “Impassable bad? Or it’ll-take-a-couple-extra-hours-to-get-there bad?”

  “I don’t know. Last night there were heavy rains. Our informant in Boma says only ‘bad.’”

  Our informant? So now we have informants? It’s no wonder things keep going wrong around Henri. Counting every card in a five-deck Vegas shoe would be easier than keeping track of his payroll.

  The first word you learn in the Congolese countryside is “mundele,” which means “white man.” Pass through any village and the word follows you like a shadow. “Mundele” is often accompanied by “mbongo,” which means “money.” If a stranger yells, “Mundele, mbongo!” it means they want you to give them some money. This happens more or less all the time.

  In the beginning I found “Mundele, mbongo!” sort of charming. The people who shouted it always wore big smiles and it sounded to me a little like “Hakuna matata.” Whenever I heard “Mundele, mbongo!” I grinned and waved like the big, friendly dork international travel so often turns us into. Then someone clued me into the meaning of the phrase, and I began to recognize the shouts only as whim dictated. Little kids usually got a wave. Gangs of unemployed men squatting around bottles of wine, not so much.

  This newfound selectivity put me in mind of the single Austrian member of my safari crew, a young, near silent, shaggy-haired blond named Rolf. At some point in our journey I noticed that in addition to nodding to villagers on roadsides, Rolf had discreetly begun waving at animals on game drives. I kept a watch on this curious behavior out of the corner of my eye, and the funny thing was that after a while I noticed Rolf waved only at the nice animals. Giraffes, turtles, and baby impalas became regular recipients of his affable alpine salutations, while baboons, crocodiles, and wild boar were passed without acknowledgment.

  There are few animals left in the DRC, and centuries of hunting have left the ones that remain in deep hiding. Wilderness, however, is abundant. The highlight of our planned exploration of the Congolese sticks is a long hike through the “Luki Biosphere Reserve,” a nature preserve established in 1937 by a group of farsighted Belgians familiar with the behavior of Europeans in virgin jungle. To help protect a piece of ancient forest where unique species of trees and plants grew, the Belgians laid out boundaries and constructed a handsome research center in the heart of the preserve. UNESCO and other international organizations ultimately lent support. When we arrive at the front gate, the line-art panda of the World Wildlife Fund is one of several familiar logos adorning the biosphere’s peeling welcome sign.

  We pass an abandoned guardhouse and broken fence and enter a world of steaming swamps, giant ferns, prehistoric vines, and soaring umbrella trees. Walking along the trail, we hear the rhythmic sound of chopping and encounter dozens of locals walking in the opposite direction with bundles of wood on their backs. Some drag large tree trunks over the dirt path.

  “They need the wood for cooking,” D. B. tells us. “No one can convince them of the importance of this place.”

  The Congolese are not impressive stewards of the wild. In the markets of Kinshasa it’s still possible to find leopard pelts. A man trying to sell me one scoffed when I rebuffed his pitch by telling him I didn’t want to encourage the killing of leopards by buying a skin.

  “But this one is synthetic,” he argued. “Fake fur.”

  “Then why does it cost eight hundred dollars?”

  “It can be as you like,” he replied enigmatically.

  Our clothes already beginning to be eaten through by jungle rot and fanatical mosquitoes—for protection against bites I’m wearing more toxic chemicals than a Chinese river—we reach the vacant research center, now the focal point of a makeshift village. Locals have taken up residence in the dilapidated staff housing quarters, living with no electricity or running water. When I ask why the preserve is abandoned, Henri says that although some organizations continue to support the project, all funds are channeled through federal ministries in Kinshasa.

  “Once the money is in Kinshasa, it goes no further,” he says. “Officials in the capital pocket it. The aid groups begin to insist that they be allowed to give money directly to the center. When their request is denied, they stop giving money altogether.”

  We talk to a few villagers. We watch an older man and young apprentice making chairs and tables with handsaws and chisels. We meet a guy who sports what is surely Africa’s most fully realized neck beard. We buy a bag of mangoes from a fourteen-year-old kid even though we could walk fifty feet in any direction and pick ripe ones for ourselves.

  The most interesting character is an old man who strides out of the brush back near the main road and introduces himself as Phangu Albert. A traditional doctor specializing in herb remedies and spirit treatments, Albert tells me that he’s eighty-two years old and that as a teenager he fought in World War II against the Italians in Abyssinia as part of the Belgians’ Force Publique, the infamous organization of white officers and black conscripts with all the attendant suffering one imagines for the lower ranks in colonial Africa. Albert served as a radioman on the frontlines calling in enemy positions. For all sides in the war, forward radioman was as close to a death sentence as one could get outside the cockpit of a Japanese airplane in 1945. He says he later served in Egypt as part of the Allied forces.

  On a continent where males often don’t live past sixty, much less seventy or eighty, Albert is a find, and not just because he’s the first African WWII vet I’ve ever come across. His answers to a few questions about the campaign in East Africa convince me of his authenticity—I’m a natural skeptic and I spent several years researching a pair of books about World War II sites, but Albert’s story seems legit—and for the next hour we talk war exploits. His most enlightening story is from a comrade who somehow ended up serving for a brief time alongside the Russians after the war: “They liked only two things: drinking vodka and shooting guns. For them this was sex.”

  He strains credulity, however, when claiming that his father lived to be a hundred and thirty years old.

  “You must mean a hundred and three,” I say, giving the old man the benefit of the doubt by a wide margin.

  “No, I mean one hundred and thirty.” Albert is emphatic on the point and doesn’t appear the least bit senile.

  “A hundred and thirteen maybe?”

  “One hundred and thirty years old.”

  The mileage shows on Albert’s face, but otherwise he’s sharp as a cat, none of that old man shambling or mumbling, so maybe he’s not bullshitting. When he tells me he still walks five to ten miles each day, I ask the secret to his longevity.

  “I always tell the truth,” he says. “If you can speak the truth you are free, even if you have nothing. This is why I have always avoided politics and never took a leadership role in my village. Politics makes you hide your true feelings. Hiding your true self will cause you to suffer. Jesus Christ came and showed us the light in the darkness, and that is the way I live.”

  Albert is just one of many friendly people I encounter in the countryside. Eating lunch on the banks of a river, I watch a fisherman in a dugout canoe drift by, pulling in his net and singing a song to himself in the local dialect, one of those elegant falsetto hymns associated with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and post–midlife-crisis, pre–Edie Brickellera Paul Simon. The fisherman’s song adds a transcendent quality to an already beautiful scene—the sun illuminating thousands of beads of river wa
ter on the net, birds circling purposefully above, now and again folding back their wings and diving like darts into the water for fish. It’s moments like these that justify the headaches of travel.

  As the fisherman drifts closer, his singing becomes clearer. The handful of nearby locals begins laughing and staring at me. An older guy motions to me and says, “He is singing a song about you.”

  “Really? What’s he singing?” I ask.

  “His song says, ‘There is a white man in our land. Why is the white man come to this place?’”

  Not exactly “You’re Beautiful” or “I Touch Myself,” but, still, to my knowledge this is the first time anyone’s ever done a song about me.

  “Does he mean this in a good or bad way?” I ask.

  “He says only that it is interesting to him. Now he comes to look at you.”

  The fisherman paddles over, breaks off his song, and shouts, “Bon jour, Monsieur Le Blanc!”

  “He says, ‘Hello, Mr. White Man,’” the old guy adds unnecessarily.

  The fisherman and I exchange a few barely comprehensible words of fellowship. We look at each other and smile. When he begins paddling away I ask if I can snap his picture. He says only if I pay him five dollars. In an instant the spell is broken, both of us reduced to stereotypes.

  Fascinating as these bucolic encounters are, none put me in contact with the mortal peril I’d come to face up to. This initially has me feeling cheated—surviving the Congolese jungle is supposed to be more of an achievement—but eventually gets me wondering if disappointment isn’t going to wind up being the whole point of the experience. As usual, Henri comes to the rescue.

  “We have a small problem,” he says, kicking off our first day in Boma with his predictable rundown of issues facing Team Congo. “It seems I have made a miscalculation and run out of cash. I need to borrow three hundred dollars. Just until we get back to Kinshasa. There I can visit a bank and repay you.”