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What a long, strange trip…

Last year at this time, travel restrictions within the city limits of Kinshasa had just been lifted, but no one was fooled since rogue bands of soldiers and police were robbing people at impromptu roadblocks. Midnight to 5 am was the ‘witching hour’ when anyone on the roads in town was declaring themselves to be fair game, and everyone acknowledged this unwritten law. The country and world were spectators to a mental debate as Joseph Kabila was deciding between fulfilling his inherited role as President, or yielding to the cultural temptation to become dictator (like his father did, leading to his assassination by disgruntled bedfellows). The World Bank, the UN, the USA, European powers and private individuals were waiting in the wings with billions of dollars, watching to see which way he went. The Rebel armies in the east were also jockeying for position as he debated, and NGOs tried their best to chip away at the mountain of disorder as national infrastructures stumbled forward under their own bureaucratic momentum. People scratched out a living selling chickens, grubs and puppies on the roadside, stores opened and closed within weeks, businesses popped up and failed overnight, garbage piled up in the streets, villages hunkered down and anyone with any sense at all stayed at home and kept the windows and doors locked.

It was during this time last year that cabin fever hit, and some friends and I decided to get as far out of Kinshasa as fate and the roads would allow. The thought of spending 2 years cooped up in a claustrophobic city was already eating away my sense of adventure in coming here, and I truly wanted to see some of the real Congo beyond the safety of our compound. We found a website for a wilderness park called “Bombo Lumene”, which said it was 120km east of Kinshasa on ‘newly paved’ roads. The website had no date to indicate how current its claims were, so we figured it could mean anything. Nonetheless, the next Saturday, four of us piled into a car and headed east on the only road out of town to see what we would see.

We got an early start and decided to take a shortcut around downtown, and although we had all been on the route before, we were hopelessly lost within minutes. We found ourselves on a tangled web of narrow dirt city roads crammed with thousands of brightly-dressed people, walking everywhere like ants swarming on an anthill. Although poverty is rampant in Kinshasa, people take immense pride in dressing very formally and neatly when they are in public, so there were men in handmade 3-piece suits, women in bright African dresses, and younger men in clean, pressed T-shirts. No adults go barefoot if they can afford not to, and no one wears short pants. There were also lots of less fortunate folks who could not afford nice clothes, wrapped in dirty rags and torn clothing, many of them hobbling along on stumps of legs using pieces of scrap wood as homemade crutches, or with clubs for hands from injuries sustained in the war or from a myriad of birth defects that the civilized world has learned to foresee and prevent. The streets were jammed with broken-down cars and washed-out potholes, and rimmed with miles and miles of open-air stalls selling cell phone cards, shoes, vegetables, furniture, used tires and anything else imaginable. People generally stopped and looked at us as we drove through, so we uneasily locked our doors and navigated using the high buildings of downtown on the horizon as a guiding landmark. Eventually, we found our way past the big stadium where Ali fought the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, and out to the recognizable main road and were back on our way, feeling relieved and a little embarrassed at our fear.

Within 5 miles of passing the airport on the eastern extreme of Kinshasa, we were stopped by a long queue of parked cars in the road. With no idea of what was causing the bottleneck, we waited until the heat got really uncomfortable, and I got out and walked to the front of the line and inquired of the soldier there. I barely could understand his reply (not being particularly fluent in French at that time), but it had something to do with a bridge that was down. I went back to the car and told my friends, who were by now surrounded by about 50 kids with big eyes, dirty, torn clothes, various sores and deformities, and all with hands out, palms up, saying “Money, gimme money, mun’dali” (mun’dali is Lingala for ‘white guy’). Like money would have done anything for them; they needed food and medical care. Some had climbed up to sit on the hood of the car, and several had pressed against the side windows, leaving smudges of dirt from their hands and faces. The consensus among the women in the car was to turn back for the familiarity of the campus, but the men vetoed, probably in an effort to regain some self-pride after our nervous drive through the urban zone, so we sat in the 100-degree temps waiting to see what would happen.

Soon, the soldier came down the line of cars and when he saw us besieged by the kids, he shooed them off and told us to pull out and move down the road. We edged our way into the masses of people walking in the driving lane and gently nudged our way to the front of the line where traffic was just starting to creep forward. Soon, we were working our way past a huge one-lane dirt bridge that construction crews were building over a wide gulley which had apparently flooded and washed out the road. There were a dozen workers sitting around and several others working with shovels, filling in dirt around a new culvert. Several huge Caterpillar bulldozers and a backhoe stood idle. The causeway was about 200 meters long and 50 meters tall, but the culvert they were putting in was only about one meter in diameter, so it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the road washed out again. We just motored through and continued on our journey, thankful for the air conditioning and open road.

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Living in Congo, Part IV - Military Danger. Riverman Buck's continuing adventures teaching and living in Africa. 5/04