So, last weekend, the two men who had done the trip last year and another new teacher decided to head out and spend the night at Bombo Lumene Park, do some fishing, and see if the situation in the countryside had changed at all. We left on Saturday morning, and again got hopelessly lost making the shortcut around town. However, this time it all felt considerably more friendly and safe. The same people were walking around in the same colorful clothing, the streets were still clogged with pedestrians and broken-down cars, and the roads were still beat up and potholed, but a year had passed and it all felt more familiar to us. We found our way past the stadium and to the main road using the downtown building as landmarks again, and soon were rolling past the airport. We were across the new causeway within minutes, and realized that the road had been freshly paved from town and out at least that far. The new tarmac didn’t last long, however we quickly found ourselves at the pagoda, past the army/police bridge, then at the fork in the road. Amazed at how close it all seemed to Kinshasa this time, we happily headed down the correct road and soon were zooming past the broke down trucks and colorful locals carrying their loads on their heads. Little children ran up to the side of the road when they saw us and waved or held out their hands for money, not very practical at 80 kilometers per hour.

Within a few hours, we were approaching the blown-up bridge, and I was able to tell the story about it that I had heard it at school. Apparently, the army destroyed it during the revolution when the rebels were approaching in an effort to keep them out of Kinshasa. The head of the police in Kinshasa, knowing that the rebels were going to find a way across anyway, contacted the head of the rebel army, Laurent Kabila, and told him of a ferry crossing a few kilometers downstream. He asked for asylum and personal safety when they got to Kinshasa. However, Mobuto heard of his treachery and had him killed that day, just hours before the army arrived and Mobuto fled.

The soldier guarding the bridge did not stop us this time, but instead stood at attention and saluted us as we went past. The same washerwomen and fishermen stared up from the fallen bridge as we crossed, and we again encountered a slow-moving truck as we climbed up to the plateau on the other side, surrounded by its regiment of joggers. Soon, we were rolling through the market town, the same stalls selling the same assortment of goods, but there were about five cargo trucks parked at the edge of town and hundreds of people were strolling about. All the garages were busy with repairs. Another half hour out of town, and we were driving down the access road to Bombo Lumene, amazed at how much the country had opened up and how easy the drive was this time.

We spent the night, I got to sleep in my beloved tent on the edge of the big valley that held the river, staring up through the mesh ceiling at Mars, and the next morning I was casting flies in the swift current to the elusive m’boto. I only managed to hook a half-dozen smaller ones, about 5 inches or so, and to the amazement and amusement of the dozens of local kids who came down to stare at me, I tossed them back. The rope bridge had been repaired, and I made several hair-raising crossings, holding on to the vine handrails as the river rushing beneath gave me vertigo. A steady line of ants had adopted the bridge as their personal crossing, so I went downstream of the bridge and cast a #18 black ant pattern and hooked a few more unsuspecting fish. A local fisherman showed me his catch: m’boto about 50 cm long. I was impressed, but could not match his netting skills.

We left around noon to come back to Kin, and passed through the market town one more time. The cluster of trucks was gone, but on the outskirts of town, several hundred feet down the hill, one of the trucks lie across the road on its side like a dead animal, its cargo scattered. Men were shoveling rice and flour into sacks with shovels and hands, and people were gathering their goods and starting to walk back towards town. One man, holding a young boy by the hand, pleadingly held up a large bunch of overripe bananas at us. The look on his face told an angst-filled story that still haunts me: the Congolese version of Hemingway’s “Old Man and the sea.” I imagined that this guy was taking his son into Kinshasa from the bush to sell some bananas and start to teach the boy how the market worked in this new, emergent economy. I imagined him saving for months, scraping together the double fare, paying it to the driver with hope and expectation for the future, and the boy and him proudly and carefully loading their sacks of bananas on the truck, hanging them from the side to avoid getting damaged from all the riders on the truck. I imagined them waving goodbye to his wife, then starting the long journey across the jungle on the ravaged road. I imagined many times him sitting with the boy on the side of the road for days as the truck driver repaired flat tires and broken front ends, desperately watching his cargo of bananas begin to ripen. Several breakdowns later, they were just a half day away from Kinshasa, and the truck brakes fail on a hill and the truck turns over. Thankfully, the boy is unhurt, but the bananas are destroyed. All he can salvage is this one overripe bunch, worthless at this market town surrounded by banana trees, and now he will not make it to Kinshasa, his crop has ruined, and he does not have the fare for passage back to his village for him or his son. All he has is this one bunch of worthless, overripe bananas.

We worked our way past the truck and sat with our thoughts as we sped back to Kinshasa. About 50 km out of town, we decided to explore an exit and maybe find someplace to buy something to eat or to drink. The exit dumped us onto a main road of a large village that was hosting some sort of festival, with a flimsy stage set up and dozens of beer gardens set up by the local brewery, with colorful plastic tables and seats. People were just starting to arrive, so we joyfully parked, pulled up some seats, and ordered a round of drinks. Several children came and sold us peanuts, still in the shells and lightly baked, so we listened to the rollicky Congolese music, feeling a sense of elation. We bought a bottle of the local palm wine off a small girl, and took turns sipping the sweet liquid and washing it down with warm local beers, feeling the warm buzz start to rise along with our spirits. For the first time in a year, I felt like we were really in CONGO!

I wandered down the street and found some ladies selling liboke, my favorite local dish made from fish baked in banana leaves with palm oil and pilipili, and bought one. I ate it back at the table, enduring some ribbing from my partners about my fearlessness at eating local food. Just then a woman came by with a large basket on her head with what appeared to be black dates. However, these dates were squirming all around: they were palm grubs, each one about the size of your big toe, and pulsing and squirming all over each other. One of the guys dared me to eat one, and truthfully I had always wondered about them, so I bought a pack of three. I asked the lady to demonstrate how to eat them. She first bit off the pea-sized head and spit it out. Then she squeezed the body as she sucked out the innards, leaving the skin behind like a limp wet sack. The skin is edible, but it’s by far the least tasty part, so for the second one I just tossed the skin away. The guts tasted a lot like warm mayonnaise, with a hint of earthy flavor. Not really all that bad, but I prefer the liboke. My friends were satisfyingly grossed out, but I had earned the looks and admiring glances of several Congolese near me who had also bought some.

The table next to us was rapidly filling up with some very attractive women and a few flashy men, definitely from the city, and all covered with gold jewelry and consuming cases of beer. One man in particular was paying for everything, and we wondered what the story was, as he was not at all who I would have guessed was the flashy ‘alpha male’ of the group. However, the others kept calling him ‘Chef’, and eventually one of the women saw us looking at their group and started chatting with us. She said that he had just taken over as chief of their tribe that day, and this was his girlfriend and her friends that he was treating to a day on the town. I went over and congratulated him, shaking his hand, and she translated that he wanted to buy our table some beers since he had seen me eat the grubs and knew we were “real Congolese mun’dalis”. We happily accepted, and proceeded to get rather hammered at the kind generosity of the Chef.

A short while later, in that giggly lighthearted drunk mindset, we started strolling around the festival, which by now had gotten into full swing with hundreds of partiers, rocking rhythmical music and wonderful smells of roasting mystery meat. We were the only mundales there, and some dressed-up clowns spotted us and encircled us, putting on their really funny and occasionally obscene act. One clown, in whiteface, had a lit cigarette and kept flipping it into his mouth, making funny faces, then flipping it out again, still lit. Another had some sort of stick in his belt under his shirt, and wiggled his hips making his belly look like it was wiggling all over the place. I wiggled my own middle-aged white guy belly, and he and I made fun of each other for a few minutes for the mirth of the people watching. A pair of other clowns did a Michael Jackson-style dance, in perfect synchronization, then fell down on their butts at the end, leaving the crowd laughing. The clowns eventually worked their way off, a few franks richer for their time, and we decided that we were plenty buzzed and needed to start heading back to the compound before dark. Just then, another pair approached us. One was a huge Congolese man, dressed sort of similarly to Uncle Sam, with a stovepipe hat and overcoat, carrying a bicycle wheel. The other was a midget, no more than 3 feet tall, with short arms and bowed legs, dressed identically. Wordlessly, the midget stepped in front of us, held out a hand to stop us, then did a perfect handstand, his little legs sticking up in the air. The giant spun the bicycle wheel and perched it on the midgets butt, leaving it spinning like a gyroscope. The midget kicked his legs and started singing a song. In a fog of surrealistic amazement and bewilderment, we fell backwards and groped our way outside the crowd and decided that it definitely was time to get out of town. Finding the car, we paid off the kids who had decided to wash it then guard it against other kids who would want to wash it again, and headed back to Kinshasa and the school, wondering what direction the country would be headed in the year to come. It had been a weekend to remember.

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