Congo
Page 27
It was the age of highways, nylon stockings, and potted plants. The new world order prompted a certain belief in progress, yea, perhaps even a certain good cheer. Walloons and Flemings left for “the Congo” in great numbers. This was the relève, the fresh blood for which men like Drachoussoff had waited so anxiously during the long years of the war. By the end of that war there were only 36,080 white people in Congo; by 1952 their numbers had risen to 69,204, more than ever before.41 Colonial officials and highly trained industrial workers, all of them men, began bringing their wives to Congo in increasing numbers. To the great relief of the church the era of the menagère was drawing to a close, although this left behind a few thousand children of mixed parentage, who often had no place in either world. The mother was almost always Congolese, the European father usually a Belgian in government service, but Greek and Portuguese men sired children by native women as well. Those Greeks and Portuguese were usually self-employed shopkeepers or restaurateurs. If the father acknowledged his natural son or daughter, the child would receive a European upbringing and passport. If not (and that was in nine cases out of ten), the child would remain with its mother in the neighborhood or village, where it was usually regarded as an outsider: too white to be black, too black to be white.42 After the war, however, the number of Eurafrican births fell sharply. The newcomers from Belgium brought their families with them or had children in the colonies: blonde, fair-skinned, and freckled children in short pants, who chased lizards on the lawn before their villa and were more familiar with mangoes than with apples.
But for the Congolese population the changes were quite few. Essential reforms aimed at more rights (with regard to political participation and socioeconomic position) were very slow in coming.43 In daily life there were no indications of any new pact between blacks and whites. The colonial trinity still championed the gradual education of the broad masses. Technically speaking, an elite could very well have been cultivated within a short period, but the authorities feared that such an elite would become alienated from the rank and file. All the people, the colonizer felt, should first ascend to an initial level of “civilization” before the next stage began. Teaching the masses to read and write seemed more prudent than cultivating a thin top layer that would then receive political rights.44 Besides, had the bulk of the Congolese themselves ever asked to take part in government? Well, there you had it!
The fact that they did not ask for political power, however, did not mean that they were happy as ever. The native’s political apathy was more an indicator of a lack of education than of any surplus of satisfaction.
In addition, daily life bore no signs whatsoever of rapprochement between Belgians and Congolese. Instead, the gap was widening. The fresh batch of colonial arrivals snuggled down in new and comfortable villas and lived in greater luxury than ever before. Their residential neighborhoods reminded one more of Knokke or Spa back in Belgium than of Central Africa. At the end of the working day they spent their time with their families; on the weekend their friends came by to barbecue or play bridge. Beer was kept in a refrigerator. (Electric fridges, no less: the age of pioneers was truly over!) An increasing number of them had cars, which they washed on Sunday mornings with the garden hose. The Europeans’ Congo began resembling the middle-class, suburban California of the 1950s. Convivial enough, without a doubt, but an expatriate community that talked more about Africans than with them. Interest in the local culture waned and the working knowledge of one or more native languages disappeared. Vladimir Drachoussoff viewed this with regret:
Officials who, outside their professional duties, show any interest in the native are few and far between. Family life, more comfortable furnishings, the possibility of (and consequently the desire for) a life almost as one would live it in Europe have edged out the old broussard, with all his weaknesses and faults, who went from post to post, talked to the village elders and finally understood them and let himself be understood.45
The Belgian-Congolese community became a fantasy, gradually overtaken and outstripped by an increasingly closed Belgian colonial community. The pith helmet was discarded, the tall tales by a glass of whisky beneath the Coleman lantern disappeared. The Congo became petit-bourgeois. Many of the women never went to the cité, the only blacks they knew were the boy and the chauffeur. White children often grew up in an atmosphere of latent racism. By 1951 things had reached such a point that the Permanent Commission for the Protection of Natives drew up a desideratum, calling for “schooling and games that will teach white children respect for individual humans, as that concerns the native family and black children.”46 That a venerable institution like the commission had to turn its attention to matters such as games of tag and hide-and-seek said a great deal.
Rare were the Europeans who succeeded in summoning up deep empathy for the Congolese perspective. And no one took that empathy as far as the Flemish Franciscan Placide Tempels. He was active in Katanga, in ways that included an attempt to fathom the profound disgruntlement of the mineworkers there. As early as 1944 he turned his attention to the uprisings in the colony, and wrote a courageous, but much-maligned essay entitled “La philosphie de la rébellion”:
This is the apogee of native disillusionment. He [the native] has allied himself with us in order to become one of us; but instead of being regarded as a son of the family, he is seen as nothing but a wage slave. Now he knows himself to be rejected for good, turned away as a son, classified as non-incorporable.47
No one had looked at it that way before. His standard work, Bantu Philosophy, appeared in 1945. The English and French translations made him world famous; Jean-Paul Sartre read his book with interest. His attempt to understand African cultures from the inside out introduced the concept of “force” as central principle. His insights called for a totally different brand of colonialism: “We thought we had to educate big children, which would have been relatively easy. But suddenly it becomes clear to us that we are dealing with fully developed human beings, with self-aware sages pervaded with an all-inclusive philosophy of their own.”48 His razor-sharp analysis caused Tempels to run into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities. He was recalled to Flanders from 1946 to 1949. It was a sort of relegation (forced exile), this time not of a Kimbanguist to a village in the jungle, but of a visionary Catholic to a monastery in Sint-Truiden.
Things did indeed remain calm in Congo between 1946 and 1956, but it was a ghastly calm, a relative repose that spoke more of old fears than of new hope. Above the gardens of the colonial villas where on Sunday afternoons the sound of tinkling glassware arose, dark clouds were gathering. But no one saw it, not even the freckled son on the lawn, holding a lizard prisoner beneath a glass jar. It was the quiet before the storm.
WHERE WOULD THE TEMPEST OF RESENTMENT FIRST BURST LOOSE? The countryside had reason enough for protest. The rural population still lived under miserable conditions. The fields lay neglected. The prodigious war effort had posed an obstacle to subsistence farming. Malnutrition was widespread. Hunting had ground to a halt. Colonial officials had to encourage the people to resume the gathering of caterpillars, termites, and grubs, a traditional source of proteins.49 At those spots where cattle were raised, after all, the beef was systematically reserved for the mines. The ten-year plan included an extensive program for getting native agriculture back on track. The goal was to help local communities with the use of modern agricultural techniques and means of production (the so-called paysannats indigènes), but those efforts met with little success. The countryside was and remained dirt poor. Rural impoverishment in Congo appeared not after independence, but during the colonial period itself. Birthrates were extremely low. Although rampant population growth is a problem in Africa today, dwindling natality was a cause for permanent concern in the Belgian Congo during the first half of the twentieth century.
So much misery might have led to social protest, but it did not. Or rather: that protest assumed a different form. People did not rise up, they ran away
. The postwar years in Congo were characterized by the massive abandonment of the countryside. On an unparalleled scale, people began moving to the urban agglomerations. Kinshasa, with its 50,000 inhabitants in 1940, mushroomed into a city of 300,000 by 1955.50 Young people had already begun migrating voluntarily to the cities in the period between the wars, but now they left en masse. After the war, 70 percent of the countryside had a population density of fewer than four inhabitants per square kilometer (about 6.5 inhabitants per square mile).51
Who was supposed to take the initiative for protest? Those with dreams went and pursued them elsewhere. Those who remained behind were often exhausted and apathetic. The rural population was aging rapidly; by 1947 an estimated 40 percent was over fifty.52 An enormous percentage, in light of the relatively low life expectancy. Those elderly people were uneducated and bowed passively to colonial authority. There were no agricultural cooperatives or unions, and no social structures that could watch over the interests of people in the countryside. The only form of social organization they knew was tribal, but that was in a state of advanced decay almost everywhere. The chief no longer had any moral authority, but was now an arriviste who did the colonizer’s bidding.
So what about the cities? Was sedition running hot there? Did the confluence of dreams result in a fist clenched in defiance? Not right away. For many, the move to the city truly did provide new opportunities. Not that the cities flowed with milk and honey, but in any case they were better than where they came from. And some of those new urbanites had the devil’s own good fortune.
LONGIN NGWADI WAS EIGHTY when I found him in Kikwit. I had been searching for him for months, hoping he was still alive. When I finally met him he was washing himself in the brown water of the Kwilu River. His torso was skinny and sunken, his washcloth a completely ragged piece of green cloth. It was not simply threadbare, it was nothing but thread. Was this the man I’d been looking for? His face seemed longer than what I remembered from the historic photo. Only when he walked could you see that he had once been a fanatical soccer player. He had the soccer player’s typical bowed legs and waddling walk.
He lived in a clay house. A huge eucalyptus tree grew beside the path to his door. Chickens pecked at the red earth, a goat kid wandered about, bleating at nothing in particular. Laundry was hanging in the sun to dry. As the wind picked up, the colorful fabric began to billow. Trouser legs snapped. Sleeves flapped. It looked like a crowd cheering along the sidelines, or along a boulevard where royalty or a celebrity was passing by. I looked at the sky. It just might rain. Longin invited me into his house, had me sit down in a plastic chair. It was very dark inside. I moved closer to the door, so that I would have enough light to write by. A few of his grandchildren stood in the doorway, staring at me with big eyes. When he chased them away, they scattered in every direction, reeling with laughter. The first drops began to fall.
“Rain! For the first time in two weeks!” He beamed. “This is a blessing. The good Lord blesses this conversation.”
He was born in Luzuna, a village along the Kwilu, in 1928, and was baptized by the Jesuits at the Catholic mission post at Djuma. His father was a carpenter. “Just like Joseph!” He built chairs, doors, and school desks for the Belgian missionaries. His mother tilled the soil and raised manioc. They still ate well in those days. Rice, manioc, and fish, but also crayfish, grubs, mushrooms, and zucchini. What a difference with today! “Now we only eat once a day. It’s always rice and beans. Or manioc and beans. We have meat only rarely. And we never eat fish anymore.”
The sky clouded over. In the distance we could hear the rumble of thunder. It became so dark that I could barely read my own notes.
Longin went on talking imperturbably. His parents were already Catholics by the time he was born, he said. He was the second of three children. It was in Djuma that he first saw a car, a pickup that belonged to the nuns. “The white man is intelligent, I told myself. I congratulated the priest.” That was also where he went to school. The missionaries ran the primary schools throughout the colony, greatly assisted by local teachers. Secondary education was limited either to vocational training or—for an infinitely smaller group—to seminaries. The classic form of secondary school, aimed at providing a broader education, did not exist yet. The first such schools were set up only in 1938. But for a long time, in other parts of Congo, one simply became either a cabinetmaker or a seminarian. Longin followed a technical curriculum. “I was supposed to become a mechanic, to work on the Lever concessions, but I didn’t feel like being dirty all the time.” At the age of sixteen he left for Kikwit. He badly wanted to become a priest. “But the padre said: You’re already too old for that. So I quit school and went back to my village.”
It’s hard for us to imagine just how frustrating that rejection must have been. Going to seminary was not only the sole possibility for continuing one’s studies, but priesthood was also the highest social position a Congolese could occupy. Then you were monsieur l’Abbé.
Longin showed me an old color photograph of himself. In it he was wearing a purple bishop’s robe and sitting on a throne, looking earnestly at the camera. “That cassock is worn out, but I used to wear it every Sunday around town. Whenever I had a vision, I told people about it. Back then everyone in Kikwit called me Monseigneur.” He has always had something with religion. Christianity, of course, his Christianity.
Just as Simon Kimbangu had begun to preach once the Protestants no longer wanted him as catechist, so Longin Ngwadi adopted the cassock after the Catholics refused to consider him for the priesthood.
The first drops began to fall, fat, heavy raindrops that made dents in the earth the size of marbles. Then the storm broke loose. The rain gushed over Kikwit and whipped at the thin roofs of huts and houses. Thunder and lightning crashed down in tandem. The sky burst open. In every tropical storm there comes a moment when the thunder no longer growls but shrieks. That moment had now arrived.
Longin threw his hands in the air and prayed to the Almighty, as a thin tendril of saliva rolled down his chin: “Seigneur, you are the one who has sent us Papa David. We ask of you: please, could you make a little less noise, so that we can continue our conversation? Merci et amen!”
Then, as though nothing had happened, he went on: “In 1945 I went to Kinshasa. I was seventeen. My father gave me money for the boat, my mother gave me food to take along. From Luzuna I walked to Djuma. There I took the packet boat. The boat trip took four or five days. First over the Kwilu, then the Kasai, and finally over the fleuve [Congo River] itself.”
Longin was one of many tens of thousands of young men who left for the capital. Most of them moved in with family or friends who were already living there, but he had no contacts. “I didn’t know anyone when I got to Kinshasa, no one at all. But a night watchman called to me to come onto the patch of ground he was guarding. It was someone from my own region. I was allowed to sleep on the ground, out in the open.”
It didn’t seem like a particularly propitious start to his life in the city.
“Soon after that I got my first job, with Papa Dimitrios. He was a Greek Jew and he owned a department store. He had me do some arithmetic to test me, then said I could stay. My job was to sell trousers and shirts, women’s textiles, soap, sugar, all kinds of things. He found a room for me, close to the Jardin Botanique. After three months I already had a mattress, sheets, blankets, two chairs, pots and pans, and cutlery. Dimitrios gave me a lot of presents. I worked for him for three years. After that I started working at the Économat du Peuple, a big shop with seven floorwalkers. I only stayed there for a year. They threw me out because I sold some sausage that was already spoiled.”
It was nothing compared to the office of the priesthood, but he was pleased with his new life in Léopoldville. His dubious success as sausage salesman was more than compensated for by a very different talent. “I played for Daring for four years. Under Tata Raphaël.” Daring was one of the city’s most successful soccer clubs, set up by Fa
ther Raphaël de la Kéthulle—a name familiar to us by now—in 1936. The club still exists today under the name Daring Club Motema Pembe, and is the premier soccer club in Congo. “I played on the same team for a long time with Bonga Bonga, the first Congolese to play in the Belgian soccer competition. He played for Charleroi, for Standard. He was our Pele! Our matches in Kinshasa were always held at the Kintambo velodrome. I was number 9, I was a striker. Tata Raphaël would stand on the sidelines and watch me play, smoking his pipe and shaking his head. He couldn’t believe his eyes. I was like a snake!”
To underscore his words, he hopped up and began—on his octogenarian legs—to dribble around his darkened living room. Beneath the low ceiling he performed a whole series of fakes. He still had it. Left, right, a backheel kick, a spin. He illustrated it all in slow motion, while outside the thunder roared on incessantly. Meanwhile, I could see the rainwater running down his living-room walls. It was not trickling, it was running. Longin paid no attention to it. “My nickname was Élastique, the rubber band. That’s what everyone called me back then. Élastique the forward, number 9 for Daring.”
But that was not the end of his remarkable life story. In the early 1950s the city had another surprise in store for him. “Pétillon was appointed governor general.” That was in 1952. “He asked five people to come to the Maison des Blancs. That was where all the secrets of the Congo were kept. The white people gathered there to govern Congo. It was right beside the Memling Hotel. Only calm, intelligent and serious people came there. It was the cercle des européens. It was my job to wait on them. ‘S’il vous plait.’ ‘Merci.’ ‘S’il y a quelque chose, vous me le dites.’ [Please. Thank you. If there’s anything you want, let me know.] The hours were long, but I got fifty Congolese francs when I was finished. Of the five Congolese who were called in, I was numero uno. I was the most polite, the most well-mannered. So Pétillon said that I could become his boy maison [house servant]. I went with him to the governor’s mansion.”