Back at the Berlin Conference of 1885, it was decided that the Congo Free State was to be open to international trade. Competition between market and state still exists today, in fact more than ever. In those days the focus was solely on the purchase of raw materials, today it’s about the selling of products as well—even in a desperately poor country, there is a great deal of money to be made with the trade in little commodities like phone vouchers, bottles of soda pop, or bags of powdered milk. To win the souls of all those dispossessed, foreign companies colonize the public spaces of the destroyed country with a temerity only thinly disguised by the bright smile of slick marketing.
In October 2008, for the period of one week, I became a minor celebrity in Kinshasa almost without lifting a finger. Strangers came up to me on the street, saying they recognized me from my pictures and were surprised that, despite my status, I had no car of my own. Dolf van den Brink had called me a few days earlier. “We’re organizing a concert with Werrason in the cité. Feel like going along?” The performance was to take place in Bumbu, one of Kinshasa’s poorest neighborhoods. As we drove there in convoy, he explained things to me. “Bracongo has started playing dirty. They’re running spots saying that Bumbu has ‘fallen,’ and that Primus is no longer market leader there. That’s patently untrue, but we’ve been forced into the defensive. Now we’re going to demonstrate the opposite with something big. Not a commercial, not a campaign, but a free Werrason concert! It’s the first time he’s ever played in Bumbu. I’m expecting a big crowd.”38 The air-conditioned SUV swerved around potholes. Dolf told me that Primus had gone through different phases in its marketing. At first the baseline had been Pelisa ngwasuma, freely translated as: get the groove started. The emphasis on ambiance went down well in a war-torn country. Then they changed the color of the label to match Congo’s national colors: blue, yellow, and red. Now that the war was over, Primus had to manifest itself as the national beer, bar none. The state was rotten to the core, but national pride was apparently still intact. Bralima took skillful advantage of that. Meanwhile they had arrived at a new baseline: Primus, Toujours leader—Primus, Still the Leader—because the point was to make the newly won market leadership seem unshakeable. The desire for dominance was an important issue among the people, Dolf believed; they needed to know who is “the strongest.” He was going to Bumbu to make that clear.
Interesting, I thought; GSM operator Vodacom hammered on precisely the same themes: national feeling and leadership. Un réseau, une nation had been their baseline in Congo for years: one network, one nation. Now they are presenting themselves as Leader dans le Monde Cellulaire, leader of the world of cell phones. Their Congolese website states that “our best is better than the best of all the rest. Losing is not an option. We are one team, and competition is our sport.” Which company is the most Congolese? And who is the leader? Weren’t those also the central themes in the electoral battle that was rolled out between Kabila and Bemba? In July 2006 the elections were ready to take place and the two favorites for the presidency were at each other’s throats like pop stars. Bemba, still more warlord than statesman, accused Kabila of being a quasi-Rwandan without the necessary congolité—a bizarre claim when one realizes that Bemba himself is one-quarter European. As president, Kabila tried to rise above the tumult by saying that “he who carries eggs doesn’t bicker”—a statement that would haunt him for months. The reference was to the street children who went from bar to bar, balancing a box of hard-boiled eggs on their heads to sell as snacks. But after that comment, all of Kinshasa thought the president was a mean bastard. The brusque accusations back and forth resembled the rivalry between Werrason and Mpiana, or between Bralima and Bracongo. In the struggle for the country’s highest office, the notion of leadership was linked directly to national identity. Commercial and political slogans were cross-pollinating back and forth.
As we pulled into Bumbu, Dolf peered out the window. The working-class neighborhood was dark, but the bars and sidewalk cafés were packed. Contentedly, he noted that about 80 percent of the bottles on the tables were Primus. A little farther along we saw Bracongo trucks parked along the streets: the competitor was bound to be passing out thousands of bottles of Skol during and after the concert. Dolf even wondered aloud whether Bracongo might not have hired a few youth gangs to stir things up. Bralima, in any case, had brought along its own security. And that was no unnecessary precaution; the young people of Bumbu—in fact the only generation present—had turned out in force. The closer we came to the concert grounds (the band was already playing, we could hear them from far away), the more young people began recklessly clinging to one of the cars at the back of the convoy. It was an SUV with tinted windows, painted in the Primus colors. They seemed convinced that Werrason was inside it. After we had been forced to a halt for a moment amid an ecstatic crowd, we were able to take a detour to the rear of the podium. The cars parked facing out: all the better to drive away quickly if things got out of hand. We climbed out and walked to the podium, shaking a few hands along the way. In the half-light backstage, with the basses thumping so hard you felt it in your midriff, I didn’t recognize him right away. He looked much more normal than I remembered from the pictures, more timid too. “Monsieur Werrason,” I said, “bon concert.” “Mmm,” he replied. And there it was, my shortest interview ever.
We climbed onto the podium. A row of dancers, behind them a row of musicians, all wearing Primus T-shirts. A wall of sound. I waved to Kakol, the drummer. Behind him, the back wall of the stage was covered by a huge banner: Primus, Toujours Leader! I shielded my eyes with my hand to look out at the audience. The podium had been set up at a broad intersection. In all three directions: hundreds of meters of people all crushed together. I tried to count one section, in order to extrapolate. Thirty thousand people? Forty thousand? Someone handed me a bottle of Primus. Cameramen filmed the two white men on the podium. And then, then the seemingly shy man with the goatee came up the steel steps to the left of the podium. Slowly, almost listlessly, he stepped up to the spotlights. He peered out into the restless darkness. Thousands of arms were raised, fists crossed at the wrists. Igwe! Igwe! was the deafening sound.
After the show, Dolf van den Brink was delighted. Not only had Werrason pulled little teenage girls up onto the stage to dance the ndombolo for him, but on two occasion, between songs, he had held a bottle of Primus aloft to tell the crowd that Bumbu was still in the hands of Bralima. Invaluable brand promotion. The show had cost ten thousand dollars. That was peanuts. The footage would be broadcast on TV nonstop in the next few days. Bralima paid thirty or forty thousand dollars a month to Antenne A, one of Kinshasa’s biggest broadcasters, which used that in turn to pay its personnel. Bralima, in fact, owned the station.
“But I know you,” a number of Kinois said to me a few days later when I sat down beside them in the backseat of a dilapidated taxi. “You’re the white guy who was up on stage at the Bumbu concert. Don’t you have a car?” It says something about Bralima’s clout. In a city of eight million, where I happened to be staying, I was suddenly more famous than in the city of one million where I had been living for the last ten years.
I USUALLY BUY MY MOBILE PHONE VOUCHERS from Beko, on the shadowy Avenue des Batetela, one of the few truly pleasant streets in Kinshasa. Beko, who is in his early twenties and holds a degree in education, sits beneath a parasol from six in the morning until eight at night, selling prepaid cards for Tigo, Vodacom, CelTel, and CCT. Every day. On Sundays, however, only from eleven o’clock on, for he attends mass first. That is his only diversion. The tree-lined footpath along the Avenue des Batetela has a little street market. Sitting beside him is a female money changer, beside her an old woman who fries little fish that, for reasons I still don’t understand, are referred to as Thomsons. A little farther along is a boy who sells pocket diaries, ballpoint pens and shoelaces, beside a young woman deep-frying beignets over a charcoal fire. A beignet is the only thing many people eat here in the course of a
day. Tasty and filling.
On a good day Beko has a turnover of one hundred dollars, but less than eight dollars of that go to him. For every five-dollar voucher he sells, four dollars and sixty cents goes to the GSM operator, sometimes even as much as four seventy-five. “And it’s only the good customers who buy a five-dollar recharge,” he clarifies. All right, an eight-dollar profit, on the best of days. But Beko lives far away from the Avenue des Batetela, very far away. He is one of the 1.6 million people who commute to the city center each day in exhaust-belching, packed VW buses.39 His ride costs him hours of his time and one dollar and fifty cents. If he wants to eat something during the day, even if it’s only a chunk of manioc loaf with a little slice of fish, that easily costs him another dollar and a half. When he gets home he gives one dollar to the aunt he lives with, because his parents are dead. He is the sole breadwinner for his brothers and sisters. Of those eight dollars, he has already gone through more than half. And he is still not finished.
While we are talking, a loudmouth comes by and begins shouting at him and the other vendors. Without protest, Beko hands him two hundred Congolese francs. A little farther along is a man in a police uniform. “Officially, we’re not allowed to be here. He’s supposed to give us a fine, but he never does. Instead, he sics that man on us. If we give him two hundred francs, he leaves us alone. The only thing is, he comes by three or four times a day. If we don’t pay, he takes our wares. This way it only costs me a dollar or a dollar fifty.”40 Call it extortion or a form of ultradirect taxation, as long as the government doesn’t pay the policeman’s wages it won’t stop. Which is not to say that a police uniform is no longer a highly valuable asset. It guarantees its wearer a regular income, not from on high, but from the bottom up. No wonder that a trade has arisen in positions with the constabulary. Rumor has it that one can purchase a job with the police for a lot of money, the way one might take over a business.
Seven days a week, a little later on Sundays, the best years of Beko’s life are going by. Tigo has introduced another new service, he sees. For a pittance customers can receive a daily text message that, the company claims, will “brighten up your day.” Using Tigo Bible, you are sent a Bible verse each day; Tigo Foi provides religious counseling; Tigo Amour gives advice on your love life; Tigo Riche tells you how to make money. If you want cheering up, you can get it. The company offers no service with news flashes.
Beko laughs uneasily when I ask about his dream. “To become an ambassador,” he says guardedly. Politics fascinates him. At the newsstand he rents a paper each day: for a few cents he is allowed to read it for half an hour. Buying one is out of the question; a newspaper costs one dollar and they are a rarity in Kinshasa. The few that do exist have a circulation of no more than fifteen hundred, microscopic in a city of eight million. Outside the capital there is no printed news to be had. And the contents of the papers that do exist are generally meager. Le Potentiel and Le Soft do their best, but the rest are dominated by gossip and partisanship. Journalists accept pay from the ministers they write about.41 The layout is miserable, the quality of the printing depressing. But each day Beko hands his copy back neatly at the newsstand. Will his dream ever come true? He was twenty-two when I first met him in May 2007. “In Congo, people usually don’t live past forty-five,” he said with a wan smile, “c’est comme ça.” In that same year, Tigo grossed a profit of $1.65 billion.42
BEKO IS AN EXCEPTION. More than half of all Kinois consider themselves poorly informed, women even more than men. The only ones with a sense of being up to date are the men older than fifty with a university diploma, the last generation to receive a decent education.43 Yet there is no lack of media in Congo. Radio remains the most popular by far, television does particularly well in the cities, the Internet is bloodcurdlingly slow everywhere. At home, no one is on line. Surfing and drafting your résumé are things you do at Internet cafés, the so-called cybers—at least when the electricity hasn’t gone out.
The national broadcaster has been breathing its last for as long as anyone can remember, but in 2002 the MONUC, in cooperation with the Swiss NGO Fondation Hirondelle, set up Radio Okapi, a station with national coverage and editorial desks in ten cities. For years it has been the only national medium in Congo. Foreign and local journalists there press on courageously, day after day. Okapi reporters are among the best (and the best paid) in their profession. The daily news broadcasts are extremely worthwhile, but the annual $10 million price tag makes one wonder what will happen in the long run. Who is going to pay for that, once the United Nations leaves?
Television is everywhere in the big cities. Congolese men watch more than two and half hours a day, the women often more than three.44 During the 1 + 4 period, the medium experienced a remarkable boom. In February 2003 there were some twenty-five stations in Kinshasa alone; by July 2006, the month of the first round of presidential elections, there were thirty-seven.45 The vast majority of those were local broadcasters. One can begin a television station in Congo for less than twenty-five thousand dollars. Any self-respecting politician, entrepreneur or clergyman has his own station these days. Zapping past those channels is an educational experience, but not necessarily by reason of their content. Tropicana, Mirador, and Raga are commercial stations showing mostly music clips, interspersed with commercials, insofar as there is any difference. Digital Congo is President Kabila’s station, run by his twin sister and rivaled at that time by Canal Congo and Vice President Bemba’s Canal Kin. With the means at their disposal, Antenne A and the RTNC try to remain informative. Ratelki belongs to the Kimbanguists; Amen TV and Radio TV Puissance represent more recent Christian movements. More than half the channels belong to the Pentecostal churches.46 Pausing at RTVA, it is good to know that the station belongs to Pastor Léonard Bahuti, the man who admonishes his (largely female) viewers to swear off jewelry, nail polish and hair attachments. RTAE belongs to “Général” Sony Kafuta “Rockman,” the devout leader of l’Armée de l’Eternel. RTMV is in the hands of his archrival, “Archbishop” Fernando Kutino, founder of l’Armée de la Victoire, who has been in prison for years. All these religious broadcasters switch back and forth between sermons and soap operas. The dramatic installments deal with moral issues concerning life and survival in present-day Kinshasa (poverty, adultery, witchcraft, fertility, success) and emphasize that only charismatic Christianity can offer redemption amid the chaos of the day. In 2005 I was present when one such soap opera was recorded. What was striking was not so much the modest means (one camera, one lamp, one microphone) or the production-line approach (shooting today, editing tomorrow, broadcasting the next day), but the extreme youth of the actors. Young people in their twenties were doing their best to grant meaning to their lives and those of the viewers by means of fanatical religious discourse. The oddest station one comes across while zapping is NTV. There one watches as Pastor Denis Lessie, the owner, holds up his hands and invites you to place yours on the TV screen, touching his, because the Lord moves in ways that include optical fiber and airwaves. Hear the crackling of the Almighty, feel the hair rise on the back of your neck at the touch. Recently he asked his believers, by way of benediction, to sprinkle water on the picture tube or plasma screen.
I LEAFED THROUGH THE WELL-THUMBED GUESTBOOK of the little hotel in the interior. There hadn’t been many foreign guests before me. In fact, only one: Andrew Snyder from Florida. His handwriting was clear and firm. Occupation? Pastor. Reason for visit? Crusade. Ah, bon. The American evangelists’ crusades had apparently reached the provincial towns as well. It made me wonder how Fernando Kutino was getting along these days.
Kutino was a case unto himself. In Kinshasa in the early nineties he had seen the arrival of the first generation of American evangelists, a new kind of missionary who brought a charismatic variation of Christianity: Pentecostalism. Mobutu was so incensed over the power of the Catholics who had organized the March of Hope that he allowed other clerics to come and spread God’s word. Divide and con
quer; that went for souls too. Fernando Kutino, still an unremarkable boy at the time, heard about Jimmy Swaggart, the American TV evangelist who had achieved world fame in the West with his weepy confession of sexual infidelity. In Kinshasa Swaggart became known for his rousing services that brought many thousands into a state of ecstasy. But the German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke came to town as well, as did the Dutchman John Maasbach, married men in neat suits who bore witness to their faith with lively shows and impeccable coiffures. They had not been sent out by a central ecclesiastical authority but operated on their own initiative, often assisted by their families. These “reborn Christians” hooked up with the local prayer groups that gathered weekly to lift up their hearts unto the Lord outside the regular Sunday services. It did not take long before native men of the cloth arose as well and Fernando Kutino was a key figure among them.
Kutino put on a tie, called himself “Reverend” and delivered a message that ran quite counter to the traditional churches and rituals. It was the starting shot for the Congolese églises du réveil, the churches of the awakening, the revival, the new beginning. The curious were drawn in by the emphasis placed on charismatic worship, in which “healing” and “salvation” could be obtained during moments of intense religious rapture. With its rituals of trance that the believers experienced as the presence of the Holy Spirit, Pentecostalism was a variation of Christianity that closely matched the spiritual cosmos of African ancestor worship. Praying aloud, casting out demons, speaking in tongues: it reminded one of Simon Kimbangu’s rise in 1921. Then too, fervent faith had been a remedy against witchcraft. Then too, people had begged for instant healing.
But Kutino added another layer, that of la prospérité. Redemption was not only spiritual, but also material by nature. During the bitter crisis years of the 1990s, this was the message people wanted to hear. What good did it do the poor, in spirit or otherwise, to be blessed when their children were dying of starvation? When your measly banknote turned out to be worth only half as much as it had when you got up that morning? No, not poverty but riches were the evidence of contact with the exalted. And to demonstrate his piety, Kutino decked himself out richly. A man of God, after all, could hardly appear in rags before his big boss? Seated on a bombastic throne he called on his followers each week to give gladly to his church. Ostentatious donorship became evidence of devotion and virtue. Kutino accepted the luxury automobiles and intergalactic GSMs with good grace. “I love money,” he told a French journalist, “it helps you to live well.”47 Revolting? Yes, but no different from the forces in medieval Europe that had seen to the building of cathedrals while the members of their religious orders walked around in gold brocade and filigree. Postmaterialism is a luxury only the wealthy can afford. The pauper looks up to the pimp. Just as Papa Wemba had brought a spark of hope to youth culture with la Sape, so did Kutino introduce a notion of prosperity via the detour of faith. Kutino himself, with his gold watches and crocodile-leather shoes, was nothing but a sapeur. He embodied success, strength and welfare.48 He was the Werrason of the liturgy. In December 2000 he brought a crowd of more than 100,000 believers to the heights of rapture in the Stade des Martyrs. His services were adorned with live pop music and offered plenty of opportunity for singing and dancing. “Sing, sing, sing, dance, dance, dance for the King of Kings,” a religious pop artist told his audience, “because if you people don’t do it here, it must be because you do it elsewhere, in the world of darkness.”49 Kinshasa had become the devil’s city; only God granted mercy and Kutino was his treasurer.
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