Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  It was, indeed, an impressive agreement. Only seven pages long, shorter than a normal rental contract, it was the most important document concerning Congo since the ten-year plan of 1949. Congo would become a construction site unlike anything seen there since the 1950s. In the Western press the deal was often depicted as a “loan” from China, while in fact it was a tradeoff: ore for infrastructure. An exchange of that sort did not imply a return to a precolonial economy, but was a handy way to skirt around corruption: a hospital, after all, is not easy to slip into one’s pocket. But it was very much a tradeoff, with a crucial clause attached. Should the deposits fail to produce the quantity of ore hoped for, Congo would be obliged to meet the terms of contract by other means.

  As soon as the announcement was made, the West began screaming bloody murder. Neocolonialism! A new scramble for Africa! Rapacity disguised as win-win gobbledygook! To some, the contract seemed a twenty-first-century variation on the agreements Stanley had asked the village chieftains to sign. The Congolese had let themselves be hosed! It hadn’t even been discussed in parliament! It wouldn’t generate any jobs! Rumor had it that the Chinese were flying in their prisoners to do the work! Et cetera, et cetera.

  Some of these reservations were justified, but others were pure panic; panic in the face of this complex, up-and-coming world order, a world in which China was rapidly acquiring superpower status. It reminded one of the skittishness at the time of the Berlin Conference or at the start of the Cold War. Congo has been drawing the attention of foreign powers for a century and a half, and that has often led to tensions—between European and Arab traders around 1870, between European nation-states after that, between America and Russia during the Cold War, and now between China and the West. Every time a newcomer claims a position on the Central African chessboard, it results at first in suspicion and nervousness.

  But was it true, had the Congolese government been taken for a ride? It is hard to say. Inherently, there is no objective standard in trade by barter other than the mutual satisfaction of the trading partners. China was pleased to gain access to raw materials; Kabila was pleased with the promised reconstruction of his country. In any case, the contract had not been forced down his throat, but followed upon two months of vigorous negotiations in Beijing.53 Attempts to nevertheless quantify the fairness of the deal are doomed to fail as well. Whether 10 million metric tons (11 million U.S. tons) of copper for $9 billion in investments is a fair deal depends, after all, on the international price of copper. In light of the pronounced fluctuations on world markets in recent years, it may amount to $14 billion, but it could amount to $80 billion. Yet one thingis clear: China is not out to plunder the Katangan substrate in the short term, for the simple reason that China’s economic policy is characterized by gradualness and planning. Beijing had absolutely nothing to win by depleting and destabilizing Africa. On the contrary. The view of China as a quack physician offering a deathly ill patient a family pack of vitamin C in exchange for, say, a kidney and a lung, does not apply. China has started on a long, structural presence in Africa that will change the face of the world in the century to come.

  How democratic that presence will turn out to be is, of course, still very much the question. The Sino-Congolese contract was negotiated behind closed doors, without consulting parliament. And even though the Congolese parliament has, by now, had the opportunity to comment on it, its say in the matter has remained very limited. What’s more, the generous trade relations that China maintains with Zimbabwe and Sudan demonstrate that for Beijing human rights are no sacred criterion; no more, after all, than in China itself. For China, commercial interests currently take precedence over humanitarian ones. Although a permanent member of the UN Security Council—which gives it a great deal of power—China is, for example, too dependent on high-grade Sudanese oil to take exception there to al-Bashir’s regime. That sounds opportunistic, but it is no more or less opportunistic than the way France, Belgium, and the United States kept Mobutu in the saddle in the 1980s. Among Western regimes, respect for human rights dates only from the 1990s. And even then . . .

  The most stubborn opponents to the Sino-Congolese contract were the international financial institutions. The IMF and the World Bank were not pleased with the clause that stipulated that, should there be too little copper or cobalt in the ground, Congo would have to meet its obligations by different means. By putting up such collateral, Congo ran the risk of accumulating even greater debts . . . and it already had such a staggeringly huge pile. There was something to that. The country still drags along behind it the debts acquired during the Mobutu era, and by 2010 the deferred payments and interest accrued on them totaled an astronomical $13 billion. That equaled one-quarter of the country’s spending each year, more than 90 percent of its GNP, 150 percent of all exports, and more than 500 percent of government revenues (not including foreign aid).54 The horse trading with China now added a potentially huge slab of debt on top of all that.

  What the IMF and the World Bank did not say, however, was that they were in a position to do something about that burden. Year after year they continued to insist that it be repaid, even though Erwin Blumenthal had roundly stated in the 1980s that it would never happen. The unfairness of weighing down a newly elected government with the twenty- or thirty-year-old squandermania of a former dictator dawned only gradually on the Bretton Woods institutions. It was, to be sure, a huge sum of money and it would set a bad example to erase outstanding liabilities all too readily, but $13 billion effectively crippled all attempts at reconstruction. It was as though the new inhabitants of a tenement apartment were being charged for the exorbitant phone bills of the former tenants, who had hung on the line all the time. Rigobert Minani, a Congolese intellectual, once rightly claimed that the international financial institutions were “holding the national economy hostage.”55

  The reason the IMF clung to its demand that the debts be repaid was that the obligation was the only thing still providing the rich Western countries with a toehold in Congo. The IMF is international by name, yet it awards votes according to the financial contributions from member countries. That means that the United States and the European Union, as the major contributors, control almost half the votes; China, home to one-quarter of the world population, has only a 4 percent vote.56 Diplomatically speaking, the West had little voice in Congo’s affairs once the elections were over; the IMF, however, whose president is by statute always a European, acted as the ultimate big stick in posing conditions regarding anticorruption measures, fiscal matters, and monetary and economic policies. The debt might be allowed to dwindle, but not to disappear completely.

  As part of a large-scale aid program for “heavily indebted countries,” the IMF stated its willingness to forgo claims on $9 billion out of the total of $13 billion if Congo complied with a series of strict conditions. Those conditions included a revision of the contract with China. At first Kabila was unwilling but in early 2009 the government found itself so strapped for cash—due to the war against Nkunda and the low price of copper as a result of the world economic crisis—that it had hardly enough funds to finance two or three days of imports. Scattered across the bottom of the state coffers was only a measly $30 million. The IMF and the World Bank reacted with lightning speed and a donation of $300 million. Since then, the authorities in Kinshasa realize that it is prudent to continue the dialogue with those institutions and that China is not the country’s sole source of redemption. It is better for them to make sure their bread is buttered on both sides.

  In December 2009, after months of renewed negotiations, a deal was struck: the collateral clause was scrapped and in return China would lower its investments from $9 billionto $6 billion. The IMF promptly coughed up $150 million and announced that Congo was now much closer to remitting its debts: of the original $13 billion, the country now had to pay back “only” $4 billion.

  Meanwhile, India too is poised to enter into a business partnership with Congo, a cooperative arr
angement on which the IMF is sure to keep a close eye.57

  BEHIND THE HIGH WHITE WALL I could see the colossal machines for mixing asphalt: on October 17, 2008, I drove around the perimeters of the Chinese Railway Engineering Company (CREC) in Kinshasa’s outlying riverine district of Kinsuka. The CREC is one of the Chinese state-owned companies in the consortium with Congo and one of the biggest construction concerns in Asia, with one hundred thousand workers on its payroll. Kabila had given the company a huge terrain close to the riverside quarries and two other concessions in the city. Rumor had it that the CREC fired Congolese workers if they refused to obey orders, even when those orders were given in Mandarin. Their monthly wages of $150 are paid out at an extremely low rate of exchange, which means they actually take home only $70.58

  But there was no way I would be allowed in, I soon discovered, let alone carry out interviews on the grounds. All I got to see were those high white walls around the concession, hundreds of meters long. Driving around them to the rear, I saw that the concession bordered on a working-class neighborhood. There was only a sandy path leading to it. As I climbed toward the houses, a little boy of about four came running up to me. He looked at me, pointed his finger and said, loud and clear, because children like to name the things they know: “Chinois!”

  A generation is growing up in Kinshasa today for whom a European is more exotic than a Chinese. In Congo there are once again children, just as there were in the late nineteenth century, who have never seen a white man in real life. One finds them even in the working-class neighborhoods of Kinshasa. On any number of occasions I have noticed toddlers running away and shrieking at my monstrous appearance as I walked through their alleyways.

  Congolese adults, however, waver between East and West. Europe and America are still admired for their know-how, but many people wonder why they see so little of that, while the Chinese carry out one ambitious project after the other. They have the impression that the West is no longer interested. Still, the election of Barack Obama brought new hope. Old Nkasi couldn’t believe it when I spoke to him that first time, the day after America had elected its new president. At six in the morning after his historic acceptance speech, young people gathered at the busy Kintambo Magasin rotunda in Kinshasa and cheered: “He’s one of us! He’s one of us! He’s a Mutetela!” Because the president’s surname begins with an O, people thought he was a member of the tribe belonging to the Batetela, where names like Omasombo, Okito, and Olenga are common. But even those better informed about his lineage were convinced that a new chapter in African American relations had begun. And indeed, Hilary Clinton came to Goma, the first American secretary of state to visit the country since 1997. That she visited Congo and not Rwanda, which after all borders on Goma, made people hope that America would alter its uncritical pro-Rwandan policy. A special U.S. envoy was appointed for the Great Lakes region, and during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in December 2009 Obama explicitly referred to the sexual violence in Congo. Yet in actual practice, the new American government has as yet developed no coherent vision for Central Africa.59

  So then what about the Chinese? During my conversations I noticed that the Congolese often speak in ambivalent terms when it comes to the Chinese presence. Their view is a mixture of admiration and suspicion, a paradox that often expresses itself in mild mockery. In their social dealings, they see the Chinese as aloof, stiff, and uncongenial. They don’t smile much, many people feel; they don’t mix with us; thirty of them occupy the same house and they forget to live! The language barrier and the huge cultural differences, of course, do little to promote contact. Those who work for a Chinese boss adopt a subservient attitude, but laugh about him (not her, for there are no women) a little behind his back—an attitude no different from that with which European men were received a century ago. That does nothing to detract, however, from many people’s admiration for the speed with which the contracting companies go about their work. “Bachinois batongaka kaka na butu,” a humorous popular song says: the Chinese always do their building at night, and when you wake up in the morning another floor has been added.

  It took awhile for the actual work to get rolling, but people were impressed when the CREC—less than a year after the banking crisis—began renewing the sewers and the surface of Boulevard du 30 Juin in the center of Kinshasa, even if all the trees did have to be cut down and the arterial reduced to a four-lane road where many fatal accidents occur. The Congolese realize all too well that Kabila has farmed out his celebrated cinq chantiers to the Chinese in order to mask his own immobility, just as he has farmed out the war to the Rwandans and the MONUC. After all, he needs to have something to show before the 2011 elections arrive. Cinq chantiers? More like Cheng Chan Che! Whenever young people see a Chinese on the street or a Congolese woman wearing an Asiatic blouse, they will roar: “Cheng Chan Che!”

  IF THERE IS ONE PLACE IN CONGO where the awe for China becomes almost tangible, it is along the walk in front of the Chinese embassy in Kinshasa. Three mornings a week, long rows of Congolese crowd together here in the hope of obtaining a visa. Some of them arrive as early as five in the morning to be sure of a spot. Others pay one of the boys hanging around to save their place in line. Early one morning I myself once stood in line there for three hours. Most of the applicants turned out to be young women, applying for a Chinese visa not to settle there permanently, but to buy things: after all, if the Chinese come here to buy up our ore, we might just as well go there to buy their products straight from the wholesaler. What the China Amitié Company did, they could do too.

  It was an exhausting morning, but a fascinating one as well. The Chinese embassy is located right across the street from MONUC headquarters. The long row of applicants paid little heed to the white tank, in which a Pakistani blue helmet with an impressive handlebar mustache was guarding the entrance to the compound. He stood bravely at his machine gun, behind a wall of sandbags and thick rolls of barbed wire that the street children used as their laundry line. These women, however, had literally turned their backs on the United Nations and were putting their hope in the new savior, the People’s Republic of China.

  As I stood in line, I started up a conversation with Dadine and Rosemonde. Dadine was an unemployed, twenty-seven-year-old actress. She had heard about other women who went to Guangzhou, the big industrial town in southern China that in Cantonese is simply called “Canton.” In 2007 she tried her luck for the first time and spent a week there buying trousers, shoes, wigs, and body stockings. Back then it had been easy to get a visa, but after the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 the procedure had become much more stringent. She had left with only her handbag and come back with sixty-four kilos (140 pounds) of baggage. The sandals she had bought there for three dollars a pair she was able to sell in Kinshasa for nine, sometimes even fifteen dollars. She didn’t have a shop of her own. She simply went by the homes of friends or to the student hostels in the city. “My customers are able to buy original articles that are a lot cheaper than they’re used to, and suddenly I’m earning some money. It’s been good for my morale, I’ve become independent. A hundred dollars is no longer such a big deal for me. I still don’t have a husband, but there are definitely a lot more candidates these days.”60

  Rosemonde, an impish twenty-six-year-old, cherishes even greater ambitions. She and her younger sister have been going to China since 2006, to Guangzhou too. Their parents have died, she has a child. None of the people waiting out on the pavement went to Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Beijing; Guangzhou was the place to be. “I buy plates and glasses for restaurants, I buy ice makers, plasma screens, and computers. The trick is to find things that other people don’t already import, so you can demand a higher price. Every time I go I fill a sea container with merchandise, all on my own. The container comes in by ship to Boma, Matadi, or Pointe Noire. A shipment like that costs twelve thousand dollars, which is a lot of money, but in two years’ time I’ve earned fifty thousand dollars, and so has my sister. We’ve both bee
n able to buy our own homes.” Young women with the means to own their own property in Kinshasa: that is an absolute novelty. Just as women found new opportunities in the informal economy of the 1980s, today the globalized variation on that economy is offering new prospects as well.

  The Congolese market is being flooded with inexpensive Chinese goods. That has actually put an end to the local textile industry, one of the country’s last remaining process manufacturing industries. A wax chinois (a dyed fabric from China), the women tell me, can’t compare to the legendary wax hollandaise from Vlisco with which they once made their best clothes. “But what do you expect? A wax hollandaise cost $120, and a wax chinois only $5.” Because the clothing, televisions, and generators that are “made in China” have a strikingly short product life, the Lingala language now has a new adjective: nguanzu. It comes from Guangzhou and means “not particularly durable,” or “unreliable.” Meanwhile, a woman who cheats on her husband is now also said to be nguanzu.