Congo
Page 70
Rosemonde wore a jumper printed with the words Dior, j’adore; no, what it said was Dior, j’adore—after all, with so many ideograms of his own one can hardly expect a Chinese factory worker to master the Roman alphabet as well. On the streets of Kinshasa, women who frequent China as often as they do clearly go dressed differently too. More flamboyant, more extravagant, almost like pop stars. They stand out in a crowd. A young woman in a miniskirt or white boots is almost certainly a Guangzhou trader. “Elles sont ‘guangzhouifiées,’” they’ve become Guangzhou-ified, people say. But Rosemonde has adopted the real hallmark of the new Congolese female. She rolls up the sleeve of her Dior, j’adore jumper to show me her bare shoulder. There, hard to see against her dark skin, is the pride of this third millennium: a tattoo. “They’re so good at it over there. You should really go and see for yourself.”61
CHAPTER 15
WWW.COM
A HIGHWAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, BUT THAT’S NOT the way it feels. Even after midnight, the cabs weave an invisible web as they glide from one lane to the other in search of the fastest way through. Compared to Kinshasa, however, the traffic is quiet as a graveyard. Not much honking. No rumbling DAF trucks of prehistoric vintage, driving at a snail’s pace and discharging a cloud of diesel fumes thick as marsh gas. No battered VW vans with thirty passengers or more on wooden benches, the last row dangling their legs out the back. And absolutely no holes the size of a volcanic crater in the asphalt. The green and white cab skims over a busy eight-lane highway through endlessly expanding suburbs, past drab residential housing blocks. Closer to the center of town we cross highway overpasses suspended between office buildings and apartment complexes. Sometimes there is a highway above us and one below. A vertical loom. And below, much further below, we see little food stands with lanterns and bright-red neon signs. Guangzhou.
I’m sharing the taxi with three Congolese; we’re on our way in from the airport. We left Kinshasa a day ago. Kenya Airways brought us first to Nairobi, where we waited for seven hours, and then, after a stop in Bangkok, to Guangzhou, seven time zones to the east. The other flight path goes by way of Dubai. From its hub at Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Airlines also uses that route. In the last few years both airlines have started offering almost a dozen weekly flights between the African continent and southern China, flights that leave with an empty hold and return full to the brim. “Why would we take clothes with us? We can buy them there, can’t we?”
The first time out, Dadine had been a bit wary. “Right after takeoff I went to the toilet. I hid all my money and my passport beneath my clothes, because I’d heard you had to watch out for the Nigerians. They drug you with something and then they take everything you have. I had fifteen hundred dollars with me that time: the big traders go with as much as twenty thousand dollars in their pocket. You have to stay on your toes.”
The cab driver is in no danger. Plastic bars have been installed behind his and the passenger seat. We, prisoners in the backseat, are kept entertained. The seats are comfortable, and at the base of the plastic bars is a built-in TV screen showing cartoons and commercials for skin cream. The volume is turned down low. One of the Congolese is up in front, talking to the driver about the fare. They’ve been at it for twenty minutes already. He, Georges, speaks fluent Cantonese. After a few years in Guangzhou he has the language down pat. I knew that almost all Congolese are multilingual and learn new languages easily, even when they are older, but that a person could learn Chinese without going to school was more than I could imagine. Georges didn’t think it was anything special. One young African woman had taught herself the language within three months.
The taxi takes us to the area close to the Tianxiu Building, in the north of town, right beside busy Huanshi Dong Lu and Guangzhou’s big inner ring, a neighborhood of dilapidated high-rises, TV towers, switching yards, and messy urbanization. In recent years, a real African neighborhood has arisen here. This section of the city is home to about a hundred thousand Africans, most of them here only very temporarily. This is where Georges has his cargo office, alongside hundreds of others. His sector is “air and ocean freight, full and groupage container,” as his impressive business card says. In the days that follow I notice that all Africans here have equally impressive cards, flashy cardboard rectangles printed in English, French, and Chinese and showing six different mobile numbers, in China and in Africa. The streets around the Tianxiu feature a host of hotels offering, for twenty dollars a night, extremely comfortable double rooms. Those hotels are full of Africans. I will spend the next ten days in the New Donfranc Hotel and not see a single Westerner.
The taxi drops us off at a pedestrian way crowded with men and women, Chinese and Africans. After checking in, I go out to explore the neighborhood; the shops, as it turns out, are open round the clock and sell shoes, suitcases, T-shirts, mobile phones, and lingerie. The streets are lined with farmers wearing reed hats and peddling piles of fruit completely unfamiliar to me: apples smaller than cherries, still on the branch, and grapefruits bigger than soccer balls, which are peeled patiently and skillfully; beside wooden handcarts bearing tanks of butane, men in sleeveless T-shirts are wokking like mad, the sweat pouring from their faces; they mix up noodles, pak-choi cabbage, and oyster sauce, sway the pan to and fro, fill little Styrofoam containers. Suddenly a shrill whistle rings out: the police are coming and they all race off with their handcarts, the gas fires still burning vigorously—the blue flames flicker like torches, the oil hisses hysterically, soy sauce flies in all directions—and within a matter of seconds they have disappeared into a darkened alleyway amid the garbage cans and fleeing rats, leaving the customer alone on the shopping street, bewildered and supperless. I buy a kilo of mandarin oranges from an old farmer; he weighs them on a bamboo scale that he holds up in front of his piercing eyes; I pay in a currency that is strange to me, not even knowing if they think in kilograms around here, and nod by way of thanks, wondering whether that’s actually the appropriate gesture. The little man with the weathered face, in any event, smiles, baring two rotten teeth. My hotel is not a separate building, but part of a labyrinthine mall where hundreds of boutiques sell the same gold necklaces, imitation Nokias and soccer shirts, Barça jerseys, Chelsea jerseys, and Dutch national team jerseys reading: Ruud van Nistelrooy, number 9. I locate the elevator doors that lead to the hotel, but when I climb out on the sixth floor, I find myself not in the corridor with rooms on each side, but in a darkened space completely unfamiliar to me. The situation has something dreamlike about it; the strains of stringed music cut through the darkness, two koi carp swim slowly in a softly lit aquarium, and, as I stand there with the bag of mandarin oranges in my hand, gradually coming to terms with having taken the wrong elevator, an extremely charming young lady comes up and asks if I am here for the “very special massage.”
Later, when I finally reach my hotel room, I see that the display containing city maps also features a decree noting that “according to the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Administrative Penalties for Public Security whoring legally forbidden is” because, as it turns out, “recently some aliens suffered stealing or robbery during whoring.” What a thing to have happen to you, pity the poor alien; nevertheless, the same display contains three packages of condoms, two packaged pairs of panties (“Antisepsis & Healthy”), and four packets of the unfamiliar South Pole (“Liexin Resispance [sic] the Germ Liquid”); as that description clarifies very little indeed, I read on the back that the product is made from natural Chinese herbs and effectively kills 99.9 percent of all bacteria “for male and female privates itch and other social disease.”
Night has come, but it doesn’t feel that way; the jetlag and the deluge of impressions keep me awake for hours; sleepless, I zap past thirty-six channels full of screaming samurai and businessmen in the throes of debate and become stranded at last in the middle of a game show in which candidates in colorful outfits have to negotiate a perilous obstacle course; very few of them succee
d, most end up ignominiously in a tank full of water, to the vast merriment of the audience and the host, who seize the chance to laugh at them mercilessly. It is 4 A.M., I miss Kinshasa and slide open the curtains; on the other side of the courtyard, in a smoky room two floors down, four bare-chested men are playing mahjong under dingy neon lighting—a gambling hall, an opium den, who’s to say. Their voices are just out of range, but every once in a while I see them rise to their feet and shout at each other furiously.
JULES BITULU SAW IT ALL CHANGE. I met him in his office on the tenth floor of the Taole building, in the hectic business district of Dashatou. “In 1993 I was the only African here. Along with a Chinese partner, I started a company in Shunde, not far from here; two years later we moved to the city center. To the Chinese I was a creature from outer space, an attraction. There was no racism back then, more like curiosity. Wherever I went they pulled up a chair for me right away. Now there are about two or three thousand Congolese living here. Most of them come from Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, Goma, and Bukavu. Five hundred of them have no visa and live here illegally. Some of them get into trouble with drugs, but there are also lots of Nigerians here who carry Congolese passports.”
Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province, an area five hundred kilometers (310 miles) in diameter with about one hundred million inhabitants, almost twice the entire population of Congo. It was here, back in the late 1970s, long before Shanghai, that Deng Xiaoping relaxed the reins of the planned economy for the first time. It was, after all, his home region. The great distance between the coast and Beijing made it a safe laboratory for an experiment in liberalization. What’s more, Guangdong is located right across from the even-freer Hong Kong and Macau, and so could enter competition with them. Thirty years later, it is the manufacturing center of the world. The province is the leading global producer of air-conditioning units, microwave ovens, computers, telecom systems, and LED lighting. Guangdong is the third largest exporter of textiles and makes 30 percent of all our planet’s shoes. The factories of Shenzhen export toys to all corners of the globe, and until recently produced two-thirds of all the world’s artificial Christmas trees—not bad for an officially atheistic region. This tightly circumscribed area accounts for 12 percent of the Chinese economy and more than one-quarter of the country’s total exports. That astounding success was due in part to a system of highly subsidized raw materials, but the financial crisis of 2008 gave the region a major buffeting—the Chinese state-owned banks remained solvent, but foreign customers disappeared. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. Today an attempt is being made to transform a serial production economy, based solely on export, into an innovative, knowledge-based industrial center that can also serve a fast-growing local market. And that seems to be working: in the crisis year 2008, telecom giant Huawei closed contacts worth more than $23 billion, an increase of 46 percent.
With its propitious location in the delta of the Pearl River, Guangzhou has always been a spot for international trade. It constituted the point of departure for the maritime silk route and established contacts with Christianity and Islam early on. The city still has a lovely mosque, dating back to perhaps as early as the seventh century, the century when Islam arose, and a Catholic cathedral of much more recent date. Persians, Arabs, Portuguese, and Dutchmen found their way here. Little surprise, therefore, that today as well it is the hub for new foreign trade relations, this time with Africa.
Bitulu came to China on a scholarship in 1988. He was part of a group of seventeen Zairians selected to attend university in Beijing in the context of friendly ties between the two nations. The first year was taken up by a mandatory linguistics course, followed by four years of computer science. Today his Mandarin Chinese is better than that of most Cantonese (according to Beijing, Cantonese is not a language but a variation on Mandarin, the standard language), and he draws Chinese characters at a pace equaled by few foreigners. An African who can write in Chinese, that takes some getting used to.
One day, during his linguistics year, he saw the word democracy written on the wall of the administration building.
I wondered: what’s going on here? I had noticed some unrest, but I didn’t understand. There was nothing about it on TV. Our professors warned us not to go to Tiananmen, but I took the bus there and saw that the square was packed with students. There were no classes being held, everything had been suspended. At the university I saw two coffins; occupied or vacant, I couldn’t be sure. Back at my apartment I saw, from the ninth floor, the American students being picked up by a minivan from the embassy. The students from the former French colonies, like Gabon, were also leaving. We, the Zaïrians, were the last to go, then our consul picked us up too. On the way to the embassy we saw burned-out army trucks along the street. There was a massacre going on. The Japanese students told us later that it was very well organized, with trucks to pick up the bodies and cleaning crews. We slept on the floor of the embassy for nine days. It was cold and there was no food.
As a recently qualified computer-science engineer in a land full of recently qualified computer-science engineers, Bitulu did not find a job right away, but he possessed another talent: music. During his student days he had already led a band manned by the few Congolese students present in Beijing, and now he joined a traveling Chinese orchestra. “We spent six months going from village to village in the interior. I visited the provinces of Guangxi, Hunan, Yunnan, Huizhou, and Sichuan. At first I only played guitar, later I sang in Chinese too. For the audiences, that was a real attraction. But I didn’t feel comfortable. I never saw another Congolese and we didn’t eat well, only that Chinese food.” His experiences remind one of the fate of the Congolese who had built their huts at the Tervuren expo a century earlier. Then too, a black person was more circus attraction than human being.
But later, after I had already started my business, I kept playing. At the weekend I played in a reggae band in Hong Kong, at the Africa Bar. Later on I sang Chinese songs in bars and restaurants, sometimes three sets a day, sometimes six days a week. I earned good money. I sang in Mandarin, Cantonese and English. Un Congolais, c’est bizarre. I played in big hotels. Lots of karaoke, too. My work took me all the way to the Mongolian border. In 2000, when I had a gig in Beijing, I met six Congolese students who were here without work and without a visa. I took them back with me to Guangzhou. That was the start of the Congolese community here. They worked in the discos. That phenomenon was becoming immensely popular. After that everyone left the music scene and started their own businesses.
From sideshow attraction to migration pioneer. Bitulu had been more or less the Peter Stuyvesant of Congo, I realize. He turns out to be a gifted storyteller and very well informed. During our talk, I fill ten pages with notes. He tells me how it had all started in Guangzhou in 2000, when a group of West Africans, Senegalese, and Malians, arrived within a few months of each other. They stayed at a Muslim hotel close to Tianxiu. He tells me how easy it was to obtain a visa back then, even for six months, even for a year. What a difference compared to the situation today, where you’re lucky to receive a visa for just two weeks, he sighs, where people go underground once their visa runs out and risk prison sentences of one to six months. “The situation is becoming unbearable, even for people with an official visa or residence permit, like me. The flights keep getting more expensive, the price of merchandise has gone up, transport is pricy, the Congolese customs costs are sky-high, and the market in Kinshasa has become saturated.”
He’s not homesick for Congo. “I’ve really become permeated with Chinese culture. The Congolese should organize themselves better, the way the Chinese do. They should start working collectively, but they don’t want to do that, even though that would help them to negotiate much better prices. It’s like a virus. The contract that Congo signed with China, that was badly negotiated too. No one in the Congolese delegation spoke Chinese. Now China is going to build a few roads, quickly, which no one will keep up.” What he says is what
many Congolese in China are thinking: this deal, the biggest in their country’s history, was a rush job; the country has been sold downriver for a little pocket money. “I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’m ashamed to be Congolese. Since independence, Congo has never been a real country. Nothing there works. All the people think about are their own wallets. In twenty years’ time, I’ve seen China develop.” In the villages where Bitulu went to sing his songs in 1990, less than 5 percent of the families had a television in 1990; by late 2006 that was 90 percent.1 “I’ve watched Vietnam grow. I’ve been to Dubai and I was amazed. It’s a desert, right, but flowers grow there, they put tubes under the lawns. No, they’ve done a good job of developing their country. If God had put the Congolese out in the desert, would they have done the same? Papa, c’est fini! It’s not the white people’s fault, or Mobutu’s fault, that things are going so badly at home; they’re just the scapegoats—that’s all over and done with. Look at the Chinese. They learn from Europe and they know that there’s no magic involved, only hard work.”2
THE DASHATOU BUSINESS DISTRICT is dedicated entirely to electronics. There are shopping malls just for digital cameras, next to shopping malls for laptops or LCD screens. After my meeting with Bitulu, I seize the chance to get lost there. That leads me to a windowless megastore where they sell only cell phones. Hundreds of boys and girls man the little stalls there; when they get hungry, they duck down behind the cash register and wolf down a paper cup of noodles. Participative observation being unequaled as ethnographic methodology, I inspect their wares. “Chinese copy!” they say frankly when I hold up something that looks like a perfect iPhone. “This one good copy. This one bad copy.” That seems clear enough. “This one original.” No, I’m not interested in an owigina. A real fake seems much more original to me, especially since these copy phones offer features the original does not, like room for two SIM cards, useful for the frequent traveler. In the brave new world, the line between real and fake fades. Fake is no flimsy replica, but technological avant-garde. And so I buy a few fake iPhones and imitation Ericssons for about fifty dollars apiece. Back in Kinshasa I will sell a couple of them to help pay for my ticket home. What I don’t know at this point is that I should have bought thirty of them instead of five: within a single day, I will sell them for many times the price I paid.