At one of the stands I meet Enson, a young, hyperactive Chinese who, installing SIM cards and replacing batteries all the while, speaks to me in fluent Lingala. No, he’s never been to Congo, he says, he works in this windowless space every day, but a lot of his customers are from Kinshasa. He doesn’t speak French, though: without realizing it, however, half the technical jargon he uses consists of French words. “Ozana besoin sim mibale?” (Do you need one with a double SIM card?) “Ay, papa, accessoires mpo modèle oyo eza te.” (Sir, this model has no accessories.)
THE TIANXIU BUILDING is a multilevel shopping mall with bright neon lights and a cacophony of Muzak. The narrow corridors consist of tiny glass shops where extremely extroverted merchants ply their wares. Many of these shops are outlets for factories elsewhere in Guangdong. Along a twenty-meter (sixty-five-foot) length of corridor I see industrial batik textiles, flip-flops, sneakers, boots, dress suits, jogging suits, T-shirts, g-strings, jewelry, cell-phone chargers, cell phones, electric fans, antimosquito coils, chainsaws, generators, motor scooters, and drum sets. As soon as the customer comes in, the salesperson jumps to his feet. Your wish is their command. Lengths of cloth are unfolded and put away again. Suits are lifted down off the rack with a stick and held up to see if they fit. The verbal communication is a disaster, but the adding machine always saves the day. This results in absolute gems of pantomime. The merchant types in his asking price in renminbi, as the yuan is called these days, and holds up the little screen for the customer to see. The African converts this to dollars, frowns, says: “No, no, no!” and types in a price that is half that. The Chinese smiles but looks pained, shakes his head and punches in a number that hurts him less. Upon which the African rests his arms in despondency on the glass counter and casts a bored look out the window. After a dramatic pause full of inconsolable longing and deep indignation, he keys in a new number and turns the calculator around for the merchant to see. This goes on for a time, back and forth, until the African makes as if to leave for another shop and new sources of possible friendship are found after all.
One shop sells only g-strings, including a fantastic model printed with the Angolan flag. The strings and triangles bear the national red and black colors; the Communist logo—a gear, a machete, and a star against the jubilant yellow of dawn—is printed at vulva level. When I ask cautiously what it might cost, it turns out they are sold only by the thousand. “Thousand,” the woman says, “not one,” as she types in a one and three zeros on her calculator.
Dadine is hesitating over a few pairs of jeans. The price, seven dollars, appeals to her; in Kin she can get thirty-five for them, but jeans are so heavy in her baggage. That means she can’t take as many with her, and the way customs is at home . . . She’s going to think about it a bit first. “At home it’s a war zone. You come back from China, exhausted, and the customs people at the airport pounce on you while you’re still waiting for your bags. They demand thirty dollars a bag to let you through, sometimes even up to a hundred, but often enough they just open your baggage with a pen or a key and take a shirt or a pair of pants, right before your eyes.”
The sisters Fatima and Fina, rare Congolese Muslims, are in a fix. I met them on the plane and a few days later I see them sitting on a bench, recovering from their bout of shopping. They had been planning to fill a sea container with cans of tomato puree, they explain to me, a twenty-foot container, not forty, those are too expensive, but at the factory they were told that the order could not be ready before December. That means the cans would arrive in Kinshasa no sooner than February, too late for the year-end parties they had been counting on. Maybe they should try their luck with nutmeg? But then again, the price of nutmeg rose from $7,200 to $8,200 a metric ton (2,200 pounds) between January and October 2008, and a container easily holds twelve metric tons (over thirteen U.S. tons). And then the transport! It costs $5,600 to have a twenty-foot container shipped to Matadi, $10,000 for a forty-foot container. Plus you have the import duties, and Congolese customs are the most expensive in the world: up to $15,000 for a small container, $20,000 for a big one. They explain it all to me. The official rates are, as always, negotiable, but a lot of people these days prefer to have their cargo shipped to Pointe Noire in Congo-Brazzaville. Maybe that’s what they should do? The container would be brought by truck to Brazzaville and then their hundreds of bags of nutmeg would be loaded onto the ferry to Kinshasa, where the cargo handling is traditionally done by people in wheelchairs, because they don’t have to pay as much for the crossing. Crippled porters, I’ve seen that with my own eyes. The handicapped people I spoke to considered it an acquired right to accept pay for loading their wheelchair with sacks, piled so high they couldn’t see over them, and then roll onto the boat as a passenger.
Lina is, without a doubt, the most successful young businesswoman I’ve met. Within four days she has had two large sea containers filled with building materials: tiles, doors, air-conditioning units, glazed earthenware, sinks and toilets, and lighting fixtures. In Kinshasa these days you find Aomeikang brand toilets, Meijiale brand sinks, Hefei Chenmeng brand fire alarms, and, yes, even Wij Mei brand toilet paper. Lina’s first container is already sealed; now she is looking around for a couple of plasma screens to go in the second one. When she’s done with that, she’s going to have some clothes made for herself. She brought along a few photographs from an African magazine, it’s up to the Chinese to do the copying. The only thing is: she has this nasty pain in her stomach. Her niece came along with her this time; the younger woman wonders whether it might be a good idea for them to undergo fertility treatment in China. Why, after all, buy only goods when there are also services to be had? But Lina will become acquainted with the Chinese medical system sooner than she thought. When I see her again a few days later, she tells me she went to a clinic. The nasty pain in her stomach was an inflamed appendix. “Normally, I would go to South Africa for an operation,” she says, “but this time I’m going to have it done in China. They say Chinese medicine is good.”
THE AFRICAN GROUP MIGRATION TO GUANGZHOU is becoming a factor of growing significance. More and more people are arriving all the time and becoming a deeper part of the country itself. Some of the migrants share a home as though they were family: while everyone is out buying goods, one of them stays home to prepare the most African meal possible with the available ingredients. Others eat with chopsticks as though they have never done otherwise. One Congolese man had started a café and dance hall, Chez Edo, which every African I spoke to said was the most fun place in the whole megalopolis, but the government closed it down because he didn’t have the right papers. Others have started barber shops or design clothes. Homosexuals, who have a bitterly hard time of it in Africa, have discovered new possibilities in China and have no plans to return home. I met a young Congolese gay man who had been disowned by his family in Kinshasa, but had started a relationship with a Nigerian in China. For him, China was not the land of repression, but of freedom.
One of the big merchants, Monsieur Fule, is informally recognized as “chairman of the Congolese community in Guangzhou.” Neither the function nor the organization itself are official, but the role he plays is rather like that of consul. Anyone arriving in town goes by to talk to him. When I meet him, he is sitting at a desk covered in women’s shoes. “I’ve been here for nine years and I have a residence permit,” he says confidently. Fule was one of the needy students who Jules Bitulu convinced to go with him from Beijing to Guangzhou. “But for foreigners without a visa, the Chinese have a prison. The golden years are over. Commerce here has become slippery ground, but in Congo it’s even much worse. Our country is destitute and things aren’t getting any better. Everything is dirty, but thanks to China everyone is now at least dressed properly.” He is fairly positive about the big contract between the two countries. “It may sound a bit vague,” he says, “but people have been stealing ore from Congo for years already. Now at least there are billions of dollars being paid for it. Congo is s
till flat on its rear end,” he concludes from behind his wall of ladies’ footwear, “but we’ll go back someday anyway. The Congolese migrants in Europe don’t care about their country; their social life takes place there, but those of us here in China realize that commerce alone is not enough to satisfy us. Someday we’ll go back.”3
One Sunday morning I enter office number 3105, on the thirty-first floor of the Tianxiu Building, high above the shops. It is a sparsely furnished space with a worn-out carpet, but a Congolese merchant has set up his own church here under the ambitious-sounding name Église Internationale pour la Réconciliation. Prayer meetings are held three times a week; on Sundays there are two services of three hours each. As I enter, I noticed that, in this particular diaspora, God has lost a little of his sparkle. He matches the interior. There are only eight worshipers, including the Chinese keyboard player. During a lengthy meditation on a Bible verse, the preacher says: “God’s word is like the rain. It only rises back up to Heaven after watering the earth, so that we know . . .” “WHAT SUCCESS IS!” the congregation answers in unison. This game of call and response is nothing new to them. “In all our . . .” “PROJECTS!” “So that they all may . . .” “SUCCEED!”
Then the congregation stands to pray. Their eyes closed and arms raised, they talk out loud, beseeching the Lord loudly for strength and commercial insight. The pastor also asks them to pray for notre frère David, who is here today for the first time. During the singing afterward the Africans dance limberly, while the Chinese organist simply shifts his weight back and forth from one foot to the other. “It’s not easy for them,” the evangelist tells me afterward, “they don’t know much at all. They don’t even know who Abraham is. If you have to explain all that first . . .”
THAT AFTERNOON I pass by the home of Patou Lelo, a trader who sends a hundred to a hundred and fifty containers to Africa each month. He took his MBA at Wuhan and now lives in a modest apartment on the ground floor of a housing block where the sun rarely enters. His daughter, who is almost two, is playing on the carpet. She has African features, but Chinese eyes. Her skin has a warm, ochre tint to it.
When I first got here a lot of people asked whether they could touch my skin. They thought I was Chinese, but that I had stayed out in the sun too long and would soon turn white again. When I walked down the street with my girlfriend, a lot of people thought she was my interpreter, or even a prostitute. We’ve been married for two and half years. Her mother was dead set against it. “It’s either him or us!” she said, but my wife’s stepfather didn’t make a fuss. “Listen, he’s a calm and serious man,” he said. In Congo, it was the same way: my father didn’t give a damn, but my mother was very upset. She didn’t accept my wife until after our child was born. In China, the family is as sacred as it is in Congo; it’s not like in Europe, where the couple is the most important thing. Here the grandparents are very important, we care for them. The couple with one child and the grandparents, that’s the nuclear family here.
Atop a chest of drawers are some photographs of Lelo’s wedding. They show him and his wife in traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Western outfits. A radiant couple. His nephew and his brother flew in from Congo for the wedding; the entire Congolese community in Guangzhou was there. Still, things here are not always easy, he admits.
It’s a totally different culture, and diametrically opposed to our Congolese one. The Chinese are hypernationalistic. My wife will automatically start defending someone, simply because they’re Chinese. She’s atheistic too. Not many Chinese are religious, or maybe they’re Buddhists, but that’s une petite religion. Here they burn their dead. That’s hard for us to take. When a Congolese person dies, the community gets together to raise money to have the body flown back. In economic terms, the Chinese are highly developed, but they’re morally backward. That spitting on the floor in big restaurants . . . Although I have to admit that Chinese women are much more open than the men, my wife certainly is.
He knows he’s lucky; racism is rapidly becoming more common in Guangzhou. More and more taxi drivers refuse to take a Congolese fare. They no longer call them hçi rén (blacks), but hçi gŭi (black devils). The streets around Tianxiu are known as the neighborhood of the black devils or chocolate city. If an African woman touches the vegetables at the market, the sellers will sometimes throw them away.
“But the blacks themselves are partly to blame. They don’t integrate, they don’t adapt. The drugs gangs of Nigerians and people from Sierra Leone give us a bad name, while a lot of Congolese people here work very hard.” Harder than in Congo, Lelo insists. “Look, people who are a hundred percent honest don’t exist in Congo. They’re always out to make some easy money fast. They don’t understand the principle of investment, because the family always takes all the money. There’s no room for reinvestment. But here there’s more distance between the businessperson and the family, you understand?”
Everyone in his own family has emigrated—his brother lives in Spain, his sister in France, another sister in Manhattan; his old mother was the only one who stayed behind in Kinshasa. Many Congolese go abroad to escape suffocating family ties. The oft-praised African solidarity has something touching about it in times of crisis, but in times of reconstruction it generates an infernal logic that makes long-term projects impossible: the little bit of money that is available is immediately distributed to feed many hungry mouths. Reinvestment and planning are not highly valued. In China, things are much easier. There are no uncles and nephews to accuse you of sorcery when you refuse to share the little bit of money you’ve earned; witchcraft in Congo is the ultimate argument for enforcing solidarity.
“No one here ever talks about witchcraft,” Lelo says, visibly relieved to be rid of that higher metaphysics. In Congo, many people have turned to the Pentecostal churches to protect themselves from witchcraft, but this morning I witnessed how little need there is of that in China. “Fake pastors and false shepherds only proliferate in Congo because of the poverty, but here work is more important than religion.”4
THAT EVENING I stop in at the office run by Georges, the man who picked me up from the airport. Even on Sunday, he is hard at work. “We have to work while we’re still young,” he says, “because someday we’ll be old.” His transport company’s motto is Vous server, c’est notre devoir (serving you is our duty) and that is definitely no empty slogan. Two employees, César and Timothée, drag huge cardboard boxes around and lug them up onto a scale, where they can barely even read the display. Georges is on the phone constantly. Can that container be sealed yet? How many tons can still go in? When does the truck leave? Has someone already gone to the airport? Wait a minute, David, how many kilos of baggage allowance have you still got? What, forty kilos! But what have you been doing for the last few days? Didn’t you buy anything at all? Only five cell phones and two suits? Forty kilos, are you sure? Do you want to sell them? Fourteen dollars a kilo, okay?
And while I am literally selling thin air, at the back of the little office, two Chinese staff members, Iso and Jodo, are filling out forms. Iso, a young woman with a delicate-looking pair of reading glasses, flips through a dictionary; she’s trying to learn English and French. Working for a Congolese trader is a good way to earn some money and to brush up on your languages. On the wall is a DHL poster and a world map with China in the middle: Europe and America have become outlying areas, Asia and Africa constitute the new center. European-American relations may have been the most important intercontinental contacts of the twentieth century, but Sino-African relations will be those of the twenty-first.
A printed sentence in Lingala is hanging on the wall: “svp Ndeko awa ezali esika ya mosala” (Dear friend, this is a place of work). “I printed that out and hung it up there,” Georges says, “because otherwise the Congolese come in here and want to chew the fat all day.” The Congolese in Guangzhou are incredibly industrious. One of the traders I called for an interview told me: “Today I’m much too busy, but tomorrow I have forty minutes f
or you. Will that be enough?” Vastly different from Congo, where almost everyone is available all the time, and where most people are disappointed when you make moves to leave after only four hours.
When the two cargo personnel are done with their weighing and stacking, they suggest we go out for a beer. Right next door is a snack bar with a few chairs out on the pavement. Darkness has already fallen, but in Guangzhou nighttime is a relative notion. We sit on the sidewalk and watch the girls from the massage parlor across the street. They wear white robes and a red ribbon draped over their shoulder. They are experts in the traditional techniques of Chinese massage, and they are trying to draw in customers. For a real massage, César explains, not “the very special one.”
César is in a class all his own. His eyes are bloodshot and his voice vacillates between mirth and blues. In Congo he was a police commander for years; “Commandant César” was what he still liked to be called. He served under Mobutu, Kabila père, and Kabila fils.
You still had the tough training back then. I once spent two days standing in a pool of water, up to my chest. Dirty, filthy water, if you fell into it you were dead. Or four days’ guard duty, on your feet the whole time, without sleeping, no problem. But in 2002 I’d had enough. My whole family had taken off, all six of them. My parents were the only ones who stayed behind, with my sister to take care of them. I went to Thailand and from Thailand I tried to get to Germany. A friend of mine who was already in Germany sent me his passport by DHL. But when I got to the German border, the immigration people saw that something was wrong. I was thrown into jail for a month, then put on a flight back to Thailand. From there I traveled around to all the countries: Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Korea, the Philippines . . . I had to move every month to keep my passport valid. That’s how I ended up in China, but my visa has already expired. They could come and pick me up any time.
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