The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  I tell her that I’ve been on ’Eua at the funeral of Douglas’ great aunt, though originally I’d been intending to sail to Ha’afeva on board the doomed ship.

  ‘That’s how stories go in this part of the world,’ Kerry says. ‘You miss your own death because you’ve been at someone else’s burial.’

  Over the following days, the number of dead rises to one hundred and twenty, and the authorities ask publicly how it’s possible that there should have been so many unregistered passengers on board.

  Then the same old pattern as everywhere: an incident had taken place and now the hunt was on for the moral high ground, and for someone to take the blame, carry the can, no stone was left unturned and no cesspit left undrained. The king was told about the catastrophe, expressed his deep sympathies and a few hours later went off on holiday to Scotland. The democracy movement immediately came out onto the streets to stage public protests and to reiterate what they’d been saying for years, namely that it was high time that the monarch abdicated.

  ‘We don’t need a king like this.’

  But on the road to the airport, there’s still a prominent poster of him, just as before, with his image and the slogan: “King George Tipou V – Icon to the World”…’

  ‘When are you off back home?’ Kerry wants to know. ‘Monday. An hour and a half’s stopover in Sydney, then it’s on to Singapore …’

  ‘What, you’re planning to catch an onward flight to Europe one and a half hours after arriving in Sydney? You can forget that straight away. The flights from here are never on time. They’re driven away from Tonga by the wind. Either they’re stuck here unable to take off in the first place, or they can’t land, and are diverted somewhere to wait, or you’re advised to fly to another island and pick up a flight there …’

  ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘Clear off as fast as you can. Now the Red Cross people are flooding onto the island as well. Doctors, journalists, relatives of the victims from the mainland. Who’s to say when you’d next be able to get away?’

  So, I grabbed a seat on the late flight to Auckland the following evening, days before my planned departure. In a back hall at the airport, I saw coffins piled up. People in bast-fibre mats were solemnly taking delivery of them and bowing to the boxes like they were bodies from which the souls had already departed.

  In Auckland, long after midnight, I check into the first hotel I can find at the airport. On the transistor radio on the night porter’s counter, a voice is reading the local weather forecast: ‘Clouded skies with occasional rains, heavy winds up and single thunderstorms on all Tongan coasts.’

  Kinshasa

  Scenes from a War

  If people are said to radiate an aura, then why not cities as well? Or at least an abiding impression, sometimes of promise, sometimes of intimidation. Certainly the quintessence of one city is encapsulated in its very name: Kinshasa. This aura is enhanced through newspaper photos and old pieces of reportage on the place, and encounters with people who came from there, whose faces would take on a very particular look at the mention of their distant home city: pained, saddened, forbearing, fatalistic, and fighting to suppress a feeling of rage.

  Kinshasa’s aura is a dark one, in which the prevailing tones are the hues of colonialism and military drab. And there was also a time when Kinshasa stood for boxing shorts, for the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, for soukous or Congolese Rumba Rock. Following the triumphal success of this musical genre, the style of dress associated with it also became popular. By contrast, the Belgian colonial power’s legacy here consisted of manufactured goods, architectural styles and companies.

  Yet the recent war has virtually erased even these images and instead imposed its own: twisted bodies in roadside ditches, marauding bands of soldiers on the city outskirts, looting, rape, mutilation and murder, the unleashing of violence, and a bloody assault on the capital, at the conclusion of which a strong man called Kabila seized the reins of power.

  ‘No photos, please’, the flight attendant says, taking it upon herself to push my camera down. For a moment, through a gap in the clouds, I’d caught sight of what looked like a vast spa town, green, cut through by the delta of the River Congo, and overrun with sprawling development: Kinshasa in a state of war, charming but clearly to remain incognito.

  ‘We are duty bound to advise you against undertaking this trip,’ was the way the German Foreign Ministry had put it. But that sounded to me like a standard-form response. They were ‘unwilling’, indeed ‘unable’, to assume a responsibility that they did not have. ‘Worst city in the world, multiplied by ten,’ an Australian colleague told me, and now here was this stewardess, acting like she had to protect the place from paparazzi from an altitude of three thousand feet.

  Forget the romanticism of Gorillas in the Mist, or the euphoria of the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ or the hope embodied in the Lusaka Peace Accord. The gorillas were butchered during the war, the splendour of the stadium where Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman is now faded and the treaty has been violated several times. In a city that has been fought over now for years, no one expects law and order any more, but instead vigilantism and anarchists, rebels, freebooters, child soldiers, occupiers, tribal enemies, petty criminals and their godfathers. You just have to come to terms with the law of the street, with landmine victims and the survivors of years of torture, broken prisoners and the mentally disturbed; in short, the whole spectrum of human flotsam and losers of history. And resign yourself to a country with 80 per cent unemployment, widespread malnourishment and shortage of medicines – this is the home of the Ebola virus.

  You only need to see the Congolese people, who hang out of the compartment windows of suburban trains every morning like umbels, or those who patrol up and down on the roofs of these trains, touting their wares, bartering or playing cards as the train rumbles slowly through Kinshasa’s commuter belt. Try not to overlook the fates of any of these individuals, whose image sears itself on to your retina between two blinks of your eye, and empathize with them! Oh, forget it then – you’re too slow and too sentimental!

  You make your way from the aircraft to the terminal on foot, following a series of yellow markings. You’ll come back this same way when you leave, but changed, that much is certain already, but what will stay the same? People will still be there on the viewing deck, looking down on the airfield and thinking of all the places that we, down below, are flying off to. One of them keeps waving.

  The porters at the baggage reclaim carousels are heaving down pieces of upholstered furniture, wrapped in what seems to be kilometre-long strips of bubble wrap, beneath which pink floral designs run riot like frost patterns. After a long journey here from some cheap manufacturing site somewhere on the planet, this three-piece suite has finally arrived at the Heart of Darkness. But at the same time, on the far side of the arrivals hall, some very similar furniture that has been produced on the streets of Kinshasa is being flown out. The porters stand between the carousels, monitor this senseless exchange in the international movement of goods and keep watching a television lounger that’s being exported, long enough to be able to picture the far-off living room in which this little piece of their homeland will be nothing but another item of seating furniture.

  I’d come to the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaïre, to meet a musician. I wanted to make a film profile of the country’s most famous musical artist, the spiritual father of Congo’s urban, cosmopolitan youth who danced to his tunes in the clubs of Kinshasa, and whose one dream was that he might one day leave his exile in Paris and come back to his homeland, as less of a fellow sufferer but as more than just a tourist: Papa Wemba, the co-founder of soukou, that pan-African style of music, also known as Rumba Rock, which originated in Kinshasa in the 1970s and went on to conquer the entire continent – the musical language of self-expression for a youth that now, two wars later, had nothing left except their music.

  I wanted to know what had happened to music in
the Congo during this period and was keen to see how this largerthan-life musician would fare when he entered the orbit of this conflict, and to hear what this world ambassador of Afro-Pop, who was travelling in the full glare of publicity in the music-loving world, had to say about the president’s politics. How much license would this untouchable personage allow himself, and how much of that freedom would he ascribe to his music?

  The clouds were hanging low and colourless over the airport, and a cluster of baggage handlers dashing past forced me to take refuge beside a pickup truck, against which a friend who’s been waiting here for me for the past two days is now leaning, ashen-faced. On the way here, the minibus he’d originally been travelling in had hit a pothole at eighty kilometres an hour, breaking both its axles, and sending the camera it was carrying flying four metres through the air across the vehicle, where it gashed open the head of the front seat passenger. My friend – and cameraman – was left with a nasty head wound, while our bodyguard sustained a compound back injury; the driver fled the scene of the accident. Three days later, the vehicle was still lying there by the roadside, by now stripped of its interior.

  On the hotel bed, we gingerly turn over our bodyguard’s massive body at which his groans grow louder, and by now even my friend is having trouble turning his head. Six hours later, both of them are lying side by side on trolleys in a hospital awaiting treatment. Then, one of them at least is fitted with an ivory-coloured neck brace and discharged. But by the time they get round to rolling the bodyguard into the bowels of the hospital, he’s already spent three hours crying, even occasionally screaming, this colossus of a man. A cracked vertebra, the doctors think.

  All the while, Papa Wemba, the country’s most renowned singer, is waiting at the bar of the Hotel Memling, though ‘waiting’ isn’t the right term; it would be more accurate to say he’s in residence there, bidding those who come to pay homage to him on bended knee to stand up, having his hands and cheeks kissed, ordering newspapers to be brought to him in which his arrival in the city is Page One news, and perusing the cocktail menu.

  As a young boy, he used to accompany his mother, who was a Pleureuse or professional mourning singer, to funerals, learning from her the high, melancholic timbre and the soft mellifluous intonation which no musical training has ever managed to spoil. He moved to Kinshasa, became a singer with the group Zaiko Langa Langa and steadily acquired the status of a god of African pop music. The then-president Mobutu indirectly helped his rise to fame by proclaiming ‘L’Authenticité’. This policy promoted indigenous music at the expense of Cuban music, rock, Western pop and R&B, which were banned from the airwaves; musicians were arrested, and the Congolese were encouraged to think of their national roots. At this time, the nation’s top musician Papa Wemba blended folk music with dance rhythms, a style that became such a hit he was soon more popular than any president.

  Whatever he touched turned to gold. People in the West sat up and took notice, and his records began to be produced in Paris. An optical illusion – perfectly understandable from the perspective of Kinshasa – made Papa Wemba appear to be seated at the right hand of Michael Jackson in the eternal musical firmament. Then someone – very possibly Papa Wemba himself – hit upon the idea of referring to his so-called ‘magic touch’. He had the phrase printed on his business cards, and soon gained a reputation for being some mythical seer or guru. At the same time, thanks to the extremely flamboyant clothing he liked to wear, which made his concerts into fashion happenings, this pop star also came to be seen as a trendsetter in Central African couture. But he’s not so keen on that label nowadays.

  For in his own estimation, he is an important man of small physical stature, and with measured gestures and a talent for pathos. His indigo-blue silk blouse is embroidered with golden appliqué designs, his generously-cut trousers elegantly crumpled, and even his fly-whisk blesses every insect it shoos away. Wearing a jacket by Yamamoto, spectacles by Mikli, and with his mobile to his ear, he briefly puts the phone down and extends his left hand:

  ‘Welcome to the Congo! Nuts? A cocktail?’

  We sit and wait, in a way that one can only wait in Africa. Something will come, a messenger will bring something or some bit of news will arrive. Arrangements will be made, meetings fixed, both sides will smile and nod, both fully aware that everything discussed and agreed here is just so much waste paper.

  Papa Wemba keeps telephoning incessantly. Delegations arrive at his desk. They bow, he sits. I enquire about a likely date for us to start filming.

  ‘Garçon, more nuts!’ he calls out to a liveried hotel employee, waving the empty dish at him. There’s clearly no question of fixing a definite date.

  ‘Where are the others?’ Papa Wemba asks me.

  I tell him about our accident; after all, we could use him putting in a good word for us at the hospital. He pushes the replenished dish of nuts across to me.

  ‘Let me have a look at your work permit,’ he says.

  That’s impertinent of him. Even so, I’m happy to present him with the quarter-pound of paperwork in my possession, all the exchanges of correspondence that have shuttled to and fro over the last few months between embassies, authorities and offices on both continents just to make this meeting over a cocktail in the bar of the ‘Memling’ possible in the first place. He shakes his head at all the letterheads, stamps and signatures, and continues shaking it as he pulls out a small piece of paper from the pile. This document, as it turns out, is missing the personal signature of the minister. So he shoves the whole pile back to me and, with no sense of the irony of the scene, adds the bill for the cocktails and nuts on top.

  ‘First thing you need to do is get hold of that signature!’

  In the lounge, a group of men in safari jackets are gathered around a television. President Kabila is addressing the nation. On screen, he looks even fatter than on his posters or the lapel pin sported by the customs official at the airport.

  Foreign commentators see him as a weak man who was elevated to his present position at the last moment by a group of marauding guerrillas, who are now fighting in opposition to him. Currently it’s a state of complete anarchy, with militias from Burundi, Uganda and Rwanda occupying parts of the Congo. Kabila’s troops have already been disarmed in the north of the country.

  But the way he’s talking there on the television makes him appear presidential, that’s clearly one of the first tricks you learn in power.

  ‘We want to involve Mobutu’s supporters in government,’ he’s saying, ‘but we won’t tolerate a Nazi Party!’

  The camera pans to show a view of the supporters of the ‘Nazi Party’, that is, the party of Mobutu’s supporters. They’re just sitting there looking stunned. They’re evidently no longer opponents who are to be taken seriously, at least to far less a degree than the rebels who are fighting against Kabila’s people in the countryside and even making Kinshasa unsafe.

  The president now turns his attention to the occupation forces, though he doesn’t call them that. How can he possibly countenance three mini-states numbering some six or eight million inhabitants apiece as serious aggressors within his realm of fifty million people? How could he allow them to maintain their long-running control over certain parts of his country? Condescendingly, he accepts the President of Botswana as an ‘arbitrator’. But scarcely has this man left the room than he starts mocking him. The UN observer standing to my left shakes his head in disbelief. That’s how this president is. Two weeks ago, he invited a camera crew over from New York for the first time to interview him. He kept them waiting for eight days. Yesterday, they flew back to the States empty-handed.

  As it happens, at that moment the only other Western camera crew in the country apart from us is just checking out at reception.

  ‘Have fun at the Ministry of Information,’ the cameraman says to me. ‘They don’t appreciate the concept of information here, still less how much we love their country. Go on, have a guess how much footage we’ve managed to
get after seventeen days here: eight minutes. That’s the last time I come to the Congo!’

  He’s already heading out the door when he suddenly stops and comes back to tell me another anecdote:

  ‘Just you be careful. There’s a woman here who is friends with the Médécins Sans Frontières people and who’s got a little flat in the city. Well, one time she let an acquaintance go out onto the balcony and view the town through his binoculars. For that, they both spent a fortnight in gaol on suspicion of spying. I’m telling you: never again!’

  Meanwhile, I’m trying to find a new angle on the war. Articles in Western newspapers customarily begin with sentences like: ‘Dopka is a dead village. The smell of burned thatch is everywhere.’ Or: ‘Night was falling when Dzara Dzeha caught sight of her murderers storming into the village.’ Or ‘The church is full of the bodies of the dead.’ Instead of an analysis of policies, all we get is a scrapbook of massacres – that’s the Africa of the Western media.

  So, there’s never any mention of the fact that the Congo is an occupied country, and that the relatively small neighbouring states of Burundi, Uganda and Rwanda have encroached and seized control of land as far as two thousand kilometres into Congolese territory. In 1996, after the dictator Mobutu had been toppled, Rwandan rebels were responsible for staging the victorious entry of the current president Laurent Kabila into the capital. Public opinion cautiously applauded this move at the time. Rumours that the rebels had murdered their original candidate just outside Kinshasa and only latterly appointed Kabila have scarcely had an airing outside the country’s borders. In any event, the man who came to power in this way quickly fell out with the rebels, who in the meantime were able to disarm his troops in the north of the country but who, as a drunken freebooting rabble, have no prospect of seizing the reins of government. On the other hand, the political opposition has retreated so far underground for fear of reprisals that even if the people wanted to choose an alternative, they wouldn’t know where to find one. So, the only alternative to Kabila is Kabila.