He, this unloved lame duck of a president, looms threateningly over the city’s streets on high billboards. Yet however distant the war might seem in Kinshasa, the brutality of a president on a war footing is omnipresent. Seven people are rumoured to have been shot dead by his henchmen for simply failing to get out of the way of his motorcade quickly enough at a crossroads. There is a deep-seated fear of his despotism.
The first thing we learn is that Western eyewitnesses to the war or investigators of massacres are not welcome. But haven’t we come here in the service of music? Only later do we learn our second important lesson: namely, that a reversed racism is now rife here. Whites are despised, harassed and subjected to increasing bureaucratic chicanery, with their passports deliberately being dropped in the mud at border crossings before being seized and retained for hours on end, and sometimes only retrieved by paying a bribe. Any white person who’s still prepared to live in the country under such conditions is often here for altruistic reasons, and not infrequently even has some sympathy for the these acts of belated revenge. Yet even this painfully acquired sense of understanding, stoutly defended against the resentful criticism from their fellow whites, is held in deep contempt.
Papa Wemba, though, is loved. In his conversations with friends, local musicians or fans, the war is never mentioned and nor is the president. Instead, Wemba cruises through the city in his air-conditioned Mercedes, telephoning Paris, letting people pass him fruit and newspapers through the window, listening to his own albums, and sometimes even waving at the neverdiminishing throng of enthusiasts on the street, who almost pull his car to pieces in their sheer ecstasy.
‘You should film this,’ he says.
Yes, sir! From now on, we spend our time taking hours of footage of his triumphal procession through the outskirts of Kinshasa, protected from harm by his fame. Now he’s waving more frequently, too.
Does music work in opposition to the war or is it another world entirely? Does it represent a line of continuity in the history of the country, or has its bloodline now run its course? Does it speak of the victims and the poor, or just aspire to be bought by them?
‘The poor should be left in peace,’ pronounces Papa Wemba.
The sad truth is, though, that of course they’re not left in peace, but instead have to pay the price for this war. Yes, that bothers him too, he says, brushing some bits of fluff off the flamboyant floral pattern of his boubou.
‘I may be an artist, but I still read a lot about politics,’ he adds. Yet when I try to probe deeper, he clarifies his position: ‘However, that doesn’t mean I’m about to take a political stance.’
‘So there’s no link between music and war?’
‘Music should inform people about the war, and we have to win this war.’
He didn’t say what he meant by ‘information’ in this context, or what winning the war would entail.
‘I’m proud of my country,’ he rhapsodized, sitting back snugly in the upholstery of his limousine, but I wonder whether he’s only really proud of it because it spawned him. He doesn’t mention the name Kabila once.
There are barely any Europeans, or any whites at all for that matter, left in Kinshasa. But one female BBC reporter is sticking it out. The authorities tolerate her presence because her reports are filmed but never broadcast, so at least she’s maintaining the outward appearance that international reporting can go on here. Her office is on one of the upper storeys of the Intercontinental. We ask her if we might be allowed to film a swift panning shot over the city from the hotel roof? No, much too dangerous, she tells us. Everything here is political, she explains. Even our visiting her office is politically charged – was the meeting prearranged, is there some conspiracy afoot here? It’d be safer if we just left again straight away. We feel our way down through the seamy, rundown building, which seems to breathe through its pile carpets; the heat is oppressive, the atmosphere no less so. We’re in a place where no one would want to be.
But when all’s said and done, life has this blind urge to keep on going somehow, and if there’s still any dancing and singing taking place in Kinshasa, then it’s a reflex reaction. In the courtyard of his town house, Papa Wemba stands in front of the guard of honour formed by his own youth band and instructs them, his brow knitted in concentration. The voice training of one of the two albino singers is a pet project of his. This whitehaired giant of a boy with his pink-lidded eyes produces sounds such as I’ve never heard before in a high falsetto; his voice is as clear and pure as those of the castrati, and the gold-bedecked star of Rumba Rock really does stand there dumbstruck for a moment. Then he nods, asks to hear a vibrato and promptly turns his attention to the ‘Fioti Fioti’, the ensemble of shortskirted stage dancers and their new dance routine. All of them, boys and girls alike, tense up when they look into Papa Wemba’s face. They’re respectful, but timid with it, and anyone addressing a question to him doffs his cap first.
We drive with him to the church where he used to sing in the choir as a boy, and now goes to attend Mass, strolling up to the altar in flip-flops and an Adidas tracksuit and telling the widows, the old ladies, the social rejects and the downtrodden day labourers that they can all make it if they really want to. This jars like it’s been churned out by some party sloganeering machine in the US presidential election. Make ‘it’, indeed! – no one standing in this church nave looks like they understand the foggiest about this phrase, unless it has something to do with salvation.
So, is he going to reveal anything to the Congolese population except his own fame? Doesn’t he have anything for them but his waving hand? Isn’t he going to make any pronouncements about the war, except that it must be won?
The security barrier outside the Ministry of Information is manned by a group of adolescent boy soldiers. Two of them have stumps where there had once been arms. You couldn’t exactly say that these young war invalids look like prematurely aged children. It’s far worse than that. There’s no hope for the future evident in their faces, it’s like they’ve been indelibly brutalized. The childlike aspect of their features hasn’t been erased, but all the tenderness has vanished, leaving only an impression of abrasiveness and ruthlessness. They’ve adopted this air of assertiveness among other soldiers, who like them simply had a gun pressed into their hands and were told to go off and defend their country. The first thing they had to do was prove themselves at some front or other, and now they’re allowed to guard the propaganda headquarters with the grim faces of battle-hardened veterans. If they find themselves involved in some misadventure where a person mistakenly meets his death at their hands, President Kabila is wont to say: Look, they’re still so young. What can I do to curb their excesses?
The ministry complex is deserted. The press hotel has also been empty for some time now, and fungus has started to grow on its walls. But in the basement of the main building, a few local journalists and cameramen are still hanging around, playing cards and flirting with the office girls while they wait for their next assignment. Most of the women are gap-toothed. Many of them have deliberately had their incisors taken out because men enjoyed oral sex with them more that way. Their faces are also disfigured by scars; repeatedly, they come over, wink at you for a second and incline their heads as if to say ‘Come on, then!’ But where – there’s nowhere to go here.
At least there’s a kiosk in the courtyard where they sell Fanta Orange, and where there are also a couple of young women sitting in the shade and waiting. They’re too heavily made-up to be government employees, wearing a thick foundation that’s plastered on like a mask to hide the signs that they’re infected with AIDS. The illness has left scars on their faces but the women have just covered these up. Now their eyes, highlighted with kohl and eyeliner, are gazing out of their sockets with an even greater intensity of expression, and their cheeks glow feverishly from the thick layers of rouge they’ve applied, which looks wholly out of place on their dark skin. But there’s something in that look that never focuss
es on what it’s ostensibly directed at. They seem to stare into their own frailty, unable to disengage their inner attention from the prospect of dying.
We’ll be able to obtain the permit we need, we’re told, on the tenth floor of the ministry, the all-important permit without which our filming becomes a criminal act. Every day, I return to the ministry in search of the relevant official and his signature. As I wait for the lift on the ground floor, a workman keeps lugging cement sacks in on his back.
‘You building something?’ I ask him, after he’s slammed the sixth sack down on the top of the growing pile.
He laughs, then giving me a conspiratorial look; bending down, he opens up a rip in one of the sacks with two fingers.
‘No, it’s just money,’ he replies, his fingers riffling the corner of a stack of banknotes.
‘All in cents?’
‘Yep, this is the employee’s salaries I’m bringing here. They’re all payable in cents.’
The cash travels up in the lift with us. But at every floor we stop at, the doors open onto blackness. People get out and disappear into the total darkness, the sacks of money likewise. From office to office, the bundles of cash will be weighed with scales – given the rampant inflation here, this is the easiest way of counting money.
‘So, you earn a pound?’
‘About that.’
There’s not a sound, not even a telephone ringing. Even on the tenth storey the smell of decay hasn’t dissipated. The workman with the barrowload of money sacks has vanished into the depths of the dark corridors. I feel my way along the deserted passageways, navigating by the occasional rectangle of light that spills out from an occupied office.
Finally, in an administration office at the end of the corridor, I manage to track down the entire ‘case’ that has my name on it. It’s hard to imagine what tortuous journey our documents have been on before ending up in this drawer. In the process, they’ve got covered in a light dust and dirty fingerprints. But it’s all to no avail anyway. More documents, more passport photos are required, and more money will need to change hands.
Over the ensuing days, I find myself having to drop in daily on the ministry, where I drink weak coffee with a secretary, make some new friends, provide lists of topics I’m planning to cover, show immunization certificates and other official-looking bits of paper, forge a signature, and even hold out the prospect of a visit by Papa Wemba. And all the while, I’ll know exactly where the information minister is at any given time, though he certainly won’t have any idea how persistently I’m dogging his every step. Even so, it will ultimately prove impossible to bring the minister and my documents into contact with one another at any point.
On one occasion, I catch a glimpse of his face on a black and white TV screen, where he’s sitting in the audience at a parliamentary debate. The secretary points out his face with her index finger:
‘There! There he is! Now all we need to do is bring that man and these papers here together, and you can get started!’
I wonder if he ever got to learn of our request? For some days already, we’ve been filming illegally, sticking to Papa Wemba like glue, because we’re guaranteed to be safe around him. For his part, he’s adopted the camera as one of his trademarks; he likes to show his countrymen that he’s travelling in the glare of global media attention.
We drive to his house on the city outskirts, and film him up on the veranda from our vantage point on the far side of his swimming pool. He waves to us. Then we set up the camera behind his back up there and look down into the garden. He waves again.
‘As a small boy from the country, could you ever have dreamt that you’d end up here one day?’
‘I always knew I would. Always. It’s no coincidence – it was predestination. Always. And one day, I’ll explode across the entire globe, too.’
‘Predestination!’ scoffs a local musician when I tell him the story that evening. ‘He was fired from Zaiko Langa Langa. So he goes off and cries on the shoulder of his best friend, some loopy diplomat’s son, who went out and bought him Western clothes, some really outlandish gear. And Wemba caused a sensation by appearing in this clobber on stages here. Ever since, he’s been linked with fashion, though he can’t stand it. Thing is, he owes too much of his success to it.’
Is it the case, then, that war brought the president to power, and fashion put the musician where he is? One of them dreams about ruling the country, the other about ruling the world music market. And the most intimate connection between them resides in the fact that the president, in refusing to grant us permission to film, is suppressing the production of images of the pop star, while he in turn is careful not to formulate any opinion about the president. So in their intimate state of separation, they cosily feed off one another.
I keep going back to the Ministry of Information on a daily basis for a while, and see the money courier with his sacks of cash again and walk past the empty offices and sometimes sit on a chair in the corner of the administration office, but I don’t even get to discuss my request again. I become nothing but an applicant in a dingy ministerial corridor in war-torn Congo, a castaway who’s been forgotten about and who months later might simply go feral and end up getting filed under ‘any other business’. All roads end here, I can’t go a step further.
A couple of years later, political reality caught up with both of them: Kabila was executed in his presidential suite by his supporters, his palace guard, the security services, maybe even members of his own family. No reliable account of what happened is forthcoming, and his son Joseph Kabila comes to power.
Papa Wemba’s musical trajectory doesn’t ultimately go global. Although he continues to present himself in interviews as a political force for integration, his influence has been outstripped by the passage of time. Instead, he’s arrested in Paris when it emerges that he’s been arranging for Congolese compatriots to enter France illegally in return for large bribes and has allegedly been at the head of a major people-smuggling operation.
But when we leave Kinshasa on that autumn afternoon, the president and the pop star are still secure in their positions. Never have I been so glad to get out of a country, and consequently at the airport the world begins to fall back into its familiar old pose: there are the furniture packers once more, reliably sitting on the edge of the baggage carousel, ruled over by Kabila, soundtracked by Papa Wemba. Their labour helps feed both of them. But one certainty remains. As we follow the yellow markings back to our plane, I turn around. How comforting: someone up there is still waving.
Chiang Mai
Opium
I travelled to Chiang Mai for the ‘opium eating’. Ever since Thomas de Quincey, that’s been the familiar expression. Notwithstanding that it’s been ages since anyone actually ate opium, ingested it in the form of cough syrup or took it to combat the flu, as was common practice around the turn of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, people smoke it, inhale it, take it on board and let it rampage around; I’m of the view that everyone ought to have smoked opium at least once in their life. Everyone should appreciate what the brain is capable of, and anyone who says: ‘Well, all I need to do is climb mountains, run marathons, dive off cliffs or even just run up the stairs fast’ has no conception of how many dramatic changes the wild beast that inhabits our skulls can undergo.
I travelled to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand by train, crammed into the short box of a bunk bed, which was only separated from the corridor by a curtain. On a note which the conductor gave every passenger to read before the journey began, we were warned not to accept any offers of refreshments from fellow passengers. In many cases, these were spiked drinks, designed to knock us out so we could be robbed more easily. The only narcotic substance I consumed was a bottle of Tiger Beer, which Helen and Mark, two Australians on their honeymoon, got me from the buffet car.
There was also a madam on the train, who, spotting that I was travelling on my own without a female companion, talked me through all the beauties pictur
ed on a brochure she handed me, whom she assured me were already waiting for me in Chiang Mai. She ended up telling me that my moral scruples were a real handicap.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ I replied, ‘but I can do as little to change them as I could a game leg.’
At this, she pulled a face like a wrinkled gherkin and beat a retreat.
When it began, very gradually, to grow dark outside, I pulled the window down and breathed in the air wafting out of the rainforest. At the station stops, people passed us coconuts, mangoes, pineapple and sticky rice through the open windows. I was so happy that I sang ‘Guantanamera’ and then Eric Burdon’s ‘When I think of all the good times I’ve been wasting having good times’.
I took a room in the ‘Je t’aime’ guesthouse, along with the newlyweds. It really was called that, but apart from the complimentary condoms in the drawer of the bedside table, nothing in the place reminded one of love. In the evening, a heavily suntanned Swiss woman with smoothly depilated arms and legs and a garrulous stream of chit-chat sidled over with her brimming glass and latched on to us.
I told her: ‘Your limbs are so beautifully proportioned.’
‘Thanks,’ she replied. ‘What was that again about proportions and whatnot, though?’
Then she started going on about places where we didn’t happen to be right then.
‘We did Singapore last week. We had such gorgeous weather there, it was wonderful. We got tickets for the theatre in the evening. I’ll happily go to the theatre if there’s nothing else on, but it was lovely all the same, we saw Gorky’s Summerbreeze.’
The Ends of the Earth Page 37