Sassou-Nguesso, a French-trained paratrooper and a northerner who needed plenty of guns and money to take power from his elected predecessor, Pascal Lissouba, was France’s man. With vast villas in Paris, an unknown sum in offshore accounts and an estimated $250 million leaking annually from the country’s oil account (principally but not exclusively in the hands of Total) it seemed safe to assume he was still.
The human price for this status quo must seem very small by the historical standards of the Congo. In 1997 at least 10,000 people died and more than 800,000 were displaced. In 1998, during a Ninja counter-attack, a good proportion of Brazzaville’s citizenry fled their homes. That year, on one notorious road, over a thousand women and girls were raped.
We had touched down, as far as I knew, into an uneasy peace. The Ninjas still held territory between Brazzaville and the sea, effectively cutting the capital off from the best deep-water port of the West African coast, the country’s oil city, Pointe-Noire. They were said to be friendly now: you were supposed to be able to pass their roadblocks just as you would the government’s – except, of course, anyone who could would surely fly.
As I walked across the tarmac, through dripping heat, I was sure of only two things about Congo. First, every account I had read promised I would meet the spirit world somewhere on my travels, Congo-Brazzaville being as much in thrall to ngangas (witch doctors), sorcerers and magic as it is to oil and guns. I was not looking forward to this. Second, according to my visa I had twelve days to make it to the country’s northern border and cross into Cameroon.
The queue for the booth in which a man was stamping passports dwindled as local fixers and resident ex-pats appeared from behind the booth to pick out their associates. These were waved rapidly through. My turn came, the passport was scrutinised, stamped and handed back with a smile. There was a small, churned crowd of hopeful faces offering help with carrying the rucksack, then customs.
‘Do you have anything for me to eat?’
The customs officer was a young woman in a brown uniform. Her gaze searched mine then flicked over my shoulder while her hand rifled the rucksack. She spoke urgently and furtively.
‘Do you have something for me?’
Each time she repeated the question something else was pulled out of the sack.
‘Do you have some money for something to eat?’
I surrendered two packets of duty-free cigarettes: the moment the first appeared, a second customs officer swooped with the same questions. They divided the cigarettes and let me go. In a bureau-de-change I changed euros to CFA francs: these are pegged to the euro at the rate of 655 CFA to 1, the exchange rate being guaranteed by France and underwritten by an agreement which puts 60 per cent of the CFA zone’s reserves in a bank in Paris. Then a man with a small green Peugeot taxi whipped me into Brazzaville.
‘What’s it like here at the moment?’
‘It’s good.’
‘Really?’
‘Oui! We have security . . .’
‘What’s it like in Kinshasa?’
‘Better! The son is better than the father!’
This referred to the presidency of Joseph Kabila, who took over from his father, Laurent-Desiré Kabila, in 2006. We laughed at the idea that the son could be better than the father:
‘So often it is not the way!’ the taxi driver said.
I checked into the best hotel I could find, planning to get my bearings and move downmarket tomorrow. A text message from London said an old friend had become a father. Messages from home came infrequently now. I toasted the baby, Oliver, in South African ‘Flight of the Fish Eagle’ brandy and went out to explore.
Tall palms line the river, a slow-moving rink stretching across to the port and the towers of Kinshasa. Large rafts of weed, water hyacinth and torn branches sail down the current. Poto Poto is a dense nest of life adjoining the city centre; its streets are swamps of brown mud and spume puddles which conceal pits and shell-holes, some deep enough to swallow a car. Poto Poto is principally made from corrugated iron. Workshops, garages, table-football bars, private dwellings, scrap-metal merchants and furniture-makers are tacked together, loud with saws and music, hammering, shouts and laughter. Smells of smoke, cooking meat, rotting garbage and coffee eddy among clouds of exhaust. People are friendly, curious and polite. Another cap-and-shades boy stops me for a while-away chat. Where am I from – what, Portugal?
‘Non, Pays de Galles – un petit pays entre Irlande et Angleterre . . .’
To not be from somewhere simple is part trick, part blessing. By the time I have explained where Wales is, sometimes with a sketch map of the British Isles, the point of the question has been lost, the conversation has passed nationality and with it, perhaps, to a degree, preconception.
‘It is a little country of mountains and rain, and lots of sheep. We are farmers.’
I produce the same line again down by the river, in a shack in the last of a line of shacks at the port of Brazzaville Beach. Disused railway lines lead there, past the walls and thick greenery protecting the Russian Embassy. The port is edgy. The soldiers look suspicious, a drunk man in uniform starts to demand money before swaying and giving it up with a whoop. Women are cooking fish on lines of griddles, the dust at their feet covered in entrails and blood. Children are smoking ‘tabac congolais’ – marijuana – and grinning through the slats of the shack where we sit. On the water two ferries lashed together are docking: one threshes the river, carrying the other like a crippled sibling on its hip. Inside, flies crawl around the rims of the Primus bottles: the few of us who can afford to are drinking; the rest are sitting around, smoking. The men are arranged around the walls of the little room and our discussion is being followed with the earnestness of a court in session. My interlocutor is the biggest man in the room. His large head is minutely shaved and his brow is furrowed, his expression clouded with scepticism.
Pays de Galles does not satisfy him. He nails it to England, and England to America. Yes, I concede, politically we are Anglo-Saxons, but we are Europeans too, and Europeans are many tribes. Many Welsh, for example, say they are Celts, like the people of Brittany in France, or the Basques . . .
Anglophones, Francophones, vous êtes les mêmes . . . You are the same, he says.
Well, I counter, are you the same as the other Africans?
‘Non!’ He smiles slightly at last. ‘We are Congolese!’
The observers start to laugh. Conversations resume.
‘And what do you do?’
‘I am with the port police.’
‘You must be busy – there’s a lot going on, isn’t there?’
‘Oh yes.’
Wilfred was off duty now, he explained, and going home to his wife and children. If I would like to come again tomorrow morning he would show me around.
In the middle of town a line of restaurants clung together under a white colonnade. One served kebabs or cakes over a counter, the next breakfast and lunch. ‘They are all good,’ I was told. ‘If it’s good and it works it is normally run by the Lebanese.’
From behind a pillar came American voices: two men in shades were finishing their meal. They were both broad-shouldered and wide-framed. One was bald and moustached; the other had an impressive beard. Apologising for interrupting them I asked if they knew anywhere which had a pool table. A pool table is a wonderful place to meet people, to find conversation and friends. Sure, they said, and gave me the address of a place, both restaurant and hotel. They were friendly and kind. They would be there later, they said – perhaps we would meet?
I moved out of my upmarket tower into the hotel they recommended, a long bungalow of rooms below a dining area, wound around the bottom of a tall building which was slowly being repaired. It was owned by Philippe, a laid-back young Frenchman who had cycled around the world, met his Vietnamese wife here, and settled. Members of her family worked in the kitchens, and the restaurant was deservedly popular, attracting the cast of a dozen novels. Among the regulars there w
as a Frenchman with a moustache so huge it looked like a disguise, and a Belgian with an impressive hat. They both looked as though they were in fancy dress, ‘disguised’ as spies. Passing trade included aid workers, diplomats, oil people and UN staff, European and African nationalities I could only guess at. At any mixed-sex table the women were always younger than the men. Beyond the buffet my new friends were eating with four others of their kind: big, broad American men.
‘So what are you guys doing?’
‘We’re building the new American Embassy.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘Real good. No problem.’
‘Is it like the old one?’
‘It’s much better. A block back from the road, near the airport, plenty of space between the perimeter and the building, so if we have to we can pick ’em off as they come over the wall . . .’
The embassy-builders’ lives fascinated me. They had all toured what seemed like dozens of countries, living in a travelling parallel world.
‘What’s the plan tonight?’
‘You’re coming out with us. We’re gonna have a few drinks here, and then we’re gonna go to a bar and get a few more, and then we’re going out dancing, and you’re gonna see more beautiful women who want you than you ever have in your life.’
We went to a dark cellar bar, air-conditioned, and drank while the clock turned towards night-club time. Some Congolese women turned up. We were all introduced with great courtesy by Jim, the extrovert king of the group, the man whom I had first spoken to. He had built embassies in more countries than I could count. Brazzaville was a hell of a lot quieter than some of the places he worked in, ‘But it does have some good women!’ he said.
His beautiful girlfriend laughed and kissed him. He was helping to put her child through school.
‘It’s only a small embassy,’ said another man, whom I privately christened the Quiet American. ‘What did you say you do?’
They were careful with me, saying as much as they could and automatically stopping short of a shared silence, a place like a wide, forbidden compound of things they could not say. There was one language we could all speak, as men far from home, and another only they spoke, which they would never use in public. They apologised for it with jokes and references.
‘You better watch out!’ Jim laughed. ‘He’s going to have to open a file on you now.’
I seemed to remember reading that Americans serving in the UK had to report encounters with the British public as alien contacts. I teased them about it. The Quiet American did not quite blush as he looked at the floor.
‘How does Brazzaville compare with other places you have been?’
The Quiet American pursed his lips. ‘Honestly? I would say this place is as dead as dead. There is nothing happening here at all.’
Somewhere out there, beyond the land, according to a paper I had read, two American warships were circling the continent, while diplomats tried to find a country prepared to host Africom – a military hub, a US equivalent of the French base in Djibouti. According to the article they were not having a great deal of luck, if the pronouncements of African leaders were true.
The embassy-builders said they did not know about that, but their construction would have lots of potential.
‘There’s only gonna be a few Marines stationed there but you should see it. There’s bunks and showers and even TVs all ready. If they ever have to send a detachment here all they do is switch it all on.’
The night club divided into three strata. We stood at a bar scattered with other ex-pats; European men, late twenties to mid-sixties, lit by bright down-lights and multiplied in mirrors behind bottles. In the dark, against the opposite wall, were Congolese men. They sat in small groups and huddles, their eyes sweeping the bar and the spaces between us all, in which there were the girls. They outnumbered the men dancing three to one. If you met any of their eyes it was taken as an invitation.
‘What do you think it’s like, for those guys,’ I asked one of the Americans, ‘watching us? Don’t you think they must hate us?’
‘It must be weird for them,’ said Dino, another of the embassy-builders. He was a broad Italian American who specialised in electronic security.
‘That girl, she’s beautiful,’ he sighed. ‘I’m gonna ask her out.’
That girl was beautiful. Anna spoke French, Dino English: I became a translator.
‘Tell him I think he is very nice.’
‘Tell her she is very pretty.’
‘Ask him if he has a wife.’
‘Tell her no, I don’t! Is she married?’
‘Ask him where he is from.’
‘Tell her I’m American. Ask her where is she from?’
‘Tell him I am from Kinshasa.’
‘Ask her what she is doing here.’
‘Tell him I am here for a rest! Ha ha ha! I have a hairdressing business.’
‘Tell her she has beautiful skin.’
‘Tell him I know he will have other girls.’
‘Dino, she says she knows you will have other girls!’
‘No way! That’s not true. Ask her if she would like to go out with me tomorrow.’
‘I am busy tomorrow but I will go out with him on Sunday.’
‘Right, that’s it! You guys understand each other just fine; I’m out.’
Wilfred was transformed. Now he was wearing a black T-shirt, with POLICE stamped on it in white, spotless black combat trousers, black combat boots, and a black automatic on his hip.
‘Do you ever have to fire the gun?’
‘Not yet.’
He led the way past the bars, through broken gates, to the port proper. Under the flat, hot sky a large market was in progress. Sacks of food were being unloaded from barges: a load of beans from Cameroon had just arrived. Spread out on the ground were fabrics, cassava, fish, chickens, vegetables, rice, spices, wood and a bundle of young crocodiles, alive, and all for sale. The crocodiles had their jaws lashed tight around wooden bits. They were not much under 5½ feet long and looked sunburned under their brown scales. Only their eyes moved, as if they were pretending to be a stack of planks.
‘So what do you actually do here, Wilfred?’
‘I make sure it is secure.’
We walked along to some warehouses where a group of birds were fluttering around iron beams. They were hirundines, but not, I was sure, Barn Swallows. We wandered back to the market, Wilfred pointing out the ferry to Kinshasa which was coming in sideways, stemming the current. Suddenly around us there was a chorus of whoops and shouts.
A thin man with bare feet in a ragged shirt and tattered shorts was running for his life.
‘A thief,’ said Wilfred, mildly, not moving. The man was tearing away from the crowd which was stilled, staring. Two or three men ran after him, sprinting as fast as they could. He ran first directly away from the river but quickly slowed on an unstable sandbank rising to an iron fence. The pursuers gained; one grabbed at him. He leapt away from the clutching hands and people in the crowd cried out as he changed direction, now coming down the bank. It had been apparent from the first instant that he could not escape: where could he run? The pursuers closed again. The fugitive stumbled, his foot slipped on sand and he crashed down, captors piling over and onto him. The crowd sighed. Men dragged the thin man to his feet and hustled him along, his head hanging and his steps uneven, weak now, as though all his strength had gone.
‘What are they going to do with him?’
‘They are taking him to the police post there,’ said Wilfred. ‘If we were not here they would kill him.’
Five minutes later, having taken his time passing between the knots of people in the market, Wilfred led me to see the man.
‘What did he steal?’
‘I don’t know,’ Wilfred said.
The man was sitting on the floor against the back wall of the police post. One of his knees was bleeding. A policeman sat between him and the door. The captive looked up. Wilfred surveye
d him, then exchanged words in Lingala with the guard. There was no expression on the thin man’s face but his eyes seemed to stare in spite of themselves. He was still panting slightly. We were all sweating.
‘What will happen to him?’
‘He will be fined, but if he does not have any money they will let him go later.’
It seemed I was expected to talk to the man.
‘Are you all right?’
He nodded.
‘Is your leg all right?’
He nodded again. There was nothing more to say, and the future seemed entirely uncertain. Would the man be beaten? Killed? Nothing seemed determined, likely or impossible. Wilfred and I returned to the bar, to drink and gaze at the river.
It was staggeringly hot in town later. A wind blew up clouds of dust from the roads which seemed to make the air hotter. The heat beat behind my eyes and in my temples; my legs shook like the thief’s. You had to walk very slowly, or sit down.
I followed the sound of a celebration through deserted streets. In a forecourt behind railings in front of a government building people in bright clothes were singing and clapping their hands under a banner which said this was a celebration of the inauguration of new delegates – delegates for what it did not say. There were no bystanders; just women and men dancing and singing, in the heat, behind the railings. Despite their swaying and singing and the bright colours of the women’s dresses there was a strained, isolated atmosphere, as if this was a staged rehearsal. I approached but then an army truck appeared, open-backed and stuffed with soldiers in purple berets. Their weapons protruded from the truck like spines: they did not carry their rifles at the vertical, but at the ready. They were not like any soldiers I had ever seen; neither cool professionals nor bored recruits; they were tense, tight-eyed, their faces blank; it was impossible to tell what they were thinking: pain at the heat, anger, anticipation of trouble – some sort of attack? I fled.
The evening had barely cooled when Dino and I went for a walk.
‘I just love my job,’ he said. ‘Lots of guys stay in but I love to go out. I’ll walk anywhere, man. There’s nowhere I won’t walk.’
A Single Swallow Page 11