Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  Kolelas had a different explanation for why the fighting stopped. And in his reasoning, in retrospect at least, one could also see the seeds for the coming conflagration, which would pit the two southern leaders against Sassou. “By the end of three months of this kind of killing we had cases where people would capture their enemies’ babies and beat them to a pulp with a wooden mortar for revenge,” he said. “Finally, I believed there had been some sort of divine intervention when I started hearing people say, ‘We are all blood brothers, descendants of the same Kongo kingdom. Why should we massacre each other if all we are doing is giving the northerners a chance to take over again?’ ”

  No one was predicting it at the time of my visit, but a new and far more destructive war, fought precisely along these battle lines, was to arrive on the heels of Mobutu’s downfall in 1997. It was much more intense than the cakewalk campaign that would topple Mobutu and bring Laurent Kabila to power, and it may have killed more innocent people, but this was the near-invisible little Congo, and its suffering, like its progress, would go unnoticed.

  For reasons I could still not fathom, Tansi had inserted himself in the middle of this venomous equation, first running for parliament in the 1993 elections, and then boycotting the institution altogether, along with the rest of Kolelas’s supporters. The stories of his final, declining months were as dispiriting as anything I had heard about this country. Congo’s greatest writer, a man whose brave satirical fiction had subverted dictatorships throughout the region, had taken up the tribalist Bakongo cause of Kolelas’s most hate-filled supporters with a virulence that he married to his gift for the verb. John Updike, writing about Tansi in The New Yorker, said that his late works were haunted by a “personal dying.” Updike quoted a passage from Tansi’s last novel, the surrealistic The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez: “In this country, night has the appearance of divinity. It smells like infinity. Day here will never be more than a pathetic hole of blue, sickly light.” The words capture beautifully Tansi’s almost fanatical disgust with the Central African condition, but give little hint of his own growing political folly.

  Tansi’s concerns were never with the cookie-cutter countries bequeathed by Europe’s arbitrary partition and colonial subjugation of the continent. Subtly underpinning all of his art, but always at the forefront of his increasingly rabid politics, was a deeply felt nationalism. It harkened back to what was for many African intellectuals a myth-infused antediluvian past, before the time, that is, when Europe’s imperial mapmakers and colonizing armies destroyed Africa’s nascent states.

  There was tragic irony in Tansi’s rage for redemption. Europe had undoubtedly wreaked untold destruction by shoehorning Africans of different languages and cultures together inside arbitrarily drawn boundaries at the end of the nineteenth century, by halfheartedly imposing its models of governance and economics on the continent for a few short decades in the twentieth century. Then, by washing its hands of Africa and walking away long before the mold had set, it vastly compromised matters even further.

  Though born of the indignities of domination by Westerners, Tansi’s passions were nonetheless based on a narrow, ethnically driven sense of identity. Everywhere one looked in Africa, runaway ethnicity in politics had the same impact: blinding carnage and chaos. Surely this was not the germ of African renaissance. An ideology like Tansi’s struck me rather more like a stick of dynamite thrown into a crowded marketplace—a recipe for death and destruction.

  While dying of AIDS, a disease he refused to so much as acknowledge, Tansi was experiencing a delirious streak of energy, which he unleashed on foes both old and new. Among them were the other ethnic groups, whose history he felt was nothing but backwardness compared to that of the descendants of the grand old Kongo kingdom. There was France, which had thrown Congo’s disparate peoples together in the same doomed formula for state creation seen all over Africa, and had been despoiling his country ever since. And finally, there was the vanity, nihilism and greed of Africa’s modern leaders, whom he condemned mercilessly, harkening back all the time to a putatively purer Africa, the Africa of his ancestors, who enjoyed order and light before the golden bough of their culture had been defiled by wave after wave of European slavers, explorers, missionaries and colonists.

  From the stories I was hearing secondhand, Tansi had worn out his welcome in Paris, where until recently he had been undergoing treatment for AIDS at the expense of both French and African friends. He had been sighted briefly in Brazzaville, together with his wife, and then they had disappeared again. Although Robert and I had heard all kinds of tales about him—that he was already dead, that he was in Zaire— most of the accounts seemed to converge around the idea that he had gone deep into the bush to undergo what French-speaking Africans call traitement à l’indigénat, or traditional cures. The village that was named most often in this context, the one that was cited with the most conviction, was a tiny place named Kibossi, located on the banks of a medium-sized tributary of the Congo River.

  Because of the infrequent air connections out of Brazzaville, we knew when we set out that Sunday morning that we had only one day to find Tansi. Everyone had told us we would require a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and although I wondered if I was setting myself up for a rip-off, I submitted to the idea and negotiated the least ruinous fee I could with the only rental-car agency that was open for business on that sleepy Brazzaville Sunday.

  The driver, André, collected us at our hotel, and we hit the road immediately, leaving Brazzaville’s sandy streets behind us. Within a few minutes, following the banks of the river, we passed the looted and destroyed compound of the World Health Organization, where I had done my stints as a translator, and finally hit the winding, pitted two-lane road that after twenty years of booming oil exports was still the closest thing Congo had to a national highway.

  I had been talked into the necessity of a true off-road vehicle, a huge and heavy Toyota Land Cruiser, and not one of the recreational vehicles that serve as oversized cars for suburban adventurers back home. But droopy-eyed André, skinny, almost dainty in his fancy shirt, designer sunglasses and gold chains, looked like anything but the type of guide one would want to have deep in the bush. What is worse, he had brought his sportily dressed girlfriend along for the ride, seating her far in the back. There was a strong hint of pique from both of them over the fact that André’s French boss had made him work on a Sunday because of a couple of Americans with a peculiar request.

  The trip started out badly between us. During the first hour I repeatedly had to ask André to turn down the music. And though he grudgingly did so each time, he gradually turned it back up, until the bass pounded so heavily that it masked even the noise that the brutal banging from the steadily deteriorating road was delivering to the car, and to us. The songs were heavily rocking Congolese rumbas, with fantastic, bouncing guitar runs, and lilting vocals by a roly-poly singer whose name I soon learned was Madilu System. In the popular manner of many Congolese singers, Madilu seemed to weave the names of every person he knew into his lyrics, laughing deeply as he pronounced words like “enigma” and “paradox” in his booming tenor.

  Like an endless loop the same tape would play over and over throughout the day, producing the same scratchy attempts by André and his girlfriend to match the singer’s trills. But however much it had grated on me at first, I was gradually won over. Indeed, in time, I was playing the guitar parts in my head, tapping my feet and occasionally even puzzling over what the enigma was.

  The ride was giving me my second lesson in the geography of this region in as many weeks. Although we never strayed far from the banks of the Congo or one of its many tributaries, climbing the grassy hills and then plunging into incredibly lush bamboo-filled valleys, I realized that I was seeing more of what I had been admiring from the air on the flight to Kikwit. Africa is extraordinarily empty. The Sahara and Kalahari Deserts, each huge, have climates far too dry to support more than a few wandering nomads. The forbidding S
ahara alone, which is scarcely smaller than the United States, is a little less than one third of the continent’s total area. At the opposite extreme of the continent’s ecological spectrum, the Central African rain forest, a biosphere of over 500,000 square miles, is a world of water and vegetation so dense that one could fly overhead for hours and never see the ground.

  However lush it may appear, though, for humans life in the forest is almost as rude as it is in the desert, which is why only small numbers of pygmies eke out a life there. We drove atop one of those grassy plateaus that had so hypnotized me from the air, and dipped into the well-watered valley that led to Kibossi. Everywhere, I was stunned to remark that apart from the road we had turned off onto—a loamy track that seemed at times as if it would swallow the car like quicksand— there was no sign of man’s hand anywhere.

  The Congo River had excavated the soil from the bowels of the continent all along its immense arc through southern, then eastern and finally Central Africa, and then deposited it here like molehills of compost. This was earth of an almost impossible richness, and yet for miles at a time there was not a soul in sight. Tropical pestilences had plagued Africa from the beginning of time, and this primordial curse had meant that much of its best land remained underpopulated, almost uninhabitable. Western science has never given these problems its best shot, far from it, and technology has been failing miserably in the face of menaces as commonplace as the mosquito and the tsetse fly.

  Water was everywhere in abundance, but the dampness bred an amazing proliferation of parasites, from larvae that bore their way into the skin of those who wade in streams, causing blindness years later, to fly-borne parasites that attack cattle, making it impossible to raise a herd. Malaria and common diarrhea alone kill millions of African children each year. And though hard to measure, the toll of disease on the survivors is easy to grasp: generalized lethargy and shortened lifespans. More recently, AIDS had descended on the continent like a coup de grâce delivered against those who had survived against already long odds. In countries like Congo-Brazzaville, perhaps a third of the population had already become infected.

  We pulled into Kibossi toward the end of lunch hour to find a Sunday afternoon scene pretty much typical of any village between Senegal and Zimbabwe. As scrawny chickens pecked for specks of grain by their feet, the village men, their clouded eyes bloodshot with a hint of yellow mixed in with the red, sat on benches alongside low-slung concrete buildings talking loudly and drinking beer from brown bottles as long as their forearms. The women were still at work, bending low to sweep their courtyards with their long African brooms of splayed straw bunched and tied loosely at one end; feeding naked, runny-nosed babies; or deep-frying batter-dipped delicacies for their young daughters to sell by the roadside as the afternoon stretched into evening.

  Foreigners don’t pull into little villages like this very often, and as we got out of the Land Cruiser everyone stopped what they were doing to watch us. André approached the most sober of the men nearby and asked him in the local language if Tansi was to be found anywhere nearby.

  The hubbub increased, drawing people out of their homes and attracting lots of bystanders. Through experience, I already had the distinct feeling that we were about to be led on a goose chase. Some people claimed to have heard of the recent arrival of the man we were looking for. They said he wasn’t staying in this village, but rather across the nearby river, and a good walk upstream.

  Having come all this way at such expense, we couldn’t turn back without having a look, so we haggled over the boat ride we would need to take, recruited a guide and were soon on our way. Robert and I sat, along with our guide, in a pirogue, a dugout made from the long but shallow trunk of a local hardwood tree, along with two young men who steered us across the river, sometimes paddling with a crude oar and sometimes standing and pushing against the bottom with a long wooden pole. With the boat wobbling jerkily, bringing the warm and muddy water to the very lip of the low-slung hull, I was convinced that we would end up swimming for our lives. And yet somehow, we made it across.

  To my chagrin, it took only a few minutes on the far bank to confirm that Tansi was not living in, nor had he ever lived in, this village. He had never even been heard of there. Going with the flow, however, even when it is hard to discern much of any direction, is a necessity in Africa. It is not my style, but I had learned to enjoy it, making a virtue of momentarily surrendering control. I had seen too many foreign correspondents tearing their hair out in frustration over Africa’s chaos or cursing the venality or supposed incompetence they claimed to see everywhere, even as they offered to bribe their way through situations unbidden.

  An improvised trip, and the experiences like these it provided, sometimes overshadowed the destination itself, becoming a source of understanding, or at least of feeling for a continent so many others were content to damn. So, having had an opportunity to admire the boatmen’s uncanny balance—and little more—we returned to Kibossi, paid our various helpers and companions, and set off for the return trip to Brazzaville.

  The advantage of a good travel companion goes beyond plain company; his real value is in the kind of moral encouragement he provides in situations like these. Robert had maintained his usual cheer in Timbuktu, even as I succumbed to dysentery. We had kept each other going on huge overland trips—navigating by the moonlight in the near-desert wastelands between Ouagadougou and Niamey, rushing to cover the overthrow of one of the region’s rare elected governments, or surviving the horrible road between Burkina Faso and Ghana that we had taken on with a battered taxi with broken seats.

  As weary as I was this time, Robert, who sat in the bumpy back seat of the car with the loud music and with André’s still-complaining girlfriend in her showy but faintly ridiculous faux-Chanel blouse, had to be even more exhausted. But just as I was about to give up the search for Tansi, he asked what we should try next. So once back in Brazzaville we did what we should probably have done from the very start: We went to Tansi’s city home in search of information.

  The afternoon had turned so hot it even seemed to slow the bulbous green equatorial flies that swarm around restaurants and refuse heaps in Brazzaville. We found the house with little difficulty. It was an unassuming place in the Bakongo quarter, a little larger than most, perhaps, but nothing special in this dusty grid of streets. A couple of teenagers sat on the veranda with machine guns, posting guard, which we took as a good sign. But once under the awnings, a glimpse at the near-total darkness inside made me think Tansi was not there.

  After a moment’s wait, Tansi’s son, Regis, appeared, sporting a look much like our driver’s, complete with gold neck chain. The style, popular all over Africa, was innocuous enough, but as an African-American, and thereby, by definition, as a descendant of slaves, I always found it ironic. Africa had been taken over and Balkanized by Europeans eager to find gold. And from there, one commodity led seamlessly to another, resulting in the trade in human beings, with black people in chains shipped off to their death or bondage by the millions from places all up and down this coast.

  Regis said he knew where his dad was and seemed eager to see him, so I invited him to come along as we set off once more in the Land Cruiser. The new destination was a place called Foufoundou, a tiny village not found on Michelin’s maps of the region, which I always carried. Regis seemed confident, though, so we forged on, traveling well past the turnoff to Kibossi.

  As the afternoon wore on, though, despair gradually displaced my earlier serenity. We were driving on sandy secondary roads now, and the tracks in the soft earth brought here by the Congo basin’s rivers were so deep that the car could often steer itself for minutes at a stretch. The massive growth of grasses and bamboo had overwhelmed what had been roadway. The heavy stalks of bushes and vines that constantly scratched and banged away at the car had turned our pathway into a tunnel of thick greenery. I distracted myself from my growing fears of our breaking down and of the approaching darkness by imagining th
is terrain in prehistoric times. I was back to my visions of Jurassic Park, and found myself imagining encounters with some hitherto uncatalogued beast.

  There was that music, too—the record by Madilu, playing over and over. I didn’t know any Lingala, the language of most Congolese pop, outside of the most common expressions of romantic affection that are repeated in almost every song, but somehow I was beginning to intuit the meaning of his fulsome valentines. When the tail-wagging intensity of the music slowed, it was just possible to imagine that the repeated references to enigmas and paradoxes evoked by the singer were about the dilapidated state of this “rich” country and its nonexistent roads, rather than some melancholic expression of the singer’s romantic obsessions.

  According to the guidebooks, this former French colony boasted a total of 770 miles of paved roads, but from the evidence of our travels, even that modest figure seemed impossible to believe. André was characteristically laconic in explaining the shortfall. “Why don’t we have roads in this country after so many years of oil exports? Because the money came in, and the politicians spent it. The worst part is that we told them: Take your time, eat well. The Congolese people have contented themselves dancing while their leaders ate sumptuous meals.”

  Whether or not we would ever find Tansi, André’s words had just brought us closer to him, I thought. He knew almost nothing of the writer, but taking different routes, the two shared conclusions.