In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  For teachers it was the pass marks they could dole out to ambitious pupils in exchange for groceries. For soldiers who rented themselves out to private businessmen or restaurants as bodyguards, it was the promise of security. For diplomats in embassies abroad, it was access to duty-free goods. For bureaucrats, it meant touting their ability to delay or expedite crucial paperwork and influence with superiors. As Mobutu himself once remarked in yet another of his surprisingly frank conference speeches: ‘Everything is for sale and everything can be bought in this country. And in this trade, the slightest access to power constitutes a veritable instrument of exchange.’

  But in a shrinking economy, most Zaireans never succeeded in entering that world of pensions and salaries, however many months in arrears. In 1955, nearly 40 per cent of the active population worked in the formal sector. By the 1990s, this had shrunk to 5 per cent and the official figures for per capita income had fallen to a laughable—and obviously impossible—$120 a year. Zaire’s real economy had dropped off the map. The vast majority of Zaireans were living off the ubiquitous vegetable plots and their wits, buying and selling, smuggling and haggling, hustling and rustling.

  Once, sitting in a working man’s restaurant behind Kinshasa’s main post office, a monolith sprouting an impressive array of obsolete antennae and dishes, I logged the stream of street sellers who entered, trawled and departed. It was a walking supermarket whose players ranged from established traders, with cigarettes and sweets displayed in usherette-style boxes, to those who seemed to be operating on an ad-hoc basis: one second-hand shirt slung over an arm, a single belt dangling from a finger, a couple of well-fondled chocolate bars whipped out of a pocket.

  In the space of forty-five minutes, as I worked my way through a steaming plate of rice and beans, I was offered the following items without straying from my seat: cigarettes, chewing gum, hard-boiled eggs, cola nuts, spice sachets and carrots (all from a medicinal box aimed at those plagued by bad breath or sore throats), French perfume (two tatty boxes, clearly fake), plastic briefcases and plastic sandals (range of), a shoe polish (a small boy knocking his brush against a stool to attract attention), men’s trousers, transistor radios (choice of two models), a display of tinny-looking watches and sunglasses, ginger powders, a couple of sports shirts, cheap nylon ties, disposable razors, men’s briefs (packet of three), men’s shirts, paper tissues, roasted peanuts (in the sachet), grilled prawns (on wooden skewers), socks (variety of colours). The traders patiently allowed their goods to be examined and commented on by the sceptical but not unfriendly diners, then moved tirelessly on. It was like watching predators on the savannah as they prowled the long grasses and scoured the horizon, searching relentlessly for a kill.

  The variety of forms of Article 15 adopted in Kinshasa never ceased to amaze. In the markets, there were the wood-carvers who had perfected the art of making masks, stools and fetishes look like weathered antiques, the starting point of a chain that ended in European galleries, where the supposed objets d’art sold for hundreds of times their original price. On street corners, boys working in cahoots with Post Office staff sold stolen copies of Time and Newsweek ordered by the few expatriates still foolish enough to expect to receive such tempting mail. At rush hour these youths might metamorphose into the bully-boys who lined the bus routes and would, for a price, shove their way onto a packed minibus, clearing a seat for commuters who didn’t want to crease their clothes. Their brothers operated in the money-changing districts of the Cité as ‘chargeurs’ whose job was to rush any approaching car and lure its passengers to a foreign exchange bureau, benevolently ignored by the traffic police who themselves sold Zairean driving licences on request. And then there were noble, solo efforts, such as the man who stood in the middle of Avenue Colonel Lukusa day after day, gesturing melodramatically at the hole in the road he had filled with sand for the benefit of passing cars and demanding, in increasingly outraged tones, to be paid for his efforts.

  For sheer weirdness, though, it was hard to rival what went on at Ngobila Beach, the port where the lumbering river ferries landed and my own first point of contact with Zaire. This was the main link between Kinshasa and Brazzaville, the capital on the other side of the swirling brown waters, and like all border crossings it provided a million ripe opportunities for Article 15.

  The fact that I was proposing to have a drink with my two unconventional companions so amazed the owner of the Mona Lisa, the café around the corner from the beach, he was initially lost for words. After twenty stunned minutes, however, the agony had got too much to bear and he ushered us indoors, off his exposed front terrace. ‘Do you KNOW these men?’ he asked incredulously, upper lip visibly curling in distaste. ‘Please keep it brief,’ he begged. ‘I don’t like these people.’ Our drinks, predictably enough, never appeared.

  To be fair, we made for a fairly unconventional party. Neither of my guests was particularly clean, due to what was clearly regular contact with the ground. As a group, we probably smelled fairly rank and between the lot of us we could only boast three sound legs—two of mine and one belonging to Ntambwe Mpanya, president of the Ngobila Beach Handicapped Mutual Benefit Society. He was a broad-chested fellow, with a round, extraordinarily expressive face. But a shrivelled left leg had put him on a permanent kilter. He walked with an ugly, wildly swooping motion, plunging earthwards with every second step, only to be saved from impact as his sound leg kicked in.

  General secretary Zege Osenge was even worse off. At first glance he appeared to have no legs at all. Closer inspection revealed two useless appendages incapable of bearing weight. Sitting in a plastic café chair, he seemed normal, a fine figure of a man, in fact. But as soon as he left the chair a terrible transformation took place: plummeting to hip height, he became a vision of horror, the kind of logic-defying deformity that rises gibbering and scrabbling from the depths of the subconscious at night. The agility with which his truncated form hopped into cars, negotiated doors and scampered along pavements was so unexpected, it made one catch one’s breath in something more than mere disbelief.

  It is hard to think of a place where life is harder for the disabled than Africa, a world away from the linguistic euphemisms, collective guilt and uneasy piety of the West. Handicapped children—for the most part, victims of polio outbreaks their parents could not afford to vaccinate them against—are often not sent to school. As adults they struggle to find work, get overlooked in hospitals and are dismissed as unsuitable candidates for marriage. The instinctive shudder of horror, the automatic shrinking from contact, are barely masked by the able-bodied. It is an approach whose only merit is its complete lack of hypocrisy.

  In Congo, poverty and desperation have increased the pressure on families tempted to throw these financial burdens out of the house, to join the blind men and sun-blistered albinos who gather at crossroads to beg from passing cars. There they swell the misshapen ranks of the gangs who effectively run a Mafia-style system, organisations based on the realisation that while one man with no legs can achieve little, a score of them demanding action can command considerable attention. Touring local stalls and shops in force, they threaten to smash windows and block entrances unless shopkeepers pay regular tribute. The sight of a crowd of furious cripples gathered outside his premises on their wheeled palettes and tricycles is usually enough to persuade a shopkeeper to pay up. But when roused, the paraplegics have been known to systematically hunt down their enemies in packs. To the physical fear of the able-bodied, appalled by such naked aggression, is added another concern: the suspicion that the handicapped possess evil powers, supernatural compensation perhaps for the rotten hand they have been dealt by fate.

  It was specifically to avoid resorting to such gangster tactics, explained Ntambwe, that the Mutual Benefit Society was created. With 213 members, both men and women, it now effectively dominated commercial trade from Ngobila Beach and was the only paraplegic association, he claimed, that managed to make a living. ‘Article 15, that’s us. We wer
e determined not to be beggars. Because no one out there would give us any work, we decided, as intellectuals, that we had to go out and create it for ourselves.’ Each morning, scores of paraplegics gather at the warehouses in the narrow streets off the port. Sitting on their hand-pedalled tricycles, they wait anxiously while their young assistants load up the specially designed compartments at the back with goods. When the tricycles can take no more, they head for the riverfront, drivers straining at the handles and sweating helpers pushing from behind. Each evening the same bizarre procession wends its way back from the port, equally heavily laden, but with a different range of goods.

  When it comes to competitive advantages, few can be more fragile than this. The society owes its commercial viability to a quirk of law which allows cripples to travel on the ferries at a discount. The handicapped travellers could accordingly afford to set slightly lower prices for their goods and hus became the favourite go-betweens for the ferocious ‘Soeurs ya Poids’ (Heavyweight Sisters), the buxom merchant women who sell in the sprawling markets on either side of the river. The paraplegics also enjoy another advantage. Because officials shrink from touching them, terrified of the cripple’s curse, they pass through the frontier with a minimum of inspection and cursory customs charges. They are therefore perfect conduits, say Kinshasa’s residents, for drugs, foreign currency and any other small, precious items an exporter prefers not to declare.

  But the real skill is to exploit the temporary, short-term scarcities that develop in each capital city, whether rice, milk, flour, sugar or margarine. ‘We bring from Kinshasa what is missing in Brazzaville and what is missing in Kinshasa we bring from Brazzaville,’ explained Ntambwe. ‘Sometimes, if we get it wrong, we have to bring our stuff all the way back and the day has been lost.’

  Not far from where we sat, a paraplegic was busy capitalising on the latest twist in market forces. Helped by friends, he was struggling to balance a pair of giant jerry cans filled with petrol onto the back of his tricycle. At that moment, the militia fighting in Brazzaville meant fuel there was scarce. Kinshasa’s petrol, itself in short supply, should sell for a high price over the river, high enough, in any case, to justify this polio victim running the risk of becoming a tricycling firebomb if a cigarette spark went astray. ‘Thanks to the war, I should be able to sell the petrol on the other side for twice the price,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll bring milk back in the same jerry cans.’

  Key to the trade were the hand-pedalled tricyles. Manufactured in Kinshasa to precise instructions from the paraplegics themselves, they came in a range of shapes and styles. A light, mobile one served for rushing around town. Those used for trade were heavier and more bulky, equipped with metal compartments on the back. And then there was the handicapped equivalent of the long-haul vehicle—tricycles with storage tanks so large they could not be manoeuvred without two helpers heaving from behind.

  These young boys, the ‘aides-handicapés’ were also critical to commercial success. ‘It’s very important to be able to trust your assistant,’ explained Zege. ‘The handicapped person can’t go and buy the rice or flour at the market himself, so he has to be sure that the assistant isn’t cheating him. Which is why the assistant will usually be a member of the family.’ For both players, it was a job that demanded aggression and a high level of immunity towards the endless ‘tracasseries’ (hassles), the shouting, the wheedling negotiations, the temper tantrums that accompany any frontier crossing in central Africa. ‘Policemen are the Number One enemy of the handicapped,’ complained Ntambwe, his features disfigured by a terrible scowl. ‘They treat us worse than rabid dogs. For the officials at Ngobila we are not human. At the other end, in Brazzaville, they behave just as badly. The UN talks about the rights of the handicapped, but here we have none. It is an African disease.’

  Try as he might, the president made an unconvincing victim. There was something about his cunning face that revealed a survivor; a thuggish belligerence born of necessity and laid down over the years, layer after layer, a carapace against a hostile world. And indeed, the game had clearly been worth the candle for its leading player. Struck down by polio at the age of one, Ntambwe was so determined to get on in life he used to follow friends to primary school in defiance of his parents’ wishes until they reluctantly agreed to enrol him. He got some education, but never as much as he would have liked. Now he was hailed respectfully as ‘president’ wherever he went, owned a motorised Vespa worth $800, and managed to support a wife and eight children. He nursed expansionist plans—he wanted to buy a second Vespa for the society’s communal use, and dreamed of running training courses in shoe-making and poultry farming for its members.

  His secretary, who was paralysed as a result of a bungled injection, must have hoped for better than this when he was a young man studying law at Kinshasa University. He blamed the premature collapse of his academic career on a rector who took against his unsightly student and had him expelled from campus. But in managing to support a wife and three children, he was doing as well, if not better, as many unemployed former students who had once believed their status as ‘intellectuals’ would automatically land them a white-collar job.

  The fact that both men were earning their living, they said, had brought about a miraculous change in attitude by initially hostile in-laws, who had come to realise the husbands they feared would shame the family were bringing home a decent wage. Neither of them fooled themselves that the sudden affection went very deep. ‘If you show signs of succeeding in life then you’ll find the in-laws coming after you,’ said Zege. ‘Recently we had to buy the coffin of a society member who had been beaten up and killed by a porter. His relatives made themselves scarce as soon as there was no more money coming in. When you’re handicapped, you can only ever rely on another handicapped person.’

  If the Mutual Benefit Society was an example of Article 15 at its most inventive, it also highlighted how easily those survival techniques could be crushed, the competitive edges eliminated in a moment by a minute change in the law.

  I lost sight of the two for a couple of weeks, but kept cruising the harbour in search of them. On my last day, by chance, I spotted the president on his beloved Vespa, returning from another round trip to Brazzaville. François, with his usual blunt driving style, decided to attract the president’s attention by mounting the kerb in front of him. I noticed with amusement Ntambwe’s instinctive snarl of aggression and furious yelp at yet another insult directed at him from the able-bodied universe, before he realised he was being hailed by a friend and the scowl turned into a smile.

  Things were going badly for him personally and the society in general, he complained. The Vespa had been in a minor accident, emerging with a dented bumper. Simultaneously, the Kabila government, so desperate for money it had taken to taxing the moneychangers and hairdressers who worked by the roadside edge, was refusing to recognise the special privileges handicapped travellers traditionally enjoyed. Touring the port, the finance minister had recently made it clear he regarded the society’s members as little better than smugglers working in collusion with the Heavyweight Sisters to cheat the government. ‘The state has never done anything for us. We have no pension, no social security. If my child gets sick and needs hospital treatment, that’s it. And now they tell us we must pay just like everyone else. We don’t know where to turn.’ As a result of the government’s new approach on customs and ticket charges, he said, the paraplegics’ profits had already fallen to a quarter of their usual level. ‘They’re squeezing us hard,’ the president muttered, with a shake of the head. ‘We must get these measures changed, because we can’t go on like this.’

  The mood was gloomy as I accompanied the two executives down to the waterside to watch the last berthing of the day. The police and paraplegics had already assumed their respective positions on the quayside. As ferry grated against dock, one stout officer began flailing around with a long black whip, determined to stem the flood of paraplegics attempting to board for free. Shou
ts escalated, the whip thudded against wood, the security forces appeared to be winning the day. Then I spotted one of the Mutual Benefit Society’s members. So stunted he seemed no more than a head attached to a pair of sinewy arms, he had exploited his size to quietly squeeze through a gap in the wire netting separating us from the water. Hand over hand, he swung his body along the underside of the ramp being blocked by the police. Clambering aboard behind them, he turned, grinned triumphantly and pointed at the adversaries he had just outsmarted, mouthing something. I could not understand the Lingala, but somehow I knew it was very rude.

  ‘Never naked,’ shouted Charles, pounding the steering wheel for added emphasis, as though any were needed. ‘No, no, Madame, never naked!’

  As we negotiated the centre of town in his gleaming four-wheel drive, Charles was running through the finer points of his religion. For Charles was a Kimbanguist, and the Kimbanguist Church, it turned out, had a bit of a thing about drinking, dancing, polygamy and personal nudity. A true believer, he explained at the top of his voice, would never undress completely, retaining his underwear even in the shower, bath and bed. Christ himself, he pointed out, had retained his briefs during baptism. In the presence of God, it was vital to be decently dressed, and God was present at all times, after all.

  For the paraplegics of Ngobila Beach, facing a future without social security, Article 15 was something to be openly embraced, acknowledged without embarrassment. But even in the despair of the modern-day Congo there were those, I discovered, who felt obliged to dress their coping mechanisms in more respectable clothes.