In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (16 page)

But this was to reckon without national
amour propre
. Mobutu
had taken a huge interest in the nuclear reactor, making a point of attending all its special events and providing funding when emergencies cropped up. Kabila took a similarly benevolent approach, dispatching the thirty-man team of gendarmes to guard the installation. The new president was as unlikely as his predecessor to close down a facility he regarded, however ludicrously, as a symbol of prestige.

‘In principle', said Professor Malu, the reactor was still switched on briefly once a week, to verify it was still functioning properly. But anything more ambitious was ruled out because of lack of funding. The general dearth of financing clearly weighed on his mind. ‘The policemen guarding this facility earn $200–300 a month. That's ten times more than a university professor. C'est pas normal.' As the years went by, he acknowledged, the forty-year-old reactor was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. The world of nuclear technology had moved on and Kinshasa's monitoring equipment had become obsolete, with worn parts impossible to replace. This forced the technicians to go in for a bit of ‘bricolage' (do-it-yourself), he admitted, a comment that raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

Such tinkering might no longer suffice. Visitors to the reactor have reported that the water used to cool the rods is becoming grubby, a sign that it is impure. Left unchecked, the process could lead to the corrosion of the uranium rods and eventual contamination of the site. ‘Something has to be done there,' sighed a spokesman for the IAEA. Responsible for the world's nuclear industry, the organisation was far from reassured by the findings of a safety inspection conducted at the Kabila government's request. ‘There is a problem with the buildings' foundations and a general problem of a lack of infrastructural support from the government. They are aware this is not the best of situations and we are trying to help.'

Not so aware, apparently, as to recognise that Congo and nuclear energy should finally part company. Staff at the reactor approached the US with a bizarre deal in November 1999. In return for granting US experts permission to empty fuel from the area decommissioned during the famous upgrade, they wanted investment in a
range of nuclear research projects. True to the unquenchable spirit of Monsignor Gillon, construction of a brand new nuclear reactor topped the list.

Some industry experts have speculated that if conditions at the Kinshasa reactor deteriorate beyond a certain point, Washington, increasingly nervous about the temptation offered to terrorists by such poorly policed nuclear rods, might feel obliged to stage a repeat of the operation in which nuclear fuel was removed from Vietnam before the country fell to the Vietcong.

Just how dangerous was the Kinshasa facility? I asked the IAEA. ‘We did some back-of-an-envelope calculations when the rebels were advancing in 1997 and worked out that there could have been contamination if the reactor had been blown up, but that it would have been largely limited to the university,' an official told me. ‘Certainly, from a safety standpoint, it lies at the lower end of the world league table. But while one can't be complacent, the scale of potential contamination is roughly 1,000 times less than Chernobyl, because the reactor is 1,000 times smaller.'

As I drove away from a battered reactor full of murky water, on a hill slowly sliding into the valley, run by physicists who had lost touch with reality, the figures somehow failed to reassure. Before I left, Professor Malu had gestured to a technician, who switched off what sounded like a car alarm, opened a locked room and emerged proudly holding a silvery metallic tube. The uranium rod was gleaming. To my untrained eye it looked pristine, free from any signs of corrosion. But in a nation on Low Batt, I wondered how long that could remain true.

During the tumultuous
post-independence years, when Congo looked to the outside world like an oversized fruitcake about to crumble into a hundred tempting morsels and an uncertain Mobutu was sizing up army morale, an empire briefly saw the light of day in the province of south Kasai, home of the Luba.

With the quiet blessing of the Belgian mining companies, more interested in guaranteed access to Congo's mineral wealth than issues of national sovereignty, the diamond province followed the example set by Katanga further south, and announced its independence. Its new emperor, Albert Kalonji, suddenly found himself swamped by returning Lubas fleeing an army which interpreted its orders to put down the secessionist revolts as a licence to massacre members of the ethnic group. Exasperated by constant requests for shelter, seeds, tools and money, he finally issued a statement telling the refugees to stop bothering the government with their problems, going so far, some say, as to write the principle into the empire's new constitution. ‘Vous êtes chez vous, débrouillez-vous,' was the message—‘This is your home, so fend for yourselves.'

Thus was born the infamous Article 15. ‘Je me débrouille,' the Kasaians would say, with a knowing nudge and a wink, as they indulged in a bit of light diamond smuggling. ‘Article 15,' Kalonji's officials would quip, with a philosophical shrug of the shoulders, citing the constitution to justify their demands for bribes. And later, long after the empire had faded into history, the principle received
another top endorsement when Mobutu, addressing a ruling party conference, acknowledged that it was acceptable to ‘steal a little', as long as the theft remained within limits.

By the 1990s, Article 15 was the sardonic thread running through the fabric of Zairean society, the
raison d'être
of a leader, a government, an entire regime. Prime ministers came and went, each of them doling out civil service jobs for the boys. There were official drivers for ministries without cars, switchboard operators for departments without phones, secretaries without typewriters. They were paid an average of $6 a month but hung on nonetheless in the hope that one day the economy would revive and they would get what they were owed. In a world of fantasy wages, knowing how to ‘se débrouiller'—that untranslatable French concept meaning to fend for oneself, to cope against all odds, to manage somehow—had become something approaching an art form.

For public servants, juggling two jobs—the official one that involved sitting in a dimly lit office reading the newspapers and the real one that started at noon and, hopefully, brought in some real money—became the norm. The skill was finding a Darwinian niche in the ecosystem, the tiny competitive edge that meant one had something to sell, a means of survival in a ruthless world.

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 were 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.