In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (17 page)

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. Shouts 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.

There was something of the rubber ball about Charles. A rolypoly figure of a man who seemed to have been born without a neck or any other superfluous links between his various body parts, he was blessed with unsquashable cheerfulness. Swat him away, one felt, and his tubby form would merely bounce off the nearest wall and come hurtling back, smile intact, perky as ever.

Two-way conversation was an alien concept. Charles was into pronouncements: emphasised by a stubby finger, delivered with all the force and rhythm of the amateur preacher he was, they brooked no dissent. Beaming with enthusiasm, he would round them off with an emphatic ‘Merci', signalling his point had been not only made, but proved. His colleagues had dubbed him respectfully ‘Papa Pasteur'. He had a collection of Kimbanguist religious books, attended church whenever he got the chance and would clearly have liked to be at worship every day of the week. Proudly, he showed off the little diamond-shaped badge—a portrait of the church's spiritual head—he always wore pinned to the natty waistcoats he favoured, and fished a plastic eye-drop bottle out of his rucksack. It was full, he explained, of Holy Water from the village of N'kamba. Birthplace of the prophet who founded the church, N'kamba had become a place of pilgrimage for believers, the Kimbanguist equivalent of Jerusalem. ‘Every morning I pray and swallow a couple of drops of this. It keeps me blessed all day.'

Yet in this picture of religious devotion one note jarred: the slight matter of his job, which, it seemed to me, might present a committed Christian with a few pangs of conscience. For Charles was what was known as a ‘protocol'. Employed by one of the few multinationals still operating in Kinshasa, his duty for the last thirteen years had been to usher employees in and out of Ndjili airport with a minimum of hassle. Essentially, that made him a professional payer of bribes. As a committed Christian, did this not present him with something of a moral dilemma?

No job goes deeper to the heart of Article 15 than the euphemistically dubbed ‘protocol'. In most airports of the world, all but the sick, very old and very young can be trusted to show their tickets, check in their luggage and pass through customs on their own. The fact that in Congo an entire profession has sprung up to deal with these simple procedures is a tribute to the sheer inventiveness of the country's officialdom.

Under Mobutu, the airport was transformed into something far more challenging than a place where you merely boarded a plane. Every check represented an opportunity for poorly paid officials to exchange their co-operation and compliance for a ‘little present'. And so the checks multiplied—at one stage there were seven separate services with the right to examine your papers—as members of the rival security forces, with friends, relatives and hangers-on attached, moved into Ndjili's peeling cupola with their snarling police dogs, metal barriers and rubber batons. The building became more than an airport, it was transformed into an intellectual contest, a real-life computer game full of hidden traps and sudden obstacles, where the punishments ranged from public humiliation to arrest and the prize—that longed-for seat on the next plane out—came with a highly variable price tag.

The state of the airport mirrored the state of the body politic, offering new arrivals an accurate thermometer of the situation outside its walls. Every now and then, a new government flush with confidence would try to clean things up. A general would be given responsibility for the airport, the number of security services would
be slashed and the human flotsam and jetsam expelled. But like hyenas lured by the smell of blood, the predators gradually crept back. As the new administrators registered the impossibility of reform, they would join the pickpockets, shoe-shine boys and beggars in the competition to see who could milk passengers most effectively. If you passed through relatively smoothly, you could count on finding some semblance of order outside. Emerge in a state of hysteria, several hundred dollars the lighter, and you knew things had gone bad again.

I never flew into Ndjili without feeling slightly nauseous. Although I knew it was coming, my stomach would lurch when an official at the door seized my passport and plunged with it into the bedlam of the interior, a move one felt was carefully calculated to put the nervous passenger off-balance. Travellers who could not afford a protocol developed their own survival techniques. My own was to keep a layer of dirty clothes at the top of my luggage, discouraging further exploration; to travel with the smallest of bags and always keep $20 notes ready folded in my pocket, to be smoothly pressed into a palm during the simulated friendly handshake that closed the ordeal. Getting the timing of the payout right was crucial. Volunteer the first bribe—intended to cover all officialdom in your ambit—too early and the friendly official who had earlier promised to ‘arrange everything' would suddenly disappear, to be replaced by a fresh set of uniforms, all claiming to deserve a piece of the action. Best was after you had entered the taxi and the driver had his foot on the accelerator, but before one of the soldiers circling like sharks in the parking lot noticed money was changing hands. It wasn't always easy.

In this jungle, the experts were the protocols. Because they were regulars, they could trade favours, knew who mattered and the real price for each service. If they were good at their job, they took on their shoulders all the sordid demands of corruption, the dirty deals and petty bargaining, allowing their charges—the Big Vegetables and expatriate businessmen—to sit in the air-conditioned VIP lounge with empty hands and quiet minds. ‘My responsibility is to make sure no one bothers my whites,' explained Charles, with possessive solicitude.

But it was not with this in mind, presumably, that Simon Kimbangu had taken on the might of the Belgian administration. For the founder of the Kimbanguist church was very much a rebel, deemed such a threat the colonial authorities imprisoned him for thirty years. Above all, he had very little time for the whites Charles spent his working day protecting from the more unsavoury aspects of Congolese existence. Which was why I found Charles's religious convictions, which he happily discoursed upon as we headed for the largest Kimbanguist church in Kinshasa, so intriguing.

Watching a religion and its myths while they are actually in the making is a curious sensation. The story of Kimbangu's life is full of parallels to the story of Christ and is told in much the same terms: his miracles, his twelve apostles, his initial reluctance to accept his divine destiny, his eventual martyrdom and posthumous apparitions. But the stories Charles was recounting had not been slowly crafted over 2,000 years, taking on an allegorical quality through the passage of time. Kimbangu died in 1951, within the memory of many living Zaireans, and the tale is dotted with disconcerting references to such modern inventions as trains, revolvers, ferries and motorcades. This is the Christian myth, replayed in the twentieth century.

Blurred photographs of Kimbangu exist. They show a man in a prison tunic, surprisingly stout despite his repeated bouts of fasting, frowning into the bright African sun. His scowl is deep and there is no discernible hint of charisma. But if you believe, as the church followers do, that Simon Kimbangu is not just a prophet sent to spread the word but the Holy Spirit itself, then here is that mysterious Christian entity, captured incarnate on film for the very first time.