Congo (93 page)

Congolese adults, however, waver between East and West. Europe and America are still admired for their know-how, but many people wonder why they see so little of that, while the Chinese carry out one ambitious project after the other. They have the impression that the West is no longer interested. Still, the election of Barack Obama brought new hope. Old Nkasi couldn’t believe it when I spoke to him that first time, the day after America had elected its new president. At six in the morning after his historic acceptance speech, young people gathered at the busy Kintambo Magasin rotunda in Kinshasa and cheered: “He’s one of us! He’s one of us! He’s a Mutetela!” Because the president’s surname begins with an
O
, people thought he was a member of the tribe belonging to the Batetela, where names like Omasombo, Okito, and Olenga are common. But even those better informed about his lineage were convinced that a new chapter in African American relations had begun. And indeed, Hilary Clinton came to Goma, the first American secretary of state to visit the country since 1997. That she visited Congo and not Rwanda, which after all borders on Goma, made people hope that America would alter its uncritical pro-Rwandan policy. A special U.S. envoy was appointed for the Great Lakes region, and during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in December 2009 Obama explicitly referred to the sexual violence in Congo. Yet in actual practice, the new American government has as yet developed no coherent vision for Central Africa.
⁵⁹

So then what about the Chinese? During my conversations I noticed that the Congolese often speak in ambivalent terms when it comes to the Chinese presence. Their view is a mixture of admiration and suspicion, a paradox that often expresses itself in mild mockery. In their social dealings, they see the Chinese as aloof, stiff, and uncongenial. They don’t smile much, many people feel; they don’t mix with us; thirty of them occupy the same house and they forget to live! The language barrier and the huge cultural differences, of course, do little to promote contact. Those who work for a Chinese boss adopt a subservient attitude, but laugh about him (not her, for there are no women) a little behind his back—an attitude no different from that with which European men were received a century ago. That does nothing to detract, however, from many people’s admiration for the speed with which the contracting companies go about their work. “Bachinois batongaka kaka na butu,” a humorous popular song says: the Chinese always do their building at night, and when you wake up in the morning another floor has been added.

It took awhile for the actual work to get rolling, but people were impressed when the CREC—less than a year after the banking crisis—began renewing the sewers and the surface of Boulevard du 30 Juin in the center of Kinshasa, even if all the trees did have to be cut down and the arterial reduced to a four-lane road where many fatal accidents occur. The Congolese realize all too well that Kabila has farmed out his celebrated
cinq chantiers
to the Chinese in order to mask his own immobility, just as he has farmed out the war to the Rwandans and the MONUC. After all, he needs to have something to show before the 2011 elections arrive.
Cinq chantiers?
More like
Cheng Chan Che!
Whenever young people see a Chinese on the street or a Congolese woman wearing an Asiatic blouse, they will roar: “Cheng Chan Che!”

I
F THERE IS ONE PLACE IN
C
ONGO
where the awe for China becomes almost tangible, it is along the walk in front of the Chinese embassy in Kinshasa. Three mornings a week, long rows of Congolese crowd together here in the hope of obtaining a visa. Some of them arrive as early as five in the morning to be sure of a spot. Others pay one of the boys hanging around to save their place in line. Early one morning I myself once stood in line there for three hours. Most of the applicants turned out to be young women, applying for a Chinese visa not to settle there permanently, but to buy things: after all, if the Chinese come here to buy up our ore, we might just as well go there to buy their products straight from the wholesaler. What the China Amitié Company did, they could do too.

It was an exhausting morning, but a fascinating one as well. The Chinese embassy is located right across the street from MONUC headquarters. The long row of applicants paid little heed to the white tank, in which a Pakistani blue helmet with an impressive handlebar mustache was guarding the entrance to the compound. He stood bravely at his machine gun, behind a wall of sandbags and thick rolls of barbed wire that the street children used as their laundry line. These women, however, had literally turned their backs on the United Nations and were putting their hope in the new savior, the People’s Republic of China.

As I stood in line, I started up a conversation with Dadine and Rosemonde. Dadine was an unemployed, twenty-seven-year-old actress. She had heard about other women who went to Guangzhou, the big industrial town in southern China that in Cantonese is simply called “Canton.” In 2007 she tried her luck for the first time and spent a week there buying trousers, shoes, wigs, and body stockings. Back then it had been easy to get a visa, but after the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 the procedure had become much more stringent. She had left with only her handbag and come back with sixty-four kilos (140 pounds) of baggage. The sandals she had bought there for three dollars a pair she was able to sell in Kinshasa for nine, sometimes even fifteen dollars. She didn’t have a shop of her own. She simply went by the homes of friends or to the student hostels in the city. “My customers are able to buy original articles that are a lot cheaper than they’re used to, and suddenly I’m earning some money. It’s been good for my morale, I’ve become independent. A hundred dollars is no longer such a big deal for me. I still don’t have a husband, but there are definitely a lot more candidates these days.”
⁶⁰

Rosemonde, an impish twenty-six-year-old, cherishes even greater ambitions. She and her younger sister have been going to China since 2006, to Guangzhou too. Their parents have died, she has a child. None of the people waiting out on the pavement went to Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Beijing; Guangzhou was the place to be. “I buy plates and glasses for restaurants, I buy ice makers, plasma screens, and computers. The trick is to find things that other people don’t already import, so you can demand a higher price. Every time I go I fill a sea container with merchandise, all on my own. The container comes in by ship to Boma, Matadi, or Pointe Noire. A shipment like that costs twelve thousand dollars, which is a lot of money, but in two years’ time I’ve earned fifty thousand dollars, and so has my sister. We’ve both been able to buy our own homes.” Young women with the means to own their own property in Kinshasa: that is an absolute novelty. Just as women found new opportunities in the informal economy of the 1980s, today the globalized variation on that economy is offering new prospects as well.

The Congolese market is being flooded with inexpensive Chinese goods. That has actually put an end to the local textile industry, one of the country’s last remaining process manufacturing industries. A
wax chinois
(a dyed fabric from China), the women tell me, can’t compare to the legendary
wax hollandaise
from Vlisco with which they once made their best clothes. “But what do you expect? A
wax hollandaise
cost $120, and a
wax chinois
only $5.” Because the clothing, televisions, and generators that are “made in China” have a strikingly short product life, the Lingala language now has a new adjective:
nguanzu
. It comes from
Guangzhou
and means “not particularly durable,” or “unreliable.” Meanwhile, a woman who cheats on her husband is now also said to be
nguanzu
.

Rosemonde wore a jumper printed with the words
Dior, j’adore
; no, what it said was
Dior, j’adore
—after all, with so many ideograms of his own one can hardly expect a Chinese factory worker to master the Roman alphabet as well. On the streets of Kinshasa, women who frequent China as often as they do clearly go dressed differently too. More flamboyant, more extravagant, almost like pop stars. They stand out in a crowd. A young woman in a miniskirt or white boots is almost certainly a Guangzhou trader. “Elles sont ‘guangzhouifiées,’” they’ve become Guangzhou-ified, people say. But Rosemonde has adopted the real hallmark of the new Congolese female. She rolls up the sleeve of her
Dior, j’adore
jumper to show me her bare shoulder. There, hard to see against her dark skin, is the pride of this third millennium: a tattoo. “They’re so good at it over there. You should really go and see for yourself.”
⁶¹

CHAPTER 15

WWW.COM

A
HIGHWAY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, BUT THAT
’
S NOT
the way it feels. Even after midnight, the cabs weave an invisible web as they glide from one lane to the other in search of the fastest way through. Compared to Kinshasa, however, the traffic is quiet as a graveyard. Not much honking. No rumbling DAF trucks of prehistoric vintage, driving at a snail’s pace and discharging a cloud of diesel fumes thick as marsh gas. No battered VW vans with thirty passengers or more on wooden benches, the last row dangling their legs out the back. And absolutely no holes the size of a volcanic crater in the asphalt. The green and white cab skims over a busy eight-lane highway through endlessly expanding suburbs, past drab residential housing blocks. Closer to the center of town we cross highway overpasses suspended between office buildings and apartment complexes. Sometimes there is a highway above us and one below. A vertical loom. And below, much further below, we see little food stands with lanterns and bright-red neon signs. Guangzhou.

I’m sharing the taxi with three Congolese; we’re on our way in from the airport. We left Kinshasa a day ago. Kenya Airways brought us first to Nairobi, where we waited for seven hours, and then, after a stop in Bangkok, to Guangzhou, seven time zones to the east. The other flight path goes by way of Dubai. From its hub at Addis Ababa, Ethiopian Airlines also uses that route. In the last few years both airlines have started offering almost a dozen weekly flights between the African continent and southern China, flights that leave with an empty hold and return full to the brim. “Why would we take clothes with us? We can buy them there, can’t we?”

The first time out, Dadine had been a bit wary. “Right after takeoff I went to the toilet. I hid all my money and my passport beneath my clothes, because I’d heard you had to watch out for the Nigerians. They drug you with something and then they take everything you have. I had fifteen hundred dollars with me that time: the big traders go with as much as twenty thousand dollars in their pocket. You have to stay on your toes.”

The cab driver is in no danger. Plastic bars have been installed behind his and the passenger seat. We, prisoners in the backseat, are kept entertained. The seats are comfortable, and at the base of the plastic bars is a built-in TV screen showing cartoons and commercials for skin cream. The volume is turned down low. One of the Congolese is up in front, talking to the driver about the fare. They’ve been at it for twenty minutes already. He, Georges, speaks fluent Cantonese. After a few years in Guangzhou he has the language down pat. I knew that almost all Congolese are multilingual and learn new languages easily, even when they are older, but that a person could learn Chinese without going to school was more than I could imagine. Georges didn’t think it was anything special. One young African woman had taught herself the language within three months.

The taxi takes us to the area close to the Tianxiu Building, in the north of town, right beside busy Huanshi Dong Lu and Guangzhou’s big inner ring, a neighborhood of dilapidated high-rises, TV towers, switching yards, and messy urbanization. In recent years, a real African neighborhood has arisen here. This section of the city is home to about a hundred thousand Africans, most of them here only very temporarily. This is where Georges has his cargo office, alongside hundreds of others. His sector is “air and ocean freight, full and groupage container,” as his impressive business card says. In the days that follow I notice that all Africans here have equally impressive cards, flashy cardboard rectangles printed in English, French, and Chinese and showing six different mobile numbers, in China and in Africa. The streets around the Tianxiu feature a host of hotels offering, for twenty dollars a night, extremely comfortable double rooms. Those hotels are full of Africans. I will spend the next ten days in the New Donfranc Hotel and not see a single Westerner.

The taxi drops us off at a pedestrian way crowded with men and women, Chinese and Africans. After checking in, I go out to explore the neighborhood; the shops, as it turns out, are open round the clock and sell shoes, suitcases, T-shirts, mobile phones, and lingerie. The streets are lined with farmers wearing reed hats and peddling piles of fruit completely unfamiliar to me: apples smaller than cherries, still on the branch, and grapefruits bigger than soccer balls, which are peeled patiently and skillfully; beside wooden handcarts bearing tanks of butane, men in sleeveless T-shirts are wokking like mad, the sweat pouring from their faces; they mix up noodles, pak-choi cabbage, and oyster sauce, sway the pan to and fro, fill little Styrofoam containers. Suddenly a shrill whistle rings out: the police are coming and they all race off with their handcarts, the gas fires still burning vigorously—the blue flames flicker like torches, the oil hisses hysterically, soy sauce flies in all directions—and within a matter of seconds they have disappeared into a darkened alleyway amid the garbage cans and fleeing rats, leaving the customer alone on the shopping street, bewildered and supperless. I buy a kilo of mandarin oranges from an old farmer; he weighs them on a bamboo scale that he holds up in front of his piercing eyes; I pay in a currency that is strange to me, not even knowing if they think in kilograms around here, and nod by way of thanks, wondering whether that’s actually the appropriate gesture. The little man with the weathered face, in any event, smiles, baring two rotten teeth. My hotel is not a separate building, but part of a labyrinthine mall where hundreds of boutiques sell the same gold necklaces, imitation Nokias and soccer shirts, Barça jerseys, Chelsea jerseys, and Dutch national team jerseys reading: Ruud van Nistelrooy, number 9. I locate the elevator doors that lead to the hotel, but when I climb out on the sixth floor, I find myself not in the corridor with rooms on each side, but in a darkened space completely unfamiliar to me. The situation has something dreamlike about it; the strains of stringed music cut through the darkness, two
koi
carp swim slowly in a softly lit aquarium, and, as I stand there with the bag of mandarin oranges in my hand, gradually coming to terms with having taken the wrong elevator, an extremely charming young lady comes up and asks if I am here for the “very special massage.”