Congo (94 page)

Later, when I finally reach my hotel room, I see that the display containing city maps also features a decree noting that “according to the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Administrative Penalties for Public Security whoring legally forbidden is” because, as it turns out, “recently some aliens suffered stealing or robbery during whoring.” What a thing to have happen to you, pity the poor alien; nevertheless, the same display contains three packages of condoms, two packaged pairs of panties (“Antisepsis & Healthy”), and four packets of the unfamiliar South Pole (“Liexin Resispance [
sic
] the Germ Liquid”); as that description clarifies very little indeed, I read on the back that the product is made from natural Chinese herbs and effectively kills 99.9 percent of all bacteria “for male and female privates itch and other social disease.”

Night has come, but it doesn’t feel that way; the jetlag and the deluge of impressions keep me awake for hours; sleepless, I zap past thirty-six channels full of screaming samurai and businessmen in the throes of debate and become stranded at last in the middle of a game show in which candidates in colorful outfits have to negotiate a perilous obstacle course; very few of them succeed, most end up ignominiously in a tank full of water, to the vast merriment of the audience and the host, who seize the chance to laugh at them mercilessly. It is 4
A.M.
, I miss Kinshasa and slide open the curtains; on the other side of the courtyard, in a smoky room two floors down, four bare-chested men are playing mahjong under dingy neon lighting—a gambling hall, an opium den, who’s to say. Their voices are just out of range, but every once in a while I see them rise to their feet and shout at each other furiously.

J
ULES
B
ITULU SAW IT ALL CHANGE
. I met him in his office on the tenth floor of the Taole building, in the hectic business district of Dashatou. “In 1993 I was the only African here. Along with a Chinese partner, I started a company in Shunde, not far from here; two years later we moved to the city center. To the Chinese I was a creature from outer space, an attraction. There was no racism back then, more like curiosity. Wherever I went they pulled up a chair for me right away. Now there are about two or three thousand Congolese living here. Most of them come from Kinshasa, Lubumbashi, Goma, and Bukavu. Five hundred of them have no visa and live here illegally. Some of them get into trouble with drugs, but there are also lots of Nigerians here who carry Congolese passports.”

Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province, an area five hundred kilometers (310 miles) in diameter with about one hundred million inhabitants, almost twice the entire population of Congo. It was here, back in the late 1970s, long before Shanghai, that Deng Xiaoping relaxed the reins of the planned economy for the first time. It was, after all, his home region. The great distance between the coast and Beijing made it a safe laboratory for an experiment in liberalization. What’s more, Guangdong is located right across from the even-freer Hong Kong and Macau, and so could enter competition with them. Thirty years later, it is the manufacturing center of the world. The province is the leading global producer of air-conditioning units, microwave ovens, computers, telecom systems, and LED lighting. Guangdong is the third largest exporter of textiles and makes 30 percent of all our planet’s shoes. The factories of Shenzhen export toys to all corners of the globe, and until recently produced two-thirds of all the world’s artificial Christmas trees—not bad for an officially atheistic region. This tightly circumscribed area accounts for 12 percent of the Chinese economy and more than one-quarter of the country’s total exports. That astounding success was due in part to a system of highly subsidized raw materials, but the financial crisis of 2008 gave the region a major buffeting—the Chinese state-owned banks remained solvent, but foreign customers disappeared. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. Today an attempt is being made to transform a serial production economy, based solely on export, into an innovative, knowledge-based industrial center that can also serve a fast-growing local market. And that seems to be working: in the crisis year 2008, telecom giant Huawei closed contacts worth more than $23 billion, an increase of 46 percent.

With its propitious location in the delta of the Pearl River, Guangzhou has always been a spot for international trade. It constituted the point of departure for the maritime silk route and established contacts with Christianity and Islam early on. The city still has a lovely mosque, dating back to perhaps as early as the seventh century, the century when Islam arose, and a Catholic cathedral of much more recent date. Persians, Arabs, Portuguese, and Dutchmen found their way here. Little surprise, therefore, that today as well it is the hub for new foreign trade relations, this time with Africa.

Bitulu came to China on a scholarship in 1988. He was part of a group of seventeen Zairians selected to attend university in Beijing in the context of friendly ties between the two nations. The first year was taken up by a mandatory linguistics course, followed by four years of computer science. Today his Mandarin Chinese is better than that of most Cantonese (according to Beijing, Cantonese is not a language but a variation on Mandarin, the standard language), and he draws Chinese characters at a pace equaled by few foreigners. An African who can write in Chinese, that takes some getting used to.

One day, during his linguistics year, he saw the word
democracy
written on the wall of the administration building.

I wondered: what’s going on here? I had noticed some unrest, but I didn’t understand. There was nothing about it on TV. Our professors warned us not to go to Tiananmen, but I took the bus there and saw that the square was packed with students. There were no classes being held, everything had been suspended. At the university I saw two coffins; occupied or vacant, I couldn’t be sure. Back at my apartment I saw, from the ninth floor, the American students being picked up by a minivan from the embassy. The students from the former French colonies, like Gabon, were also leaving. We, the Zaïrians, were the last to go, then our consul picked us up too. On the way to the embassy we saw burned-out army trucks along the street. There was a massacre going on. The Japanese students told us later that it was very well organized, with trucks to pick up the bodies and cleaning crews. We slept on the floor of the embassy for nine days. It was cold and there was no food.

As a recently qualified computer-science engineer in a land full of recently qualified computer-science engineers, Bitulu did not find a job right away, but he possessed another talent: music. During his student days he had already led a band manned by the few Congolese students present in Beijing, and now he joined a traveling Chinese orchestra. “We spent six months going from village to village in the interior. I visited the provinces of Guangxi, Hunan, Yunnan, Huizhou, and Sichuan. At first I only played guitar, later I sang in Chinese too. For the audiences, that was a real attraction. But I didn’t feel comfortable. I never saw another Congolese and we didn’t eat well, only that Chinese food.” His experiences remind one of the fate of the Congolese who had built their huts at the Tervuren expo a century earlier. Then too, a black person was more circus attraction than human being.

But later, after I had already started my business, I kept playing. At the weekend I played in a reggae band in Hong Kong, at the Africa Bar. Later on I sang Chinese songs in bars and restaurants, sometimes three sets a day, sometimes six days a week. I earned good money. I sang in Mandarin, Cantonese and English.
Un Congolais, c’est bizarre
. I played in big hotels. Lots of karaoke, too. My work took me all the way to the Mongolian border. In 2000, when I had a gig in Beijing, I met six Congolese students who were here without work and without a visa. I took them back with me to Guangzhou. That was the start of the Congolese community here. They worked in the discos. That phenomenon was becoming immensely popular. After that everyone left the music scene and started their own businesses.

From sideshow attraction to migration pioneer. Bitulu had been more or less the Peter Stuyvesant of Congo, I realize. He turns out to be a gifted storyteller and very well informed. During our talk, I fill ten pages with notes. He tells me how it had all started in Guangzhou in 2000, when a group of West Africans, Senegalese, and Malians, arrived within a few months of each other. They stayed at a Muslim hotel close to Tianxiu. He tells me how easy it was to obtain a visa back then, even for six months, even for a year. What a difference compared to the situation today, where you’re lucky to receive a visa for just two weeks, he sighs, where people go underground once their visa runs out and risk prison sentences of one to six months. “The situation is becoming unbearable, even for people with an official visa or residence permit, like me. The flights keep getting more expensive, the price of merchandise has gone up, transport is pricy, the Congolese customs costs are sky-high, and the market in Kinshasa has become saturated.”

He’s not homesick for Congo. “I’ve really become permeated with Chinese culture. The Congolese should organize themselves better, the way the Chinese do. They should start working collectively, but they don’t want to do that, even though that would help them to negotiate much better prices. It’s like a virus. The contract that Congo signed with China, that was badly negotiated too. No one in the Congolese delegation spoke Chinese. Now China is going to build a few roads, quickly, which no one will keep up.” What he says is what many Congolese in China are thinking: this deal, the biggest in their country’s history, was a rush job; the country has been sold downriver for a little pocket money. “I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’m ashamed to be Congolese. Since independence, Congo has never been a real country. Nothing there works. All the people think about are their own wallets. In twenty years’ time, I’ve seen China develop.” In the villages where Bitulu went to sing his songs in 1990, less than 5 percent of the families had a television in 1990; by late 2006 that was 90 percent.
¹
“I’ve watched Vietnam grow. I’ve been to Dubai and I was amazed. It’s a desert, right, but flowers grow there, they put tubes under the lawns. No, they’ve done a good job of developing their country. If God had put the Congolese out in the desert, would they have done the same?
Papa, c’est fini!
It’s not the white people’s fault, or Mobutu’s fault, that things are going so badly at home; they’re just the scapegoats—that’s all over and done with. Look at the Chinese. They learn from Europe and they know that there’s no magic involved, only hard work.”
²

T
HE
D
ASHATOU BUSINESS DISTRICT
is dedicated entirely to electronics. There are shopping malls just for digital cameras, next to shopping malls for laptops or LCD screens. After my meeting with Bitulu, I seize the chance to get lost there. That leads me to a windowless megastore where they sell only cell phones. Hundreds of boys and girls man the little stalls there; when they get hungry, they duck down behind the cash register and wolf down a paper cup of noodles. Participative observation being unequaled as ethnographic methodology, I inspect their wares. “Chinese copy!” they say frankly when I hold up something that looks like a perfect iPhone. “This one good copy. This one bad copy.” That seems clear enough. “This one original.” No, I’m not interested in an
owigina
. A real fake seems much more original to me, especially since these copy phones offer features the original does not, like room for two SIM cards, useful for the frequent traveler. In the brave new world, the line between real and fake fades. Fake is no flimsy replica, but technological avant-garde. And so I buy a few fake iPhones and imitation Ericssons for about fifty dollars apiece. Back in Kinshasa I will sell a couple of them to help pay for my ticket home. What I don’t know at this point is that I should have bought thirty of them instead of five: within a single day, I will sell them for many times the price I paid.

At one of the stands I meet Enson, a young, hyperactive Chinese who, installing SIM cards and replacing batteries all the while, speaks to me in fluent Lingala. No, he’s never been to Congo, he says, he works in this windowless space every day, but a lot of his customers are from Kinshasa. He doesn’t speak French, though: without realizing it, however, half the technical jargon he uses consists of French words. “Ozana besoin sim mibale?” (Do you need one with a double SIM card?) “Ay, papa, accessoires mpo modèle oyo eza te.” (Sir, this model has no accessories.)

T
HE
T
IANXIU
B
UILDING
is a multilevel shopping mall with bright neon lights and a cacophony of Muzak. The narrow corridors consist of tiny glass shops where extremely extroverted merchants ply their wares. Many of these shops are outlets for factories elsewhere in Guangdong. Along a twenty-meter (sixty-five-foot) length of corridor I see industrial batik textiles, flip-flops, sneakers, boots, dress suits, jogging suits, T-shirts, g-strings, jewelry, cell-phone chargers, cell phones, electric fans, antimosquito coils, chainsaws, generators, motor scooters, and drum sets. As soon as the customer comes in, the salesperson jumps to his feet. Your wish is their command. Lengths of cloth are unfolded and put away again. Suits are lifted down off the rack with a stick and held up to see if they fit. The verbal communication is a disaster, but the adding machine always saves the day. This results in absolute gems of pantomime. The merchant types in his asking price in renminbi, as the yuan is called these days, and holds up the little screen for the customer to see. The African converts this to dollars, frowns, says: “No, no, no!” and types in a price that is half that. The Chinese smiles but looks pained, shakes his head and punches in a number that hurts him less. Upon which the African rests his arms in despondency on the glass counter and casts a bored look out the window. After a dramatic pause full of inconsolable longing and deep indignation, he keys in a new number and turns the calculator around for the merchant to see. This goes on for a time, back and forth, until the African makes as if to leave for another shop and new sources of possible friendship are found after all.