Congo (95 page)

One shop sells only g-strings, including a fantastic model printed with the Angolan flag. The strings and triangles bear the national red and black colors; the Communist logo—a gear, a machete, and a star against the jubilant yellow of dawn—is printed at vulva level. When I ask cautiously what it might cost, it turns out they are sold only by the thousand. “Thousand,” the woman says, “not one,” as she types in a one and three zeros on her calculator.

Dadine is hesitating over a few pairs of jeans. The price, seven dollars, appeals to her; in Kin she can get thirty-five for them, but jeans are so heavy in her baggage. That means she can’t take as many with her, and the way customs is at home . . . She’s going to think about it a bit first. “At home it’s a war zone. You come back from China, exhausted, and the customs people at the airport pounce on you while you’re still waiting for your bags. They demand thirty dollars a bag to let you through, sometimes even up to a hundred, but often enough they just open your baggage with a pen or a key and take a shirt or a pair of pants, right before your eyes.”

The sisters Fatima and Fina, rare Congolese Muslims, are in a fix. I met them on the plane and a few days later I see them sitting on a bench, recovering from their bout of shopping. They had been planning to fill a sea container with cans of tomato puree, they explain to me, a twenty-foot container, not forty, those are too expensive, but at the factory they were told that the order could not be ready before December. That means the cans would arrive in Kinshasa no sooner than February, too late for the year-end parties they had been counting on. Maybe they should try their luck with nutmeg? But then again, the price of nutmeg rose from $7,200 to $8,200 a metric ton (2,200 pounds) between January and October 2008, and a container easily holds twelve metric tons (over thirteen U.S. tons). And then the transport! It costs $5,600 to have a twenty-foot container shipped to Matadi, $10,000 for a forty-foot container. Plus you have the import duties, and Congolese customs are the most expensive in the world: up to $15,000 for a small container, $20,000 for a big one. They explain it all to me. The official rates are, as always, negotiable, but a lot of people these days prefer to have their cargo shipped to Pointe Noire in Congo-Brazzaville. Maybe that’s what they should do? The container would be brought by truck to Brazzaville and then their hundreds of bags of nutmeg would be loaded onto the ferry to Kinshasa, where the cargo handling is traditionally done by people in wheelchairs, because they don’t have to pay as much for the crossing. Crippled porters, I’ve seen that with my own eyes. The handicapped people I spoke to considered it an acquired right to accept pay for loading their wheelchair with sacks, piled so high they couldn’t see over them, and then roll onto the boat as a passenger.

Lina is, without a doubt, the most successful young businesswoman I’ve met. Within four days she has had two large sea containers filled with building materials: tiles, doors, air-conditioning units, glazed earthenware, sinks and toilets, and lighting fixtures. In Kinshasa these days you find Aomeikang brand toilets, Meijiale brand sinks, Hefei Chenmeng brand fire alarms, and, yes, even Wij Mei brand toilet paper. Lina’s first container is already sealed; now she is looking around for a couple of plasma screens to go in the second one. When she’s done with that, she’s going to have some clothes made for herself. She brought along a few photographs from an African magazine, it’s up to the Chinese to do the copying. The only thing is: she has this nasty pain in her stomach. Her niece came along with her this time; the younger woman wonders whether it might be a good idea for them to undergo fertility treatment in China. Why, after all, buy only goods when there are also services to be had? But Lina will become acquainted with the Chinese medical system sooner than she thought. When I see her again a few days later, she tells me she went to a clinic. The nasty pain in her stomach was an inflamed appendix. “Normally, I would go to South Africa for an operation,” she says, “but this time I’m going to have it done in China. They say Chinese medicine is good.”

T
HE
A
FRICAN GROUP MIGRATION TO
G
UANGZHOU
is becoming a factor of growing significance. More and more people are arriving all the time and becoming a deeper part of the country itself. Some of the migrants share a home as though they were family: while everyone is out buying goods, one of them stays home to prepare the most African meal possible with the available ingredients. Others eat with chopsticks as though they have never done otherwise. One Congolese man had started a café and dance hall, Chez Edo, which every African I spoke to said was the most fun place in the whole megalopolis, but the government closed it down because he didn’t have the right papers. Others have started barber shops or design clothes. Homosexuals, who have a bitterly hard time of it in Africa, have discovered new possibilities in China and have no plans to return home. I met a young Congolese gay man who had been disowned by his family in Kinshasa, but had started a relationship with a Nigerian in China. For him, China was not the land of repression, but of freedom.

One of the big merchants, Monsieur Fule, is informally recognized as “chairman of the Congolese community in Guangzhou.” Neither the function nor the organization itself are official, but the role he plays is rather like that of consul. Anyone arriving in town goes by to talk to him. When I meet him, he is sitting at a desk covered in women’s shoes. “I’ve been here for nine years and I have a residence permit,” he says confidently. Fule was one of the needy students who Jules Bitulu convinced to go with him from Beijing to Guangzhou. “But for foreigners without a visa, the Chinese have a prison. The golden years are over. Commerce here has become slippery ground, but in Congo it’s even much worse. Our country is destitute and things aren’t getting any better. Everything is dirty, but thanks to China everyone is now at least dressed properly.” He is fairly positive about the big contract between the two countries. “It may sound a bit vague,” he says, “but people have been stealing ore from Congo for years already. Now at least there are billions of dollars being paid for it. Congo is still flat on its rear end,” he concludes from behind his wall of ladies’ footwear, “but we’ll go back someday anyway. The Congolese migrants in Europe don’t care about their country; their social life takes place there, but those of us here in China realize that commerce alone is not enough to satisfy us. Someday we’ll go back.”
³

One Sunday morning I enter office number 3105, on the thirty-first floor of the Tianxiu Building, high above the shops. It is a sparsely furnished space with a worn-out carpet, but a Congolese merchant has set up his own church here under the ambitious-sounding name Église Internationale pour la Réconciliation. Prayer meetings are held three times a week; on Sundays there are two services of three hours each. As I enter, I noticed that, in this particular diaspora, God has lost a little of his sparkle. He matches the interior. There are only eight worshipers, including the Chinese keyboard player. During a lengthy meditation on a Bible verse, the preacher says: “God’s word is like the rain. It only rises back up to Heaven after watering the earth, so that we know . . .” “
WHAT SUCCESS IS
!” the congregation answers in unison. This game of call and response is nothing new to them. “In all our . . .” “
PROJECTS
!” “So that they all may . . .” “
SUCCEED
!”

Then the congregation stands to pray. Their eyes closed and arms raised, they talk out loud, beseeching the Lord loudly for strength and commercial insight. The pastor also asks them to pray for
notre frère
David, who is here today for the first time. During the singing afterward the Africans dance limberly, while the Chinese organist simply shifts his weight back and forth from one foot to the other. “It’s not easy for them,” the evangelist tells me afterward, “they don’t know much at all. They don’t even know who Abraham is. If you have to explain all that first . . .”

T
HAT AFTERNOON
I pass by the home of Patou Lelo, a trader who sends a hundred to a hundred and fifty containers to Africa each month. He took his MBA at Wuhan and now lives in a modest apartment on the ground floor of a housing block where the sun rarely enters. His daughter, who is almost two, is playing on the carpet. She has African features, but Chinese eyes. Her skin has a warm, ochre tint to it.

When I first got here a lot of people asked whether they could touch my skin. They thought I was Chinese, but that I had stayed out in the sun too long and would soon turn white again. When I walked down the street with my girlfriend, a lot of people thought she was my interpreter, or even a prostitute. We’ve been married for two and half years. Her mother was dead set against it. “It’s either him or us!” she said, but my wife’s stepfather didn’t make a fuss. “Listen, he’s a calm and serious man,” he said. In Congo, it was the same way: my father didn’t give a damn, but my mother was very upset. She didn’t accept my wife until after our child was born. In China, the family is as sacred as it is in Congo; it’s not like in Europe, where the couple is the most important thing. Here the grandparents are very important, we care for them. The couple with one child and the grandparents, that’s the nuclear family here.

Atop a chest of drawers are some photographs of Lelo’s wedding. They show him and his wife in traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Western outfits. A radiant couple. His nephew and his brother flew in from Congo for the wedding; the entire Congolese community in Guangzhou was there. Still, things here are not always easy, he admits.

It’s a totally different culture, and diametrically opposed to our Congolese one. The Chinese are hypernationalistic. My wife will automatically start defending someone, simply because they’re Chinese. She’s atheistic too. Not many Chinese are religious, or maybe they’re Buddhists, but that’s
une petite religion
. Here they burn their dead. That’s hard for us to take. When a Congolese person dies, the community gets together to raise money to have the body flown back. In economic terms, the Chinese are highly developed, but they’re morally backward. That spitting on the floor in big restaurants . . . Although I have to admit that Chinese women are much more open than the men, my wife certainly is.

He knows he’s lucky; racism is rapidly becoming more common in Guangzhou. More and more taxi drivers refuse to take a Congolese fare. They no longer call them
hçi rén
(blacks), but
hçi gŭi
(black devils). The streets around Tianxiu are known as the neighborhood of the black devils or chocolate city. If an African woman touches the vegetables at the market, the sellers will sometimes throw them away.

“But the blacks themselves are partly to blame. They don’t integrate, they don’t adapt. The drugs gangs of Nigerians and people from Sierra Leone give us a bad name, while a lot of Congolese people here work very hard.” Harder than in Congo, Lelo insists. “Look, people who are a hundred percent honest don’t exist in Congo. They’re always out to make some easy money fast. They don’t understand the principle of investment, because the family always takes all the money. There’s no room for reinvestment. But here there’s more distance between the businessperson and the family, you understand?”

Everyone in his own family has emigrated—his brother lives in Spain, his sister in France, another sister in Manhattan; his old mother was the only one who stayed behind in Kinshasa. Many Congolese go abroad to escape suffocating family ties. The oft-praised African solidarity has something touching about it in times of crisis, but in times of reconstruction it generates an infernal logic that makes long-term projects impossible: the little bit of money that
is
available is immediately distributed to feed many hungry mouths. Reinvestment and planning are not highly valued. In China, things are much easier. There are no uncles and nephews to accuse you of sorcery when you refuse to share the little bit of money you’ve earned; witchcraft in Congo is the ultimate argument for enforcing solidarity.

“No one here ever talks about witchcraft,” Lelo says, visibly relieved to be rid of that higher metaphysics. In Congo, many people have turned to the Pentecostal churches to protect themselves from witchcraft, but this morning I witnessed how little need there is of that in China. “Fake pastors and false shepherds only proliferate in Congo because of the poverty, but here work is more important than religion.”
⁴

T
HAT EVENING
I stop in at the office run by Georges, the man who picked me up from the airport. Even on Sunday, he is hard at work. “We have to work while we’re still young,” he says, “because someday we’ll be old.” His transport company’s motto is
Vous server, c’est notre devoir
(serving you is our duty) and that is definitely no empty slogan. Two employees, César and Timothée, drag huge cardboard boxes around and lug them up onto a scale, where they can barely even read the display. Georges is on the phone constantly. Can that container be sealed yet? How many tons can still go in? When does the truck leave? Has someone already gone to the airport? Wait a minute, David, how many kilos of baggage allowance have you still got? What, forty kilos! But what have you been doing for the last few days? Didn’t you buy anything at all? Only five cell phones and two suits? Forty kilos, are you sure? Do you want to sell them? Fourteen dollars a kilo, okay?

And while I am literally selling thin air, at the back of the little office, two Chinese staff members, Iso and Jodo, are filling out forms. Iso, a young woman with a delicate-looking pair of reading glasses, flips through a dictionary; she’s trying to learn English and French. Working for a Congolese trader is a good way to earn some money and to brush up on your languages. On the wall is a DHL poster and a world map with China in the middle: Europe and America have become outlying areas, Asia and Africa constitute the new center. European-American relations may have been the most important intercontinental contacts of the twentieth century, but Sino-African relations will be those of the twenty-first.