Stringer (11 page)

We walked more. All the shops were shut, rows of them. Metal shutters reflected the last light and bounded the space like cracked mirrors, extending it in haphazard angles and making it seem to stretch beyond, to the garden, the commune headquarters, the churches and over the roofs of houses, the disco with the metal grill, beyond the plastic-sheet-covered lopsided stalls. All this emptiness, it suddenly made one alert.

“Hsss,” a lady said, drawing our attention. “There is a riot!” And she ran away clumsily.

We followed her, keeping close to the walls, searching for signs of a noise, until we turned for Victoire. And we saw them at the end of the street. It was a mob. They were street boys. I immediately felt sympathy, thinking of Guy. But the boys climbed over cars and perched on the walls; on the road they appeared as a jumble of hands and legs. They could have been forty or fifty, but the chorus of cries made their group seem larger. I saw gangly figures rattle the gates of a house and call to residents inside; boys climbed the gates and jumped into compounds and chased stray chickens and goats onto the gravel, clapping after them; they smashed car windows with rods and fell inside. My sympathy turned into fear. The vehicles were stripped of radios, gearshifts, and seats. The boys laughed wildly and danced down the road, jeering at the barred-up people. They tied the livestock at the feet and dragged them along the dirt. We needed to find a way out.

The streets around the mob were silent and settled. The neighbor's boy ran into a narrow lane, at an angle to the wreckage. He was fast; I gave chase, apprehensive about our environment, feeling that around any corner the boys could suddenly come at us. We reached the monument at Victoire, strangely lonely without the throng. Bozene was equally silent. The house was locked. I banged on the door and Jose warily divided the curtain. He let us in.

I asked what had happened. “This is not the worst,” Jose said. “Sometimes they are one hundred, the Kata-Kata.” It was the term the Kinois used to describe the mobs of boys—which were said to decapitate people to kill them. Some claimed that the boys possessed sinister powers. Jose latched the door and turned the key. Then he paused at the door. “Who knows what really happened. The boys have nothing to do. It is so easy to start a riot.”

Jose pulled the curtains shut and took a seat, his baggy shorts covering a portion of the sofa well wider than his legs. The television was showing the post-match coverage. Nana stacked empty plates on the counter, wiping each one with a red-checkered kitchen cloth. I crept behind her and to my room but she followed me to my doorway. “There's no more food,” she said, calmly.

“No problem,” I said, trying to make light of it and to sound reassuring. “I'll go tomorrow first thing.”

“Don't you understand? There is no food for Bébé Rhéma.” And she waved her hand at me, as though slapping me through the air. She seemed overcome. I felt dreadful. I felt she did not say more because I was paying for the house.

I returned to the warmth of the living room and sat on the broken sofa. I swatted the mosquitoes on my legs. Jose still seemed light-headed, somehow detached from Nana's suffering, and the house's plight. He smiled weakly and said, almost mourned, “An era is over.” His team had failed to make the play-offs, and for
the first time in years. All of a sudden the bulbs sparkled. The television tube in the dark glowed green. Appliances stopped with a rumble. I heard the irregular clicks of circuits breaking. For an instant there was silence . . . the chatter resurfaced. Jose said the match had eaten the city's power, so the districts each took turns to go without, the poorest first.

9

N
ews had fallen to a paltry level. The airplane crashes had stopped. I was filing less and less. My income was squeezed. Jose as well was finding no solutions. The family would not make it past the month. It was then that I came upon a chance to go to the east—to the mines, and the war.

I was in the Grand Hotel. Anderson's CIA agents had arrived—hundreds of them. The hotel was graced with posters of silverback gorillas. It was a meeting of the Great Apes Survival Project. I was here to try to find news.

From the conference registration desk I spotted Richard Bentley, chasing a red-bearded man who looked important. This man was surrounded by people. I waved hello—maybe Bentley could get me in, I thought. I raised my hand higher, trying to be seen. Bentley looked in my direction but didn't wave back.

“Isn't that guy a prick?” a man beside me said. “He always makes me feel like I'm wasting his time.
Such
a prick.” He looked about himself. “Want to grab a drink by the pool? It's bloody freezing in here.” He gave me a card:

KEITH LEPER HALE

War Correspondent & Investigative Reporter

I had so far pursued ordinary stories. It had little to do with a lack of seeming opportunity: reports about uranium smuggling for instance were all over the press; but they felt too remote, too fantastic. As did the revelations on Radio Trottoir. They told you something of the environment of fantasy that people lived in; but the stories themselves—one had the impression—either didn't exist or would kill you.

Keith Leper Hale,
Time
magazine correspondent and erstwhile Congo reporter, pursued
only
such stories. And in a single sitting he expanded my ideas of Congo's possibilities.

I followed the direction he had taken, past a set of glass doors that opened to the swimming area. I spotted him at the far end of the pool. He was bare-chested on a reclining chair and he wore a pair of swimming shorts. The day was hot and sultry; I wished I had brought my trunks.

The plastic chairs were full so I sat on a side table. All around us women in bikinis lounged about, pretending not to notice the men. A group of Congolese women with heavy gold earrings rubbed suntan lotion on their chests and contentedly lay back among the foreigners, looking like a row of piano keys. They slowly rolled over. Some slipped into the pool. All of them looked serious.

“Are you down with malaria?” Keith asked.

I said I was tired, and by way of explanation I mentioned that I lived in an African house.

He smiled. “Gonzo-style. That's the way to be.”

No, actually, I thought; I'd much prefer a nice bed and air-conditioning. But I wondered what made me seem so beaten down.

Keith was an old hand in Africa. And he was writing a controversial book:
Part 1
was going to be standard fare, he said—what
the AP might publish.
Part 2
was to be more “hard-core.” Mainstream press might publish it, but only an adventurous editor.
Part 3
, he said, nobody would touch. “It's the
crack
.”

I asked what was in
Part 3
.

He smiled. “See? You're already interested.”

He ordered a waitress to bring chocolate cake. Though the light had faded he lifted a pair of aviator sunglasses from a hard case and put them on—it was popular fashion in Congo. The glasses were called “anti-night.” Keith twirled his pen. The cake was brought. Quickly Keith hacked into it with a spoon. “Did you know George W. Bush has a stake in Congo's pillage?”

I shrugged.

“The proof is hidden in the jungle, on the border with the Central African Republic. Tons of wood are being transported by boat. The logging company is three levels down, a subsidiary in a petroleum conglomerate. No petroleum on those trucks. They're raking down half a forest on a daily basis. And Bush sits on the conglomerate's board.”

“Sounds like you're all over the story.”

“That's nothing,” he said. “Listen to this.”

Keith lifted his sunglasses and smiled. “You know the famous uranium mine? No? Let's go way back. World War II. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Little Boy and Fat Man?”

I nodded.

“That uranium came from Congo. The mines are dead. Right?” He bit on the cake, staining his hands. He spoke while chewing. “
Wrong
. The mines are not dead. Have you been to Rwanda? You'll see American planes. Not little Cessnas. We're talking Hercules and transport craft, large enough to carry Abrams tanks and platoons of Special Forces. What are they doing there?”

Keith sniffed and leaned back in his chair. He stretched his legs and with a hand massaged his thigh, shaking the muscle briskly.

“The UN has seventeen thousand soldiers in Congo. But not
a single American, Brit or Canadian. Know why? They're too scared to send their men to this hell. It's not worth it to them. But go down to Katanga. That American military base has maximum security. It's the uranium they're after. Check any public reference: the army, the navy, the White House. That base doesn't exist. What
are
they doing here?” He paused for effect. “You know they've discovered a new nuclear deposit.”

“Where?”

“It's top secret, man. This place is
full
of stories. You just eat them like a kid in a candy store.”

I heard his words, but what was Keith really telling me? My mind was in a blur, overrun with ideas: soldiers, mines and smugglers crossed with the pool, the sun and the women: image upon image, they shifted confusedly. Suddenly they fell away. I felt a moment of clarity.

As if on cue Keith made me an offer. “I'm working on a new piece that goes to the highest levels,” he said. “It's about a massacre at Kilwa. One hundred dead, give or take. You know who arranged the massacre? Anvil Mining. But no one's reported it because Anvil gets World Bank funding. Paul Wolfowitz knows. Kofi Annan knows. There's a UN report detailing how Anvil flew in an armed militia and gave them company cars to dump the dead in mass graves. The White House suppressed it.”

“Where is Kilwa?”

“That's what I'm saying. Want to come?”

We paused to watch a girl undo her robe and step into the pool. The women had cleared from the reclining chairs. The light had faded. I could barely see the girl's face. I wondered why she had come so late; perhaps to avoid the stares.

“Kilwa is in the far east,” Keith at last said. “It's remote. That's why the story is so sweet. Getting there will be expensive but we'll split it. We'll hire porters to carry the gear and supplies. I'll get started on the shopping list. Let's be talking.” He tipped his sunglasses.

That night the AP confirmed its interest in Kilwa—the editor said I should pursue the story, but from Kinshasa. He would not hear about any travel: the bureau's stringer budget was apparently running on empty. I became agitated—I told him I felt the bureau wasn't supporting me. I desperately wanted a chance. “If you smell a story then maybe you should pay your own way,” he said. “If it works out then we'll see. Right now I can promise you nothing.”

I went home excited—convinced that I needed to take some sort of risk to escape the cycle of hardships at home, and also to get where I wanted. I felt suddenly projected outside Kinshasa—and frustrated, for the country's possibilities seemed beyond my reach. I would have to find a way to make my own luck. Entering the house I again became depressed.

10

I
could not concentrate at the house.
“Ne touche pas!”
“Don't touch!” Jose's voice boomed. The commotion was around his new record. A boy from the neighborhood held his hands behind his back and leaned over the purchase, inspecting it with pursed lips. The record was in the old vinyl format, in its original cardboard sleeve; the print had faded. Jose opened a glass case and carefully placed the record on a plate. He pressed a button. The vinyl began to spin. Bébé Rhéma was brought. Jose held the baby by the ends of her fingers so she stood uncertainly and shifted her feet. The song was French, uncommon in Congo, but Jose had spent two years of his youth in Belgium and some of the customs he kept—European music, muscatel and a quiet disposition—distinguished our house, which was otherwise no taller, no wealthier and no better kept than the other cement-sassy wood structures on Bozene. The habits gave Jose a reputation for being
évolué
. And it was seen as a mark of his evolution when he made a skiing motion with his arms, jiggled his hips, and sang along to the cactus song:

The whole world is a cactus . . .

To this the little boy slapped his little bottom with his palm—a rhythmic move he had no doubt learned from the young girls who performed on television. I set aside my work and took a seat on the sofa, forgetting it was broken—and Jose added a new chorus, to which they danced with greater verve:

All of Kinshasa is a cactus!

Im-poss-ible to sit down!

It used to be an official designation, Évolué, conferred by the Belgians in colonial times to a select few families who had rejected their “primitive structures”: the clan, beliefs, traditions, even dress codes and language. It was an idea of human rights: to show the African could be as civilized as the white man. A special committee was tasked with visiting the Negro home, to check the standard of hygiene, the quality of visitors, the use of cutlery, and if the children had underwear on. It was when I asked around about the cactus song that I discovered Jose was an
évolué
(and that Nana was not).

From the dining table Nana observed Jose. After a week of waiting she had decided to act. She sat with clasped hands, a figure of calm. Around her hair was wrapped a red cloth. She wore a dotted blouse. A skirt reached to her ankles, and she kicked strappy sandals back and forth on the cement. Bébé Rhéma laughed and Nana gave a restrained smile. There was a knock on the door. Jose was asked to turn off the music. He looked surprised, but lowered the volume. We observed our guest with curiosity as Nana showed him around.

He was slim, bald and wearing a suit. Prominently, he carried a shiny-silver pen that he waved like a wand at the various items Nana pointed to: the lighting fixtures, the old cupboard with
plates, the deep freezer. He crouched over Nana's plastic boxes of jewelry and inspected their contents, and Nana was about to show him the television but he said he had seen enough. The man was a microcredit lender.

And he approved the loan. Nana absentmindedly straightened the chairs. Under the table were two large bales of colorful clothes. “Gym pants from Canada.” She planned to turn the house into a boutique for young people. The lender smiled benevolently, and gave her some papers. Nana's hand was unsteady—as though unaccustomed to the meager form of the pencil, to the delicate task of scrawling one's name within neat rectangular boxes. The lender took the papers and left.

Jose seemed unsure, unhappy. Carrying Bébé Rhéma he walked across the living room. “I bought these for our marriage,” he said, touching the jewelry. “You can't just pawn them off.” Nana folded the table napkins and said she wasn't pawning off anything. It was just collateral. The terms she used:
collateral, yield, return
; they were not the vocabulary of a housewife. She fumbled with a napkin, unable to fold it correctly, and abruptly left the room.

Few Congolese would take such cheek from a wife, and though Jose was
évolué
this was perhaps too much emancipation to handle at once. He seethed, and it showed in his voice. He loudly said the next time Nana invited strangers to look at their objects she should inform him first. It was basic respect he was asking for, nothing more. After all, it was also his house. “Next you'll be pawning my music system,” he said, “and I won't have it, you hear? I won't have it!” He put on a shirt and oxford shoes and, for the first time in weeks, left the house carrying his briefcase. The new vinyl had meanwhile spun past the cactus song, to its conclusion. The festivities were over.

My mind was occupied by the meeting with Keith, and how I would find the money to travel with him. I did not return to the conference—it seemed too small. Richard Bentley had written
about an excursion to an ape sanctuary. The visit had been arranged by the red-bearded man. Others had gone with him. The AP was the only news outlet without the story—a fact the bureau took the trouble to point out to me. I spent the week anxiously flipping through the Congolese papers, but there was so little news that the editors had swelled the font to fill up space.

There was another reason I did not go to the Grand Hotel that day. Bobby, the shop owner from the event at the Indian embassy, had called to ask if we could meet in private. (“Do you drink beer?” he had asked—and the mention of alcohol combined with his secretive tone implied our discussion would be serious.) I said I might need to be at the conference. But Bobby insisted. I asked why the rush, and he said, with not a little exasperation, “Just come, man. My girl will cook us something good.”

The drive was punishing; his neighborhood was full of traffic and the exhausts from cars saturated the air. I tried to cover my nose with my shirt but the smoke had impregnated the cotton, making my nose revolt and run in streams. Suddenly, through the chaos of smells, there was the clean, precise scent of gasoline; we passed a truck in the orange halo of station lights. Bobby greeted me at the front of his parcel with a solemn handshake and a rub on my back. And he guided me through the exterior garden facing the part of the house where we had taken tea.

The garden had not been tended. Weeds had taken over. But the little yellow and white flowers on the weeds' ends gave off perfume: it was fresh, pleasant. We arrived at a mossy corridor of his shop: plastic, grease, ink, rust; the smells were strong but powerless as soon as Bobby pushed aside the dividing curtain, for the aromas of curries came in numbing waves: coriander and bay leaves and fried mustard; rancid hot sugar, pungent garlic, sour yogurt; parsley, mint, basil; each smell layered over the other and lingered over the dining room.

The table was laid with various bowls on a clear plastic sheet. The place mats were rudimentary, of knotted jute. The table was
of plywood. Glasses of lassi on the table perspired, covered by steel plates scratched from long use. The girl, who stood mute in a corner, brought us a tray with green bottles of imported Heineken. The bottle opener she used had a picture of a siren in lingerie.

She served us spoonfuls of curries in four colors: yellow, orange, red, green. Each produced a different and distinct flavor, unlike the homogeneous red pastes one got at restaurants. The
biryani
was finely spiced. It was my first Indian meal—and a home meal too—since I had come to Congo. I ate with my head bowed, almost without speaking.

The girl departed to the kitchen.

Bobby wiped his mouth and laid out the reason behind his invitation. “I have a problem,” he said. “A piece of my land has been appropriated.”

He had brought a folder filled with papers of various sizes and colors. There was also his deed, covered in stamps and signatures of the central and provincial authorities. Bobby's own signature was at the bottom, next to the title “PROPRIÉTAIRE.” The plot was to the north of Kinshasa, in the jungle province of Équateur. It was large. It must have cost a small fortune.

Bobby claimed the appropriation was illegal. He said he had proof that powerful people were involved. But it wasn't my intention to get mixed up in politics. I was also apprehensive: I thought Bobby could be showing me a small piece of a much larger affair: maybe the land was taken for revenge, to settle some score. I said, “The biryani is very good.”

Bobby smiled.

“I understand your hesitation,” he said, and he let some silence pass. “But the land has become a nature park. A U.S. conservation group is now managing the territory, and the government has posted armed guards around it. Don't you think that is strange?”

Sure, it was odd. But I apologized, saying I could not help.
“You should complain to the conservationists,” I said. “Or to the government. Tell them they are working illegally.”

“It won't work,” Bobby said. “You see, there is more.” He wiped his face with his hand. “I would not have called you if it were a case of simple politics. I think there is something in that ground.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Red mercury.”

“I've never heard of it.”

“It is a colloquial appellation. The rock is red when you take it from the ground. It doesn't really matter what it is called—the locals give strange names and most of the time they don't know what they talk about—but I am certain it is precious.” Bobby pulled out two business cards. “See for yourself. Everyone is after my land. Even Avi Mezler.” The card was for a mineral purchasing firm registered in Israel. “Mezler wanted to buy that land for seven times its market price. A businessman from Egypt was also interested. But the Americans found out. And now they are mining something while calling it a conservation project.” He tucked the cards into his shirt pocket, shaking the cloth so the cards fell to the bottom. “It is a little strange, don't you think?”

“You think the U.S. government is behind this?”

He huffed. “USAID.” He held one hand out, palm up. “Department of Defense.” Other hand. “Don't be fooled, all Americans inform the Secret Service when the time comes.”

“Like who?”

“The people at the conference . . .” He broke off, as if considering how much to say. “Some go straight to Condoleezza.” His hand made a form like an airplane.

“Is it expensive to reach your land?”

“The barges leave one right against the property. It is also cheaper and better to travel like the Congolese. We can move about with less hassle.”

I almost regretted not being able to clean out the curries: I felt those dishes would come back to haunt me in some future
moment of hunger. But Bobby called his girl and asked her to pack it all. She poured the leftover dal into a bottle.

Tea was brought in cream-colored porcelain. Bobby leaned forward to sip, making a soft slurping noise at his lips. The cup came cleanly down on the circle of the saucer. The porcelain clinked.

“Well, take your time to think about it,” he said.

I felt pity. It took courage to do business here. Stories like Bobby's were all too common, but they generally involved so much corruption that a journalist could not approach. The businessman generally feared the journalist. The fact that Bobby had solicited me meant either that he was clean, or that he had exhausted every other option.

He was part of Congo's rising Indian class. West Africa was traditionally Lebanese. Indians dominated the East African economies. Congo straddled this divide, making a natural route for migration. And among the most celebrated migrants, some seventy years earlier, was a Gujarati called Rawji, who opened a shop in the middle of Congo. For nearly all his life he had only that shop. His sons expanded, and their sons. And in only two generations the Rawji Group became a billion-dollar conglomerate. The story inspired more Indians to cross, and join the Lebanese, the Israelis, the Belgians and the politicians to form a small moneyed class that owned nearly all of Congo's GDP.

The imbalance was blatant, shameless. Outside every sit-down restaurant ragged children hoped for sympathy. Every UN jeep solicited stares. Clubs served tequila shots for fifteen dollars; a studio apartment in downtown Kinshasa cost nine hundred dollars a month, like in a big American city. But the foreigners seemed to show no compassion, and they brazenly perpetuated their extravagances.

The Congolese solution, typically inversive, was to subvert the outsider's logic, to undermine the clever immigrants. A new economics was invented, a financial order that valued cunning and
hustle—skills the locals possessed—over labor and ownership. So where before in Kinshasa hardly anyone could find a job, now nobody needed employment: money passed as if by osmosis; it became a basic human right to steal from those who had more. It was why Anderson had seemed pleased when my phone was stolen, and why each rich house employed armed guards. The system of theft evolved in a communitarian spirit, and rather than embezzle in secret the politicians asked the people to join. “Do not steal too much at a time,” Mobutu told the people. “
Yibana mayele
—Steal cleverly, little by little.”

Some, like the Rawjis, managed the kleptocracy (they ran their business, it was said, from the golf course) and succeeded; but the majority stagnated for years in their shops and eventually became ruined by sudden devastations like this affair with the land.

And the Congolese reaction to the wealth divide, which could be interpreted as a form of social redress, has become itself corrupted, into a more primitive and instinctual form of thievery. The poor now steal not from the Rawjis and politicians but from the most vulnerable: other poor, and modest middle-class people. It is why the Congolese to the outsider appear as mere bandits, and why their greed often seems as unscrupulous, incomprehensible and immoral as that of the moneyed.

Bobby asked what I, as a journalist, thought of the country's media. I spoke about the Opposition Debout; but he was impatient for me to finish. The question had been posed half rhetorically, to allow Bobby to give me
his
opinion: he had learned to read in Lingala (despite his contempt for Africans) and had come to respect the local journalists for their frankness. It was in the Congolese blood, he believed, because Mobutu—who had shaped so much in this country—had been a newspaperman. Mobutu was among the only Congolese brave enough to report the colonial killings. His writings, Bobby said, did a lot to remove the Belgians.