In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  A nation on Low Batt

  Mobutu, French President Jacques Chirac and Bill Clinton are all on the same plane, returning from an international conference. Halfway into the flight, the pilot announces that he has lost his way in the fog and has no idea where they are. Clinton opens a porthole a few inches, reaches down and feels around. ‘I know where we are,’ he announces. ‘We’re over the US.’ ‘How do you know?’ ask the other two. ‘I just felt the top of the Statue of Liberty.’ A few hours later, and the pilot is still lost. Chirac opens the porthole and reaches down. ‘I know where we are. We are over France,’ he says. ‘How do you know?’ the others ask. ‘I just touched the Eiffel Tower.’ Several hours later, the plane is still lost. Finally Mobutu rolls up his sleeve, opens the window and reaches down. ‘I know where we are,’ he announces, withdrawing his hand. ‘Where?’ ‘We’re over Zaire.’ ‘How can you be so sure?’ ask the other two. ‘Someone just nicked my Rolex.’

  Joke popular in Kinshasa’s expatriate community

  By the mid-1980s, Zaire’s Belgian-installed telephone network had disintegrated to a point where communications—both internal and international—were becoming impossible. It was then that a young American who had recently lost his job at an airline office came up with the bright idea of issuing Kinshasa’s movers and shakers with Motorola radio sets which allowed them to keep in touch with each other within the city limits.

  Not long afterwards a private cellular telephone system was set up and the Motorolas were replaced by chunky mobile phones. And so Telecel was born, an example of how a collapsing state structure could be sidestepped or simply substituted when the needs of the elite became acute. Road non-existent? Buy a four-wheel drive. National television on the blink? Install a satellite dish in your back garden and tune in to CNN. Phone out of order? Hire a Telecel. As Zaire crumbled, one community, at least, could afford to buy its way out of anarchy.

  Customers might moan about the crippling seven dollars a minute the company at one point charged for international calls, but they were careful not to be cut off. Long before mobile phones became the rage in the West, owning a Telecel in Zaire was the ultimate prestige symbol, the difference between being a player and remaining on the periphery. For the new arrival, whether diplomat or journalist, it was a convenient way of sorting out the sheep from the goats. If, at the end of your meeting, you discovered that your interlocutor did not own a Telecel, you knew that no matter how worthy or articulate, he bore the unmistakable stamp of irrelevance. In contrast, I knew I was in the presence of greatness when I watched Bemba Saolona, Zaire’s leading businessman, juggling a row of Telecels lined neatly up on the coffee table in front of him as they trilled in swift succession.

  As with all things in Zaire, the Telecel and its idiosyncrasies became part of the language. One of the problems with a Telecel was the speed with which its rechargeable batteries would expire. As they ran down, the words ‘Low Batt’ would flash up on the display, accompanied by a two-tone bleep that would become more and more insistent until the line went completely dead. ‘Je te rappelle, je suis Low Batt’ (‘I’ll ring you back. I’m Low Batt’) users would warn their callers. As time went by, the phrase took on something of a symbolic meaning. By the 1990s, the entire nation seemed stuck in a permanent state of ‘Low Batt’, surviving rather than living, ticking over without ever flaring into life.

  The Zaireans had developed their own language to deal with this depressing reality, ironic word games replete with scepticism, the only form of quiet rebellion on offer in a system seemingly impervious to change. Cock-ups were attributed to ‘Facteur Z’, the Zairean factor, delays to ‘Heure Zairoise’, the lethargic local timescale. The capital once known as ‘Kin-la-belle’ was now dubbed ‘Kin-lapoubelle’ (Kinshasa, the rubbish dump), testimony to the mountains of garbage collected but never taken away. The men who sold stolen petrol on the roadside were known as ‘Khadafis’, in tribute to Libya’s oil-rich president, while the urchins who slept on the streets were called ‘phaseurs’ (Lingala slang for ‘sleepers’) because, a friend joked, ‘they were in phase with life’. The unemployed young men with nothing to do but stand on street corners discussing topical issues were scornfully dismissed as ‘parlementaires debouts’ (standing parliamentarians). Ask one of these how he was doing and the answer would never be the automatic ‘bien’. ‘Au rythme du pays’, (in time with the country) he would reply, with a shrug, or ‘au taux du jour’ (at the day’s rate), a reference to the national currency’s unstoppable decline.

  Returning from trips abroad, I never ceased to be amazed by how much further batteries I had assumed to be already near-exhaustion had sunk. I could measure it in the state of the taxi I hired on a daily basis and the mood of its owner François, the grumpiest, if most resourceful, driver in town. When I first arrived, his eighteen-year-old Fiat, a cast-off from a grateful Neapolitan businessman, was already nearing the end of its natural life. Too often, it needed to be push-started to coax it into action. The triumph of determination over logic, its seats had been eviscerated, its windscreen cracked in two places. Long gone were side mirrors, indicator lights, horn and windscreen wipers, which made driving in the rain particularly exciting. The electrically powered windows had to be manually heaved from their slots, the engine only started when three wires were twined together. At puddle level, the rusting bodywork was developing the delicate texture of lace. Front doors had a disconcerting tendency to fly open at high speed and sometimes had to be tied to the chassis with a rope made from knotted plastic bags.

  Never light, François’s spirits deteriorated in tandem with his car. Aware that an extra scratch or dent would now make little difference to the Fiat’s roadworthiness, he paid only lip service to traffic regulations. His response to criticisms of his careless habits had become so aggressive, shocked bystanders would come to complain when I got in. As we clattered along at thirty miles per hour, the exhaust pipe occasionally trailing along the ground, François, who was plagued by stomach ulcers, would sit muttering darkly to himself: ‘This country is screwed,’ shaking his head. ‘Who would want to buy it? Not even the Japanese. If I’d had any sense I’d have left long ago.’

  The extent to which the nation was running on empty really came home to me during my regular trips to the Ministry of Information. The ministry was located on the nineteenth floor of a concave tower built, during the sweet days of international cooperation, by a company run by the then French President Valéry Giscard D’Estaing’s cousin. Across the continent, I have trudged, cursing, up the urine-scented stairs of such high-rise monoliths, dreamed up by men who modelled Africa’s itinerary on their nation’s own. Seemingly incapable of conceiving of a future worse than their hopeful present, the foreign engineers could not imagine the day when electricity would be spasmodic, spare parts impossible to find, maintenance a joke. But so it proved and there the hulking anomalies sit: twenty-storey cement monstrosities caught out by history; designed for air-conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting and smoothly operating lifts; marooned in countries heading back to pre-colonial times.

  At the Ministry of Information it was always worth sending a scout ahead of time to find out whether the lifts were working that day. In any other country, you might also call ahead to find out if the man handling your documents was at his desk. But as a low-ranking Zairean official he did not boast a Telecel. One option was to stand at the bottom of the building and shout upwards until someone above heard your calls and established that your man was there. If you were unlucky, you then faced a painful climb up the dark stairwell, which doubled as a male lavatory. If you were lucky, tapping on the first-floor metal doors with a pair of keys would alert someone at the top to your presence, and they would send the lift down to collect you. Occasionally, the lift would be working but the lights were not. The solution on such days was a workman’s lamp, solemnly handed from one passenger to another as they entered and left the lift.

  At the top of the Ministry, there was al
ways a refreshing breeziness. The air-conditioning did not work, but the windows were kept open and the air wafted through the building. Here you got a bird’s eye view of the world. Toy cars could be seen driving along the Avenue 24 Novembre, people had become the size of tiny dolls and the layout of the nearby military barracks, the People’s Palace and the modernistic sports stadium—two more foreign architectural gifts to a grateful President Mobutu—took on a new dimension.

  But the detail that always stuck in my mind was a mundane one. From up there what went virtually unnoticed at ground floor level emerged: a pattern of neat squares carved into the red earth. For kilometres around, all open spaces had been divided into carefully watered plots. On road verges, traffic islands, what should have been the lawns of the ministry itself, the distinctive spiky leaves of the cassava plant grew. This was a green city, but it was not greenery aimed at pleasing the eye. While Mobutu amused himself landscape gardening in Gbadolite, a nation on permanent Low Batt had no time for lawns. Preoccupied with the immediate problem of getting enough to eat, the residents had turned Kinshasa into one massive vegetable allotment.

  To the north-east, the outline of a walled institution on the edge of the city centre could just be glimpsed. Constructed by the Belgians, it was a low-lying building whose main entrance was guarded by two men in beige uniforms. At street level their task seemed a tedious one—opening and closing the heavy metal gates with mind-numbing frequency. But closer investigation revealed the two to be armed with the kind of black rubber truncheons used by riot police. Their gaze was watchful and they scanned the crowd filtering through the entrance with care, on the lookout for inmates making a break for freedom.

  These were no watchmen on duty at Kinshasa’s Makala prison. This was the hospital once known as Mama Yemo and now called Kinshasa General Hospital. Their task was to physically restrain patients foolhardy enough to try and abscond without meeting their bills. For the cash-starved administration of the city’s main hospital, non-payment was a luxury it simply could not afford. ‘We call it impounding the ill (‘séquestration des malades’),’ explained Dr Henri Kasongo, head of emergency surgery at Mama Yemo. ‘All the hospitals do it, although they’ll never admit to it. The guards have to be very alert, sorting out those who have been sick from those who are well. Often people will try to blend amongst the public at visiting time. There are lots of escapes because, to be honest, these hospitals have become like prisons.’

  Equipped with 2,000 beds, Mama Yemo for a long time claimed the proud title of central Africa’s biggest hospital. Mobutu clearly had a glorious future in mind when he named it after his mother and ordered a bronze bust of her to be placed on one of the paths running between the blue and white painted pavilions. As the ‘people’s hospital’, it was supposed to receive almost 50 per cent of the health budget, but the money never followed the good intentions. Supplies dwindled. Salaries, on the rare occasions when they were paid, fell to laughable levels. Sick mouvanciers would check into private clinics or, following Mobutu’s example, fly to Switzerland in their private jets for treatment. Mama Yemo was left to fend for itself.

  It was a situation, said Dr Kasongo, a tall man whose prominent jaw hinted at a certain pugnaciousness, that had led ineluctably to a condition not covered by the traditional medical textbooks: an overall hardening of the heart. ‘In the popular press we are portrayed as butchers, coldhearted and utterly ruthless. But without the crumbs we get from the patients the hospital would close down completely. So what is the alternative?’

  From the outside, the situation did not look too bad. White egrets picked their way across the green lawns, looking for edible rubbish. Washed clothes spread on hedges to dry provided bright patches of colour. There were the usual gaggles of women bringing food in metal containers to their loved ones and signs banning rifles, prompted by one too many incidents involving wounded soldiers demanding priority treatment. A bullet hole in one wall bore witness to how insistent they could become.

  But inside the wards, it became clear why even the staff openly referred to Mama Yemo as a ‘mouroir’ (death chamber). Doors were splintering, the walls badly needed painting and there was no window netting to ward against malarial mosquitoes. Men and women, soldiers and civilians, suspected AIDS-carriers and the HIV-negative were mixed indiscriminately together, their narrow beds only inches apart. The air was pregnant with that acidic aroma you rarely notice in Western hospitals, where it is swamped by a layer of soap and disinfectant. A mixture of pus, warm flesh, urine, human secretions. With its promise of possible infection, the sweetish smell clung to the hairs of the nostril, hovering hours after its source had been left far behind.

  When it came to emergencies, heaven help those unlucky enough to be admitted in extremis, without friends and family on hand to offer instant cash. At one stage, the hospital used to keep a stock of drugs and supplies. But they vanished as patients supposed to reimburse the hospital once the emergency was over proved unequal to the task. ‘Now the doctor is in a dilemma—the patient has no money, the doctor sees that he is dying but he has no drugs or supplies. I probably lose two out of every ten patients admitted with serious problems that way,’ admitted Kasongo.

  Those with more time at their disposal knew what to expect: scalpels and sewing thread, plaster of Paris and rubber gloves—all must be brought before the doctor would lift a finger. And at the end, the guards at the gate were instructed not to let the patient out until what was delicately termed the ‘service de recouvrement’ (recovery service) had ensured costs were covered. ‘A patient may end up owing a couple of thousand dollars. But how can a civil servant who is not being paid his salary afford that? So he will be physically prevented from leaving and usually after a month or so his family will have gathered enough money together to get him out.’

  Those most vulnerable to such pressure were young mothers, whose new-born babies could quietly but firmly be kept in their cots till the bill was settled. ‘One woman spent two months here,’ recalled Kasongo. ‘She had given birth and couldn’t leave. Everyone was laughing about it.’ A rival hospital, he said, had gone so far as to set up a special room for patients with outstanding debts as a way of streamlining the problem. ‘It’s more convenient, as it frees up space. As a doctor, I don’t want to have wards full of healthy people.’

  Nothing could be taken on trust. At times the hospital acted as a pawnbroker, confiscating radios, watches or televisions as surety. ‘Patients will often claim they have nothing, that they are destitute. In that case, they will be asked if they have any possessions. If one admits, say, that he has a television, we’ll say, “OK then, bring that in.” ’

  Even death, it emerged, offered no escape from debt. Just as living patients could be held hostage, bodies could be retained in the morgue until the family settled—a practice, the doctor acknowledged, that violated every moral precept in a culture where ensuring that a body was properly laid to rest had always been of enormous spiritual importance. ‘Impounding a body is scandalous, a monstrosity, it’s simply unacceptable. Those who can will pay up immediately to get the body out of the morgue.’ But not everyone could. Hence the growing tendency for poverty-stricken families to abandon their relatives’ bodies. Every three or four months, Mama Yemo’s morgue filled with unclaimed corpses. Given the hot climate and intermittent electricity supplies, its refrigerators usually proved unequal to the task and the bodies began to decompose. At a certain point, when the problem became overwhelming, volunteers with strong stomachs would remove the corpses and bury them in a mass grave. National television sometimes broadcast images of these heroes at their terrible work. Behind their face masks, they retched as the corpses fell apart in the process of being lifted, shedding hands, feet, limbs.

  Such horrors helped ensure that patients still waited until all other options were ruled out before admitting themselves to Mama Yemo. Doctors, for their part, avoided surgery unless absolutely necessary, for fear of infection, aware that poor medic
ine was encouraging diseases once beaten into submission to flare back into prominence. ‘Sleeping sickness, leprosy, typhoid. All these illnesses that were nearly under control are coming back, and it’s not a pure coincidence.’

  Kasongo himself was entitled to a $20 monthly salary, but he had not been paid for five months. Most doctors in the state sector, he said, dreamed of moving abroad. He was one of the few who wanted to improve conditions here, despite his scepticism. His hair was thinning, he was no longer a young man. Sometimes, he acknowledged dourly, he wondered whether he had made a mistake choosing to become a doctor at all. ‘I didn’t study medicine to cure people on the basis of wealth, to extort money from patients or to let people die without intervening. I get demoralised. If I met someone who wanted to go into medicine today I’d say, think twice. It’s a big disappointment. There’s something sub-human about this way of life.’

  As we walked towards the exit and the uniformed sentinels, standing like Cerberus at the gates to Hades, we paused at the plinth which once supported Mama Yemo’s bust. Within hours of Kabila seizing power, the bronze had been toppled by members of staff. Maybe they recalled another symbolic statue-felling, staged at the bidding of the leader they then believed in, who left his mother’s namesake to rot. ‘It’s funny how an event will suddenly reveal what everyone feels,’ pondered the doctor. ‘Everyone hated that bust, but no one dared say it.’

  If a state of Low Batt often proved fatal for the unfortunate individuals admitted to Mama Yemo, there was one public institution where the chronic condition held out potential risks for an entire city. On a hill looking out over Kinshasa is a one-storey building that briefly became the focus of local media attention a couple of years after Kabila’s takeover.

  A metal projectile, the newspapers reported, had ploughed into the wall of the establishment. As no one was hurt in the incident, debate focused on the puzzling question of where the missile had come from. True, a civil war was raging across the river in Brazzaville. But it seemed unlikely that a missile, however badly aimed, could stray as far inland as this. The other possibility was that the ‘missile’ was in fact a fragment from a small plane that had recently crashed near Ndjili airport. But, once again, it was difficult to work out how the debris could have ended up so far from any known flight path.