In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  The sapeurs fancy themselves the best dancers in town and are often the players who decide when a particular disco step has outlived its interest and it is time to adopt a new one. The Kwasa-Kwasa, the Kotcho-Kotcho, the Otshule: the dances are born, sweep across the nightclubs of Africa and Europe and then mysteriously disappear, replaced by a new style that involves using the hips more, perhaps, a slightly different rhythm, or moving the foot and arm in tandem.

  The crazes are not without a sense of political and social irony. The Etutana dance, based on the principle of rubbing yourself vigorously against your partner and with a chorus of ‘ça c’est bon’ (‘it feels good’), was a reaction to the AIDS awareness campaign which was trying to persuade young Congolese to stop having unprotected sex. More recently, the Ndombolo has been causing a stir. Said to have been invented by the street kids of Kinshasa, it involves spreading the legs far apart, bending the knees and poking one’s bottom in the air. Banned as obscene in Cameroon, the Ndombolo is not very graceful. But then, it’s not meant to be, because the Ndombolo combines a crude imitation of sex with mocking mimicry of the gait of the overweight Laurent Kabila. This is one dance that did not originate with the sapeurs, who consider it below their dignity. ‘A sapeur will never, ever dance the Ndombolo,’ said Colonel Jagger. ‘Gyrating your hips is fine for women, that’s our view. But a sapeur moves as little as possible, just enough to show off his trousers or his shoes. If you’re wearing a nice outfit, you obviously don’t want to break into a sweat.’

  Ask a sapeur about the motivation behind the phenomenon, and he will usually mention a desire to prove to the Europeans, who brought clothing to central Africa, that they could be beaten at their own game, that the once-naked savages had become cooler and more elegant than their dowdy colonisers. But another factor was the desire to react against the stylistic monotony of the Mobutu years, when ‘authenticity’ led to the outlawing of Western dress, ties were regarded as subversive and the ghastly ‘abacost’ jacket was supposed to hang in every loyal citizen’s wardrobe. For a population known for its love of display, few decrees could have been more demoralising.

  ‘For twenty years people here wore a uniform,’ recalled Colonel Jagger. ‘We were the only ones who refused to do so. At concerts sapeurs would be beaten up for wearing suits. It was a way of saying “no” to the system, of showing there’s a difference between us and everyone else. A way of feeling good about ourselves.’ Once the sapeur had embraced that lifestyle choice, days off were not permitted. ‘Sapeurs don’t dress for other people. They dress for themselves. And in contrast with most people, who dress up at the weekend or to go out, they dress smartly every day of the week.’

  But wasn’t all this a rather trivial way of expressing revolt? In other countries, frustrated young men took to the streets or got involved in politics. In Kinshasa, the generation holding out hope for the future was busy fussing about the colour of their socks. Wasn’t this a waste of energy better channelled elsewhere? ‘It’s easy for you to talk. But the older generation here has fenced off the world of politics. This is a world where you can’t go out and shout in the street, where you suffocate, because there is no room to breathe. I have no weapons, so instead I create a world of my own,’ explained Colonel Jagger.

  Certainly, when you considered the practical difficulties involved in being a sapeur today, as opposed to the years when money was still washing around the system, the struggle to ‘affirm’ oneself acquired a near-heroic quality.

  A pair of good shoes started at $100 in Kinshasa, almost equivalent to the average yearly per capita income logged by UN agencies. The clothes displayed in the boutiques of the Hotel Intercontinental, expensive even by European standards, were well beyond most locals’ reach. Unable to actually buy the Versace jackets, Paul Smith shoes and Gianfranco Ferré trousers they so longed for, the sapeurs depended on their friends—especially those abroad—for loans and swaps. ‘Most of us rely on trading items between friends rather than outright buying,’ said Colonel Jagger. ‘There’s a certain solidarity. I know which of my friends has money at any given time and we help each other out. We tighten our belts. But either you’re a sapeur or you’re not. It’s not a question of money. It’s a question of taste.’

  Talking to the melancholic Colonel, I was suddenly overwhelmed by that sense of tragic waste, of crippled potential, that so often sweeps over one in Africa. This articulate, subtle man was no longer young. He had reached the age when most men have relegated an obsession with jean brands and fancy waistcoats to the mental drawer where they keep their motorbike manuals and collection of Bo Derek posters. Yet here we were, discussing shoe makes and dancing styles with the seriousness a Buddhist would devote to meditation techniques.

  And then I remembered an excerpt from The Road to Wigan Pier, in which George Orwell wrote about the spending habits of the poor, the tendency of the bored, miserable and harassed to fritter their wages on chips and ice-cream instead of the dull, wholesome food that would keep them healthy. Middle-class puzzlement missed the point, suggested Orwell, for being able to ‘treat yourself’ was the only thing that made such existences bearable. La Sape, I realised, was that principle seen through to its philosophical conclusion. Spending your money on a luxury rather than a necessity was part of what kept you human, as essential to a sense of self-worth as the smear of lipstick on the face of a pensioner. Acting the dandy in modern-day Congo was like playing the gourmet in a concentration camp. The harder finding a Comme des Garçons shirt became, the more convincingly its eventual wearer proved he remained master of his fate.

  ‘Papa Wemba, Niarkos and I, we brought the young people here hope—we made them realise that you didn’t have to be the son of a rich man to make it,’ said Colonel Jagger. ‘They regard us as role models. No matter how poor, they aspire to one day dressing like us. Even a boy in the street here will know who his favourite designer is.’ I must have been looking sceptical, because Colonel Jagger called one of the urchins playing football in the dust over to prove his point. ‘Go on, ask him.’ ‘Who’s your favourite couturier?’ I said in French. The boy shuffled his bare feet, picked at his filthy shorts and looked down at the floor. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘He doesn’t understand the question,’ said Colonel Jagger tolerantly. ‘Griffe oyo olingaka mingi ezali nini?’ he translated, and at the word ‘griffe’ the boy’s eyes lit up in immediate understanding. ‘Versace for jackets and Girbaud for jeans,’ he answered, without a moment’s hesitation.

  The sapeurs had managed to keep their dreams alive, skating around the edge of despair without tumbling in. But there were those who had seen their complicated fantasy edifices come crashing down. Standing in the rubble, they gazed around them with clear eyes and shuddered at what they found.

  Most of the expatriate community seemed to fall into that category. Often they were the children of Belgian administrators, Greek businessmen or Portuguese shopkeepers who remembered frightened mothers standing guard with machetes during the civil disturbances of the 1960s and listening wide-eyed to tales of lions prowling outside rural compounds. Or they were Europeans of humble origins with grandiose ambitions, who thought they had discovered in Africa the freedom to cast off the shackles of class and prejudice and reinvent themselves.

  Congo had been a home that once offered warmth, laughter, endless possibilities and the automatic respect accorded a white man in Africa. Europe seemed alien territory where aspirations were cramped, relationships strained. Initially convinced they possessed the intuitive understanding that would allow them to solve the riddle, beat the Congolese conundrum, they had stayed on after each outbreak of violence. ‘This country is like a woman,’ a Belgian lawyer lamented. ‘She cheats you once and you forgive her and come back. Then she cheats you again and you forgive her once more. She keeps cheating and you keep coming back.’

  Now their businesses were barely ticking over. Their numbers had shrunk as, one by one, their friends packed up and left. Resigned to keeping out of
politics, they had realised they could not make money either. When they were arrested or threatened by the authorities, they found precious little sympathy at their embassies, whose young diplomats regarded them as unreconstructed colonialists largely deserving the treatment meted out. If they were still universally hailed as ‘patron’ (‘boss’), the title had begun to grate, the nature of their tiny ghetto had become manifest. They now knew themselves doomed to be aliens by virtue of their skin, fixed in the aspic of paternalism.

  Unlike most Congolese, they enjoyed the luxury of choosing where to live. But they were trapped in a different way. Uneasy and ill-defined, they were the mirror images of the Congolese exiles trying to start new lives in Paris and Brussels. Souls in limbo, they knew they could not make things work in Congo but had nothing left to give to a European continent whose cold efficiency chilled them. When more recent white arrivals, in boorish expatriate mode, raged against the perfidy of the locals, they concealed their anger. Their tragedy was that they loved the place, but no longer expected to be loved in return. They had come to share with Mobutu the quality of obsolescence. ‘We are like dinosaurs, dying off one by one,’ acknowledged the lawyer. ‘We feel so involved, but we are utterly marginalised, incapable of dictating events.’

  On the banks of the River Congo, an hour’s drive east of Kinshasa, before the road passes the fishing village of Maluku, I found one of the most poignant members of the breed. Strolling through groves of avocado, grapefruit, lemon and lychee he had planted and nurtured into luxuriant life, patrolling warm brown pools teeming with fish, Daniel Thomas was taking stock of a lifetime of labour destined to leave him empty-handed in what would all too soon be his old age.

  His glade exhaled lazy peace, sun-drenched contentment. Troupes of guinea-fowl, their bobbing heads the bright turquoise of a tropical beetle, picked their way across the green lawns, butterflies wafted over the yellow hibiscus and a widow bird looped from bush to bush, its languid tail dipping. It was hot, and while the staff prepared an open-air barbecue, Thomas’s dog determinedly dug a hole in the lawn, where it sat panting, cooling its belly on the exposed earth. From the river came the sound of a barge pushing logs cut many, many miles upstream, somewhere in the equatorial jungle where Mr Kurtz gradually lost his reason. But its chugging progress was dwarfed by an expanse as vast as his dreams: the cloud-dotted sky meeting a mother-of-pearl sheet of water in a horizon that was no more than a shimmer of grey-blue.

  From Thomas’s farm the sometimes imperceptible curve of Malebo pool made itself manifest. To the right, across the water, lay a thickly forested island. To the left, you could see the slim tower of Nsele, where Chinese workers built Mobutu an ornate pavilion and the single party system was born. Behind it, the glints from the skyscrapers of two turbulent African capitals. The heat haze was pierced by the odd plume of smoke from a farmer’s fire, thin threads of white trailing across the rolling, pea-green landscape that must have looked so terrifyingly alien to the eyes of Stanley and Brazzaville, accustomed to the cosy fields and neat hedgerows of Europe.

  ‘There was nothing here when we came in 1976, just brush to be cut down,’ said Thomas. ‘Now look at these mango trees.’ He bent to point out the little buds in the thick green foliage, shaking his head with wonder at the fertility of the soil. ‘They’re flowering again, and we’ve only just finished eating the last crop, which were mouthwatering. What a feeling, to pick fruit from something you have planted yourself! There’s nothing finer in the world.’ His face was the colour of baked terracotta and it had the glazed quality of someone who had spent his entire life working outdoors. His teeth, stained by cheap local cigarettes, pointed in a variety of unconventional directions. But his blue eyes, though tired and watery now, still had the trusting innocence of a child. Which seemed appropriate, for Thomas himself admitted he had been truly infantile in his slowness to learn the painful lessons of experience. Bewitched by his vision of an African Garden of Eden, he had been like a toddler who tumbles, gets up, is knocked down a second time, falls once again, staggers back on his feet, only for the whole process to be repeated once more. It was hard to know whether to admire his commitment or dismiss him as a fool. Either way, you had to marvel at his energy.

  Thomas and his wife, a pale, melancholy woman, had been looted not once, not twice, but three times in eight years, an escalating ladder of theft and destruction that had worn away the huge store of optimism they had brought to the country. In fact, if you counted Zaireanisation, you could argue that the couple have been ripped off a total of four times in the land they once wanted to make a home but now talked of leaving.

  He had come to Zaire in 1970 as a construction expert speaking with the twang of rural northern France, brought in to set up and run factories producing high-quality tea in the eastern Kivu province for export to the Common Market. Now associated with sprawling refugee camps and rebel uprisings, Kivu was then a peaceful province of green hills and misty mountain ranges. The madness began, Thomas was taken over by the farmer’s passion for the soil. ‘The climate, the people, the land. It was paradise on earth: I bought 150 hectares outside Bukavu and lived like a king.’

  Then Mobutu introduced Zaireanisation, and foreign-owned farms, factories and businesses were allocated to cronies with little desire to get their hands dirty. ‘Zaire’, as Thomas put it, ‘began to self-destruct’. The tea project took only three years to collapse. Expecting to lose his own land, Thomas donated it for free to a Franciscan order and moved to Kinshasa to start again. He bought the 114-hectare site near Maluku and raised Barbary ducks, which proved profitable until most were killed by bad feed from the only suppliers. ‘I sent the feed for analysis and was told it was full of sawdust and coffee grounds. The ducks died of hunger with their stomachs full.’ So Thomas taught himself how to graft fruit trees and built up a herd of cattle and sheep with which he supplied Kinshasa’s Moslem community for the yearly El-Khadir festival.

  Digging a three-kilometre channel to divert water from a nearby stream, he created five pools on the river bank and stocked them with tilapia and capitaine, the most popular species of fish in this part of Africa. Anglers who could tolerate the sauna conditions at the river’s edge would come and catch their own. The couple built paillottes—thatched awnings—and word spread of a new place to lunch over the weekend. On a Sunday afternoon, they sometimes found themselves running to serve roast fish, barbecued lamb and home-made ratatouille to 300 guests.

  The concern was thriving by 1991, when the first round of army-led looting swept across the country. Thomas estimates that he spent 100,000 French francs (£10,500) repairing damage done to the property and replacing stock that time. Two years later, when the riots and pillaging broke out again in Kinshasa, the farm was more seriously affected. ‘We had all the kitchen and farming equipment stolen and lost 280 sheep. The damages totalled about 700,000 francs (£74,000).’

  But the incidents were dwarfed by what happened in 1997 in the run-up to Kabila’s seizure of power, just as the couple were about to harvest their fish. Marooned in Kinshasa, Thomas had fretted about the livestock on the farm, situated worryingly close to the road Mobutu’s soldiers were meant to defend against the oncoming rebels. Finally, he set off with a stock of cash and methodically paid his way through twenty military roadblocks, until, at the last checkpoint, he was held hostage while the gardes civiles debated taking his car.

  On his release, he found the scene he had dreaded. The paillotes had been burnt down, the farm stripped bare, the herds of sheep and cattle shot and for the first time the sluice gates had been opened and the pools emptied of all their tilapia and capitaine, dumped on a local market. The losses this time were a crushing 1.2 million francs (£126,000).

  If businesses looted in Kinshasa through the years were hard put to identify their attackers, for the Thomas couple there was no such comforting anonymity on offer. Depressingly, the people who led the soldiers to the farm each time were local villagers. Far from regarding the fa
rm as a project worth encouraging, or at least tolerating, for the investment and employment it might bring to the area, they monitored the farm through the years like schoolboys watching a ripening fruit, waiting for the moment when a breakdown of law and order would provide the cover for some neighbourly appropriation. ‘It’s always the same hard core that incites the other villagers and brings the soldiers here. We know who they are, we even know their names. But they’ve never been punished and they never will be,’ said Thomas.

  He had not quite managed to kick over the traces. He had restocked the fish pools and rebuilt the paillottes, though customers willing to risk the journey had become a rarity. In his stained shirt and old trousers, he toured the banks with cutters in hand, exclaiming like some modern-day Andrew Marvell over the delights of his jewel-green kingdom. He could not begrudge the money he had lavished on the farm over the years for, like the lawyer, his feelings for the land were those of the romantic lover. ‘It’s like a beautiful woman, you don’t count what you’ve given it.’

  He appeared to harbour little rancour, attributing the repeated pillaging to the hunter-gatherer instincts on which the Congolese relied for survival until so very recently. But something in this man who attributed his career to ‘eternal optimism’ appeared to have snapped this time, perhaps overwhelmed by the realisation that those around him never regarded him as anything more than just another white colonialist to be taken for a ride at worst, deferred to at best. Since the last looting, he said, the couple have given up their long-held hopes of building something permanent and spending their last years in Congo. ‘The punch just isn’t there any more. It’s obvious that nobody here understood what we were trying to do. We have no more hope. All we want is to be left in peace.’ One sensed gentle pressure from his wife, who had not been well. Her face did not have his childlike gleam, it looked bleached by disappointment and betrayal. ‘We put our hearts into this place twice and our hearts were broken,’ she said. ‘We have been broken. You try and you try and you try, and then you just run out of energy.’