Four times during my career between 1999 and 2000 I had the opportunity to travel to Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s the only place in the word that I truly experienced culture shock, even with multiple trips to places like Albania, Serbia, Egypt, Jordan, and other locations considered wild and exotic. Here are a few photos. For what it’s worth, it’s against the law to take pictures in the DRC – that, or the local constabulary uses it as an excuse to put the squeeze on anyone they happen to catch doing it. As a result, some of the pictures are mine, and others were scavenged from the internet.

Kinshasa is distilled chaos.

Drove into one of the real backwater quarters of Kinshasa.  With the four-wheel drive, we drove over roads that would have made Indiana Jones quail in terror.  Everywhere: mud, mud, mud, garbage, and more mud, mosquito havens in road ruts the size of canyons, absolute squalor everywhere.  It was like something out of a bad dream.  Hordes of little boys running along the side of the car shouting “White man!” in their native language, big tubs of fufu (manioc powder) for sale everywhere, chickens and ducks roaming the streets, and in the midst of all the wretchedness, people buying and selling, trading and walking, bartering and dickering, visiting and playing, incredible disorder.

Driving to the airport in the dark, the main road was lined with vendors everywhere, most of them lighting their small business areas with rags soaked in red palm oil, which gave the entire stretch of highway a surreal appearance. No electricity anywhere outside the main urban area – but that didn’t stop people from conducting a brisk trade well into the night.

Everyone in Kinshasa is on the take. Trust no one; pay everyone. Life is so hard here that no opportunity to make a dollar or a franc is lost. Corruption is so prevalent that it can no longer be considered corruption – it has become the norm. The entire nation deals with the reality that if you want anything done, even things that are supposed to be free, it will cost you. No one uses the post office; anything that looks valuable will be opened and ransacked; even the locals don’t trust the system. Things get in and out of the country with friends and relations; as I left for the airport, countless people gave me letters to deliver or mail once I had left the country. Import a package from Canada worth $400.00? “Customs agents” will charge you $1,000.00 to let it in the country. Strangers walk up to you out of nowhere and say “Give me twenty dollars.” If the official exchange rate is 5 Congolese Francs to the dollar, your friends might be able to give you 10… and then they’ll go get 16 on the street. Stopped by the police for no reason? Pay to make the situation go away. Foreigners are special marks, routinely charged whatever the locals will think they can get out of them, and for whatever reason. No price is fixed, no law is immutable, as long as your pockets are full of cash to grease the thousand palms stretched out to you. How the natives deal with this is beyond me.

I met some good people here, but my mind shorts out when I try to imagine what life is like for them. Somehow life goes on.

In a book by Mike Resnick entitled Purgatory, the author introduces his thinly-veiled history of Rhodesia with the following anecdote (this isn’t Resnick’s version, but the same story):

One day, a scorpion came upon a river. The scorpion wanted to cross the river, but having searched up and down the bank, he found no way across. As he was sitting there, wondering what to do, he noticed a crocodile sitting in the reeds.

“Hello, crocodile,” said the scorpion, “would you be so kind as to give me a ride across the river?”

“Only if you promise not to sting me,” replied the crocodile.

“Of course, I promise.” the scorpion assured him.

“I mean it,” insisted the crocodile, “if you sting me, we will both drown.”

The scorpion responded, “I promise, you can trust me. I don’t want to drown!”

The crocodile came closer, and the scorpion crawled onto his back. The crocodile moved out away from the river bank and began swimming to the other side of the river. At about the middle of the river, the crocodile felt a sting on his back and knew the scorpion had just doomed them both.

With his final breath, the crocodile asked the scorpion, “Why did you sting me? Now we will both die!”

As the scorpion slipped below the surface, he shrugged and said, “Because it’s Africa.”

The Old Wolf has spoken.

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