Yesterday began early and cold. The drillers were up cooking breakfast by 5:30, the cusp of day and night, and the coldest time of either. I was sleeping in the tent I had been given by Ilkka, a Finnish traveler I met in Lusaka. It’s a tiny one-person tent, and it looks funny next to the large family-style tents the drillers sleep in. When they started the generator 15 minutes later I could no longer tempt myself with thoughts of falling back asleep.
After breakfast and ablutions, it was off to the rigs on the morning rounds. We started at the diamond rig, bringing the day shift to their posts in the bed of the Land Cruiser. There I learned more about the workings of the machine, which, though still impressive, had a less exalted aspect by day. I took notes on what I saw and what Bart told me about the machine before moving on to the reverse-circulation (RC) rig, about 13 miles in the other direction. We got there on what was possibly the worst road I’d ever seen, and it took the better part of an hour to make the trip. On the way we saw that the grader had got stuck in the road’s muddy margin. It was tilted toward the marsh beyond at a precarious angle, and it looked as if a vigorous push might tip into the drink.
The RC rig was a much older contraption than the diamond rig, which was new, and it looked like it had been cobbled together from bits and pieces of other machinery. The big differences are that it uses pneumatic pressure to turn the drill, and that the sample, rather than being removed as an intact core, is broken up and blown up to the surface and into a bag. This type of rig is less expensive to operate, and is used in places where there is less certainty as to what might be found. Its reliance on pneumatics also makes it more dangerous than the diamond rig. The rig foreman was a Zimbabwean named Monay*. He is a friendly guy with a funny way of talking. As we were leaving, I noticed that he was looking ill. A bit rheumy-eyed, with some crusting leakage from his nose.
Our next errand took us to Kasumbalesa, the Congolese border post. Bart had to go there to pick up something called an air core bit from a customs agent who expedites things on behalf of his drilling outfit. There was nothing too exciting about the errand or the place itself, but Bart knows of my interest in the Congo and asked if I wanted to come along. Which I naturally did. The ride there was relatively awful. It was over mostly over the same road that I had come on with Kelvin, but this time I was sandwiched between Bart and a policeman, who needed to sit shotgun in the event of an ambush. And Bart, having been a rally car driver at one time, was driving fast. If I had any thoughts in my brain that were waiting to hatch, I think the that ride sprang them.
What’s that? How likely is an ambush? The chances are probably not very high if you have an armed escort, so fear not, friends.
Once we had turned out onto the main road, I asked how long before the border, and Bart said about five clicks. The truck queue began well over a mile before the actual border. At perhaps a hundred feet a truck, that’s something like 500 trucks. All of them were hauling serious cargoes. Many were carrying containers shipped into ports in Namibia, South Africa, or Tanzania, but most had machinery or commodities lashed to their trailer beds, I suppose for ease of inspection. Having hauled loads through Africa in the past himself, Bart guessed that the line’s recent arrivals would easily have spent three days at the border by the time they passed their inspections and were waved through. The Congolese are not keen on promoting cross-border commerce unless you bribe them, you see.
What he said when we got to the gate really resonated with me. Being this close to the Congo, he said, made him feel like something awful could happen at any moment. And you know what? It felt true. Even though we were still technically in Zambia, the atmosphere was subtly different. There were fewer smiles, and some of the smiles had turned into leers. Looks of friendly curiosity seemed to have been replaced by appraising glances, strolling by strutting. What is it about that place?
After we’d parked, the policeman and I stood on the other side of the road while Arthur went to look for his man. In the 30 minutes or so we were standing there, the Zambian guards let three trucks through. Which made Arthur’s 3-day estimate accurate—but only if the post operates around the clock, which it does not. Kasumbalesa appeared to be complete chaos: Everybody was running laterally along the border—exhorting, hawking, yelling, strutting—and no one was crossing. The policeman and I got into a discussion as we waited. I asked him if he had ever shot anyone with his gun. He laughed: Ah! Many times! Then I asked if the people he shot had died. Mostly yes, he said. He made sure of that. In his previous posting he had been part of an armed robbery containment unit. He and his team had lain in wait at intersections likely to be hit by carjackers, and their job was to trump attacks. I asked him if he felt bad about killing robbers (people), and he said that you get used to it. He felt bad the first time, and had even had nightmares about it, but you get used to it. And your fellow police officers fill you with courage.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
The Drill Site
After attempt for the better part of a week to reach the site in the bush (as it’s called in these parts) where my friend Arthur operates some drill rigs in search of copper for the, I am finally here. The reason this post can reach you from where I am is that they’ve got a satellite uplink they use to send spreadsheets on mineralization statistics and diesel consumption and so forth to the head office.
The place is about 3 hours’ drive from Ndola, the last hour of which runs through a forest over a rutted red track best negotiated in a Land Cruiser or similar. But like I said, it took me most of a week to make the trip. Not the journey, mind, but the logistics leading up to it. It was a matter of organizing a ride with someone who was going out to the site.
It began with Arthur beseeching me—I use that word because the requests were repetitive, and there was a plaintive tone to them—to come visit while I was busy with an assignment last week. I had been contracted to aggravate the greenhouse effect by breaking down complex German documents into simpler English analogues, plus methane (A friend suggested in that regard that I paper my translation site with a background suitably illustrative of this chemico-linguistic conversion, something along the lines of DE à EN + CH4, along with a bunch of cattle grazing ant one end on suitably abstruse German words like Verwohlfeilerung or Versinnbildlichung and releasing the English equivalents, plus methane, at the other). The point being that I had to keep delaying the visit until I’d run a sufficiently large batch of words through the Teuton-Anglo converter to secure a handsome credit to my bank account. Lange Rede, kurzer Sinn: Once I was ready at the end of last week, I began trying to organize a ride.
The first attempt did not work. Arthur put me in touch with the drilling company’s office manager. A whelp of a white South African. He told me he could give me a ride on Saturday, but he had a hard time finding the diesel he was supposed to deliver to the site, and ended up leaving at 4 A.M. on Sunday. This did not suit my diurnal cycle. He was difficult to track down throughout Saturday, and I ended up with the impression that he was unconcerned about expediting my errand. Arthur phoned to say there was another truck going in on Tuesday. A Zambian geologist by the name of Kelvin. I called him up to arrange the lift, and he was as nice as could be. On Sunday he said he’d be by to get me at about 10 in the morning the following day. This being Zambia, of course, 10 in the morning turned out to be three in the afternoon. He had been detained by the police on the way from Lusaka for talking on his cell phone while behind the wheel. Quite an ordeal. He also had some errands to do around town, so it was around 4 PM before we pushed off on the final leg.
Most of the way there was on a road I had taken before, on my way to the chimp orphanage with Simwinga. First we drove past Kitwe, Kitwe with its abominably dirty copper smelter whose column of sulfurous smoke announces the Copperbelt’s industry like a cipher for all to see for 30 miles around. Next we passed Chingola, another town choked in a cloud of smoke: Drifts of diesel, smoldering brush fires where land is being cleared by villagers, belching smelters. There we stopped so Kelvin could negotiate the purchase of fuel for a road-grader he was bringing in to the bush. This took longer than expected, and night had almost fallen by the time we got into Chililambombwe, the town closest to the site. Kelvin was apologetic when he said he thought it best if we spent the night there before pressing on. It wasn’t just a matter of him being fatigued from the long journey—our proximity to the lawless Congolese border meant bandits, who would be more than happy to take Kelvin’s spanking new Ford Ranger over to their side of that border. A dilapidated guest house seemed preferable to trying our chances with Congolese bandits, so I assented.
Milyashi Guest House had a sign out front that identified it as ‘the place to be.’ I’ll allow that it was the place I was at. There is little to say about it, and what little there is to say runs the risk of verging on litany, so I’ll confine myself to saying that the shower water was not hot. One thing about the place made me feel good, though, and I’ll say it. It was the only place I’ve ever stayed in Zambia where the tops of the perimeter walls were not lined with crushed glass. Which says more about the relative calmness of the town than it does about the quality of the accommodation itself.
We left Milyashi behind in the morning after several more delays. Riding with us in the Ranger were two police officers armed with AK-47’s and several clips of ammunition apiece. Despite the guns, both were as jovial and low-key as the Zambian stereotype would have them be. I was sitting shotgun, with one police officer in the backseat and the other in the bed. We drove first to a police checkpoint and then turned off into the scrub. At first the track ran through a seemingly endless village of hardscrabble huts and wide-eyed children. Men were coming and going on bicycles between the various sections of this run of villages, some carrying passengers sitting side-saddle, others using the bicycles for advantage in transporting large loads of charcoal, cornmeal, even small palettes of bricks. There were also women transporting water and hay and bundles of cloth and what-not using that great carrier of African loads—their gracefully poised heads. As we drove by these people, many of them stopped and gave us what to me seemed baleful stares. When I at length remarked to Kelvin that these people did not seem happy, and he translated my comment to the police officer in the back, we learned that one of the geologist trucks had run into someone on the road that day and put him in the hospital. Which was unfortunate, but it was still a relief to learn that the grievance was specific—and that I was not just seeing things. Once we had gone in about ten miles and had put some distance between ourselves and the site of the earlier crash, the charged atmosphere cleared. I soon found myself waving hello and being greeted by a gleeful peals of ‘Mzungu! Mzungu!’ For that is what I am. Mzungu is a widespread Bantu word meaning ‘white man,’ and which connotes confusion or aimless wandering.
As usual with these blog entries, I find that I have piled on the words hand over fist before getting to the interesting part, the rub. But I trust in your forbearance, esteemed readers. So: Just after catching up to the lumbering grader that Kelvin had been organizing fuel for the day before, we pulled into the camp. On first impression, it was very similar to the one I had stayed in on my Botswana safari. It was a clearing in a teak forest with a number of tents for sleeping and for working, a food prep area, and a generator. I got out of the Ranger and thanked Kelvin for the ride.
Arthur is the site manager for the two rigs manned by the camp. It was nice to see him in his element among the drillers and the machines, and not just gadding about town. He enjoys a position of unquestioned authority—so much so that the drillers immediately took to calling me ‘boss’ by way of association. He told me he was glad to have at least someone around who wouldn’t say ‘yes, boss’ every time he cracked a joke. We spent the afternoon doing our respective office work. His concerned drill depth and fuel quotas, while mine was preliminary to what you see before you.
The camp was sectioned off from the surrounding woodland by a strip of perimeter tape patterned a barbershop red and white. There were 7 or 8 military tents for sleeping, and a great tent that served as Arthur’s office. It had lights, a strip of electrical receptacles, freezers, and various spare parts for the drill rigs. Apart from Arthur, the men were wearing blue coveralls and white hardhats.
We drove to the first drill site at dusk. The bed of Arthur’s Land Cruiser carried the night shift to relieve the day crew, while I squeezed into the cab between Arthur and another heat-packing agent of the law. The site was about 3 miles distant, and to get there we backtracked along the road Kelvin and I had come in on before forking off through a strange meadow studded with thousands of elongated termite mounds that looked like nipples rearing out of the soil. They seemed to be standing sentry to something, whether to our passage or the sun’s setting or some entirely other mysterious event. The framing horizon was that very interesting and fleeting shade of pinkish orange bleeding into purple. We plunged into the woods beyond, at length reaching a clutch of men grouped around a tent and a small generator. This device powered a pump fitted to a nearby borehole, which supplied lubrifying water to the drill rig some 300 yards away. We stopped for a few minutes while Arthur exhorted his men to work harder, and never to let the generator run out of fuel. ‘We’re here to fucking work, you cunts.’ I’m not kidding when I say that there was something endearing about the way he said it.
The drill site was a sight, in a word. The contrast with the surrounding night was dazzling. It a clearing lit by several pillar-mounted halogen spotlights, and with about a dozen drillers alternately loitering and rushing about their barked assignments, it had the feel of a film crew shooting a scene by night. Either that or some esoteric industrial ritual, a séance to channel the mineral gods and call on them to make it a good run, a good year. When I stepped out of the cruiser, my feet could feel the earth trembling. Also noticeable was that the early night was already very cold, easily in the thirties. The temperature was marked by steam trailing from men’s mouths and from several parts of the roaring drill rig. Tthis may be Central Africa, but it’s still the winter, and I’d guess that we’re higher than 7,000 feet.
There was something about this rig roaring away in the night, something to remind one of pioneering days, of the elemental struggle of man against indifferent nature. Where the night was dark, here was light. And where the surrounding woods were cold, silent and ominous, here was the din of hopeful industry. The men gathered around this great sputtering machine were working its levers and monitoring its levels hoping that what it pulled from the earth would be fruitful and lead them to better places.
The rig at that site is a diamond rig. The bit is studded with diamonds, and the drilling work is lubricated by a bentonite slurry that is pumped down through the structural tubing to the drill head in such a way that the soil/rock core in the sample tube can be pulled out intact. It has hydraulic jacks, hydraulic outriggers, and runs on diesel. The company that makes it is Boart Longyear.
The operation struck me as chaotic at first, with lots of yelling and running around. B ut observation revealed a rhythm. They worked in sections of three meters, meaning that as soon as the first three meter section of tubing (the section to which the diamond drill bit is attached) had been bored into the earth, the drill head would be unscrewed from that tube, then retracted up the mast to accommodate another tube for insertion between the it and the first section of tubing. Yet before the next section is attached, an independent “sample tube” is reeled up from the structural tube. The sample tube’s contents are then removed and placed in trays in sections of a meter apiece. The process continues until as many as a hundred three-meter sections have been driven into the ground. The samples are then taken to a lab for analysis, and if the mineral content is rich enough, what started as a narrow hole may one day become a gigantic excavated pit.
After I had been silently observing for some time, and thinking about these things, Arthur sidled up. “Pretty dumb way to make a living, isn’t it mate? It doesn’t take much to plunge a hole in the ground.”
The place is about 3 hours’ drive from Ndola, the last hour of which runs through a forest over a rutted red track best negotiated in a Land Cruiser or similar. But like I said, it took me most of a week to make the trip. Not the journey, mind, but the logistics leading up to it. It was a matter of organizing a ride with someone who was going out to the site.
It began with Arthur beseeching me—I use that word because the requests were repetitive, and there was a plaintive tone to them—to come visit while I was busy with an assignment last week. I had been contracted to aggravate the greenhouse effect by breaking down complex German documents into simpler English analogues, plus methane (A friend suggested in that regard that I paper my translation site with a background suitably illustrative of this chemico-linguistic conversion, something along the lines of DE à EN + CH4, along with a bunch of cattle grazing ant one end on suitably abstruse German words like Verwohlfeilerung or Versinnbildlichung and releasing the English equivalents, plus methane, at the other). The point being that I had to keep delaying the visit until I’d run a sufficiently large batch of words through the Teuton-Anglo converter to secure a handsome credit to my bank account. Lange Rede, kurzer Sinn: Once I was ready at the end of last week, I began trying to organize a ride.
The first attempt did not work. Arthur put me in touch with the drilling company’s office manager. A whelp of a white South African. He told me he could give me a ride on Saturday, but he had a hard time finding the diesel he was supposed to deliver to the site, and ended up leaving at 4 A.M. on Sunday. This did not suit my diurnal cycle. He was difficult to track down throughout Saturday, and I ended up with the impression that he was unconcerned about expediting my errand. Arthur phoned to say there was another truck going in on Tuesday. A Zambian geologist by the name of Kelvin. I called him up to arrange the lift, and he was as nice as could be. On Sunday he said he’d be by to get me at about 10 in the morning the following day. This being Zambia, of course, 10 in the morning turned out to be three in the afternoon. He had been detained by the police on the way from Lusaka for talking on his cell phone while behind the wheel. Quite an ordeal. He also had some errands to do around town, so it was around 4 PM before we pushed off on the final leg.
Most of the way there was on a road I had taken before, on my way to the chimp orphanage with Simwinga. First we drove past Kitwe, Kitwe with its abominably dirty copper smelter whose column of sulfurous smoke announces the Copperbelt’s industry like a cipher for all to see for 30 miles around. Next we passed Chingola, another town choked in a cloud of smoke: Drifts of diesel, smoldering brush fires where land is being cleared by villagers, belching smelters. There we stopped so Kelvin could negotiate the purchase of fuel for a road-grader he was bringing in to the bush. This took longer than expected, and night had almost fallen by the time we got into Chililambombwe, the town closest to the site. Kelvin was apologetic when he said he thought it best if we spent the night there before pressing on. It wasn’t just a matter of him being fatigued from the long journey—our proximity to the lawless Congolese border meant bandits, who would be more than happy to take Kelvin’s spanking new Ford Ranger over to their side of that border. A dilapidated guest house seemed preferable to trying our chances with Congolese bandits, so I assented.
Milyashi Guest House had a sign out front that identified it as ‘the place to be.’ I’ll allow that it was the place I was at. There is little to say about it, and what little there is to say runs the risk of verging on litany, so I’ll confine myself to saying that the shower water was not hot. One thing about the place made me feel good, though, and I’ll say it. It was the only place I’ve ever stayed in Zambia where the tops of the perimeter walls were not lined with crushed glass. Which says more about the relative calmness of the town than it does about the quality of the accommodation itself.
We left Milyashi behind in the morning after several more delays. Riding with us in the Ranger were two police officers armed with AK-47’s and several clips of ammunition apiece. Despite the guns, both were as jovial and low-key as the Zambian stereotype would have them be. I was sitting shotgun, with one police officer in the backseat and the other in the bed. We drove first to a police checkpoint and then turned off into the scrub. At first the track ran through a seemingly endless village of hardscrabble huts and wide-eyed children. Men were coming and going on bicycles between the various sections of this run of villages, some carrying passengers sitting side-saddle, others using the bicycles for advantage in transporting large loads of charcoal, cornmeal, even small palettes of bricks. There were also women transporting water and hay and bundles of cloth and what-not using that great carrier of African loads—their gracefully poised heads. As we drove by these people, many of them stopped and gave us what to me seemed baleful stares. When I at length remarked to Kelvin that these people did not seem happy, and he translated my comment to the police officer in the back, we learned that one of the geologist trucks had run into someone on the road that day and put him in the hospital. Which was unfortunate, but it was still a relief to learn that the grievance was specific—and that I was not just seeing things. Once we had gone in about ten miles and had put some distance between ourselves and the site of the earlier crash, the charged atmosphere cleared. I soon found myself waving hello and being greeted by a gleeful peals of ‘Mzungu! Mzungu!’ For that is what I am. Mzungu is a widespread Bantu word meaning ‘white man,’ and which connotes confusion or aimless wandering.
As usual with these blog entries, I find that I have piled on the words hand over fist before getting to the interesting part, the rub. But I trust in your forbearance, esteemed readers. So: Just after catching up to the lumbering grader that Kelvin had been organizing fuel for the day before, we pulled into the camp. On first impression, it was very similar to the one I had stayed in on my Botswana safari. It was a clearing in a teak forest with a number of tents for sleeping and for working, a food prep area, and a generator. I got out of the Ranger and thanked Kelvin for the ride.
Arthur is the site manager for the two rigs manned by the camp. It was nice to see him in his element among the drillers and the machines, and not just gadding about town. He enjoys a position of unquestioned authority—so much so that the drillers immediately took to calling me ‘boss’ by way of association. He told me he was glad to have at least someone around who wouldn’t say ‘yes, boss’ every time he cracked a joke. We spent the afternoon doing our respective office work. His concerned drill depth and fuel quotas, while mine was preliminary to what you see before you.
The camp was sectioned off from the surrounding woodland by a strip of perimeter tape patterned a barbershop red and white. There were 7 or 8 military tents for sleeping, and a great tent that served as Arthur’s office. It had lights, a strip of electrical receptacles, freezers, and various spare parts for the drill rigs. Apart from Arthur, the men were wearing blue coveralls and white hardhats.
We drove to the first drill site at dusk. The bed of Arthur’s Land Cruiser carried the night shift to relieve the day crew, while I squeezed into the cab between Arthur and another heat-packing agent of the law. The site was about 3 miles distant, and to get there we backtracked along the road Kelvin and I had come in on before forking off through a strange meadow studded with thousands of elongated termite mounds that looked like nipples rearing out of the soil. They seemed to be standing sentry to something, whether to our passage or the sun’s setting or some entirely other mysterious event. The framing horizon was that very interesting and fleeting shade of pinkish orange bleeding into purple. We plunged into the woods beyond, at length reaching a clutch of men grouped around a tent and a small generator. This device powered a pump fitted to a nearby borehole, which supplied lubrifying water to the drill rig some 300 yards away. We stopped for a few minutes while Arthur exhorted his men to work harder, and never to let the generator run out of fuel. ‘We’re here to fucking work, you cunts.’ I’m not kidding when I say that there was something endearing about the way he said it.
The drill site was a sight, in a word. The contrast with the surrounding night was dazzling. It a clearing lit by several pillar-mounted halogen spotlights, and with about a dozen drillers alternately loitering and rushing about their barked assignments, it had the feel of a film crew shooting a scene by night. Either that or some esoteric industrial ritual, a séance to channel the mineral gods and call on them to make it a good run, a good year. When I stepped out of the cruiser, my feet could feel the earth trembling. Also noticeable was that the early night was already very cold, easily in the thirties. The temperature was marked by steam trailing from men’s mouths and from several parts of the roaring drill rig. Tthis may be Central Africa, but it’s still the winter, and I’d guess that we’re higher than 7,000 feet.
There was something about this rig roaring away in the night, something to remind one of pioneering days, of the elemental struggle of man against indifferent nature. Where the night was dark, here was light. And where the surrounding woods were cold, silent and ominous, here was the din of hopeful industry. The men gathered around this great sputtering machine were working its levers and monitoring its levels hoping that what it pulled from the earth would be fruitful and lead them to better places.
The rig at that site is a diamond rig. The bit is studded with diamonds, and the drilling work is lubricated by a bentonite slurry that is pumped down through the structural tubing to the drill head in such a way that the soil/rock core in the sample tube can be pulled out intact. It has hydraulic jacks, hydraulic outriggers, and runs on diesel. The company that makes it is Boart Longyear.
The operation struck me as chaotic at first, with lots of yelling and running around. B ut observation revealed a rhythm. They worked in sections of three meters, meaning that as soon as the first three meter section of tubing (the section to which the diamond drill bit is attached) had been bored into the earth, the drill head would be unscrewed from that tube, then retracted up the mast to accommodate another tube for insertion between the it and the first section of tubing. Yet before the next section is attached, an independent “sample tube” is reeled up from the structural tube. The sample tube’s contents are then removed and placed in trays in sections of a meter apiece. The process continues until as many as a hundred three-meter sections have been driven into the ground. The samples are then taken to a lab for analysis, and if the mineral content is rich enough, what started as a narrow hole may one day become a gigantic excavated pit.
After I had been silently observing for some time, and thinking about these things, Arthur sidled up. “Pretty dumb way to make a living, isn’t it mate? It doesn’t take much to plunge a hole in the ground.”
Thursday, June 21, 2007
White Paper
Yesterday, while riding in a taxi to the Internet café where I’ve been doing a bit of work at a rate that no Zambian (in
Now, in the local idiom, Bemba, the line between 'r' and 'l' is quite blurred. Read it as White Papel Out, and I think you'll see what the inspired young scrawler was driving at. I noted to my driver and the vehicle's other passenger that if one were to read into the spirit if not the letter of the graffito, one would be confronted by a racist slogan. But no! protested my copassenger. It was simply a matter of there being far too much white paper in Zambia, and the scrawler had seen fit to voice his sentiment against that glut of bleached pulp product. In Zambia, you see, we are very nice people, and there is no racism.
I write this post not in the way of complaint, but of humor, albeit somewhat...black humor.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Curfew Violation
I’ve had my first scrape with the Zambian police. It was on Friday night, and we had ended up at a braai somewhere not too far from where I am lodging—in a part of town called Northrise. Braai is the Afrikaans word for barbeque, for the record. And by we I mean myself, my Western friends Randolph and Minerva, and Bart the driller. The three of us Westerners had been out to Indian food at a place called Starscape, and I’d given Bart a call when we’d taken down the last scrap of naan and dollop of curry. Bart was apparently too drunk to drive, because he rolled up riding shotgun in the tow truck of a colored Zambian named Marcus. After I’d met my namesake and Bart had met my friends, we were off. Marcus drove, and Katie sat with him up front while Bart, Randolph and I arranged ourselves around the towing fork in the bed. When we’d got going, the ever-smoky Ndola air began to run pleasantly over my scalp. A peaceful feeling set in, and we began to joke around. Man, said Bart, I’m fucking drunk. Then he launched into a series of questions aimed at ascertaining the availability of our female companion. But that’s hardly the point:
After a time we pulled into the braai. There I met various members of the colored community. All of them were involved in some capacity in services to the mining industry, whether as drivers, cooks, miners, drillers, wholesalers, whatever. I aim to tell you more about the colored community over here in a separate post, because they’re very interesting—just note by way of disclaimer that ‘colored’ here refers to those of mixed race, but that the colored community, culture and argot extend to certain black, Indian and Arab Zambians—but for now let me get to the point.
At around midnight, Randolph and Minerva started getting edgy. They were working tomorrow, and needed to get to bed. We began saying our goodbyes, but were warned by Bart to stick around and wait for a ride. It’s late, he said. You’ll either get robbed or picked up by the police. But the imperative to get home was strong, so his caveat was pooh-poohed and we set off into the night. Personally I had no idea where we were going, and contented myself to follow Randolph. Real mist and the omnipresent smoke from charcoal fires combined to saturate the night the fuzzy and swirling smog. I was feeling somewhat expansive, and began to imagine that we were approaching the shore of some Styx. Cerberus could be heard as a thousand latter-day incarnations howling desolately in the thick gloom, while above us we could see the entire vast blanket of the southern firmament allowing us brief glimpses of this constellation and that as our closer, earthbound blanket of mist-alloyed smoke thickened and parted by turns. Up ahead was a bona fide pack of wraithlike dogs that flitted in and out of the driving smog. My courage was alloyed by beer, and I promised my companions in steps that my kicking foot was cocked and ready. When they seemed unconvinced I burdened my pockets with stones for good measure. We drew close to the intersection and the dogs stood at howling attention. Minerva made some sound of fright, and Randolph cautioned her just to look straight ahead.
Just as we entered the gantlet a Toyota Landcruiser pick-up pulled up and sent our canine foes scurrying into the ditch. With several armed men riding at attention in the truck bed, it was the type of vehicle referred to in Somalia as a “technical.” Spotting us, the vehicle stopped at a rakish angle in the middle of the intersection. The men came piling out, and we were soon surrounded by a sizable number of armed men. We are the police, they declared. Their leader, who had been riding shotgun, asked us what we were doing on the streets so late at night. In Zambia, he explained, it is illegal to be in public on foot after twenty-three hours. It was for our own safety—if we were on the streets there was no guarantee that we would not be robbed or come to grief. Still feeling jaunty, I asked if they might not give us a ride home in that case. But both the humorous and the sensical side of the request slid right off their ears. No, the captain said, we’d have to proceed to the police station and sort the issue out there. This was a matter for the constable. Randolph protested that we lived very near, and that as the administrators of a family counseling and AIDS clinic, he and Minerva would have to work the following day. But his protest availed little, and we soon found ourselves trooping the hundred yards or so over to the Northrise precinct.
And that is where things began to get interesting. We were dropped off by the patrolmen at a small cinderblock building with a desk and a holding cell that corresponded to what we would call “the tank” at home. The close confines were lit by a single grimy bulb that made the faces of the men inside glow a dim and greasy gold. I may be stretching a bit here, but now that I consider it, the light reminds me of that in Rembrandt’s autopsy of Nicholas Tulp (I don’t know if that’s the name of the painting, but I believe that was the name of the condemned man whose dissection was captured in that famous painting of the cadaver surrounded by a gang of self-satisfied physicians bathed in a glow of softest gold). In this narrow cinderblock building were perhaps ten or twelve people besides us. No one rose to attend to us when we filed in. There was other business at hand, and it appeared to revolve around a young fellow crouched down at the foot of the wall just outside the holding cell. The officers were questioning him, accusing him, and he was making loud protestations. Of course I had no idea what was being said since they were speaking in Bemba. The interrogation went on for about five minutes, and it appeared to be going in circles. The questions grew louder, but the “perp” kept warding off his interrogators with the same protest. Things changed quickly and conclusively when the constable nodded to some men outside, who then brought in another fellow—his accuser. Also a young man, he was disheveled, naked from the waist up, and highly agitated. On his bare torso were two large lacerations that I gathered had been inflicted on him by the accused with the help of a screwdriver. My insight into the attack weapon came not from native linguistic ability, but from the mouth of the victim, who kept using the word ‘screwdriver’ in the middle of a Bemba phrase that, upon questioning by the constable, he repeated with the greatest vehemence. If pressed, I would venture the following as a possible translation: This prick stabbed me with a fucking screwdriver!
Then something quite nasty happened. The victim strode over and delivered a vicious kick to the head of his attacker, who let the blow fall unguarded. There must have been some secret commerce or understanding between the victim and the officers, because none of them moved to stop him as he wound up again—and then again. I take it that that sort of impromptu physical retribution is standard practice in Zambia—and I would imagine throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa as well, where tales of vigilantism are rampant—but it was still a highly sobering sight.
Next some officers dragged the accused out of the miserable, bleeding pile he had collapsed into and tossed him into the holding cell with a kick to the rear and a thump to the head. As they finished taking the victim’s statement, I sent a quick volley of surreptitious texts to my Zambian friends lest (the fear was irrational, I recognize) we too should end up in the holding cell. All unnecessary of course: Once the constable had booked another offender and committed him to the tank with a good deal less violence, he gave us a cursory look, then tossed his head quickly to one side to indicate that we were to be dealt with in some other way. We were soon escorted out of the dusty cinderblock Rembrandt by some senior personage in uniform. I hung back and let Randolph do the talking. With two years of Zambia under his belt, he made a natural mzungu-Zambian police interface. Besides, I wasn’t carrying my passport. It took some explaining and apologizing, but lest you think Zambia is the type of place where all public officials are out to rip you off, allow me to dispel the notion. Once Randolph had clearly and respectfully told them that ‘we’ were in Zambia doing good work and that ‘we’ and worked the next day and really lived only a few blocks away, the man said that, although we had been taken in for our own protection, he was sorry for the inconvenience. He spoke to his men, and soon we were being taken to our respective places of sleep in the “technical” vehicle. We paid no fine.
After a time we pulled into the braai. There I met various members of the colored community. All of them were involved in some capacity in services to the mining industry, whether as drivers, cooks, miners, drillers, wholesalers, whatever. I aim to tell you more about the colored community over here in a separate post, because they’re very interesting—just note by way of disclaimer that ‘colored’ here refers to those of mixed race, but that the colored community, culture and argot extend to certain black, Indian and Arab Zambians—but for now let me get to the point.
At around midnight, Randolph and Minerva started getting edgy. They were working tomorrow, and needed to get to bed. We began saying our goodbyes, but were warned by Bart to stick around and wait for a ride. It’s late, he said. You’ll either get robbed or picked up by the police. But the imperative to get home was strong, so his caveat was pooh-poohed and we set off into the night. Personally I had no idea where we were going, and contented myself to follow Randolph. Real mist and the omnipresent smoke from charcoal fires combined to saturate the night the fuzzy and swirling smog. I was feeling somewhat expansive, and began to imagine that we were approaching the shore of some Styx. Cerberus could be heard as a thousand latter-day incarnations howling desolately in the thick gloom, while above us we could see the entire vast blanket of the southern firmament allowing us brief glimpses of this constellation and that as our closer, earthbound blanket of mist-alloyed smoke thickened and parted by turns. Up ahead was a bona fide pack of wraithlike dogs that flitted in and out of the driving smog. My courage was alloyed by beer, and I promised my companions in steps that my kicking foot was cocked and ready. When they seemed unconvinced I burdened my pockets with stones for good measure. We drew close to the intersection and the dogs stood at howling attention. Minerva made some sound of fright, and Randolph cautioned her just to look straight ahead.
Just as we entered the gantlet a Toyota Landcruiser pick-up pulled up and sent our canine foes scurrying into the ditch. With several armed men riding at attention in the truck bed, it was the type of vehicle referred to in Somalia as a “technical.” Spotting us, the vehicle stopped at a rakish angle in the middle of the intersection. The men came piling out, and we were soon surrounded by a sizable number of armed men. We are the police, they declared. Their leader, who had been riding shotgun, asked us what we were doing on the streets so late at night. In Zambia, he explained, it is illegal to be in public on foot after twenty-three hours. It was for our own safety—if we were on the streets there was no guarantee that we would not be robbed or come to grief. Still feeling jaunty, I asked if they might not give us a ride home in that case. But both the humorous and the sensical side of the request slid right off their ears. No, the captain said, we’d have to proceed to the police station and sort the issue out there. This was a matter for the constable. Randolph protested that we lived very near, and that as the administrators of a family counseling and AIDS clinic, he and Minerva would have to work the following day. But his protest availed little, and we soon found ourselves trooping the hundred yards or so over to the Northrise precinct.
And that is where things began to get interesting. We were dropped off by the patrolmen at a small cinderblock building with a desk and a holding cell that corresponded to what we would call “the tank” at home. The close confines were lit by a single grimy bulb that made the faces of the men inside glow a dim and greasy gold. I may be stretching a bit here, but now that I consider it, the light reminds me of that in Rembrandt’s autopsy of Nicholas Tulp (I don’t know if that’s the name of the painting, but I believe that was the name of the condemned man whose dissection was captured in that famous painting of the cadaver surrounded by a gang of self-satisfied physicians bathed in a glow of softest gold). In this narrow cinderblock building were perhaps ten or twelve people besides us. No one rose to attend to us when we filed in. There was other business at hand, and it appeared to revolve around a young fellow crouched down at the foot of the wall just outside the holding cell. The officers were questioning him, accusing him, and he was making loud protestations. Of course I had no idea what was being said since they were speaking in Bemba. The interrogation went on for about five minutes, and it appeared to be going in circles. The questions grew louder, but the “perp” kept warding off his interrogators with the same protest. Things changed quickly and conclusively when the constable nodded to some men outside, who then brought in another fellow—his accuser. Also a young man, he was disheveled, naked from the waist up, and highly agitated. On his bare torso were two large lacerations that I gathered had been inflicted on him by the accused with the help of a screwdriver. My insight into the attack weapon came not from native linguistic ability, but from the mouth of the victim, who kept using the word ‘screwdriver’ in the middle of a Bemba phrase that, upon questioning by the constable, he repeated with the greatest vehemence. If pressed, I would venture the following as a possible translation: This prick stabbed me with a fucking screwdriver!
Then something quite nasty happened. The victim strode over and delivered a vicious kick to the head of his attacker, who let the blow fall unguarded. There must have been some secret commerce or understanding between the victim and the officers, because none of them moved to stop him as he wound up again—and then again. I take it that that sort of impromptu physical retribution is standard practice in Zambia—and I would imagine throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa as well, where tales of vigilantism are rampant—but it was still a highly sobering sight.
Next some officers dragged the accused out of the miserable, bleeding pile he had collapsed into and tossed him into the holding cell with a kick to the rear and a thump to the head. As they finished taking the victim’s statement, I sent a quick volley of surreptitious texts to my Zambian friends lest (the fear was irrational, I recognize) we too should end up in the holding cell. All unnecessary of course: Once the constable had booked another offender and committed him to the tank with a good deal less violence, he gave us a cursory look, then tossed his head quickly to one side to indicate that we were to be dealt with in some other way. We were soon escorted out of the dusty cinderblock Rembrandt by some senior personage in uniform. I hung back and let Randolph do the talking. With two years of Zambia under his belt, he made a natural mzungu-Zambian police interface. Besides, I wasn’t carrying my passport. It took some explaining and apologizing, but lest you think Zambia is the type of place where all public officials are out to rip you off, allow me to dispel the notion. Once Randolph had clearly and respectfully told them that ‘we’ were in Zambia doing good work and that ‘we’ and worked the next day and really lived only a few blocks away, the man said that, although we had been taken in for our own protection, he was sorry for the inconvenience. He spoke to his men, and soon we were being taken to our respective places of sleep in the “technical” vehicle. We paid no fine.
Bidding on the House
A couple of days ago Bart came and picked me up. Riding shotgun was a guy named Swidden. I had heard about him before. Bart had mentioned him to me earlier as a “dodgy fellow” who had lived illegally in America for 8 years before returning home to manage the properties and enterprises his father left him upon his death. When I got in the car, they told me they had a plan. They needed me to do something for them. Swidden owned a house, they explained, which he wanted to sell to the guy who had been living in it for the past 17 years. But the guy was cheap, they said—an Indian—and he was low-balling Swidden. The original idea had been to present Bart as a rival bidder for the property, but they thought I would make a better candidate. Shit, Bart said, that cunt will probably know who I am and realize that me, I’m scheming. It does seem that just about everybody in town knows Bart.
I declared myself to be up for the ruse. In work boots and a John Deere button-down picked up for a dollar at an African market in Livingstone, I looked very much the part. We drove for awhile, with Swidden explaining how he wanted to get about $50,000 for the house, and that the guy had offered $30,000. How much would a three-bedroom ranch house cost in America, he asked. I gave him a ballpark figure of $200,000, and his purpose was steeled. He was going to get more than $30,000 out of the man. Intoxicated by righteousness, they elaborated the game plan. I was an American come to invest in the mines, and Bart was my Zambian contact. We wanted the house as a sort of base station in town for “the boys” as they either prepared for or recuperated from stints out in “the bush.”
I felt very much the charlatan from the start. The house’s resident was a small, highly energetic Indian man who pumped our hands as if the gesture of the handshake were going out of style. After we had introduced ourselves he began to speak rapidly—whether to distract us or himself I didn’t know. As we patrolled around the yard he spun off a lengthy discourse on how council bylaws prevented him from building either up or out. I remember him saying there needed to be nine feet of space between the house and the perimeter wall. I mmm’ed and ah-ha’d. Bart tried to make small talk about the local sewerage, while Swidden sat silently by, watching his ruse take effect. I gathered that the fellow was mentioning the building restrictions to make the house seem to have less potential, and thus less value.
Once inside he continued to emphasize the house’s modesty. There were only two bedrooms, and they were really nothing to look at. But he had been living here for 17 years, he said, and by God he had taken care of the place. I live here, isn’t it? I felt a twinge of shame when I saw his wife and daughter preparing food in the kitchen.
But you stick by your friends, and once outside again I explained how the house really seemed perfectly suited to our needs. We didn’t need anything much, I said. Just a couple of bedrooms where we could throw some mattresses down for the boys when they came back in from the bush. The man sensed an opportunity and tried to regain the upper hand: How many bedrooms did we need, he asked. Really no more than two, I explained—this house seems just right.
Ah! he said. You should have come to me a week ago. I’m in property, too, you know. I could have sold you a really nice little house not far from here. 2 bedrooms, a pool, everything. He seemed to be doing his best to ignore the fact that we were there because Swidden owned that house (a proper fact) and we were there because we were interested in buying it (a ‘datum’). He went on to say that although he was known for charging very fair prices on properties, the price was set with the understanding that the new owners would buy all their furnishings from his store in town. That’s the deal, you understand, he said, beaming. Bart said that sounded okay, as long as he didn’t sell the buyers anything out of the shop that they didn’t need.
My charlatanism almost came to the light of day when the man then turned to me and asked if I or my outfit might be interested in purchasing some drilling supplies from him as well. It was one of the new lines of work he was getting into, you see. For instance, he said, I can guarantee you that you’ll find no better price on a diamond drill bit than what I can offer you. You guys, he said, indicating me, I know you guys. You have no time to come to town and bargain hunt. You have to be prospecting out in the bush. I can relieve you of the burden. I have a one-stop shop for everything you might need out there. I’ve got bush showers, tents, stoves, water purifiers, everything. Go on, just tell me what you need.
I tried to straighten out the lifting corners of my mouth, and allowed that we might need a spare diesel generator or two, but as for the camp supplies in general, we were pretty much squared away. At that the man gave me his card and told me to keep him in mind.
We all shook hands and parted. I don’t believe that Swidden said a word the whole time. Once in the car their opinion of the exchange came out. Man that cunt is a motormouth! Swidden said that the talk about all the restrictions on expansion was bullshit. He was a Zambian, he said, and this was Zambia. He could build as it suited him, and nobody would give a shit. And did we notice how he had knocked out all the walls in the house? It’s like that with all the Indians. They like to knock down all the walls so they can keep an eye on their wives and children. These Indians live in a different world. They said some more nasty things about the man and the group of people of which he was an example, but I don’t care to repeat them here.
I asked Swidden if he thought our ruse had worked. He said he thought so. For my part, I hope the fellow living there gets the better of Swidden. Though of course I could just as easily have been a pawn on the other side, with the Indian man explaining to me afterwards how all these blacks are the same...
I declared myself to be up for the ruse. In work boots and a John Deere button-down picked up for a dollar at an African market in Livingstone, I looked very much the part. We drove for awhile, with Swidden explaining how he wanted to get about $50,000 for the house, and that the guy had offered $30,000. How much would a three-bedroom ranch house cost in America, he asked. I gave him a ballpark figure of $200,000, and his purpose was steeled. He was going to get more than $30,000 out of the man. Intoxicated by righteousness, they elaborated the game plan. I was an American come to invest in the mines, and Bart was my Zambian contact. We wanted the house as a sort of base station in town for “the boys” as they either prepared for or recuperated from stints out in “the bush.”
I felt very much the charlatan from the start. The house’s resident was a small, highly energetic Indian man who pumped our hands as if the gesture of the handshake were going out of style. After we had introduced ourselves he began to speak rapidly—whether to distract us or himself I didn’t know. As we patrolled around the yard he spun off a lengthy discourse on how council bylaws prevented him from building either up or out. I remember him saying there needed to be nine feet of space between the house and the perimeter wall. I mmm’ed and ah-ha’d. Bart tried to make small talk about the local sewerage, while Swidden sat silently by, watching his ruse take effect. I gathered that the fellow was mentioning the building restrictions to make the house seem to have less potential, and thus less value.
Once inside he continued to emphasize the house’s modesty. There were only two bedrooms, and they were really nothing to look at. But he had been living here for 17 years, he said, and by God he had taken care of the place. I live here, isn’t it? I felt a twinge of shame when I saw his wife and daughter preparing food in the kitchen.
But you stick by your friends, and once outside again I explained how the house really seemed perfectly suited to our needs. We didn’t need anything much, I said. Just a couple of bedrooms where we could throw some mattresses down for the boys when they came back in from the bush. The man sensed an opportunity and tried to regain the upper hand: How many bedrooms did we need, he asked. Really no more than two, I explained—this house seems just right.
Ah! he said. You should have come to me a week ago. I’m in property, too, you know. I could have sold you a really nice little house not far from here. 2 bedrooms, a pool, everything. He seemed to be doing his best to ignore the fact that we were there because Swidden owned that house (a proper fact) and we were there because we were interested in buying it (a ‘datum’). He went on to say that although he was known for charging very fair prices on properties, the price was set with the understanding that the new owners would buy all their furnishings from his store in town. That’s the deal, you understand, he said, beaming. Bart said that sounded okay, as long as he didn’t sell the buyers anything out of the shop that they didn’t need.
My charlatanism almost came to the light of day when the man then turned to me and asked if I or my outfit might be interested in purchasing some drilling supplies from him as well. It was one of the new lines of work he was getting into, you see. For instance, he said, I can guarantee you that you’ll find no better price on a diamond drill bit than what I can offer you. You guys, he said, indicating me, I know you guys. You have no time to come to town and bargain hunt. You have to be prospecting out in the bush. I can relieve you of the burden. I have a one-stop shop for everything you might need out there. I’ve got bush showers, tents, stoves, water purifiers, everything. Go on, just tell me what you need.
I tried to straighten out the lifting corners of my mouth, and allowed that we might need a spare diesel generator or two, but as for the camp supplies in general, we were pretty much squared away. At that the man gave me his card and told me to keep him in mind.
We all shook hands and parted. I don’t believe that Swidden said a word the whole time. Once in the car their opinion of the exchange came out. Man that cunt is a motormouth! Swidden said that the talk about all the restrictions on expansion was bullshit. He was a Zambian, he said, and this was Zambia. He could build as it suited him, and nobody would give a shit. And did we notice how he had knocked out all the walls in the house? It’s like that with all the Indians. They like to knock down all the walls so they can keep an eye on their wives and children. These Indians live in a different world. They said some more nasty things about the man and the group of people of which he was an example, but I don’t care to repeat them here.
I asked Swidden if he thought our ruse had worked. He said he thought so. For my part, I hope the fellow living there gets the better of Swidden. Though of course I could just as easily have been a pawn on the other side, with the Indian man explaining to me afterwards how all these blacks are the same...
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Too Much of Anything
Hi all,
This post is by way of dispatch from Ndola, in Copperbelt Province. It’s my second foray up here, and I shan’t be leaving without a Congolese visa resting snug and proper in my passport’s greasy pages.
I have been to the Congo Consulate, yes. And yes, it’s true they’re feeding me the same line about invitations and highly irregular and we don’t know and the chancellor this and the consul that. The difference this time is that I have made a number of contacts who want to make it happen for me. The most promising is Lucas, a Kinshasa Congolese who is staying in the same guest house I’m in, the Castle Lodge. He’s down here doing IT for one of the mining outfits, and has contacted some of his friends in Lubumbashi about drawing up a little letter of invitation for me. From Lucas I’ve learned that, at 3 million, Lubumbashi is a much larger place than I had imagined. He’s thinking about going up there over the weekend, and has invited me to come along. Better just hope the visa is in place—though he did seem to think something could be arranged at the border. Twenty minutes, he said. He is the first Congolese I have met. He complains that Ndola is small and provincial, and that there’s nothing to do. He says it’s been difficult to make friends here. The Zambians, he says, don’t like to have fun in a modern way.
My other helpful contact is Bart, a brash jack-of-all-trades Zambian I met while in Livingstone whose current gig is to operate drill rigs on behalf of clients who own land where there is mineralization and want him to drill down and do some core sampling. He seems to think that we can walk into the consulate together and sort things out with the help of a few trusty Andrew Jacksons or Benjamin Franklins. The Congolese are very fond of these two trusty Americans, he says.
Between these two fellows I hope to be able to swing a visa.
But that stuff is cursory, accessory. I’ve had a very revelatory few days that I think have made this trip worth it. What I mean is that through the people I have been meeting, especially through Bart, I have started to glimpse the soul of this place. I believe I have a feeling for these things.
But I will forbear with my judgment and let you be the assessors. I do not fancy myself the kind of traveling writer who goes on tour in order to levy a moral judgment for the edification of the folks back home. Obviously that sort of moral-empirical reporting is valuable and has its place on our bookshelves and in our minds, but I do not think that my house is in such perfect order that I am entitled to assume the pedestal of moral authority from which to peddle my judgments. More and more, I prefer to deal in the subtleties of clear observation. Maybe that will result in a judgment that is the clearer when the time comes. Who knows, maybe I would be keener on this business of judging if I were here to write something pithy and cutting for a magazine, if I had to wrap up my experience in a bow of conclusive words. But I am here on a more abstract and deferred enterprise. I prefer to present my experience in a more gaseous medium, and one prone to flux.
~
When I met Bart in Livingstone he struck me as a lonely type. There was little sophistication in my impression: Toward the end of our conversation he waxed lonesome and asked me, “What is this thing people call love? I’m serious. I know what it is not. It is not sex, it is not flirting, it is not just stability. I have known those things, and they are not love. I just wish one day I could experience what these people are talking about when they talk about love.” Obviously I could give him no conclusive answer to the query, so I confined myself to the remark that it is the sort of thing one simply recognizes when one is in it. When I told him that I was working on a novel, he told me that his grandfather had been a Bemba moralist and that he had written a number of books about righteous conduct. More importantly, he told me I was welcome to accompany him on a drill run.
I contacted him when I got up here, which worked out well timing-wise, since he is on a 7-day leave. Because Bart is involved with mining, however peripherally, this translates as a 7-day bout of drinking. I’ve spent the past two of those days with him, and I must say that he is difficult to keep up with. On the first day we hung out with his friend Longyear, who is also a Bemba. When I put the tribal question to him, Bart said yes of course he’s a Bemba—otherwise you wouldn’t see me hanging out with him. Longyear is smaller and more fine-featured than Bart, who is quite a big man. We started with lunch at a nice Italian place, during which luncheon we talked about various things. Bart told the story of how he had been stung by a scorpion in the bush, and how, believing it had been a snake, he had rushed off to the nearest medical clinic, fully convinced that he had 40 minutes or less to live. He said I would see strange things if I went into the rural areas. There would be little fellows about yea high kicking a football around and playing children’s game, but who were in fact not a day under 30 years old. There would be old men who could remember a time a century ago and more when no one had yet seen a white man. They live a long time in the bush, he said, because there is no pollution, no time for drinking, and no money for TVs and other dissipating distractions.
After lunch we proceeded to a place called the Boating Club which, as with most of the names of such establishments, is in fact a fig leaf for the very heavy drinking that goes on between its walls. When we showed up at 2:30, the groundskeeper reported that they wouldn’t be opening for business until 4:00. Or sixteen hours, as they say here. To kill the time, we walked over to the SPCA of all places. It was appalling. I suppose that all impounded dogs have it tough, but these dogs were in a league of their own. Vicious, slavering, every one of them was barking at us with a kind of murderous fury as we trooped past their warrens. I took a couple of pictures but don’t think they turned out. A funny thing happened as we strolled back to the boating club. I saw some women working a field alongside the road. The field was backgrounded by a giant belching cement factory. They were on their guard from the moment they saw me, and as soon as I pulled out my camera, they fled into the cover of some bushes. One woman threw herself to the ground. It was as if I had pulled out a gun.
There was still some time to kill when we got back to the boating club, so we sat ourselves down on a bench to take in the view of the lagoon and the cement plant and the haze. Bart and Longyear told stories of crazy Australians they had known. One of them had addressed some Zimbabwean police officers as ‘boys’ at a border crossing. Unamused, one of the cops picked up a bag of pot that had been sitting on the dashboard. To which the Aussie’s response was “Ah, good on you, mate. I’ve been looking all day for that.” The problem was rectified through the good offices of Benjamin Franklin. At length we proceeded indoors. Things started off slowly. At first it was just the three of us playing pool. I taught them how to play cutthroat. A couple of beers in, a fellow by the name of Salim showed up with a little coterie of grizzled-looking drinkers. They were already drunk. And that’s when it started. Salim, you see, was keen that everyone have a new beer in his hand every fifteen minutes. It reminded me of that scene in Back to School where Rodney Dangerfield asks the waiter to bring “a pitcher of beer every five minutes until someone passes out, and then bring one every seven.”
Salim is one of Africa’s “Asian traders.” He owns a big garage called Mirza Auto and seems to be a major player in town. He was born in Zambia and was highly amused to hear that I was writing a book about Africa. He wanted to know one thing: Had I ever read the work of Wilbur Smith? I said no. But how could I possibly hope to write a book about Africa if I hadn’t read Wilbur Smith? I allowed that I would have to look into it. But Salim kept riffing on it every beer or so: You mean to tell me you’re not familiar with Wilbur Smith? At length I pulled out my own name-drop bomb: Was he acquainted with V.S. Naipaul’s work set in Africa. Salim protested that he read so much that he couldn’t be expected to keep track of trifling matters such as the authors’ names. I smiled and started working on my 8th beer.
Awhile later Bart’s son and a woman prefaced as his son’s mother joined us. His son’s name was Brandon. Brandon was 8, and he sat there quietly as all the grown-ups drank and talked shit. At one point Longyear and I had a revealing moment. We were off in a corner observing the loud and hollow carousing, and I said it didn’t seem right that Brandon should be in this place. Longyear agreed, but indicated that there was little to be done. After all, the boy’s mother and father were both there. I asked if perhaps we should make a move to go, and Longyear thought that sounded like a good idea. “Too much of anything…” he said. Indeed. I think Bart felt some of the unspoken opprobrium when we indicated that we might go. He finished his drink and mobilized in a hurry. We all piled in his Toyota Corolla, and he drove us home with all the abandon of 12 beers. We made plans to meet again the next day.
~
The next morning, predictably, was rough. I did manage to get into town by around 8:30 to do some e-mailing, which I did with the sort of yo me odio that such mornings can bring. Bart came to pick me up from there around 10, and I accompanied him around town on some errands. He needed to pay his son’s school fees, wash his car and see some people. I brought up the issue of the roads as we drove. The roads, like the rest of Ndola, are in an advanced state of decay. What Bart had to say was something along these lines: This is Africa. Here, instead of getting better, things are constantly getting worse. Things have been crumbling around me from the day I was born, and nobody lifts a finger to fix anything. Actually, the roads are being mended right now. After a fashion, that is: The potholes are being filled in with raw dirt that will wash away with the first rain.
Back to first impressions: One of the first things Bart said to me was that he didn’t really feel that he belonged in Zambia. Because he was skilled, because he was ambitious, because he had traveled widely within Africa and met all sorts of people, he felt that he was destined for the West. He has some Zambian friends living in Texas, and plans to visit them in September.
Back to yesterday: I told him that based on what I had seen, Ndola was indeed very much decaying, that I couldn’t dispute him. He said that, if possible, he wanted to move to America and bring his son there. Surely he could give his son a good education there? I allowed that it was so—but he’d have to live in a good neighborhood to make it so. So many complexities! Bart told a joke to diffuse the discomfort: What are the only two things that a black man cannot steal, he asked? I question-marked. A snake and a tree, he said. A black man cannot steal a snake or a tree.
I countered with a joke about a Scot. A Scot calls in to the obit. page because his wife has just died. The editor says he knows this must be very hard, but let me just explain the terms. You get 4 free words, 4 words at 5 quid each, and every words thereafter at a quid. The line is silent for awhile. Sir? Okay, says the Scot. 4 free words, eh? I have it: Mary McFadden is dead. The editor is dismayed. Listen, Sir, he says, you shouldn’t think about it that way. Let me tell you what. I’ll make an exception in your case, and give you the first 8 words for free. That way you can give your wife a proper obituary and not have to worry about the money as much. Mr. McFadden considers this new development and thinks about it for awhile. Sir? Eight free words, eh? He’s thinking. Okay, he says. I have it: Mary McFadden is dead. Ford Fiesta for sale.
Bart’s son’s school was quite interesting. It’s run by Indians, and once on its grounds I had a hard time imagining that I was anywhere but in India. It had that same sort of majesty-in-decay-as-informed-by-some-inscrutable-wisdom with which I felt forever surrounded while on the Subcontinent. There were mangos, tamarinds, bougainvillea, jacaranda, and lots of vines and flowers I did not know growing up along a trellis that ran along the whole perimeter of the school’s colonnaded courtyard. I gathered that school was in session, but there was no child’s voice to be heard. The only thing I could hear were the hundreds of bees and wasps buzzing around the blooming trelliswork. I noticed several signs in various places on the grounds advising young minds on the sacredness and scarcity of water. Water is sacred: respect it. The same water flows through us all: keep it clean. For his part, Bart seemed somewhat put off by this (Rajastani?) dictum. They have something funny about water at this school, he concluded. For my part, I could not help concluding that this must have been the first time Bart was setting foot inside his child’s school.
Next we went for a lunch of nshima (or pap, as a plate of corn meal paste is called in Southern African English) in Ndola’s derelict industrial district. It was actually pretty good, and it’s the first time I’ve eaten nshima without eliciting the laughter of those defter at eating it. Over lunch I learned how Bart had at one point not too long ago got quite wealthy as the owner of a trucking outfit that ran parts between the copper mines and their South African suppliers. I can’t recall the details, but everything had gone downhill a couple of years ago when two of his trucks had been stolen and he had been forced to write them off as losses. This had caused his company to fold, and had coincided with his wife deciding that perhaps he wasn’t the best of guys to settle down with after all, and leaving for a time, only to return when he had found his footing again.
It must be added that Bart is only two years older than I am. I’ll be perfectly honest and say that his life to date seems to have been enticingly rich. I’ve not been married, I’ve not had a child, I’ve not made a fortune and lost it. All I have is a book that is written but unpublished, one that is half-written, and a shitload of ideas for more books.
Our next stop was Quick Collisions, the motor and body shop where Bart’s male in-laws work. The grounds of Quick Collisions were littered with cars whose drivers could not possibly have survived the crashes that put them there. Several cars’ passenger cabins were simply crushed. I asked Bart’s brother-in-law Manfrid about the circumstances of the accidents. Drinking, he said. And I have to clean them up. See that car over there? I looked over at a heap of twisted metal and nodded. That used to be a Kia. 3 Chinese died when it collided with a bus.
In addition to the scrap and wrecks, the yard had 2 goats nibbling morsels of trash in a corner. There was also a banana tree. The sun was shining strongly onto the gray dirt and gray-streaked metal and glass, and for a moment I wondered if I might have hurt my eyes taking it in.
It was Manfrid’s birthday, and Bart persuaded him to come out to the tennis club with us for awhile so that he could buy us beers. When I asked why Manfrid should be the one buying, Bart said it was a new thing in Zambia. Because everybody was so poor these days, friends could no longer afford to buy rounds of beer for all the birthdays that came around. So the burden had been shifted to the birthday boy. This way people only had to buy their friends free beer once a year, when they turned, instead of having to buy free beers here and there all the time as birthdays came and went. Of course, he said, people seemed to be having fewer and fewer birthdays these days. Some people even claimed to have suddenly forgotten their date of birth.
Given the night before, I did not want to drink. But my protests went unheeded. The Castles started coming. I managed to put a stop to the session after 3. Manfrid needed to be getting back to the garage anyway, and we dropped him off. Bart was keen to continue drinking somewhere else. We went to see his secret girlfriend. On the way there he explained that they weren’t having sex. You could never be sure these days. I'll omit the description of their meeting--I didn't like her very much.
The next stop was Highcrest, an area of town where the ‘coloured’ or mixed-race people live. The area is also known as “Highly” because of the propensity of its denizens to dabble and deal in dope. Sure enough, there were a lot of men around who were red-eyed and grinning. Bart said that Highly is the type of place where anything can happen. Nothing happened to us beyond the consumption of a beer or two (or was it three?) at a shibeen with a few associates of his in the transcontinental trucking business. Stories were told. And what stories they were!
More on that later—I need to sign off for today and go pick up a pair of Colormatic eyeglasses I ordered the other day. Call me Royal.
This post is by way of dispatch from Ndola, in Copperbelt Province. It’s my second foray up here, and I shan’t be leaving without a Congolese visa resting snug and proper in my passport’s greasy pages.
I have been to the Congo Consulate, yes. And yes, it’s true they’re feeding me the same line about invitations and highly irregular and we don’t know and the chancellor this and the consul that. The difference this time is that I have made a number of contacts who want to make it happen for me. The most promising is Lucas, a Kinshasa Congolese who is staying in the same guest house I’m in, the Castle Lodge. He’s down here doing IT for one of the mining outfits, and has contacted some of his friends in Lubumbashi about drawing up a little letter of invitation for me. From Lucas I’ve learned that, at 3 million, Lubumbashi is a much larger place than I had imagined. He’s thinking about going up there over the weekend, and has invited me to come along. Better just hope the visa is in place—though he did seem to think something could be arranged at the border. Twenty minutes, he said. He is the first Congolese I have met. He complains that Ndola is small and provincial, and that there’s nothing to do. He says it’s been difficult to make friends here. The Zambians, he says, don’t like to have fun in a modern way.
My other helpful contact is Bart, a brash jack-of-all-trades Zambian I met while in Livingstone whose current gig is to operate drill rigs on behalf of clients who own land where there is mineralization and want him to drill down and do some core sampling. He seems to think that we can walk into the consulate together and sort things out with the help of a few trusty Andrew Jacksons or Benjamin Franklins. The Congolese are very fond of these two trusty Americans, he says.
Between these two fellows I hope to be able to swing a visa.
But that stuff is cursory, accessory. I’ve had a very revelatory few days that I think have made this trip worth it. What I mean is that through the people I have been meeting, especially through Bart, I have started to glimpse the soul of this place. I believe I have a feeling for these things.
But I will forbear with my judgment and let you be the assessors. I do not fancy myself the kind of traveling writer who goes on tour in order to levy a moral judgment for the edification of the folks back home. Obviously that sort of moral-empirical reporting is valuable and has its place on our bookshelves and in our minds, but I do not think that my house is in such perfect order that I am entitled to assume the pedestal of moral authority from which to peddle my judgments. More and more, I prefer to deal in the subtleties of clear observation. Maybe that will result in a judgment that is the clearer when the time comes. Who knows, maybe I would be keener on this business of judging if I were here to write something pithy and cutting for a magazine, if I had to wrap up my experience in a bow of conclusive words. But I am here on a more abstract and deferred enterprise. I prefer to present my experience in a more gaseous medium, and one prone to flux.
~
When I met Bart in Livingstone he struck me as a lonely type. There was little sophistication in my impression: Toward the end of our conversation he waxed lonesome and asked me, “What is this thing people call love? I’m serious. I know what it is not. It is not sex, it is not flirting, it is not just stability. I have known those things, and they are not love. I just wish one day I could experience what these people are talking about when they talk about love.” Obviously I could give him no conclusive answer to the query, so I confined myself to the remark that it is the sort of thing one simply recognizes when one is in it. When I told him that I was working on a novel, he told me that his grandfather had been a Bemba moralist and that he had written a number of books about righteous conduct. More importantly, he told me I was welcome to accompany him on a drill run.
I contacted him when I got up here, which worked out well timing-wise, since he is on a 7-day leave. Because Bart is involved with mining, however peripherally, this translates as a 7-day bout of drinking. I’ve spent the past two of those days with him, and I must say that he is difficult to keep up with. On the first day we hung out with his friend Longyear, who is also a Bemba. When I put the tribal question to him, Bart said yes of course he’s a Bemba—otherwise you wouldn’t see me hanging out with him. Longyear is smaller and more fine-featured than Bart, who is quite a big man. We started with lunch at a nice Italian place, during which luncheon we talked about various things. Bart told the story of how he had been stung by a scorpion in the bush, and how, believing it had been a snake, he had rushed off to the nearest medical clinic, fully convinced that he had 40 minutes or less to live. He said I would see strange things if I went into the rural areas. There would be little fellows about yea high kicking a football around and playing children’s game, but who were in fact not a day under 30 years old. There would be old men who could remember a time a century ago and more when no one had yet seen a white man. They live a long time in the bush, he said, because there is no pollution, no time for drinking, and no money for TVs and other dissipating distractions.
After lunch we proceeded to a place called the Boating Club which, as with most of the names of such establishments, is in fact a fig leaf for the very heavy drinking that goes on between its walls. When we showed up at 2:30, the groundskeeper reported that they wouldn’t be opening for business until 4:00. Or sixteen hours, as they say here. To kill the time, we walked over to the SPCA of all places. It was appalling. I suppose that all impounded dogs have it tough, but these dogs were in a league of their own. Vicious, slavering, every one of them was barking at us with a kind of murderous fury as we trooped past their warrens. I took a couple of pictures but don’t think they turned out. A funny thing happened as we strolled back to the boating club. I saw some women working a field alongside the road. The field was backgrounded by a giant belching cement factory. They were on their guard from the moment they saw me, and as soon as I pulled out my camera, they fled into the cover of some bushes. One woman threw herself to the ground. It was as if I had pulled out a gun.
There was still some time to kill when we got back to the boating club, so we sat ourselves down on a bench to take in the view of the lagoon and the cement plant and the haze. Bart and Longyear told stories of crazy Australians they had known. One of them had addressed some Zimbabwean police officers as ‘boys’ at a border crossing. Unamused, one of the cops picked up a bag of pot that had been sitting on the dashboard. To which the Aussie’s response was “Ah, good on you, mate. I’ve been looking all day for that.” The problem was rectified through the good offices of Benjamin Franklin. At length we proceeded indoors. Things started off slowly. At first it was just the three of us playing pool. I taught them how to play cutthroat. A couple of beers in, a fellow by the name of Salim showed up with a little coterie of grizzled-looking drinkers. They were already drunk. And that’s when it started. Salim, you see, was keen that everyone have a new beer in his hand every fifteen minutes. It reminded me of that scene in Back to School where Rodney Dangerfield asks the waiter to bring “a pitcher of beer every five minutes until someone passes out, and then bring one every seven.”
Salim is one of Africa’s “Asian traders.” He owns a big garage called Mirza Auto and seems to be a major player in town. He was born in Zambia and was highly amused to hear that I was writing a book about Africa. He wanted to know one thing: Had I ever read the work of Wilbur Smith? I said no. But how could I possibly hope to write a book about Africa if I hadn’t read Wilbur Smith? I allowed that I would have to look into it. But Salim kept riffing on it every beer or so: You mean to tell me you’re not familiar with Wilbur Smith? At length I pulled out my own name-drop bomb: Was he acquainted with V.S. Naipaul’s work set in Africa. Salim protested that he read so much that he couldn’t be expected to keep track of trifling matters such as the authors’ names. I smiled and started working on my 8th beer.
Awhile later Bart’s son and a woman prefaced as his son’s mother joined us. His son’s name was Brandon. Brandon was 8, and he sat there quietly as all the grown-ups drank and talked shit. At one point Longyear and I had a revealing moment. We were off in a corner observing the loud and hollow carousing, and I said it didn’t seem right that Brandon should be in this place. Longyear agreed, but indicated that there was little to be done. After all, the boy’s mother and father were both there. I asked if perhaps we should make a move to go, and Longyear thought that sounded like a good idea. “Too much of anything…” he said. Indeed. I think Bart felt some of the unspoken opprobrium when we indicated that we might go. He finished his drink and mobilized in a hurry. We all piled in his Toyota Corolla, and he drove us home with all the abandon of 12 beers. We made plans to meet again the next day.
~
The next morning, predictably, was rough. I did manage to get into town by around 8:30 to do some e-mailing, which I did with the sort of yo me odio that such mornings can bring. Bart came to pick me up from there around 10, and I accompanied him around town on some errands. He needed to pay his son’s school fees, wash his car and see some people. I brought up the issue of the roads as we drove. The roads, like the rest of Ndola, are in an advanced state of decay. What Bart had to say was something along these lines: This is Africa. Here, instead of getting better, things are constantly getting worse. Things have been crumbling around me from the day I was born, and nobody lifts a finger to fix anything. Actually, the roads are being mended right now. After a fashion, that is: The potholes are being filled in with raw dirt that will wash away with the first rain.
Back to first impressions: One of the first things Bart said to me was that he didn’t really feel that he belonged in Zambia. Because he was skilled, because he was ambitious, because he had traveled widely within Africa and met all sorts of people, he felt that he was destined for the West. He has some Zambian friends living in Texas, and plans to visit them in September.
Back to yesterday: I told him that based on what I had seen, Ndola was indeed very much decaying, that I couldn’t dispute him. He said that, if possible, he wanted to move to America and bring his son there. Surely he could give his son a good education there? I allowed that it was so—but he’d have to live in a good neighborhood to make it so. So many complexities! Bart told a joke to diffuse the discomfort: What are the only two things that a black man cannot steal, he asked? I question-marked. A snake and a tree, he said. A black man cannot steal a snake or a tree.
I countered with a joke about a Scot. A Scot calls in to the obit. page because his wife has just died. The editor says he knows this must be very hard, but let me just explain the terms. You get 4 free words, 4 words at 5 quid each, and every words thereafter at a quid. The line is silent for awhile. Sir? Okay, says the Scot. 4 free words, eh? I have it: Mary McFadden is dead. The editor is dismayed. Listen, Sir, he says, you shouldn’t think about it that way. Let me tell you what. I’ll make an exception in your case, and give you the first 8 words for free. That way you can give your wife a proper obituary and not have to worry about the money as much. Mr. McFadden considers this new development and thinks about it for awhile. Sir? Eight free words, eh? He’s thinking. Okay, he says. I have it: Mary McFadden is dead. Ford Fiesta for sale.
Bart’s son’s school was quite interesting. It’s run by Indians, and once on its grounds I had a hard time imagining that I was anywhere but in India. It had that same sort of majesty-in-decay-as-informed-by-some-inscrutable-wisdom with which I felt forever surrounded while on the Subcontinent. There were mangos, tamarinds, bougainvillea, jacaranda, and lots of vines and flowers I did not know growing up along a trellis that ran along the whole perimeter of the school’s colonnaded courtyard. I gathered that school was in session, but there was no child’s voice to be heard. The only thing I could hear were the hundreds of bees and wasps buzzing around the blooming trelliswork. I noticed several signs in various places on the grounds advising young minds on the sacredness and scarcity of water. Water is sacred: respect it. The same water flows through us all: keep it clean. For his part, Bart seemed somewhat put off by this (Rajastani?) dictum. They have something funny about water at this school, he concluded. For my part, I could not help concluding that this must have been the first time Bart was setting foot inside his child’s school.
Next we went for a lunch of nshima (or pap, as a plate of corn meal paste is called in Southern African English) in Ndola’s derelict industrial district. It was actually pretty good, and it’s the first time I’ve eaten nshima without eliciting the laughter of those defter at eating it. Over lunch I learned how Bart had at one point not too long ago got quite wealthy as the owner of a trucking outfit that ran parts between the copper mines and their South African suppliers. I can’t recall the details, but everything had gone downhill a couple of years ago when two of his trucks had been stolen and he had been forced to write them off as losses. This had caused his company to fold, and had coincided with his wife deciding that perhaps he wasn’t the best of guys to settle down with after all, and leaving for a time, only to return when he had found his footing again.
It must be added that Bart is only two years older than I am. I’ll be perfectly honest and say that his life to date seems to have been enticingly rich. I’ve not been married, I’ve not had a child, I’ve not made a fortune and lost it. All I have is a book that is written but unpublished, one that is half-written, and a shitload of ideas for more books.
Our next stop was Quick Collisions, the motor and body shop where Bart’s male in-laws work. The grounds of Quick Collisions were littered with cars whose drivers could not possibly have survived the crashes that put them there. Several cars’ passenger cabins were simply crushed. I asked Bart’s brother-in-law Manfrid about the circumstances of the accidents. Drinking, he said. And I have to clean them up. See that car over there? I looked over at a heap of twisted metal and nodded. That used to be a Kia. 3 Chinese died when it collided with a bus.
In addition to the scrap and wrecks, the yard had 2 goats nibbling morsels of trash in a corner. There was also a banana tree. The sun was shining strongly onto the gray dirt and gray-streaked metal and glass, and for a moment I wondered if I might have hurt my eyes taking it in.
It was Manfrid’s birthday, and Bart persuaded him to come out to the tennis club with us for awhile so that he could buy us beers. When I asked why Manfrid should be the one buying, Bart said it was a new thing in Zambia. Because everybody was so poor these days, friends could no longer afford to buy rounds of beer for all the birthdays that came around. So the burden had been shifted to the birthday boy. This way people only had to buy their friends free beer once a year, when they turned, instead of having to buy free beers here and there all the time as birthdays came and went. Of course, he said, people seemed to be having fewer and fewer birthdays these days. Some people even claimed to have suddenly forgotten their date of birth.
Given the night before, I did not want to drink. But my protests went unheeded. The Castles started coming. I managed to put a stop to the session after 3. Manfrid needed to be getting back to the garage anyway, and we dropped him off. Bart was keen to continue drinking somewhere else. We went to see his secret girlfriend. On the way there he explained that they weren’t having sex. You could never be sure these days. I'll omit the description of their meeting--I didn't like her very much.
The next stop was Highcrest, an area of town where the ‘coloured’ or mixed-race people live. The area is also known as “Highly” because of the propensity of its denizens to dabble and deal in dope. Sure enough, there were a lot of men around who were red-eyed and grinning. Bart said that Highly is the type of place where anything can happen. Nothing happened to us beyond the consumption of a beer or two (or was it three?) at a shibeen with a few associates of his in the transcontinental trucking business. Stories were told. And what stories they were!
More on that later—I need to sign off for today and go pick up a pair of Colormatic eyeglasses I ordered the other day. Call me Royal.
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