Going to Congo (for real)

Hi Folks,
This is just to let you know that I am flying to Lubumbashi, DRC, in less than an hour. Can only stay for two days or so due to a number of considerations. Upcoming bachelor party, meeting my cousin in NYC, etc. Wish me luck.
Markus
Crazy things happened to me in Dar Es Salaam, I might add.

Down in a deep dark hole

I have been thinking for the past five days about how to write about my trip underground in the Nchanga copper mine. Not just how to write but with what energy. I’ve been busy, yes, and that accounts for some of it. But the experience of my visit down there was staggering. Now that I’ve begun I feel even more inadequate to the task. I had seen the magnitude of the open pit, that great and yielding laceration on the earth; I had seen the plant where the copper is attracted onto cathode plates out of an electrolytic acid bath and then palleted for sale. I had seen drill rigs at work, boring into the earth for hints of booty. I have never used the phrase I am about to use, so I mean it when I use it: Nothing could prepare me for what I saw last Thursday.

I booked myself in on a mine tour, as stated on this site I believe, at the Ndola Trade Fair. The mine was in Chingola, which is about 60 miles away from Ndola. My appointment was for 8 o’clock in the morning. Owing to various circumstances, getting there the night before was not a good option. Nor was leaving with the first bus at 6 AM, since there was a good chance I’d miss the appointment due to time lost transferring to another (unscheduled) bus in Kitwe. So I hired Fabian to drive me. He was late as usual, which made me fretful and angry, but that is a different story.

I got there on time-ish, cleared security, and joined the group I’d be going down with in the exhibit room. They were a group of junior workers at ZESCO, the Zambian electrical utility, and their managers. First we were briefed about the grade of the copper, the nature of the rock formations, the history of the mine, etc. What stood out most clearly was a model of the mine made out of spindly sections of color-coded plastic tubing joined together into something that resembled a neural network.

(To be continued shortly...)

Bared Zanzibar Chest

I have left Ndola because the three month term of my tourist visa was up. This dispatch is being sent from Zanzibar, that famed isle of spices and slaves in the Indian Ocean. This is my first encounter with Swahili culture, which strikes me as a pleasant and relaxed fusion of African with Arab. Many Swahili words contain recognizable Arabic roots, so I’ve been able to trade a few pleasantries with the locals much faster than it took me to get to speed with Bemba in Zambia. Which for the record is a puttering half-stroke speed that stalls out in the first gear.

I was in Stone Town, the Arab-built old quarter of Zanzibar Town, for two days. Though I didn’t do much there, hobbled as I was with the duties of converting German to English, plus methane, I feel that I managed to take on a charge of that ineffable “exoticism” that jaded moderns long for, just by being there. Walking around the old town and feeling as if I were back in Yemen has been enough to make my presence here its own reward.

Zanzibar features prominently on the East African tourist circuit. Scantily clad wzungu wandering around the Stone Town casbah can be heard gibbering away about climbing Kilimanjaro, or how nasty Nairobi was, or how they managed to see leopard in the Serengeti but that their luggage had been lost in transit and God! they just couldn’t think about anything else. Many are the unimpressive garden-variety wzungu fresh off a London or Frankfurt flight, some of them young things sniffing about during their “gap years.” Others among them are more faded and gnarled, beach fossils who come in motley permutations on the mélange of differing proportions of drunkenness, callousness stupidity, and lechery.

But I’ve also run into a few more reassuring wanderers, the kind of people whose taste for adventure reminds me of a few lines of Conrad I read not too long ago:

They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilization, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement.

Last night at a bar, I got into a conversation with one of these wild yearners. There was talk of kayaking the northwest passage, of being smuggled into Afghanistan rolled up in a rug, of crossing on foot from Tibet into Nepal, of crisscrossing the Congo on a 250 cc motorbike. It was exciting to hear tales of anticipated enterprise from one of these uncut and unpolished natural souls who sometimes crop up unexpectedly from among the deep ranks of the low-carat streamlined synthetic utility gems turned out by the institutes of modern life. Actually the supply of interesting travelers on the African circuit is not all that low—much of the perceived deficit is probably a demand-side problem caused by my natural reticence.

Yesterday I traveled north to a beach town called Nungwi. It’s supposed to be the “party town” of Zanzibar’s north coast. There was a party going on last night, true, but it was nothing like the shameless sweep of beachfront saturnalia that I had imagined. The guidebooks evidently all list this town as the thronged place-to-be, in effect warning off those who, rather than “fun,” want “authenticity.” My theory is that there is a sort of cartographical emergent property at work, which is to say that in putting the town on the map as a thronged place-to-be, they scared people away, and in so doing changed it—many of the people who make it to Africa have at least the pretense of wanting to be in the fuzzy regions of the map. Call it Lonely Planet’s Heisenberg if you like: The official cartographer cannot observe and analyze the system without changing it.

I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. Maybe a week. What next? Well—I’m glad you asked that question, because:

In closing, I have an announcement to make: (ahem, silence please) Ye e-foregathered, I am pleased to declare that I have managed to obtain a multiple-entry visa to enter the Congo, valid for three months. Wait! Wait—but soft, peace! Before you stifle me with your course whoops of jubilation, let me tell you how I got it. So far I have mostly spared you the long and disappointing story of my multiple failures to get a Congolese visa. The thought was that if I had nothing good to say, why then I wouldn’t say anything at all. Basically it is a tale, lacking all sound and fury, about idiots. A variety of Zambians told me that the could get me a visa easily, all they had to do was call so and so and it would be done. While at Arthur’s drilling camp in the bush, at one point he declared, “I could walk in there and get you a visa from those cunts without even opening my mouth!” My taxi driver Fabian had an aunt who worked at the Congo consulate, but she happened to be in Lubumbashi both times we braved that grotty bureaucracy together. Despite my enthusiasm for this liberally offered assistance, none of these helpful Zambians ever followed through. Likewise with the Congolese themselves. I met two of them during my time in Ndola. Both were full of brave rhetoric about fast friendship, about being honored to bring me along the next time they went to Lubumbashi, etc. Maybe they said these things just because they enjoyed hearing themselves say it—let’s just say that of these words nothing ever came. For a while there was even an American who said he was going to get me in. He was the manager of the Frontier copper mine, and his firm basically owns one of the border crossings. Same thing: An impressive fabric of words, yet lacking the stuff of action. It’s like magic: Mention the Congo, be it ever so softly, and the person who hears it instantly turns into a flake.

To wrap up by sounding a happy note, this is how I got it: Arthur’s brother in law is married to a woman named Ashley who works for one of the big mining outfits. Her job there is to sort out visas and work permits for managers shuffling back and forth across the border. I did not know this. One night I found myself at their house for a braai. When I told them about my visa hardships, Ashley explained where she worked and said she could get me a visa the next day, free of charge. I thought it was more of the usual and let it slide. But a few days later, as I was walking along the road, someone pulled up and called my name. It was Ashley. She was upset that I had not come by with my passport. I began to offer some excuse, but she cut me short and demanded my passport on the spot. I was reluctant to surrender it, as my flight to Tanzania was fewer than 36 hours away. But she wouldn’t relent, and I gave it to her. The next evening at 7 or so, she came by and handed me my passport. It had a Congolese visa stamp in it, complete with spelling errors and vaguely threatening legalese. Congo here I come.

Oh, and one more thing. On my last night in Zambia, I found out the truth. Rex had a girlfriend eight months back or so who died. His wife lives on. Whether he was in some way financially impacted by his girlfriend’s death remains a mystery.

Two things, or Three

If you count the first, that is. Which is that it’s often true that when you return from a voyage, or even a prolonged absence, most of the folks back home do not care all that much about the pictures you took. They’d rather pick things up where they left off. Which is not to say that they do not care about you, or how you have been, just that the pictures have greater immediacy to the one who took them. And the folks back home are happier to see you alive and in the flesh than to ponder the frozen images of your absence. It seems that pictures can serve a much more useful function if made available to the home front for viewing while still away. And that is what I am trying to do here. Pictures with words, that is. They say a picture is worth a thousand of these things, but I reckon you will have to make do with unconverted verbal currency for now.

The first thing is about sleeping in the tent. Yesterday I was told by Mrs. Zulu—the maid where I am staying—that it is a very bad thing to sleep outside. I am not happy, Mr. Markus. It is not good. At first I laughed it off, saying that it was in fact good for mzungus such as myself to sleep al fresco. When her husband came to pick her up after she was done cleaning, I could see them discussing something over in a corner. Then Mr. Zulu strode over purposefully and expressed the same concern. You should not sleep outside, he said. You will get sick. The expression on his face was very stern. It occurred to me that there must have been some taboo at work. I asked if there was any reason other than the cold and the possibility of getting sick that prompted their concern. Mrs. Zulu explained that it was a custom among the Bemba to sleep outside during when grieving someone’s death, and only then. I said I saw, and that I’d make sure to bring the mattress in that night. They would not leave until I had done so.

The next thing is much more problematic, and I wish to present it succinctly to avoid giving it too much of my own overlay. Before heading out to the bush last week, I learned in bits and pieces from Rex, one of my cab drivers, that his wife was sick. He was very concerned, and spoke with feeling about wanting to send her to the doctor but not being able to afford to. I gave him some money. Not much, but enough to cover the doctor’s visit. He was thankful, and I felt I had done the right thing. The next time I saw him he seemed distraught. The doctor had mentioned something about ulcers, about surgery. I recall advising him to be very thorough in questioning the doctor, and to insist on being guided through the thinking behind the diagnosis and treatment. I had heard too many horror stories already. The next day, when I had made it as far as Chililabombwe, I got a call from Rex. I asked him how he was, and he said not good. But since talk time is expensive and Zambians are understandably loath to use their minutes, the conversation did not last long enough for him to tell me what had happened. I said I would call him when I returned. Because I suspected he had called me in order not to ask for money, but perhaps to obtain it from me obliquely by putting me in a position where I as the rich white man could not keep myself from offering it. I decided that it would not be proper to give him any more if he asked or tried to put me in that position.

Two days ago, I decided to call him for a ride and find out what was going on as we drove. When I asked him how he was, he said OK. I asked what had happened to his wife. She was dead, he said. I was shocked, and for a while did not know what to say. I told him I was very sorry and for a time could say nothing more. When I had gathered my wits I began asking questions. I determined that she had been to the hospital, that they had not been able to find anything directly wrong with her, and had sent her home. She died the same day. Rex did not know why. Just one of those things in Zambia: People die and nobody knows the cause. When he said that she had been pregnant, I told him I thought it had probably been an ectopic pregnancy, meaning that the embryo had lodged in a fallopian tube and grown there. And that when it had got big enough, it had ruptured the tube and caused her to bleed to death. It must have been very painful. I didn’t say that last bit.

When I asked why he hadn’t challenged the doctor, he didn’t know what to say. Easy questions for the educated white man to ask, I know. But Rex was living in the present. His wife was dead, there was no changing that. Now there were funeral costs to attend to. The coffin had to be bought, as did the grave plot. Her parents had to be fed and their transport back home to Southern Province paid for.

The thing floored me. I talked to a friend just after finding out about how normal he had seemed in light of the circumstances. She said she had seen it before in Africa. It was a defense mechanism. When life was an unmitigated succession of tragedies, there was little to do but grin and bear it. Or drink. And it is true that Rex had been driving on several brandies.

Let me try to wrap up as briefly as possible. Later that day I gave Rex some more money, my earlier vow notwithstanding. I told him to try not to spend too much on drink, and think of his children who needed him. At home I cried at the senselessness of it.

The next day I mentioned the thing to Fabian, another driver I use around here. He expressed surprise, saying that this was the first he had heard of Rex’s wife dying. And Fabian, I should note, appears to know about pretty much every other thing that goes on in Ndola.

So now I find myself in the morally strange position of really wanting her to be dead. I don’t want to have to come to terms with the possibility of having been played that badly for the fool. Or having to acknowledge that someone I like(d) could stoop that low. I’ve posted Fabian to a reconnaissance mission, and expect to be finding out the truth anytime now. I am aware that Fabian is a cynic, but this is the environment that reared him, and he has every reason to be.

Either way, it’s very much another TIA: This is Africa, friends.

Oh, and one last thing. Yesterday I hit somebody for the first time in a long while. It was a thief going for my pocket outside the supermarket. It just happened. As soon as I felt the hand grope, I turned around and let fly

The Ndola Trade Fair

One of the reasons I’ve pitched a tent in my friends’ backyard is that all the hotels in town are full up, this being trade fair week. Even my trusty hoteliers at Castle Lodge had to relinquish my room in exchange for the bloated rates to be made off trade fair goers. So yesterday I went to the Ndola Trade Fair with a friend to see what all the hoopla was about. I am aware that it began over fifty years ago as the Northern Rhodesia Show.

I spent very little time there, an hour at most, but I came away with a grab-bag of impressions. There was even time to perform an act of patriotism.

Because there was an admission price, more actual business seemed to be conducted outside than in. The ticket price also meant that there were more people outside the gates than in, a sort of general reflection of the dispensation of having and not-having around here. On our way in we have to navigate through this chaos of informal commerce. After stepping over a little spread of belts and shirts, some asshole (who I suspect was in no way associated with that particular spread of items for sale) tried to shake me down, saying that I had damaged his goods. I had heard about this scam, and ignored him completely and successfully.

Inside, my first impression was that there was more fanfare than substance. The most prominent buildings and displays were given to the long and greedy arms of the Zambian government. Each department had its own building, with its own staff and displays. The Department of Immigration, the Department of Disaster Mitigation and Control, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Mining and Natural Resources. Each had a colorfully painted official insignia, and below each insignia was the same subtitle: Economic Growth through Competitiveness. Walking through these displays was like touring a petrified forest. The staffers were all sitting, eyes downcast, and for the most part could not be bothered to respond to our greeting. They had nothing for sale and nothing to say. Just going through the motions.

Even worse was the official stand of the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose staffers were downright surly. Their displays consisted of poorly executed graphics illustrating their various doomed economic initiatives. Each display was spruced up with an arrangement—either a half-circle or a pyramid—of beer. My attempts to purchase a beer were rejected. On n’est pas ici pour vendre des boissons, Monsieur. No indeed, they were there to promote large-scale industrial initiatives.

Later I tried to get a cup of water at the bottled water company’s stand. They regretted to inform me that they did not have any cups just then.

When I tried to purchase a T-shirt from a parastatal garment company, I was informed that they only accepted bulk orders. How about that one, I asked, the one that says “Economic Growth through Competitiveness?” I’m sorry, Sir.

But just around the corner there was a sea-change. From one step to the next, the sterile atmosphere of parastatal business was replaced by the spicy drafts of the bazaar. All of a sudden we were in the thick of enterprise. People were jostling, yelling, appraising, exhorting. I was crowded by a gaggle of Chinese men in a hurry. People were coming from every direction with some sort of purpose written on their faces. There were Pakistanis selling rosewood furniture inlaid with brass, Nigerians selling fancy ankaras and leather products, Iranians selling rugs, Zambian women selling jewelry they had made, an infomercial-type guy rattling off the benefits of a new kind of vegetable peeler to a crowd captivated by the rhetoric of the market. Enthused, I bought a goatskin briefcase from Nigeria, and then several pieces of jewelry. My critical side gave way to thoughts of filling up a container with African artifacts and making a killing.

The last place we stopped by was the mining tent. I met an employee of Nkana Mining named Justus. He seemed amenable to my curiosity, and we made a plan for me to see their operations either this week or the next, both open cast and underground.

On the way out we walked past a rank of international flags. Old Glory was hung upside down on the pole. We lowered her, righted her orientation, and raised her high on the mast. No one paid us any mind.

Surveying Chimfunshi

As you may recall, some time ago I paid a visit to the Chimfunshi chimpanzee orphanage. I just paid another visit on a very different errand. This second visit was paid in the company of a geologist and an environmental engineer who were giving me a ride back to Ndola. On the way, they stopped at Chimfunshi to conduct the preliminary stages of an environmental impact assessment. The task was to take pictures of the floodplain of the Kafue River, and to establish the GPS coordinates of the chimpanzee enclosure itself.

The impact being assessed is that of a road they are planning to build through the Chimfunshi Trust’s property. Chimfunshi, you see, abuts the south bank of the Kafue River, which forms a natural barrier against Congolese highwaymen. The parcel Arthur & co. were prospecting lies to the north of the river. Once that parcel becomes a working mine, the plan is to reduce security risk by building a bridge across the Kafue and transporting the ore to the main Chingola-Solwezi road—through the trust’s property.

You will recall my dire musings about the orphanage’s future. Given my earlier intuition, it felt grimly affirmativee to be a part of that operation. At one point the geologist let slip his company’s real ambitions: To prospect for minerals at Chimfunshi itself in the hopes of turning it into a mine. His company owns the mineral rights, after all, and you better believe that the only thing the government cares about is revenue flowing into the trough. There were various bons mots about ‘stakeholders’ and equitable solutions and this and that, of course, but I believe that I may have glimpsed the future when, as we slogged around the flooded perimeter of the property taking GPS readings, I saw the peaceful wooded enclosure transform into a gigantic open pit. And the whole project may end up facilitating the movement of Congolese brigands to boot.

TIA.

Independence Day, Congo-Style

I spent a total of five days in the drillers’ bush camp. With the notable exception of the drilling itself, their routine was my routine. After waking up at 6, I’d have some tea and eggs and head out to the rig in Arthur’s Land Cruiser. He’d make sure things were going according to plan, and I’d take pictures and notes, or read. Then we’d head over to the other rig to make sure things were on track there. Lacking 2-way radios and being most of the time out of cell phone coverage, this process was repeated up to three times a day. At some point there would be lunch. Sometimes, if Arthur was compiling reports for the office in Ndola or busy disciplining his crew, I’d try to do a little exercise, a little writing. The days passed quickly, and between the elevation, the sun, the cold, the exercise, and the harrowing rides in the Land Cruiser, I’d already be half asleep by the time the generator was cut and everyone turned in.

Arthur wants badly to operate his own rigs one day soon, and he spent a great deal of time trying to convince me to go in on one with him. Of course, a new diamond rig costs $300,000—and that’s before bribes, duties, logistical equipment, base camp essentials, and crew. It could also be useful to know how to operate one. Which of course is where he comes in. At first I told him it probably wasn’t for me. I didn’t have the money, I wasn’t a businessman, investing in Africa was dicey, etc. All those things still hold, of course, but since getting out I’ve been mulling over a figure he cited: A rig, operating full-time, can throw off $300,000 in a month. So even if a large percentage is taxed or frittered away in bribes, you’re laughing. Now who’s in?

After 4 days I decided it might be time to head back into town, and so organized a ride for the following day. Not only to have my clothes washed, have a shower & c., but to plot my next move. While in the bush I got two e-mails of invitation from friends who are doing the Kilimanjaro-Zanzibar circuit in East Africa. Very tempting after all of this vain knocking on hell’s door. There’s also the prospect of heading toward eastern Zambia and Malawi with Arthur. He needs to pay a visit to his ailing stepfather out that way, and has invited me along. Lastly, there’s the grubby business of getting my ass down into an underground mine and into the Congo, on both of which fronts there have been promising developments. My thinking is tending toward the pleasures of the East African tourist circuit though, followed by a return to Zambia/Congo after seeing my stateside friends off into the blissful state of wedlock.

Before wrapping up this post and having some breakfast (I’m back in Ndola, staying with my friends here—I’ve pitched my tent in their backyard, a nice compromise between town and bush), I’d like to paint you a picture of my last morning at the drillers’ camp: While shuttling our armed guardians to their posts, we happened to tune into a radio broadcast out of Lubumbashi, Congo. They were playing marching band music, then Independence Cha Cha. It was Trente Juin, the Congolese day of independence. After some hoopla from various radio personalities, we were taken live to Kasangani (a town symbolic of the Congo’s struggle for independence) where President Kabila was addressing the nation. He uttered a bunch of bons mots about this day being the most important day in the Congo, about how it commemorated the martyrdom of the nation’s founders, & c., & c. Then he segued into the continuing struggle to unite the disparate parts of his country, noting that mutual sacrifice would be necessary for the greater good. All very well. What really got me was the next thing he said: That the Congo was on the threshold of the information age, and of widespread prosperity, and that if diligence and discipline were brought to bear on the exploitation of the nation’s vast resource base, the threshold could be crossed, with no looking back. It would have struck an absurd chord if I’d heard it back home, but what made it even better was our proximity to the Congolese border, where all of our movements were accompanied by a detail of heavily armed policemen. All of whom, I should add, reported having used their guns to kill Congolese bandits in the past.

In a way, Kabila’s speech reminded me of one given by Jenny Granholm, the governor of Michigan, at the 2004 DNC, when she waxed hopeful about fostering a “technology corridor” in the Upper Peninsula. Ha.