Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Over the years, the articles and topics I'd read about the DRC described aggressive
people—pushing, shouting, asking for bribes, travelers shoving each other in airport lines. This
wasn't my impression, neither here nor at the border crossing. People apologized for bumping into
me, and even the security agents, notorious for extortion and made-up taxes, were courteous, one
telling me he was a poet, adjusting his glasses as he explained that he wrote about AIDS, inequal-
ity, and handicapped children. Maybe the DRC was changing. Life here certainly used to be worse.
But I'd traveled enough not to fixate on media reports, which rated Kinshasa as one of the most
dangerous cities in Africa and described the Congo with a daily fare of spectacularly depressing
statistics and stories of inhumanity—massacres, slavery, mass rapes, cannibalism, and brutal witch-
craft. These reports, though necessary and true in certain regions, easily blind outsiders to the great
majority of the country's people, who work hard to feed themselves and their families.
Eric Epheni Kandolo, a Congolese conservationist in his late twenties and BCI's communica-
tions coordinator, was waiting for me at the airport. Short and solidly built, he spoke as if we'd
known each other for years. This immediate familiarity, I was soon to learn, is one of the most en-
dearing qualities of the Congolese. Eric explained that his taxi had refused to wait, and he asked if
I'd like a beer while he found another. I declined, but he led me to a beer stall anyway and said I
should wait there since he needed to negotiate with taxi drivers.
“If they see a white man,” he told me, “the price won't be very good.”
He found one, a car of no discernible make, its windshield webbed as if hit by a brick, every
panel a different color. When I opened the rear passenger door, the smell of the dark, musty, tattered
interior cast me decades back to the rural Virgina junkyards I prospected in as a teenager, looking
for parts to rebuild my car and motorcycle.
Beyond the airport, men gathered around booths selling Vodacom, Tigo, and Airtel phone cards,
talking and laughing, money changing hands. In the shade of a concrete building, a teenage boy
lounged on a swatch cut from a car rug next to a stack of used tires for sale. Women carried bundled
market goods on their heads, their spines drawn long, necks as elegant as those of ballerinas.
We drove into the most densely populated neighborhoods of Kinshasa, the wide, uneven streets
of broken asphalt littered with trash and rubble and crammed with vehicles. Many of these were
also patched together, their varied panels so dented they appeared as if they'd been beaten into
place with hammers. People ran through traffic that didn't slow or swerve. Huge unbranded trucks
rumbled past, looking as if assembled from dozens of old vehicles, their engines half exposed. At
least one hundred yellow jerry cans were tied to their sides and the cargo was lashed down beneath
blue tarps, young men sitting on top.
Eric launched into a political discussion with the taxi driver, a rail-thin man with a weathered,
angular head and veins so prominent that his forearms appeared twined with electrical wire. In
excellent, mildly academic French, the driver debated President Kabila's merits, pointing out that
though he wasn't popular in Kinshasa, he was gaining support. As he and Eric broached the top-
ic of whether the president was promoting the country's development while protecting its national
resources, a red passenger van with a rectangular opening in its side cut into our path. Our driver
braked and swerved, and Eric told me that these vans, group taxis, were called les esprits des morts ,
“the spirits of the dead.” They were the most salvaged-looking vehicles on the road, their headlights
and grilles missing, people crammed into them, a few clutching the edges of the doorless openings.
Suddenly, our taxi hit a border of raised asphalt and we were in a different city, one of smooth,
dark, wide avenues with fresh white crosswalks painted on them, symmetric lines of streetlamps,
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