Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
much energy it took to get around and shop for basic needs, how demanding life was for BCI's
staff. Just traveling the four miles to BCI's offices gave me a sense of the city's pace, at once hectic
and painfully slow. People rushed cars with an empty seat or trucks with space in the bed even as
traffic stopped for minutes at a time. Vehicles crammed the street as far as I could see, the distance
obscured in the smoke of burning roadside trash.
The only clear geographic marker for Kinshasa is a widening of the Congo River called the Pool
Malebo, formerly Stanley Pool. On the map, it nearly resembled a bull's-eye, an immense lake par-
tially filled in with an island of sediment, around which the river flows. It separates the world's two
closest capitals, that of the DRC from Brazzavilla in the Republic of the Congo, a former French
colony.
Kinshasa, founded in 1881 by the American explorer Henry Morton Stanley and named Léo-
poldville after the Belgian King, served as a trading post where the river's navigable stretch ends.
One of the challenges of colonization was that the river, though providing a route into the continent,
began its descent to the ocean, just beyond the Pool Malebo, by rocketing down dozens of narrow
cataracts. To link Léopoldville to the port, a railroad had to be built across Bas-Congo Province, a
panhandle that attaches the country's massive inland territory to its scant twenty-five-mile stretch
of Atlantic coast.
During the colonial era, Kinshasa's nickname was
Kin la Belle
, “the beautiful.” Now it's re-
ferred to as
Kin la Poubelle
, “the trashcan.” Heightening the sense of disorder is the construction
underway in many parts of the city, fueled by the postwar rush for minerals. During the recent wars,
the borders the DRC shares with nine other countries were often less boundaries than sieves through
which its wealth escaped. Now, with the growth of industry in India, China, Brazil, and Russia caus-
ing an increased demand for raw materials, the minerals are often still sold illegally through the
DRC's neighbors, notably Rwanda. The Chinese are renovating the capital and building highways
into the Congo's interior in exchange for mining contracts, and the country's elite are profiting.
Signs of commerce are everywhere, with new buildings going up helter-skelter even as those next
door are collapsing.
The effect of all this was overwhelmingly claustrophobic, with a seventh of the country's sev-
enty million here, many from the provinces for work or in refuge from ethnic conflict. One in five
adults is HIV positive, and, unable to afford health care, the vast majority resort to faith healing and
magic. In
Planet of Slums
, Mike Davis suggests that among the world's megacities, only the poverty
of Dhaka, Bangladesh, compares to that of Kinshasa, where less than 5 percent of the population
earn salaries, and the average yearly income is less than one hundred dollars. All along the street,
young men in torn, colorless clothes sold goods or looked for work. They crowded into the road,
trying to find rides. Six or seven at a time stood on a single rear bumper. They held onto tailgates or
the back doors of vans, fingers hooked at the edges; at stops, they lowered a hand and shook it out,
repeatedly extending it back to a familiar shape.
Group taxis crammed passengers in, many of them hugging baskets or synthetic gunnysacks.
On my second day, I traveled without Evelyn, and it took me longer to get a ride. The Congolese
barely had to gesture; they just leaned forward, revealing what they wanted with their gazes and
postures. As I'd been taught, I lifted my arm and pointed my thumb or index finger to indicate the
direction I would take at the next fork in the road.
Though I'd been told that the Kinois, the residents of Kinshasa, would work me over for every
penny, on my first two rides, the drivers wouldn't let me pay. One steered a rumbling Mercedes, its
