Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible

Our life here in Kinshasa contains more mercies than most can hope for. I haven’t yet had to bump off Mobutu’s elephant. I even got to bring home a nice fat paycheck, for a time. I signed on to an American payroll, rationalizing that I’d scatter dollars over the vendors in nay little corner of la cite, at least, as it’s certain no foreign relief will reach them any other way.

Mrs. Ngemba, English teacher, was my new identity. It chafed me as much as the Benedictine habit, as it turns out. I taught at a special school in the compound for Americans who came to work on the Inga-Shaba power line.This was the great nuptial gift from the U.S. to the Congo-financing the construction of the Inga-Shaba. It’s an enormous power line stretching across eleven hundred miles of jungle, connecting hydroelectric dams below Leopoldville to the distant southern mining region of Shaba. The project brought in Purdue engineers, crews of Texas roughnecks, and their families, who lived outside Leopoldville in a strange city called Little America. I rode the bus out there every morning to teach grammar and literature to the oddly unpoetic children of this endeavor. They were pale and displaced and complained of missing their dire-sounding TV shows, things with Vice and Cop and Jeopardy in their titles. They’d probably leave the Congo never knowing they’d been utterly surrounded by vice, cops, and the pure snake-infested jeopardy of a jungle. The compound was like a prison, all pavement and block, enclosed by razor wire. And like any prisoners, these kids fought with anything sharp they could find. They mocked my style of dress and called me “Mrs. Gumbo.” I pitied them, despised them, and silently willed them back home on the first boat. I got “warnings time and again, for “attitude” as the superintendent put it, but he tolerated me for want of a replacement. I quit at the end of the second term.

The place spooked me. I’d step up onto the bus at my street corner at the end of 17 Janvier, doze bumpily through half an hour of predawn, then open my eyes in another world. The compound had row after row of shining metal houses and dozens of liquor bars glittering at daybreak with an aura of fresh vomit and broken glass.

The bus would hiss to a stop just inside the gate for a bizarre shift change: we teachers and maids would step down, and the bus would take on the weary, disheveled whores. Congolese girls, with bleached orange hair and a crude phrase or two of English, and the straps of expensive American bras sliding down their shoulders from under skimpy blouses. I could just imagine them getting home, folding this uniform, and wrapping themselves in pagnes before going to the market. As we all stood blinking at each other, getting our bearings, the compound trucks would roar past us into the jungle, carrying crews of men who apparently (judging from the whores) never slept.

In the course of a year I watched these rough-and-ready foreigners go out to build thousands of miles of temporary roads for carting cable, machine tools, and sheet metal, past villagers who’ll live out their days without electricity, machine tools, or sheet metal.The Shaba Province, incidentally, roars with waterfalls, more than enough to generate its own electricity. But with all the power coming from the capital, the mines could be lit up by Mobutu’s own hand, and shut down at the first sign of popular rebellion. Katanga had once tried to secede, after all. At the time I was working there, we believed that was the justification for this strange project.

Since I quit, we’ve learned more, enough for me to curse my small contribution to the Inga-Shaba. It was not merely a misguided project; it was sinister. The power line was never meant to succeed at all. With no way to service a utility stretching across the heart of darkness, the engineers watched the monster’s tail crumble as fast as the front was erected. The whole of it was eventually picked clean in the way a forest tree gets gleaned by leaf-cutter ants: nuts, bolts, and anything that might serve for roofing material trailed off into the jungle. Anyone could have predicted that exact failure. But by loaning the Congo more than a billion dollars for the power line, the world Export-Import Bank assured a permanent debt that we’ll repay in cobalt and diamonds from now till the end of time. Or at least the end of Mobutu. It’s a popular game, wondering which will come first. With a foreign debt now in the billions, any hope that was left for our Independence is handcuffed in debtor’s prison. Now the black market is so much healthier than the legitimate economy I’ve seen people use zaires for repairing cracks in their walls. Foreign bootlegging of minerals is so thorough that our neighbor the French Congo, without a single diamond mine in its borders, is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of diamonds.

And whatever hasn’t left the country is in the King’s pantry. If my sister Rachel and Mr. William Shakespeare put their heads together to invent an extravagant despot, they couldn’t outdo Mobutu. Now he’s building a palace modeled on the one his friend the Shah has got in Iran. It’s in his native village of Gbadolite. They say he’s got fat peacocks strutting around in a courtyard, protected by high walls, pecking up grain from silver plates inscribed with Moorish designs.The gasoline generator that lights up the palace makes such a horrid bellowing, day and night, that all the monkeys have fled the vicinity. The air-conditioning has to run all the time so the jungle heat won’t damage the gold leaf on his chandeliers.

I can just imagine. Outside the palace walls, the women of Gbadolite are squatting in their yards, boiling manioc in salvaged hubcaps, and if you asked them the meaning of Independence they’d scowl and shake a stick at you. What a nuisance, they’d say. The towns all have new names, and if that weren’t enough to remember, now we’re supposed to call one another dtoyen.

In downtown Kinshasa, where a lot of the bars have television sets, Mobutu in his leopard-skin hat blinks on every evening at seven o’clock for the purpose of unifying our nation. “How many fathers?” he asks again and again in this recorded pageant, and his recorded audience responds, “One!”

“How many tribes? How many parties?” he continues. “How many masters?”

Each time his loyal congregation screams,”Mookoo! One!”

The image flickers and the citoyens drink their beer or go on about their business. Mobutu is speaking in his own tribal language. Most people out there can’t even understand.

Rachel Axelroot DuPree Fairley

THE EQUATORIAL JANUARY 1978

LISTEN, don’t believe in fairy tales! After that happy-ever-after wedding, they never tell you the rest of the story. Even if you get to marry the prince, you still wake up in the morning with your mouth tasting like drain cleaner and your hair all flat on one side.

That was poor little me, suddenly a diplomat’s wife on the edge of the forest prime evil, wearing my Dior gown and long black gloves to embassy parties in Brazzaville, French Congo.That was the fairy-tale part, and sure, it was fun while it lasted. I felt like a true-life Cinderella. My hair did just wonderfully in the humidity, and I had my own personal French hairdresser (or so he said, but I suspected him of being Belgian), who’d come to our home every Tuesday and Saturday. Life could not have been better. Never would anyone have believed that merely a few short years before I had been living with my family over on the other side of the river-me, the very self-same Rachel, slogging through the filth! Ready to sell my soul for a dry mohair sweater and a can of Final Net hairspray. Hoo, boy! I received quite an education about politics, as an embassy wife. The French Congo and the newly independent Republic of Congo are separated by one mere river and about a million miles of contemporaneous modern thinking. It’s because they tried to go and do it all for themselves over there, and don’t have the temperament. They’re still struggling to get decent telephone service. Whereas in my duration of diplomatic service in Brazzaville, French Congo, the worst I ever had to do was fuss at the servants to cut back the scraggly hibiscus on the lawn, and clean the mold off the crystal.