Dara - HRI

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Eindi

Surviving in the outskirts of Kinshasa

Gilles Gasser

They are columns of humans that move in silence. In lines, they walk on the abandoned railroad tracks or along the sides of the road that has been taken over by heaps of rubbish. These desperate people, who must walk up to 30 kilometres, come from Matete, Limete and Ndgili, some of the many bidonville (shantytowns) that surround Kinshasa. They are headed towards the centre of the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with just one thought in mind: food. Years of war, corruption, suffering and poor governance have destroyed this African giant. The people of Kinshasa live in conditions of extreme poverty, on the edge of human dignity. All indicators of vulnerability are in the red. When the nation’s economy plummeted, the middle class all but disappeared. The result is, on one hand, an overwhelming majority of the population living in extreme poverty, and on the other, a fistful of privileged people who can afford the luxury of a weekend in Paris or shopping in Brussels for clothes and make-up. The DRC is bankrupt and is ranked 167th out of 177 countries in the Human Development Report 2006 – quite a paradox for a country with such immense natural resources like diamonds, copper, uranium and water… scandalous wealth. Rich country, poor population.

And so, with an unfailing sense of humour, the Kinois describe their city as “a graveyard” or “a corpse.” A city where every day they survive on what few things they can sell: a coverless book, a flat tyre, a broken umbrella. Sitting on the ground behind an old case of beer serving as an office desk, a man rents a pen. Leoni sells skewers. She lives with her family in Ndgili, a bidonville that everyone calls the Republic of China because of its high population density: more than 3,000 inhabitants per square kilometre. Every day around 5:00PM, she lights a small barbeque and cooks the food she sells in the street. “The problem is that people have no money. I have to sell on credit, but in the end, many will never be able to pay me back,” Leoni explains in a calm and dignified voice. Leaning against the cracked wall of their home’s small yard, her brother Edmond listens. The abysmal look in his eyes is plagued with the demons of poverty. Prominent cheekbones, decaying teeth, and hunched shoulders; Edmond is hungry. “We eat once a day. You have to get used to it. In the morning we have a coffee or tea and then we have to get through the entire day before we can even touch food.”

Generally, they cook beans or the traditional “fufu”, a white paste made of cassava flour. Most people in Kinshasa’s shantytowns cannot even dream of acquiring meat, fruit or vegetables. A kilo of beef costs five dollars… five dollars when there are so many other things that must be paid. The rent, for example, is twenty-five dollars with ten people crammed into a dismal 16m2 room. Not to mention electricity and water. In the DRC, nothing is free. Public schools, hospitals and transport: the state, riddled with corruption and incompetence, does not provide a single public service for free or even at a price affordable to the poorest people. The accounts are shocking: school is twenty dollars a term, one day at the hospital costs seventeen dollars and a basic doctor’s visit is five. Everything has a high price, yet nothing works. Edmond is hungry. He is weary and holds not the slightest hope that things will get better. “Nobody helps us, aid doesn’t get here. We are alone in our misery,” he whispers with a sad smile. He has never even heard of an NGO. And, when someone asks him what was his last pleasure, he falls into a deep silence and after a few seconds he replies, “I don’t know.”

Kivu families have settled in Edmond and Leonie’s neighbourhood. Terrorised by the extreme brutality used by the militia and the regular army, the population of the eastern part of the country fled their homes, victims of atrocious and intolerable violations of their human rights. Some are now living in giant refugee camps around Goma. Others continued on their internal exile to the outskirts of Kinas and now live in crowded makeshift shacks. It is impossible to know how many there are. The last census that could be considered as such, was conducted in 1988, but as an Ndjili local says, “there are a lot.” Their lack of knowledge about the city, its codes and its tricks, makes them extremely vulnerable within the group of already very vulnerable people. And the present situation of violence and impunity that continues in upper Kivi is no incentive for them to return to their villages and towns. They are trapped in a labyrinth of misery, just as tens of thousands of their fellow compatriots.

In the face of sure death of the city and its officials, some Kinois fight with imagination and courage. This is the case of the mothers and grandmothers who have transformed the belt that separates Kinshasa from the bidonville into gardens of survival. In the centre of urban chaos, they have cleaned every square metre to establish a system of urban agriculture. They grow cassava and potatoes. On the road home to the bidonville, they gather herbs and roots to prepare creams and soups. The streets are swarming with slow-moving people who toil wearily. Under a leaden sun, a man flattens tins with a hammer. Here, even waste is used for survival. A few metres away, a hairdresser’s customer is seated on a plastic chair with a leg missing. He cuts the customer’s hair right there in the street, which was once nicely asphalted but rapidly became a memory of dust, cracks and stones that becomes a sea of nauseating mud when it rains. There is no drainage system. At times, a choking stench pollutes the atmosphere. Here, everything is improvised so that the worst at least remains tolerable. Three workmen armed with yellow overalls and shovels dig a trench at a diabolically slow pace. A drain a metre wide, dug by just three men beaten by hunger and heat, for a population of 200,000. Incredible. The never-ending list of chronic problems continues: a blackout that lasts five days, the water supply that is constantly being cut off, corruption among the police who patiently wait for their victims on every corner, and crime that further poisons an already dramatic every day existence.

In a clothing shop, three young workers watch the time go by. The owner imports clothes from France because “sape (dressing well) is important if you want to feel good”. However, there are few who can sacrifice twenty dollars to buy a pair of jeans. “Eindi,” says one of his employees, “it’s all bad”. In this context of absolute misery, the traditional values of the Congolese society crumble. Many jobless young men who cannot afford their fiancée’s dowry end up abandoning their pregnant girlfriends and wives. In addition, AIDS is causing a genuine catastrophe. In the most populated neighbourhoods, no prevention campaigns are to be seen. Every day there are more orphaned children and more HIV-positive people. The bidonville lives in constant uncertainty. The feeling of abandonment devastates the balance of its inhabitants. Collective precariousness, desperate fatalism and massive pessimism have pushed the people into the arms of charlatans who practice traditional magic and prophetic cults. “Churches” and other centres of prayer multiply at lightning speed. Each neighbourhood has its own. The most alarming statistics speak of over 2,500 religious sects in Kinshasa. The Church of the God of Wonders is one of them, led by Daniel Tumba, a man who proclaimed himself as “the visionary” three years ago. This former electrician and butcher had a vision, a calling from God. Since then, with his accomplice Bishop Marcel Lihau, a “manager” as he calls himself, he has been spreading a confusing message among the weak and vulnerable. With their pinstriped suits and flashy shoes to match, they look more like Chicago mobsters from the 1950’s than soul savers. They receive their visitors in a round and cool room. The walls are adorned with a complex organisation chart showing the “visionary” in charge of ministers, pastoral teams and other fellow visionaries. And, of course, there is a cash register. Aside from establishing power within the community, the Church of the God of Wonders has not been a bad business for these improvised preachers. Every Sunday their roofless church fills up. Two hundred faithful pray for hours on end. This is what they call “the single great day”, a day of absurd preaching, of fainting spells brought on by heat exhaustion and generalised manipulation.

They, and many others like them, form part of an alarming explosion of sects, and the focus of their preaching is fear and witchcraft. A wave of hysteria has taken hold of the people of Kinshasa who are hunting child-witches in particular. These children are being accused of all Earth’s disasters. If a child has a bodily malformation, if they develop the “symptom of disobedience” or if they wet the bed, they are identified by the sects’ preachers as a child-witch who brings the devil into the home. Accused of causing their family’s misery, the child is sacrificed and abandoned. Thousands of children, some just infants, are forced by their own parents to leave their homes and end up living in the street. Families without resources, incapable of meeting their child’s basic needs, are then freed of children in an atmosphere of collective sadism and urban cruelty. The result: every day, the so-called child-witches abandoned by their families join the thousands of child refugees – products of the war, –child soldiers, or other orphans already living in the street. On a local level, there is no system for protecting these children. In a best case scenario, an NGO or a religious community takes charge of their wellbeing and education. But the fact of the matter is that there are too many: some estimates point to over 30,000. They survive by stealing, prostituting themselves or with the help of some NGOs. 30,000. An army. A time bomb primed to explode.

Géancy is 10 years old. His neighbourhood’s sect branded him with the terrible seal of child-witch. His parents torture him, though they have still not abandoned him. His eyes are popeyed from profound fear, his feet covered in cuts and his voice is stifled, shaky like a stutterer’s. This is the terrible witch-child of the area, a victim of frightening cruelty. He is incapable of pronouncing a single word. Totally paralysed from fear, he looks more like a small animal desperately seeking shelter. For other children, however, the situation is even worse. They are tortured until they publicly confess to being witches. Then, they are killed. “We put them in tyres and burn them,” explains one of the neighbours coolly. It is dangerous to be a child here.

In this setting of extreme poverty and desperation, asking what was the last bit of good news that somebody received simply sounds absurd and inappropriate. A man in a hairdressers’ boldly came up with one: “the Chinese”. The Empire has decided to disembark in DRC. Businesses, roads, schools and construction – the UNDP claims that the grandchildren of Mao will invest the exorbitant figure of eight billion dollars in the former Zaire. And China has arrived with a bang: the Chinese are spoiling the international community’s routine and taking over key concessions in the mining sector, namely, diamonds and uranium. But hopes should not be raised too high. The contracts are for Chinese companies that, in the majority of cases, will hire Chinese manpower, even for building roads. Furthermore, it is not very likely that they will ever invest money in Ndgili’s roads. It seems that this bidonville’s nickname “the Republic of China” will not help them.

It is mid-afternoon and staying round here much longer would not be wise. The people are friendly, but when night falls, all hell could break loose. The gangs of children fight each other with that cold cruelty they learned from adults. In the darkness of the bidonville’s roads without street lights, Leoni can be found trying to sell skewers to other penniless people. The preachers can be heard selling hate. Edmond continues feeling the pangs of hunger that leave him numb. And Géancy, well, he carries on alone in the shadows, struggling against fear and fists. Eindi!