Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 14:54:39 -0500 From: Louis Proyect <leata-AT-EarthLink.NET> Subject: M-I: In Congo, a New Era With Old Burdens (NY Times article) May 20, 1997 By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF KISANGANI, Congo -- Mauwa Funidi's face softens and glows for a few moments as she recalls happier days as a brilliant student, as a new college graduate, as a member of a prospering family in a nation seemingly about to enjoy an endless economic boom. Then Mauwa snaps out of her reverie, and she is back in the squalid university library where she works, unpaid except in promises, trying to protect faded magazines from the wind and rain that blow through the broken windows. She is back in a sordid reality where she survives by selling charcoal on the street, where her family lives in humiliation on the earnings of a cousin who sells her body at the Take-a-Peek bar. A solid, self-confident woman of 45, one of the most successful women of her generation here in the faded city of Kisangani on the Congo River, Mauwa abruptly fought back tears. "If my grandfather were alive today, he would be very sad," she said, choking, her eyes wet and luminous. "He would regret that his family turned out this way." Now her country has a chance to remake itself with the rebellion of Laurent Kabila. But as Zaire, renamed Congo by Kabila as he came to power, looks forward to a new phase, many families are also looking back at squandered decades and wasted lives. Congo is a nation whose 47 million people in many ways live in grimmer conditions than when this was still a colony of Belgium four decades ago. In that respect, Congo is emblematic of a group of countries in Africa that have been disasters for their inhabitants. In most of the world, change over the last two decades has been measured by the pace of progress -- here rapid, there slow, but at least progress. In sub-Saharan Africa, in contrast, per capita income actually fell most of the time since the late 1970s, including a 10 percent drop between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. The tragedy is that this was so unnecessary. Congolese are among the poorest people in the world, with an average income of just $150 a year, but paradoxically Congo is about as rich in resources as any nation in the world, blessed with diamonds, gold, copper and other minerals scattered across vast tracts of untouched jungle. For all the hopelessness that Westerners often feel about Africa today, this was in the 1950s a bustling nation that brimmed with optimism. To visit Congo and bounce along its horrific jungle roads today is to experience a twilight world where hints of past greatness and squandered potential peek through the trees: abandoned factories, gas stations, plantations and once-stately homes, their doors creaking on old hinges. One glimpse of the past comes on the road to Stanley Falls, the rapids at Kisangani that were once a famous tourist attraction in central Africa. The road is on the outskirts of town but has been partly overtaken by the jungle and is now so overgrown that one has to leave one's car behind and finish the trip on foot. Yet overhead are ancient street lamps, some with bulbs intact, stripped of wire but still a reminder to the hiker that this remote and overgrown path was once a well-tended avenue and a part of the modern world. In the little village of Mambeau in eastern Congo, peasants live in mud houses on the fringe of the jungle and survive much as their forebears did 100 generations ago, without doctors, schools, stores, electricity or any equipment more sophisticated than a hoe. But beside the village is a startling reminder that it was not always so: rows of sturdy brick houses, empty, overgrown and seemingly haunted, where local villagers once lived much more modern lives as they worked on a vast rubber plantation. Decades ago the plantation was abandoned, becoming an eerie ghost town overgrown with brush, and now the villagers farm only tiny plots to feed themselves, using a small fraction of the land that their parents worked. The vast majority of the plantation has been claimed once more by the jungle, a habitat for elephants and leopards. The U.N. Development Program calculates that 11 African countries, including Congo, were richer per capita in 1960 than they are today. And the decline in Congo is not just economic, for the family unit is also tearing at the seams, and the majority of children cannot even graduate from elementary school. Many illiterate young people are members of a lost generation that will impose a burden on the country for half a century to come. Everybody says that Funidi, grandfather of Mauwa and patriarch and namesake of the Funidi family, must be tossing in his grave. COLONIALISM: POWER PRESERVED FOR EUROPEANS Funidi was born in about 1904 in what was then the Belgian Congo, the personal property of King Leopold of Belgium. Almost all of the continent had just been seized by European countries in the "scramble for Africa" of the 1880s, but the Congo was a special prize: a huge country, one-third the size of the United States, with diamonds, gold, copper, ivory and rubber that made Leopold one of the world's richest men. To be sure, Leopold's wealth was not extracted easily. Between 5 and 8 million Africans are said to have died in the rush to exploit the Congo's resources, and early in this century labor bosses were notorious for cutting off the right hands of boys who did not meet their mining quotas. To demonstrate their strictness, bosses showed off baskets of hands. Belgium also imposed a web of harsh discrimination, excluding virtually all Congolese from any hope of higher education and banning Africans from traveling without a permit, from drinking anything stronger than beer, from becoming engineers or architects or lawyers. Yet while focusing its efforts on plundering minerals and preserving power for Europeans, the Belgians also built a country that in many respects was impressive. Kisangani, then called Stanleyville, was typically majestic, with stately buildings, broad avenues, concerts by visiting European musicians and spectacular views of the Congo River. In a description that seems incredible today, the writer John Gunther wrote in 1955 that Kisangani was a place with the "liveliness and efficiency of a miniature Antwerp." The country in those days had one of the highest school attendance rates in Africa, a flourishing arts community, widely published poets and a dynamic economy with a bulging trade surplus and $3 billion in exports each year -- compared to about $400 million now. "The essence of the Belgian system is to buy off African discontent by giving economic opportunity, widespread social services and a comparatively high standard of living," Gunther wrote in 1955, and one of the beneficiaries was Funidi. A tall, lean man who moved to Kisangani in about 1943 from the small village where he had been chief, Funidi got a government job as a street cleaner. Before he died in 1959, he sent all his children to school and he was one of a large number of Congolese on the verge of joining an emerging middle class. Funidi's children and grandchildren celebrated, of course, when Congo became independent in 1960. Throughout Africa, there was elation at the prospect that diamonds and minerals plundered by Europeans would finally enrich local people. The Funidi family already was moderately well off, with educated children and such conveniences as a bicycle, a hand-crank phonograph, a battery-powered radio and a sewing machine. "Everybody was very happy with independence, because God seemed to have decreed it and everybody expected life to get better," recalled Emmanuel, one of Funidi's sons. "But it didn't take long to realize that things were getting worse." At first the Funidi family was relieved when Col. Joseph Desire Mobutu seized power during a political crisis in 1965, for he seemed to represent order and stability. But then everything began to go wrong. The economy stagnated as foreigners were evicted, as rubber, coffee and banana plantations returned to the jungle, as corruption began to asphyxiate business. Mobutu became one of the "big men" of Africa, rewarding himself with a fortune usually estimated at several billion dollars as well as with a new name, Mobutu Sese Seko. As the economy stalled, soaring inflation eroded the salaries of government officials like the Funidis. The pauperization means that everyone in Congo, not just members of the elite, must "se debrouiller" -- make do, get by with what one has. Se debrouiller is a way of life in Congo, and it means that government officials take bribes, doctors ignore patients who do not offer gifts, factory workers steal parts from assembly lines, and soldiers wave guns to get "donations." That is why Mauwa, who as a college graduate once reflected all the hopes and promise of her country, is now a charcoal peddler. Smart and disciplined, always the brightest student in her class, in 1976 she became the first person in her family to graduate from college. She was given a job as a university librarian, a particularly exalted post in Congo because of the prestige of universities, which were set up only on the eve of independence with the mission of cultivating an educated elite to run the country. "It will be dangerous to educate the Africans," the country's Belgian leader ruminated at the time. "It will be more dangerous not to educate them." Yet for all the hopes and resources invested in these university graduates, Mauwa now says bitterly that it was a mistake to go to college. Her job as librarian is almost meaningless, she said, because all classes at the university have been suspended for lack of funds. The library has not had any money to buy books or subscribe to magazines since 1982. Her salary as a librarian has diminished because of inflation from the equivalent of $300 a month when she was hired to $11 a month now -- and in any case the wages are theoretical. The last pay was in November, after a gap of many months, and for the last half year Mauwa has survived only by buying charcoal in big bags and reselling it in little bags on the curb. "It's humiliating, it really is," Mauwa said moodily, as she sat at an ancient table in the dilapidated library. "But it isn't quite so debasing when all of the other university graduates are out there beside me, peddling on the street, selling cakes, palm oil, salt, sugar, soap, lemonade." INDEPENDENCE: HOPES DISSOLVED INTO POVERTY The Funidis live in a two-room mud house with a tin roof, dirt floor and a hole in the wall that serves as a window to let in light, in a neighborhood that resembles a remote village more than a part of a major city. A flimsy outhouse made of palm fronds is in the back, and the "kitchen" is the muddy area in front where the children cook dinner each evening over a fire. The Funidis have no electricity and no running water. Congo is said to have more undeveloped hydro-electric capacity than any country in the world, but most families in the villages never get closer to electricity than when lightning strikes. The bulwark of the Funidi family today is not Mauwa, who is too poor to generate much respect in the rest of the family and who cannot contribute to family finances. Instead, the main provider is her cousin, Alphonsine, 25, with her earnings from prostitution at the Take-a-Peek Bar. Alphonsine is a complex figure, an unmarried mother and earnest Catholic who goes to Mass each Sunday and takes Communion and believes God will help feed and clothe her loved ones. And while she waits for His help, she cares for her 7-year-old son, Patrick, and younger brother and sister by peddling herself. Pauperization has produced countless people like Alphonsine, deeply troubled men and women who fear that what they are doing is wrong but feel that they have no alternative if they are to feed their loved ones. Alphonsine has been a prostitute for only two years; if she had started earlier she might have had the money to save her other child, a baby who died of malnutrition at about the time she began to work at the bar. "Everybody in the family criticizes me, but I'm the only one putting food on the table," said Alphonsine, a sturdy, strong-boned woman with a steely face. "Mauwa always says she's afraid I'll get AIDS, but then how come she doesn't help? She just scolds, and complaining doesn't help!" To be sure, Alphonsine knows that the Rev. Louis-Marie Butari at the neighborhood Catholic church would disapprove. And, indeed, Butari argues that Congo's long slide has produced a moral quagmire that is at least as wretched as its economy. "When someone finds himself in economic difficulties, his conscience asks, 'What should I do?"' he said. "For example, if he hasn't been paid, he says, 'I see there are pens, papers, all these other things here, and I can take them and sell them to survive.' "So the moral framework disintegrates, and people start to steal, and their children follow and do anything to survive, and girls find nothing to eat and so they sell their bodies. For me as a priest, if there is a problem in our society, if there is a crisis, it is because our moral bulwark has collapsed." Mauwa has university housing, but Alphonsine lives in the family home with her sister Moza, 15 -- who the family is afraid will follow Alphonsine into prostitution -- and her brother Mariabwana, 17, as well as with little Patrick. The father of Patrick is never around, for he is "a bad man," Alphonsine said. "A crook." Several years ago he ran away and abandoned his family -- a pattern increasingly common in cities across Africa. The vast migrations to the cities by people looking for work have dramatically reshaped the sociology of much of Africa, creating huge new urban slums and undermining the village values that used to dominate society. In Congo, for example, city-dwellers have soared from one-quarter of the population at independence to nearly one-half now. Kinshasa, the capital, had 40,000 inhabitants in 1940 and is now a vast and unplanned agglomeration of slums housing 5 million people. Alphonsine's 27-year-old brother, Londeke, is also a migrant, but he moved from the city to the jungle. A broad-shouldered man with a solemn, handsome face, he searched for a job in Kisangani so that he could be with his family, but the only job he found was mining for diamonds in the jungle a day's journey north of Kisangani. "I came here because I had nothing at all," Londeke said softly, as dusk fell on his tiny mud house in the mining camp, a 3 1/2 hour hike through the jungle from the nearest dirt road. Londeke sat on a stool, slapping away mosquitoes and flies, his face illuminated by a small fire. Digging for diamonds is back-breaking toil in a malaria zone, and some of the miners die from cave-ins or disease. Yet countless young men dig for gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt, uranium and other minerals in Congo. Many miners, like Londeke, work for themselves, although they must give part of what they find to the mine owner. If they are unlucky and do not find diamonds, they will simply fall deeper into debt. Moreover, most of the mines are like this one, in remote parts of the jungle, and so the men spend their time at the bottom of muddy pits, far from their loved ones, heaving a shovel and hoping for a sparkle that will transform their finances. "I've spent the last two months digging a hole, and I just got to the point where we reached the sand that may contain diamonds," Londeke said, trying to control the excitement in his voice. "Now I'll wash the sand in the creek and see if there are any diamonds." If he finds diamonds, he said, he will buy merchandise and go into business as a trader, perhaps bringing goods from Kisangani to sell at the mining camp. That way he would be able to spend at least some time with his wife, Marie, in Kisangani, to ease the burden of separation and the strains that have driven them apart. "We've got tensions in our relationship, of course," Londeke acknowledged, wincing slightly. "Since I've been away this time, Marie has sent three letters asking me to come back. But I wrote back saying, 'how can I come back when I haven't found anything yet?"' Back in Kisangani, Marie, a vivacious woman with a quick laugh that rings like a bell, grips her son and suddenly becomes edgy as she confides her worries about her husband. "All the miners there have girlfriends," Marie said with a touch of sadness. "I can't accept it, and there's probably lots of AIDS there. But there's nothing I can do." THE FUTURE: LACK OF EDUCATION HARMS A GENERATION Perhaps in no area has Congo mortgaged its future so dangerously as in education. Once it was among the best-educated of African countries -- in terms of primary education, not universities -- but now Alphonsine's son, Patrick, is typical. He attended only three months of school last year, in first grade, and he is on the verge of dropping out this year. The problem is school fees, which mostly run $1 to $7 a month per pupil. Zaire's government stopped sending money to schools years ago, so teachers decided that instead of closing the schools down they would charge fees. "When the students don't pay fees, we don't get paid," Bernard Mwania, the principal of the local school, explained as he sat in his tiny, dark office. The school, built in the colonial period by the Belgians, must have been pretty once, but now its lawns are ripped apart by open sewers and the windows have all been broken and boarded over with plywood so that classrooms are dim and Dickensian. There seems to have been a precipitous drop in school attendance in the last few years as more families lost the wherewithal to pay the tuition, and now fewer than one-third of elementary school age children attend school, according to a variety of teachers and principals interviewed in various towns and villages. That is about the same proportion that attended school in the early 1950s under Belgian rule. Now that Kisangani has been taken over by the rebels, the Funidis are cautiously optimistic that corruption will diminish, that school fees will be eliminated, that life will get better. Another reason for optimism is that other African countries that have endured wrenching national traumas -- such as Uganda and Eritrea -- have emerged, however scarred, with a greater sense of nationhood and purpose, and a much greater ability to forge a modern economy, government and society. Indeed, it is the scarred countries that provide some of the continent's greatest success stories, and certainly the rebel-held areas of Congo seem far less corrupt and much better managed than they were under Mobutu. But the optimism is tempered by an awareness that the last time there was such hope for change -- independence -- the exhilaration quickly collapsed into a downward spiral of war, chaos and poverty. The Congolese poet Mukala Kadima-Nzuji wrote bitterly of his homeland in those years: Gorged with blood, with blood, with blood From the thousands of innocent souls Lying silently, motionless, without breath On clods of scorched earth Even with peace at hand in Zaire, it is clear that the Funidi family is much less prepared to prosper now than it was in the 1950s. Then all the children went through elementary school at least; now all the children get little or no education and are illiterate. Then a college education, however rare, seemed a ticket to run the country; now it is seen as just a detour on the way to becoming a charcoal hawker. "Dad would be very unhappy with the way things have turned out," Londeke said wistfully as he gazed at the embers of his fire at the mining camp. "When he was alive, conditions were better. We had food, we had clothing, and we could afford breakfast. Now we have nothing." Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005