John Matshikiza
With the Lid Off
I know it’s bad form to try and get other people to listen to your dreams, considering that you usually can’t understand the random clips that make up your own dreams anyway. Nevertheless, I’m going to share a dream I had one night in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, that was still fresh and detailed in my mind when I woke up.
In the dream, I was carrying around a large cardboard box of videotapes for my research into the Congo situation. Some of the tapes bore labels that gave detailed descriptions of their contents, and I knew that there was some sensitive material among them.
We (whoever “we” were) came to a checkpoint and had to disembark with our belongings. A big Afrikaner with a wide and unconvincing smile below his pencil moustache was in charge of the black soldiers who were scrutinising our credentials.
As the bluff Afrikaner came towards me, I remembered that one of the videos was provocatively labelled “The Mobutu Film – confidential”, and it was sitting at the
top of the pile. The Afrikaner security man noticed me trying to subtly hide it from view, and equally subtly released it from my fingers. He was still smiling affably, but the tension was mounting on both sides.
We were bundled back into our minibus and driven towards Mobutu Sese Seko’s fortified presidential compound, where the secret police were also headquartered. I felt a chill as we drove through the high gates, and glanced towards the back of the vehicle, looking for support. Sure enough, there was my editor ensconced in the furthest corner and calling to me: “Don’t worry, John, you stick to your guns. We’re right behind you.” I have to say I wasn’t terribly comforted.
Anyway, we were by this time inside the building, being marched towards the technical centre where the tapes were going to be analysed, and where, presumably, our fate was going to be sealed. En route, we passed through the back of a little amphitheatre, and there, on the stage below, was Mobutu himself, in full dress uniform and peaked cap, whiningly asking his ministers, who were assembled in the auditorium, whether they still supported him. The ministers avoided his eyes and murmured indistinctly.
But Mobutu held the stage. He wasn’t going to be cowed. He started dancing to the accompaniment of the soundtrack that suddenly boomed out of the bank of loudspeakers. Suddenly the uniform disappeared, and the real Mobutu was revealed, moving powerfully to the sound of the Lingala beat.
Mobutu was a large woman, dressed in a blue and white African combination, lunging provocatively among her ministers with her large hindquarters raised and her head dropped forward. The ministers were powerless to react. It was Mobutu’s show.
I woke up at around that point, pondering the meaning of all this as I lay half awake. Slowly I remembered that the night before, I had read documents on the last days of Mobutu’s violent reign, and had then gone out on a foray into the nightlife of Bukavu, where I had discovered that, in spite of war and fearful instability, the Congolese continue to get down and party in the clubs and discos that play on until dawn. The images of dancing couples dressed up to the nines on the dance floors had fused with the terrible tale of the last days before the fall of Kinshasa, and Mobutu’s ungraceful exit from the world stage.
It had not been easy to access the nightlife that lurked behind the crumbling facades of downtown Bukavu. The first taxi driver I asked about it told me there was nothing happening at night, and it was dangerous to be out on the streets after 9pm because of the soldiers.
The second taxi driver sneered at this idea. “You can go out all night, every night, if you want to,” he said. “I know that other driver. He’s a Protestant. That’s why he’s trying to discourage you from having a good time.”
Another reminder of the complexities of the Congo slipped into place. The Catholic missionaries had played an important role since the time of King Leopold, and Catholicism is still a powerful influence. But Protestant missionaries, with a different angle on life, have also been dabbling in the Congolese playground for a long time, and in recent years, there has been a phenomenal rise in the presence of fundamentalist churches. It is the members of these churches, with their abstemious extremism, who are dismissed as “the Protestants” by the fun-loving Catholics.
In the absence of political solutions, the fundamentalists have been making striking inroads among the demoralised population.
One night another taxi was taking me to find a meal. The driver asked if I would mind if we dropped off his two friends on our way. They alighted outside a huge, hangar-like structure that turned out to be their church, and asked if I didn’t want to join their all-night prayer session. When I said I didn’t think so, they asked how I thought my soul was going to be saved when the world came to an end.
I told them to worry about their own souls and leave mine be.
The driver, a Protestant himself, wasn’t too pleased with my response. But I was paying, and my soul was hell-bent on grilled chicken, cold beer and loud music in a friendly open-air restaurant I’d been introduced to. Life is short.