John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu in Congo, is an idyllic tourist destination. But because of the war, which drags on despite the Lusaka peace accords, its charms are not availed of by many people. The locals don’t use the soft waters of the lake for much more than subsistence fishing. The only people who actually use it for the purpose it was created, that is, picnics and swimming, are the foreigners who have come to the area in spite of, or because of, its traumas -the mercenaries and the aid workers.
The first one of these I met was Stephen the Russian. Stephen has the strongest Volga boatman accent you’ve ever come across, yet he insists he is a South African.
“Are you sure it’s not Stefan?” I asked him.
“Stefan is for Germans,” he replied. “I come from Midrand.”
Nevertheless, the Congolese friend who was sharing sundowners on the hotel balcony quietly confirmed to me, when Stephen had staggered to the toilet, that he was indeed a Russian, and that he was a pilot, flying the unregulated Congolese skies like many other hired guns, a man with no past and no future that anybody cared about.
Stephen was as high as a kite, sitting with the teenage paramour he calls his “Congolese wife” when I met him. He regaled me with a string of beers washed down with bowls of peanuts, invited me to visit his house any time I liked, even hitch a ride in his plane to Kinshasa, if I felt like it. “Africa is shit,” he explained, “but I love it. Come and see me some time.” Then disappeared. He was never seen again.
I asked Simon, the Swiss Red Cross worker, what brought him to Africa. “I guess there are a lot of reasons,” he said. “In Switzerland I’d worked as a mechanic, a teacher, a nightwatchman, many things. I studied commerce and humanities but didn’t complete my studies. Then you reach an age, moving towards your 40s, when you have to decide what you’d like to do. I enjoyed being a mechanic, but I decided that I liked working with humans more than with machines. So I thought, ‘I’m Swiss, I’d like to travel and work with people: why don’t I join the Red Cross?’ I’d hoped to be posted to South America, because I already spoke Spanish, and also it sounded like a romantic kind of place to be. But they sent me to Sierra Leone instead.”
Once he’d had his first introduction to the African continent, however, he became absorbed with the place.
“I can’t pretend to understand everything about Africa,” he says. “The work is so intense, yet travel is restricted because you’re always working in a war zone, so you couldn’t learn everything about a place even if you wanted to. But I love being in Africa.”
James, who works for another aid agency, started off his professional life as a banker in the City of London, drifted into a kind of self-imposed exile in Canada and the Far East, and eventually ended up in Bukavu. It’s hard to tell if he has any profound thoughts about Africa. He’s just there, far from the madding English crowd.
It was Irish Ned, the United Nations man, who summed up all these strange African adventurers for me. What triggered it was my question about whether or not he had a family.
“Ah, well, mother, sisters, aunts, that sort of thing, back in Galway,” he replied. “But you can’t really be a family man in this kind of trade. You sort of have to be alone -to deal with the stress and uncertainty.”
He deals with his own stress by swimming in the lake every evening, a lonely figure with his lonely thoughts, pale against the black waters. Like the other aid workers, his three-monthly rest-and-recuperation trips to the fleshpots in neighbouring countries, especially the seedy Kenyan capital, Nairobi, are a necessity.
Again and again I get the feeling that they are neither adventurers, nor are they men and women driven by a passionate missionary zeal. They are people whom life has turned into loners, who have found this hidden corner of paradise by default.
The other side of the coin is the local workers employed by, or working with, the international agencies. Without them, the aid initiatives would have no direction. Yet they are on a lower rung, ever dependent on decisions taken from London or Geneva, while at the same time anxiously initiating programmes whose outcomes can make the difference between life and death for their own people. For them there is no R&R. As one Congolese aid worker explained, their task is more than just to provide seeds out of a sack marked “Foreign Aid”.
“We have to inspire the people not to give up all hope in this time of war. We have to inspire them to keep planting, to stay in contact with their fields and their homes, so that the crops, which are your future, keep on growing, even when the bullets are flying.”
THE FOREIGN AID WORKERS ARE AN ANOMALY BUT ALSO A NECESSITY. AFRICA IS A STRANGELY TEMPORARY PERCH WHOSE CONTRADICTIONS BECOME FATALLY SEDUCTIVE. IT’S CRAZILY VIOLENT BUT OUTRAGEOUSLY GENTLE AT THE SAME TIME. IT GETS TO YOU. AND LIKE DR LIVINGSTONE, THE GRANDDADDY OF THE GENRE, YOU JUST NEVER GET AROUND TO GOING HOME.