The only problem was: how does one set about doing that in a country where the average life expectancy during the last decade has never risen above forty-five? The country itself was turning fifty, but its inhabitants no longer were. There were, of course, the voices that came bubbling up from forgotten or nearly forgotten colonial sources. Missionaries and ethnographers had documented marvelous stories and songs. Numerous texts had been written by the Congolese themselves—to my amazement, I would even come across a native “ego document” from the late nineteenth century. But I was also looking for living witnesses, for people who would share their life stories with me, even the trivia. I was looking for what rarely ends up on the page, because history is so much more than that which is written down. That applies everywhere and always, but certainly in areas where only a tiny upper crust has access to the written word. Because of my training as an archaeologist, I attach great importance to nontextual information, which often provides a fuller, more tangible picture than textual information does. I wanted to be able to interview people, not necessarily the big decision makers, but everyday people whose lives had been marked by the broader scope of history. I wanted to ask people what they had eaten during this or that period. I was curious about the clothes they’d worn, what their house looked like when they were a child, whether they went to church.
It is, of course, always risky to extrapolate to the past from what people tell one today: nothing is so contemporary as our memories. But while opinion can be extremely malleable—informants sometimes sang the praises of colonialization: was that because things were really so good for them back then? Or was it because things were so bad for them now? Or was it because I’m a Belgian?—the memories of commonplace objects or actions often exhibit greater permanence. In 1950 you either had a bicycle or you did not. You spoke Kikongo with your mother as a child or you did not. You played soccer at the mission post or you did not. Memory does not discolor at the same rate everywhere. The trivial details of a human life retain their color longer.
So I wanted to interview ordinary Congolese people about their ordinary lives, although I don’t like that word ordinary, for often the stories I was told were truly extraordinary. Time is a machine that crushes human lives to bits, I learned during the writing of this book, but occasionally there are also people who crush time.
Yet still: how was I to get started? I’d hoped to be able to speak on occasion to someone who might still remember the final years of the colonial period. I unquestioningly assumed that there would be no eyewitnesses to the period before World War II. I would have been very pleased to think that some older informant could still tell me something about his parents or grandparents in the period between the wars. For earlier periods I would have to navigate by the shaky compass of written sources. It took a while, however, before I realized that the average life expectancy in Congo is not so low because there are so few old people, but because so many children die. It is the country’s hideous infant mortality rate that undercuts the average. During my ten journeys to Congo I soon met people of seventy, eighty, and even ninety years of age. One time, a blind old man of almost ninety told me a great deal about his father’s life: in that way I was able to descend indirectly to the year 1890, a dizzying depth. But that was nothing compared to what Nkasi told me.
FROM THE AIR Kinshasa resembles a termite queen, swollen to grotesquery and shuddering with commotion, always active, always expanding. In the sweltering heat it stretches out along the river’s left bank. On the far shore lies its twin sister, Brazzaville, smaller, fresher, shinier. The office towers there have mirrored windows. This is the only place on earth where two capital cities can view each other, but in Brazzaville, Kinshasa sees only its own, shabby reflection.
Kinshasa’s palette is varied, but they are not the intact pigments of other sun-drenched cities. Nowhere will you find the saturated hues of Casablanca, the warm coloration of Havana, the deep-red tints of Varanasi. In Kinshasa every lick of paint fades so quickly that the people seemed to have given up on it: pallid colors have become an aesthetic of their own. Pastels, the missionaries’ favorite hues, are dominant. From the tiniest boutique selling soap or prepaid mobile-phone refill cards up to and including the exuberant volume of a newly built Pentecostal church, the walls are always a faded yellow, faded green, or faded blue. As though illuminated day and night by neon lighting. The crates of Coca-Cola piled to form huge bulwarks in the yard at the Bralima brewery are not scarlet, but a dull red. The shirts of the traffic policemen are not a bright yellow, but urine colored. And in the brightest sunlight even the colors of the national flag flap rather wanly.
No, Kinshasa is not a colorful city. The soil there is not red, as in other parts of Africa, but black. Beneath the layers of pastel paint the walls are consistently drab. When masons along the Boulevard Lumumba lay their stones in the sun to dry, you see a color fan of grays: wet, dark-gray blocks beside mouse-gray ones that are still brittle, and ash-gray blocks beside those. The only color that really stands out here is the white of dried manioc, also known as cassava, the tuber that forms the staple for large parts of Central Africa. The plastic tubs of ground meal beside which the female merchants squat glisten so brightly that the women are forced to squint. Beside them lie piles of manioc roots, hefty, bright-white stumps that remind one of sawed-off tusks. Seeing those untidy piles from the air it looks as though the subsoil is baring its teeth, angry and fearful as a baboon. A grimace. The crooked ivories of a drab city. But pearly white, indeed. Impeccably white.
Imagine you could skim over this town like an ibis. A chessboard of rusty corrugated-iron roofs is what you would see, parcels of dark-green foliage. The grisaille of the cités, too, the poor districts of Kinshasa rolling on and on. We would circle above neighborhoods with leaden names like Makala, Bumbu, and Ngiri Ngiri, and down toward Kasavubu, one of the oldest neighborhoods for “inlanders,” as the Congolese were called in colonial times. We would see Avenue Lubumbashi, a straight stretch of arterial with countless smaller streets and alleys emptying into it, but which has never been paved. It is the rainy season, the street is covered in puddles the size of swimming pools. Even the most skilled cabby becomes bogged down here. The inky-black mud spatters from beneath his screeching tires and sullies the flanks of his rattling, but newly washed, Nissan or Mazda.
We would leave him behind, cursing, and soar on to Avenue Faradje. In the courtyard of number 66, past the concrete wall topped with shards of glass, past the heavy metal gates, something white is glistening. We zoom in. It is not manioc or ivory. It is plastic. Hard, white, extruded plastic. It is a potty. A child is sitting on it, a darling little one-year-old girl. Her coiffure: a plantation of young palm trees bound together close to the crown with yellow and red elastic bands. Her yellow dress with the floral pattern is draped over her rear end. Around her ankles there are no panties: she doesn’t have those. But she is doing what all one-year-olds all over the world do when they don’t understand exactly why that potty is so damned important: she is screaming, furiously and heartrendingly.
I SAW HER SITTING THERE on Thursday, November 6, 2008. Her name was Keitsha. It was a traumatic afternoon for her. Not only was she being denied the joy of spontaneous defecation, but she was also facing the most terrifying thing she had ever seen in her short life: a white person, something she knew about only from her worn-out, handicapped Barbie doll, but then big, and alive, and with two legs.
Keitsha would remain on her guard all afternoon. While the members of her family sat talking to this peculiar visitor and even sharing bananas and peanuts with him, she remained at a safe distance, staring for minutes at how he dug his hand too into the crackling bag of nuts.
Fortunately I had not come for her, but for her forefather, Nkasi. I left the courtyard with the howling child behind and slid aside the thin sheet covering the doorway. The room was almost completely dark. As my eyes