Authors: Ryszard Kapuscinski
None of them has laboriously climbed the ladder of government promotions, pinching votes and bowing to patrons. A wave of liberation struggle has carried them to the top: they are the children of storms and pressure, born of the longings and desires not only of their own countries, but of the whole continent. Thus, each of them becomes a
sort of pan-African leader. Each of them will long to make his capital the Mecca of Black Africa.
This quartet is never to meet: Lumumba will not make it. Everything in the biography of the man comes down to the formula: he will not make it. In the years when a Kasavubu or a Bolikango is painstakingly fitting his clientele together, Lumumba is nowhere to be seen because he is either too young or is sitting in prison. Those others are only thinking of their own backyards, anyway, while Lumumba is thinking of the whole Congo.
The Congo is an ocean; it is a gigantic fresco of contrasts. Small clusters of people live scattered across a great jungle and a vast savannah, often unacquainted, knowing little about each other. Six people per square kilometre. The Congo is as big as India. It took Gandhi twenty years to cover India. Lumumba tried to cover the Congo in half a year. Absolutely impossible.
And for the Congo, as for India, the only way is to cover the whole country. Call on every village, stop in every small town, and speak, speak, speak. People want to have a look at their leader; they want to hear him at least once. Because what if he’s the leader of some bad cause, some godless affair? You have to see for yourself, let him speak, and then decide if he’s a leader or not. In other countries leaders have the press, radio, film and television at their fingertips. They have personnel.
Lumumba had none of this. Everything was Belgian, and there was no personnel. And say he had a newspaper: how many people would have been able to read it? Say he had a radio station: how many houses had radios? He had to criss-cross the country. Like Mao, like Gandhi, like Nkrumah and like Castro. Old photographs show all of them in simple peasant attire. Mao tightening his belt around a padded coat, Mahatma’s skinny legs sticking out
of his
dhoti
, Kwame throwing an ornamented
kente
over his shoulder, and Fidel standing there in a threadbare partisan’s shirt.
Lumumba is always studiously elegant. The glowing whiteness of his shirt, his starched collar, his cufflinks, the stylish knot of his tie, his glasses in expensive frames. This is not the popular touch. This is the
style évolu
of the would-be European. When Nkrumah travels to Europe he demonstratively puts his African costume on. When Lumumba travels to an African village he demonstratively puts on European dress. Perhaps this is not even a demonstration of anything. But it is read that way.
Anyway, he doesn’t spend a lot of time in the villages. Patrice was not the peasant-leader. Or the working-class leader. He was a product of the city, and the African city is not as a rule an agglomeration of the proletariat, but of bureaucrats and
petits bourgeois
. Patrice sprang from the city, not from the village. Not from peasants, but from those who were peasants yesterday. There’s the difference. A person coming straight from the jungle to the Boulevard Albert in Leo reels around like a drunk. The contrast is too great, the jump too violent. Back there, he lived quietly in his tribe, and everything was comprehensible. Whether he liked it or not, the tribal organization gave him one thing: a balanced life. He knew that if he found himself in situation X, he should resolve it by method Y. Such was the custom. But in the city a man found himself alone. In the city there are the boss, the landlord, the grocer. One pays you, and the others have to be paid. There are more of the latter and that’s when the trouble starts. Nobody cares about anybody else. Work finishes and you have to go somewhere. People go to the bars.
To tell the truth, Lumumba’s career begins in the bars. In the clay-hut districts of Leo you can find 500 of them. The
African bar has nothing in common with, for instance, the Bar Lowicki back home in Warsaw. In the Lowicki a guy stands in line, gets a shot of vodka, munches a pickle and disappears. If he wants another drink, he has to stand in line again. A crowd, haste: cultural life is out of the question.
My favourite bar in Africa is called Alex. Often the names are more suggestive: ‘Why Not?’ ‘You’ll Get Lost’ or ‘Only You’. Recently, more high-flown signs have been hung out, like ‘Independence’, ‘Freedom’ or ‘The Struggle’. Alex is a small one-storey shack but decorated like an inn for a country wedding—gay and extravagant. It stands in the shade of the palms, among billboards advertising Coca-Cola, Martell and Shell. In the morning it’s virtually empty, but in the evening it draws a swarm of people. They sit on tin chairs at tin tables and drink beer.
There has to be beer. A lot of bottles and a lot of glasses. The bottle caps ring against the floor. From these caps the black pussy-cats make belts, which they wrap around their hips. The pussy-cat walks and the caps rustle. This rustling is taken to be exciting. There has to be jazz. And raspy Armstrong. The records are so worn out that they no longer carry melody, only that rasping. But the bar dances. It makes no difference that everyone is sitting down. Look at their feet, their shoulders, their hands. You can talk, argue and flirt, do business, read the Bible or snooze. The body always dances. The belly undulates, the head sways, the whole bar sways until late at night.
This is a second home. In their own homes they cannot sit around because it’s cramped, grey, poverty-stricken. The women are quarrelling, the kids are peeing in the corner, there are no bright crêpe dresses and Armstrong isn’t singing. Home is constraint and the bar is freedom. A white informer will not go to a bar because a white person stands
out. So you can talk about everything. The bar is always full of words. The bar deliberates, argues and pontificates. The bar will take up any subject, argue about it, dwell on it, try to get at the truth. Everybody will come around and put in their two cents’ worth. The subject doesn’t matter. The important thing is to participate. To speak up. An African bar is the Roman Forum, the main square in a medieval market town, Robespierre’s Parisian wine cellar. Reputations, adulatory or annihilating, are born here. Here you are lifted on to a pedestal or tumbled with a crash to the pavement. If you delight the bar you will have a great career; if the bar laughs at you, you might as well go back to the jungle. In the fumes of foaming beer, in the pungent scent of the girls, in the incomprehensible roiling of the tom-toms, names, dates, opinions and judgements are exchanged. They weigh a problem, ponder it, bring forth the pros and cons. Someone is gesticulating, a woman is nursing a baby, laughter explodes around someone’s table. Gossip, fever and crowding. Here they are settling the price for a night together, there they are putting together a revolutionary programme, at the next table somebody is recommending a good witch-doctor, and further on somebody is saying that there is going to be a strike. A bar like this is everything you could want: a club and a pawn shop, a boardwalk and a church porch, a theatre and a school, a dive and a rally, a bordello and a party cell.
You have to take account of the bars and Lumumba understood this perfectly. He also stops in for a beer. Patrice doesn’t like to keep quiet. He feels that he has something to say and he wants to get it out. Patrice is an inspired speaker, a genius. He begins with casual conversations in the bar. Nobody knows him here: a strange face. He’s not a Bangal or a Bakong. What’s more, he doesn’t back any of the tribes. There’s only one Congo,
this stranger says. The Congo is a great subject, you can talk about it endlessly without repeating yourself. Such things are good listening. And the bar starts to listen. For the first time the bar falls silent, hushes, settles down. It pricks up its ears, ruminates, compares viewpoints. Our country is enormous, Patrice explains. It is rich and beautiful. It could be a superpower if the Belgians would leave. How can we oppose the Belgians? With unity. The Bangals should stop letting snakes into the huts of the Bakongos. That only leads to quarrels and not to
Fraternité
. You don’t have freedom and your women don’t even have enough to buy a bunch of bananas. This isn’t life.
Patrice speaks simply. You have to speak simply to these people. He knows them. He too came from the village, he knows these people without timetables, shaken and disoriented, off the tracks, looking for some sort of support in the incomprehensible new world of the city, looking for some oar to grab hold of, for a chance to catch their breath before plunging back into this whirl of faces, into the confusion of the market, into everyday drudgery. When you talk to these people you can see how everything in their heads is tangled up in the most fantastic way. Refrigerators and poisoned arrows, de Gaulle and Ferhat Abbas, fear of the witch-doctor and wonder at the Sputnik. When the Belgians sent their expeditionary force to the Congo, they ordered the infantrymen to change into paratroopers’ uniforms. I kept wracking my brains—why were they all paratroopers? Then it dawned on me: because paratroopers are feared here. In Africa they fear anybody who drops out of the sky. If somebody drops from the sky, he’s not just anybody. There’s something in it, and it’s better not to go too deeply into such things.
Patrice is a son of his people. He too can be naive and
mystical at times, he too has a predisposition to jump from one extreme to another, from explosions of happiness to mute despair. Lumumba is a fascinating character because he is extraordinarily complex. Nothing about the man submits to definition. Every formulation is too tight. Restless, a chaotic enthusiast, a sentimental poet, an ambitious politician, an animated soul, amazingly tough and submissive at the same time, confident until the very end that he is right, deaf to the words of others, enraptured—by his own splendid voice.
Lumumba enchants the bars. From the very moment he walks in. He conquers them totally. Patrice always speaks with conviction, and people want to be convinced. They want to discover some new faith, because the tribal faith has become shaky. We used to say, ‘Comrade, don’t just agitate among us, give us something we can feel.’ Lumumba knows how to give the bars something they can feel. He teaches, demonstrates, proves. The people say yes and applaud.
Il a raison
, they shout—
‘He’s right!’
And today in the Congo, when his name is mentioned, they repeat the same thing with melancholy reflection:
Oui, il avait raison
. Yes, he was right.
There were three of them. They always walked together, as three, and drove around together, as three, in a big, dusty Chevrolet. The car stopped in front of the hotel, the doors slammed, and we could hear three pairs of feet coming up the stairs. They knocked, entered our room and sat down in the armchairs. If three people go around together in Poland, you don’t think anything of it. But in the Congo, three people can be a party.
Our first conversation. They introduced themselves: ‘Socialists from Kasai.’
Nice to meet you.
After a few pleasantries one of them came right out with it: ‘We need money.’
‘What for?’ asked Jarda Boucek, my Czech friend.
‘We want socialism to triumph in Kasai. And for that, we must buy off the leaders of our province.’
They were young, and you must make allowances for youth. So Jarda said that socialism does not triumph by means of money. He added something about the masses. ‘The masses first,’ that’s how Jarda put it.
The socialists sat there, downcast. For them, the masses were not so important. Had we ever seen the millions marching here? The millions are passive, directionless, diffuse. All the action takes place among the leaders. Five hundred names, maximum. And it’s exactly those names that you have to buy. Once you’ve bought a few, you can go ahead and set up a government, and the ones who put up the money determine the kind of government it will be. That’s how the governments of Chombego, Kalonji and Bolikango were started. There are many possibilities, many untapped reserves. I quickly calculated that I had 1,000 dollars left. I wondered if I could buy myself a republic.
One with a real army, a government and a national anthem. I might not get much of a republic for my money. A thousand dollars is not a great sum. I would not be in the same league as Washington or London or Brussels. No: I had to forget about it. So did my friends. But to keep the conversation going, Jarda asked them about their party.
They represented the Kasai Socialist Party. They had a programme: drive out the Kalonji, stop the tribal wars, support a united Congo. A worthy programme.
‘Is your party big?’ Jarda asked.
They handed us the membership roll. The letterhead on the sheet of paper read: Kasai Socialist Party. Below it, we saw three names with their functions: party chairman, general secretary, treasurer.
Is that all? someone asked, tactlessly.
Yes, that was all, if you did not count the dusty Chevrolet, the chairman’s wife and their two little boys. Pierre Artique, an authority in these matters, had determined that there were about ninety Congolese parties. One hundred and twelve of them ran in the 1960 elections, and if somebody said there were 200, you should know enough not to argue. At home, people shake their heads when they see these figures: too many. But it’s not.
European countries have also had as many as 200 political parties, perhaps more. The parties, however, had come into being over a long stretch of time. Something would spring up, fail to sustain itself and die off. Life, time and the conditions of a normal political life effected a process of natural selection. Dominant parties existed but so, too, did the smaller parties, even if less significant. Some rose, others sank. The misfortune of the Congo was that there was no time. What took three centuries in other countries has happened here in three years.
In 1958, clusters of parties started bursting forth. Often,
several a week. Some might ask: why so many at once? Wouldn’t three be enough or five? Of course they would be enough, but not in the Congo. The Belgians kept the Congolese not only isolated from the world, but also from each other, ignorant of what was going on in their own country. The average resident of the second-largest town in the Congo had no idea of what was going on in the third-largest town. If he wanted to go there, he had no money to pay for the trip. The distance between two towns in the Congo can be like the distance between, say, Warsaw and Madrid.