Authors: Ryszard Kapuscinski
So a Congo People’s Party arose in Leo. At the same time, identical parties were formed in Kindu, in Boende and in Kenge. None of them knew a thing about the others. Then came the moment of national independence, when the parties were to unite. The chairmen of the People’s Parties assembled from Leo, Kindu, Boende and Kenge. They said to each other: Let’s unite into one party. But one party meant one chairman. Who’s going to be the number one chairman? They all wanted the job! None of them backed down—Why should I be the one to give in? I’m as good as you are, so what right do you have to give me orders? We might have advised these chairmen to consult the opinion of their grass-roots supporters, but, then again, the grass-roots supporters in Kindu did not know the chairman from Boende, and the chairman from Boende had nothing to say to the grass-roots supporters in Kenge, because he had never even been in Kenge. So the grass-roots supporters did not matter in the least; what did was what went on behind the scenes. Behind the scenes they were all quarrelling—obstinate and ambitious. This was the moment to establish your career, get a jump on everyone else, advance at a dizzying speed. And they believed, each one, that they all had the same chance. There were no party
regulars, eminent thinkers, experienced administrators or decorated generals: they were all from the same mission schools; today they were petty party bureaucrats. But tomorrow—
tomorrow
—any of them could have been party chairman!
The army moved out at dusk. We heard the roar of the motors and then eight big trucks drove through the square. The soldiers stood leaning on the handrails, in helmets, with rifles slung across their backs. It’s not the custom here for the army to sing. They drove in silence through the empty city, through streets depopulated by the rigours of the curfew. There were perhaps 300 of them. The trucks turned on to the road out of town, the roar of the motors could still be heard, and then everything disappeared into silence, into jungle, into the violent twilight.
I wanted badly to go with them. I wanted to see the war; it was the reason we had forced our way into the Congo in the first place. But in the Congo we had found no war, only a brawl, absurd quarrels and heavy-handed imperialistic intrigue. There was nothing for us to do here. There were days when we didn’t set foot outside the hotel because there was nowhere to go. There was no reason to go anywhere. Everything seemed either too inconceivable or too obvious. Even conversations were senseless. The Mobutu backers always considered the Lumumba backers animals, and the Lumumba partisans always regarded the Mobutu supporters as scoundrels. How many times can you listen to the same accusations? The one with the most patience was Fedyashin. Fedyashin was always getting somebody to talk, and then he would come back to us with a revelation: ‘You know, this young fellow says that they have a lot of followers in Kindu.’ I don’t know what was wrong with me, but the fact that they had so many followers in Kindu did not particularly interest me.
That’s why I wanted to go with the army. The army, unlike the banal running off at the mouth over warm beer, was a concrete reality. The army was now beginning an
offensive. In the heart of the continent, 300 soldiers were going off to war. But I couldn’t be among them. I had a wolf ticket. You get that ticket when you cross a certain parallel. When you reach a place where you find out that you have white skin. This is a discovery, a sensation, a shock. I had lived for twenty-five years without knowing about that skin. A hundred children play in the courtyard of the townhouse I live in back home, and not one of them has ever given his skin a thought. They only know that if it’s dirty, that’s bad. But if it’s clean and white—that’s good! Well, they’ve got it wrong. It’s bad. Very bad. Because white skin is the wolf ticket.
Books about Africa used to get on my nerves: so much about black and white in them. This colour, that colour, and all the hues in between. When I finally went myself, I understood. Right away you find out what’s assigned to you, which line you’re supposed to stand in. Right away that skin starts itching. It either affronts or it elevates. You can’t jump out of it, and it cramps your style. You can’t exist normally. You will always be above, below, or off to the side. But never in your own place. I was once walking through the black quarter of Accra. I was with a black student, a girl. As we walked, the whole street jeered. They called us the worst names; the cursing and the rage followed her. It was too much to bear. ‘I had five people and twenty blacks with me,’ an Englishman told me. It’s the ones like him that help build the myth. The total, absolute myth of the colour of skin, still alive and powerful.
People ask why the blacks beat the whites in the Congo. Why, indeed. Because the whites used to beat the blacks. It’s a closed circle of revenge. What is there to explain? People give in to the psychosis and it deforms and kills them. In the jungles of the Eastern Province I found a
Polish
émigré
. For a hundred kilometres around he was the only white. He was gravely ill. Sitting hunched over, he repeated mechanically, ‘I can’t take it, I can’t take it.’ He had been raised in the colonial world: a black man would be walking along, and a white gentleman and his lady would be driving back from a party, and if the black didn’t get out of the way, the car stopped, the gentleman would get out and hit the black in the face. If the black was walking too slowly—in the face. If he sat down—in the face. If he mumbled—in the face. If he drank—in the face. The blacks have strong teeth, but they can get tired of having to take it and having to take it, even on a tough jaw. The world has changed: now it is the white
émigré
who sits and trembles, because his fillings are not very strong.
The strong teeth were on the offensive, and the rotten teeth were hiding in the corners. I too would have gone to the front, but I had a wolf ticket. I thought of going and explaining: I’m from Poland. At the age of sixteen, I joined a youth organization. On the banners of that organization were written slogans about the brotherhood of the races and the common struggle against colonialism. I was an activist. I organized solidarity rallies with the people of Korea, Vietnam and Algeria, with all the peoples of the world. I stayed up all night painting banners more than once. You never even saw our banners—they were great, enormous; they really caught your eye. I have been with you wholeheartedly every moment of my life. I’ve always regarded colonialists as the lowest vermin. I’m with you and I’ll prove it with deeds.
We set out to do just that. To go with the offensive. With relief we left our stuffy hotel rooms and started across the city. It was hot, awfully hot, but nothing could hold us back. The downtown ended and we entered one of the quarters. Beyond was the army camp and headquarters.
That was our destination. But we didn’t reach it, because an officer suddenly stopped us. He looked at us threateningly and asked us something. We couldn’t understand the language. The officer was slightly built—we could have taken care of him easily—but a crowd of onlookers appeared at once, surrounding us in a tight circle. This was no joke. The officer swore and pointed his finger at us, and we stood there helpless and mute because our language was incomprehensible in the officer’s ears. He started asking more questions. And we couldn’t do anything. The soldier was becoming furious. This is where we get it, I thought to myself. But what could we do? We stood and waited. A boy on a bicycle rode out of a side street. He stopped and pushed through toward us. He understood French; he could interpret. We told him that we were from Poland and Czechoslovakia. He translated this. The people in the crowd began looking at each other, searching for a sage who would know what those names meant. The officer didn’t know them, which made him angrier than before. There were more shouts, and we stood there as meek as sheep. We wanted to say that we were full of feelings of friendship, that each of us stood in solidarity with the struggle of the people, that our desire to take part in the offensive was proof, but the officer was shouting and we couldn’t get a word in. He must have been insisting that we were Belgians; I don’t know what he was after. Finally Jarda found a way out. Jarda lived in Cairo, so he had a driver’s licence printed in Arabic. He took out the licence, showed it to the officer as the crowd watched attentively, and said: ‘It’s from Nasser.’
The magic of this word serves all over Africa. ‘Aha,’ the boy translated for him: ‘So you’re from Nasser. What a shame, that so many people in this world look like Belgians.’
‘It’s not our fault,’ I said in Polish, ‘not our fault at all.’
The officer shook our hands, turned about-face and walked away. The crowd dispersed and we were left alone. We could have kept going, but somehow everything had lost its sparkle. In fact, we had no reason to feel resentful. In Poland, too, there are a lot of people who don’t know that such countries as Gabon and Bechuanaland exist, even though they really do. I once leafed through a Belgian history book written for Congolese schools. It was written in such a way that you could think Belgium is the only country in the world. The only one.
We were back to sitting around in the hotel. Jarda listened to the radio. Duszan read a book. I practised shadow-boxing.
In this book that I haven’t written for lack of time and sufficient will-power, I would like to include the story of the few hours that we lived through after the night when Stanleyville learned that Lumumba had been murdered, and that he had died in circumstances so bestial that they trampled all dignity. We were wakened by someone’s piercing shout in the morning. We jumped out of bed—I was sleeping with Duszan in one room, and Jarda was next door—and dashed to the windows. In the street in front of our hotel (it was called the Reśidence Equateur),
gendarmes
were beating a white man to within an inch of his life. Two of them had his arms twisted back in such a way that the man was forced to kneel and stick his head out, while the third was kicking him in the face with his boot. We heard shouts from the corridor as other
gendarmes
went from room to room dragging whites out into the street. It was obvious that the
gendarmes
had begun a morning of spontaneous revenge directed at the white colonists whom they blamed for the death of Lumumba. I looked at Duszan: he was standing there, pale, with fear in his eyes, and I think that I too must have been standing there, pale, with fear in my eyes. We listened to hear if the sound of clumping boots and banging rifle butts against doors was headed our way, and, nervously, hurriedly, we started getting dressed because it’s bad to be wearing only pyjamas or a shirt in front of uniformed people—it puts you at a disadvantage right away. The one in the street was screaming more loudly and was bleeding profusely. In the
meantime, more whites appeared, pushed out of the hotel by the
gendarmes
; I didn’t even know where these people were coming from, since our hotel was usually empty.
For an instant we are saved by chance or, more exactly, by the fact that our rooms don’t open on to the corridor but on to the terrace at the end of the building, and the
gendarmes
hadn’t taken the trouble to poke into every corner. They threw neighbours, now also beaten up, on to a truck and drove off. Immediately it grew as quiet as a graveyard. Jarda, who had come into our room, was carrying his radio. The Stanleyville station was giving government communiqués appealing to all the whites still in the city to stay off the streets and not to appear in public because of the behaviour of isolated elements and certain military groups which the government ‘is not able to control fully.’ Since there was no sense in sitting around in the room, we went down to the lobby, thinking that somebody might tell us what was going on. We were not tourists, but correspondents who had to work, and the more dramatic the circumstance, the more we had to work. There was no one in the lobby. We sat in armchairs, around low tables, facing the door. It was hot and we were developing a thirst for beer even though beer was not to be dreamed of. In the last few days we had become thoroughly famished. Our daily nourishment consisted of one can of Dutch sausages for the three of us. There were five little sausages to a can. We ate one sausage each and then drew lots: the one with the short straw didn’t get a second sausage. Aside from those two sausages (or that one) we didn’t eat anything, and on top of that, our supplies of sausages were running out. So we sat in the armchairs,
thirsty and dripping sweat. Suddenly a jeep drove up in front of the hotel and a gang of young people jumped out with automatic rifles in their hands. It was clearly a hit squad, a vengeance patrol. Yes, you had only to look at their faces: they were out for blood. They came storming into the lobby and surrounded us, pointing their weapons at our heads. At that moment I honestly thought: this is the end. I didn’t move. I sat immobile not because of any courage, but for purely technical reasons: it felt as if my body had turned to lead, that it was too heavy for me to budge it. Just then, when our fate seemed already to be determined, the following occurred: the leader of the squad trotted into the lobby. He was young, a boy, mulatto, with a mad look in his eyes. He rushed in, saw us and stopped. He stopped because he spotted Jarda. Their eyes met and they looked at each other in silence, without a word, without a gesture. They looked at each other in this way for a long while and the mulatto seemed to calm down, as though thinking something over. Then, without a word, he motioned to his people with his automatic rifle and they—also without a word—turned away from us, got back into the jeep and drove away.
‘That’s Bernard Salmon,’ said Jarda. ‘He was once in Cairo as Lumumba’s envoy. I interviewed him.’
We went back upstairs to our rooms to write our dispatches about Lumumba’s death and about what the city looked like afterwards—the city where he once lived and worked. Each of us wrote something brief because, as a matter of fact, we had little information and what we had lived through that morning was not fit to appear as part of the next day’s official press coverage. There then arose the
problem of taking our dispatches to the post office at the other end of town: we—that is, white people—would have to drive across a city terrorized by the
gendarmes
and the vengeance squads. I haven’t mentioned that immediately upon arriving in Stanleyville we had pooled our resources to buy a very used car, a Taunus, from an Indian. In this car (Jarda was driving) we set off for the post office. A very hot and humid afternoon. The city was so deserted that we did not see a single car or person. It was the model empty city, dead concrete, glass, asphalt. Dead palm trees. We reached the post office building, alone in an open space. It was locked. We started banging on the doors, one after another. No one answered. Duszan found a small metal shutter that opened on to the cellar below, and we slipped into the dark, musty passageway. At the end there were stairs that led up into the cavernously empty main hall, covered with litter. We didn’t know what to do next, so we simply stood there. At the other end of the hall was a door, and behind it were more stairs, leading to the second floor, and we went up to see if anyone was there. We started up to the third floor, the top one. If the police caught us in this place, deserted now but still strategically important, they would, we feared, treat us as dangerous saboteurs. Finally, going from room to room, we stumbled upon a hall with more than a dozen telex machines and a battery of transmitters. A hunched-over, dried-up African approached us from the corner.