Our reporter Duncan Guy has reported on many chaotic and violent periods in Africa. In one of a series of articles, he reflects on the turmoil in light of the recent rioting and looting in South Africa.
Thirty years ago, I had a warm-up for what I was to see in Durban last month.
Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, had been pillaged. In this case because, at the end of the Cold War, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, no longer had Western backing to pay everyone in his army. He kept his special protection unit fed and allowed the rank and file to loot the country’s formal sector. The masses followed in their wake. Offices, factories and houses were smashed.
Belgian, French and American soldiers flew in to evacuate their nationals. Millions left the economy overnight.
The loot appeared for sale in the streets and in the Bon Marche, the main market. Tennis racquets, designer clothes, family photo albums…
Two big differences between Kinshasa and Durban were that people’s residences ‒ mainly those of expats – were hit and hyperinflation followed in Kinshasa. In Durban, it was more confined to warehouses and malls and then, of course, there was all the burning.
Food queues were sometimes a nuisance in Durban but, somehow, we haven’t suffered hyperinflation.
In Kinshasa, post the “grand pillage”, the remaining businesses would accept local currency – called the Zaire – and, at lunchtime, rush to an outdoor money market where women sat with piles of Zaire banknotes stacked in bundles that looked like bricks.
Calculators in hand, they exchanged Zaires for US dollars, the exchange rate so volatile that, for business people, waiting for the end of the day could have led to losses.
The currency trading mamas operated on the roadside towards “The Beach”, the closest escape route out of the country, on the bank of the mighty Congo River (then called the Zaire River) from where ferries would sail to Brazzaville, the capital of the “other Congo”, on the opposite bank.
Their market was known as Wall Street.
I thought it quaint that the mamas controlled the banking sector, until a seasoned Kinois (resident of Kinshasa) corrected me. “The mamas don’t own that money, the generals do.” I thought of a line I had heard in some African dictatorships, that there was “general economic empowerment – for the army generals”.
There were too few supermarkets in “Kin” to notice any Durban-like queues but people battled to get enough food in the informal markets.
I had been sent there as a freelancer by the former Argus Africa News Service to report on the aftermath of the pillaging. Talks between Mobutu’s ruling Movement Populaire de la Revolution and opposition parties he had created, and others that called themselves the “radical opposition”, were in progress. A couple of years later, the whole lot of them were eclipsed by Laurent Kabila’s guerrilla army.
I battled to make head or tail of the Conference Nationale and set about finding out how the megacity was getting its food, which led me to boarding a rickety lorry – the only public transport – heading for the breadbasket Bandundu Province.
Riding out of Kinshasa, we left the tatters of the ruined and dysfunctional formal sector behind and entered a nicer Zaire. The “camion” (lorry) conductor, after gathering “bricks” of fares, led the passengers in song. It made the rough ride more bearable.
Sometime in the night, the lorry “camion” suffered a puncture. Tired as ever, everyone took to the roadside bush for a more comfortable resting spot. Within minutes, the outlines of more people, but not from the “camion”, emerged, carrying bowls of cooked fu-fu – the cassava equivalent of putu on their heads. Hungry, tired passengers enjoyed a cooked meal.
Imagine an Engen freeway shop coming to you when broken down on a highway at 3am.
One fellow passenger explained that he regularly did the cassava run to Bandundu to fetch the staple for resale in Kinshasa. After the city collapsed, he preferred to stay at home in his village where there were no luxuries such as soap and sugar, but there was food from the fields and the forest.
I understood what he meant better at daybreak. Fields beside the continuous row of villages alongside the track of a road oozed with food. People were walking all over the place, all carrying mealies, avocados, bananas, pumpkins, sweet potatoes and, of course, cassava.
Only metres away from the line of villages, fields and road, forest trees rose to the heights of skyscrapers in central Durban.
Here, the difference between Durban’s riots and looting and Kinshasa’s pillaging is that the Kinois could survive in this equatorial abundance of food. Urban Durbanites don’t have such a bank of village and forest subsistence to fall back on.
Two days out of Kin, beyond the town of Kikwit, where Ebola was later to be first discovered, I couldn’t find a Coke. Here, the effect of the pillaging was that the only refreshment available was traditional palm wine, served not in a bottle but a calabash. Not bad, though.
Back in Kin I continued to call in on Wall Street to exchange money. Sometimes the Zaire devalued at a slower rate. The reason: banknotes became scarcer as they couldn’t be printed fast enough. When word came that a plane had landed carrying more from Argentina, where Zaire money was printed, the devaluation once again gained pace.
Here in Durban, I often think of how silver coins have value for being scarce, simply because I pay for everything with a card.
However, I must keep a stash to pay the car guards who are more than often Congolese.
The Independent on Saturday