My reflections on an African experience! (part IV)

After nearly a month in Kinshasa:

I finished my last posting by hoping that not all public places around Kinshasa are like the restaurant I went to on my first night (3615). Fortunately that has not been the case. I have been to at least six more restaurants since and none of them was quite like that. I should mention, however, that the scene of older white guys hanging out with young Congolese girls is still present and to a certain extent disturbing but not unbearable.

I had the chance to travel to some of the “real Kinshasa.” That is to say where the general public lives. Although I have been to some of these neighborhoods 3 or 4 times already, nothing is reduced from my bewilderment in regards to the level of underdevelopment. No roads, hardly any structure that would resemble a house (mainly huts), often no electricity, no running water and of course no sewage system. Mind you that we are talking about the capital city of one of the per capita richest countries (in terms of natural resources) on earth.

The main staple here is wheat and corn flour. They make a puree type food out of certain types of flour called Fufu, that has the consistency of pizza dough. Fufu, in my opinion, hardly has any taste. I haven’t been able to take more than a little bit of it. The only common vegetable in the staple is something called Kasawa (I much prefer spinach ;-). Any other type of food goes to the level of luxury. Milk is nearly absent from the Congolese (or at least Kinshasan) staple. Middle class Congolese seem to consume fish, chicken and meat once in awhile. Most supermarkets are filled with imported stuff with prices that go through the roof. A kilo of lamb meat is over $10. A box of 40 warmer candles goes for $50. And the list goes on.

One of the things that struck me hard was the price of laptops. A colleague of mine sells electronics as a side job. His brother is an importer of electronics from Dubai and my Congolese colleague does part of the marketing for his brother. The other day, he was selling an outdated, low quality Dell laptop for $950. This scene brought me back to the US a couple of years into the history. I bought a laptop for my mom a with very similar specifications from office depot for $360. I remember how shocked I was by the low price I paid for a well functioning machine and kept asking myself “how is this possible? How can they pay for the material, labor, technological know-how, shipment and etc. and still sell it for such a low price and manage to maintain profit!”

Later, I was introduced to the concept of “cost externalization,” which in short means that business owners strive to dump the real cost of a product on others (including the environment) to produce a competitively-priced product. In the case of portable electronics (that people in the developed world hold so dear) Coltan is one of the most important raw materials used. And of course Congo has an underground ocean full of Coltan (like Tin, Uranium, Gold, Diamond and …). And who is extracting it cheaply for “us?” It is the Congolese boy who is deprived of education and basic health care. It is the Congolese girl who is raped as early as the age of 10. It is the mother who is raped in front of her children by a battalion of Coltan soldiers. In the meantime, “I” conveniently buy my laptop for $360 in office depot and continue living a convenient life. I also use that very same laptop (with the great internet connection) to buy and sell the stocks of the very same companies who are exploiting that Congolese child and thus make even more money out of it. The Congolese child, however, does not stop paying for my laptop just yet. When and if s/he gets lucky and tries hard to pull her/himself out of the deep sludge we have cooked up for her/him, s/he will have to pay us back again by paying $950 for a product that goes for less than $400 in the U.S.! What a “smart” business we run.


Ps: since my arrival here, I have been given the glorious title of “the white man.” This is the first time in my life that I am being considered “white.” I guess everything is relative in this world! Kids, who chase my car in the poor neighborhoods of Kinshasa, call me Mundele (Lingala for white) and the people in slightly better off neighborhoods call me Blanc (French for white). But what was really interesting to me was to discover that my name in the lunch list is “Nouveau Balnc.”