My reflections on an African experience! (part V)

Haut Katanga—a massive district with lovely people, gorgeous lakes and awful roads.

Children find joy in running after the cars and shouting Muzungu (white in Swahili). Once before, I have told the story of the little girl who ran out of her mom’s masterful hands that were braiding her hair just to make sure that she shouts Mundele (Lingala for white) together with other overly-excited children. While traveling in the terrible roads of Haut Katanga (one of the four districts of Katanga province), an even more interesting scene happened.

Our white Land Cruiser was dashing through one of the hundreds of villages on the road (if I can call it a road) from Kilwa to Pweto when my eyes caught sight of a young woman breastfeeding her child (who I recon was at least a year old). The woman was casually lying on a small mat, stretched outside of her house, with her breast exposed for the not very young child to suck on (Breasts seem to be not as sexualized in the Congolese culture as in many other cultures—certainly the ones I know. You often see women topless by the river washing cloths or their children. On the same token, breastfeeding in the open seems not to be a private matter. One would see women breastfeed their children right by the road side where many unfamiliar faces may pass by). Like in many other occasions, tens of children started running along side the road shouting Muzungu, Kikopo (which apparently means bottle. Children ask for empty bottles from the passersby and then sell them for a meager income). But the climax came when the little one took her mouth off the nipple and started shouting along with the other children as soon as s/he realize that a white person was in the car. I am not even sure if s/he actually saw me or just reacted to the excitement of the other kids, but either way, it was a sweet scene.

This part of the country is relatively mountainous with several small and large rivers cutting through the green and beige landscape. There are two major lakes in this region, lake Muero, which borders Zambia and D.R. Congo and lake Tanganika that borders Uganda, Rwanda and two provinces of the D.R. Congo. They are so gorgeous. They are extremely soothing. There is water and water as far as eyes can see. And of course dawn and dusk are particularly pretty. We also passed through two rivers, one river Lwapula and the other river Luvua. Awesome!

People are hardworking and friendly. There are thousands of them on the road with their worn-out bicycles carrying massive cargos from timber and charcoal to several jerry cans of water. I bet that the average weight of the cargos surpass 100 kilos. While pushing their bicycles up the steep hills on terrible dirt roads, they hardly ever fail to respond to your waving hands with a friendly hand-wave. Being in a closer contact with them has calmed me down a great deal.

Right before setting off for the field, I finished another book about the Congo, which was again about war and rebellion in this country. The scenes in this brilliantly written book were so graphic that I started having nightmares night after night. In my dreams, people were slicing each other up and young children were shooting women on the head. But now that I am seeing them on a human level, I am much more at peace with myself and the world. Sometimes it is good to cut yourself off of what the others have to tell you about a phenomenon and start observing it yourself without intermediaries.

On a different note, what makes me love this experience most is the pale face of hypocrisy among these people. Since my graduate studies at an American university in one of the most diverse cities of the world, I was introduced to the concept of power (especially in the context of the West-East or North-South relationship) in a manner different from before. In this new understanding, hypocrisy has a central role. Power, thus, has a new meaning and further significance for me. Since then, this is first time that I have had the chance to step into an environment where hypocrisy is not sullying the air you breathe. I regained some hope for humanity. And please do not get me wrong, hypocrisy plays a very significant role in power relations here in the Congo, but it is so little in the rural areas that it may be called nonexistent. Perhaps hypocrisy is a virtue that grows alongside what we like to call “civilization.”

I felt, in many instances, that my organization’s vehicle was the messenger of hypocrisy. We are here to serve these people but our vehicles are banned from giving ride to even the most devastated human being on the road. In so many instances people plead to us for a ride to the next village or to the hospital/health center, but the driver refused, obeying the orders! Also, in these dusty roads, wherever we moved, we made the population inhale way more dust than they normally would. The inhuman scale of our 4x4 was very apparent in this context. The amount of dust that the humanly sized bicycles can make is not existent as compared to what our white Land Cruiser was unsettling. This made me think hard and long about a concept that E.F. Schumacher wrote about 36 years ago (1973) in his epic book of economics “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.”

Schumacher talks a lot about the disastrous nature of any human product that is inhumanly sized. He talks about how giantism or what we tend to call gigantism is having unreparable effects on life on planet earth. (Notice the already changing language in terms of size from less than four decades ago! It seems that giantism stopped describing the phenomenon of our industrial and post industrial society and therefore we had to go one step higher and come up with a term that reflects the increasing size. If chain stores of the 1960s were giants, walmart is definitely gigantic! If the Boeings that would carry 200 passengers were giants, the new versions that accommodate thousands are no doubt gigantic!). Reference to this concept, I was thinking how the 4x4 is inhumanly sized for this society is still using bicycles as the primary means of transportation. And then I started thinking about what goes on in the mind of these people when they see this giant machine that moves 100 km/hr, leaving them in a haze of dust and dreams!

Of course I am not claiming that I can predict what these people think, but I tried as hard as possible to put myself in their place and think. I came up with two general categories of thoughts: 1. hatred and disgust and 2. admiration and wonder. The first category primarily brings a desire for destruction and revenge and the second stimulates envy and desire of being in the driver’s seat of the giant. In either case (and if I am not too far off in my analysis), the reaction of these people can be disastrous from the perspective of the rich and powerful. The rich neither wants its “stuff” to be destructed nor it wants anyone else in the driver’s seat. I believe the reality of their feelings is probably some sort of a combination of these two categories. What is important is: which one is stronger and why?!

Once I addressed my peers at the graduate school in a class that was primarily focusing on the American foreign policy in the Middle East. I tried to make my classmates—some of whom would probably soon have serious decision-making power in the American government—understand that there is a difference between how two people can perceive the same reality to be extremely different: the one who looks through the peephole of a tank’s cockpit versus the one who looks through the barrel of the tank, waiting for a 200 mm bullet to role out. I urged them to sometimes—when they are making decision about people’s lives—only imagine how it feels to be looking through the barrel of an ultra modern tank that is just about to fire on your house and destroy your world. Of course the tank is just a metaphor as I do not think any of my classmates would join the army on a combat level.

Then, I was primarily trying to explain the hatred that exists amongst many Middle Eastern populations against the West. But since I stepped into Africa, I am realizing that the latter category (the one of admiration and wonder) is generally dominant in this part of the world. Now I am questioning my own judgment of the Middle Eastern population: are they really reacting out of hatred or do they just want to be the one who looks through the peephole and not through the barrel? I will try to find a satisfying answer to this soon, as it is hurting my brain these days!!!