I shot this video with a Sony still camera Cyber-shot on Sunday July 25 at Maluku, a commune of the Congolese capital, by the River Congo, about 80 km east of downtown Kinshasa.
I was privileged to spend the entire day there at the Portuguese-owned and aptly named bar-restaurant “Le Petit Paradis,” courtesy of the blogger buddy Luka Mambu I first met a few years ago on Cédric Kalonji’s blog and who later became a fixture on my blog in French.
Though his handle “Luka Mambu” is Lingala for “the one who picks quarrels,” the guy is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in Kinshasa in a long time. He is also one of those people you need to know in Kin: he’s a rich businessman (he moves every two months between Kinshasa and Brussels) and, most of all, he has a powerful machine in the shape of a brand new BMW in a city where moving around could turn into a major headache.
"Le Petit Paradis"
Maluku is steeped in Congo’s history. Mobutu always boasted to have set it into an integral commune of the capital, thus giving the Teke ethnic group—the tribal entity to whom the territory of Kinshasa traditionally belongs—the recognition they so much deserved. To get to Maluku you’d drive by N’Sele, the infamous place where Mobutu literally buried Congolese democracy underneath a stele, still visible on the left side of the road as you head towards the Congo River, where the first draft of the “N’Sele Manifesto” is interred! And today, to get to Kingakati, the presidential ranch, you also have to drive through the partially broken N’sele River Bridge (I’m told the Chinese will soon repair it) where there’s a strong police presence. That Sunday, as the Raïs went out early to his ranch, there were a few elements of the presidential guard at the bridge…
But the long overdue respect the Congolese owe to the Teke ethnic group came with a hefty price for both the Kinois and Teke common people. It turns out that Teke leaders are the ones who profit from the “manna” that this recognition showered on them. Modern land tenure and land use laws don’t apply on Tekeland; it’s the tribal leaders who decide who owns what piece of land. They have virtually sold all their tribal land to powerful Kinshasa elites, who turn them into ranches, farms or “ngandas” (sidewalk/open-air bars). And when a piece of land is sold, boundary stones and barbwires are set up to delimit the boundaries of the property, and poor Teke households are forced to move from their homesteads. In other words: the wild, Wild West.
A pirogue with a makeshift sail
After these limits have been built, the new owner then slashes and burns the place to the ground. As most of these ranches start out at the curb of the road, bamboo trees whose shoots used to add to the delicacies of the Chinese community of Kinshasa have all been burned to ashes.
I don’t know whether the members of this new tropical “landed gentry” know that their mindless slash-and-burn would end up destroying the roads and causing catastrophic erosions on the erosion-prone sandy soil of Kinshasa and its vicinities.
What’s more, a systematic attack has also been launched against the eucalyptuses that used to line so beautifully this road, trees planted under the previous regime when this roadway was opened to lead to one of Mobutu’s white elephants: the now virtually defunct steel plant “Sidérurgie de Maluku.” It’s the impoverished Teke who’ve been mowing down eucalyptuses to burn them into charcoal, a brisk commerce for fuel-hungry Kinshasa. Only a few isolated patches of these eucalyptuses have been able to repulse the seemingly unrelenting assault on them. Smaller trees and shrubs are also being systematically cut down and sold in bundles along the road or trucked to Kinshasa.
“Le Petit Paradis” is an open-air bar and restaurant that has about half a dozen gazebos by the left bank of the Congo River, whose width is so tiny at this spot (about 5 km) that it is called the Channel: you can even see through the mist of the “elanga,” Kinshasa cold dry season, a small fishermen village on the right bank, the side of Congo-Brazzaville. That explains why the place teems with plain clothed immigration security officials. At one point, as I was snapping a few photos of the place, one security agent angrily confronted me, claiming I took a picture of him. A claim I vigorously denied. His hands on the camera, he forced me to scroll the photos to make sure I didn’t take his photo. But Ntsimba, a tough Kinois who always accompanies Luka Mambu, came up and brazenly broke up the donnybrook in progress. I had a narrow escape there: the man would most certainly have seized the camera had I been alone.
Luka Mambu is known to local fishermen as a good and steady Kinois customer. As soon as we settled down under the canopy of a gazebo, a few of them flocked around it, offering their catches: “capitaines,” “zaikos” (formerly known as “congo-ya-sika” or new congo, the same name as water hyacinths that are choking the river), etc. Between the fishermen (mostly non-Teke outsiders) and the buyers, there are “commissionaires” (or brokers) who are young Teke from the village next to “Le Petit Paradis.” They are the owners of the land and the waters; and any fisherman who’d cross them would be banned from fishing around here.
Simon with his catches
Luka Mambu insisted on dealing directly with Simon (photo below), a fisherman from the Topoke ethnic group from around Kisangani in the Orientale Province. But Simon was a clever young man: it seemed to me he was just including the percentage of the required commission into the price of the fishes he was selling to Luka Mambu, $35 for 4 huge fishes, one of which was given to me as a present.
Simon introduces a "zaiko"
Oddly enough, the place was all left to the expats, there were almost no representatives of the Congolese business or political elite around. It seems that successful Congolese, with the exception of guys of the ilk of Luka Mambu, shun calm places like “Le Petit Paradis”: the crowed streets of the capital are their natural element.
Luka Mambu tells me there’s a nautical club downtown by the river that rents boats; and renting a boat is “a very, very, very expensive proposition.” As the average Congolese can’t afford renting a boat, “Le Petit Paradis” will remain for the foreseeable future the exclusive small paradise of Kinshasa expats. To make matters worse, Luka Mambu informs me, the average Kinshasa kid doesn’t have the opportunity of seeing the river up close and most of them can’t swim: businesses and industries have built warehouses and factories for kilometers on end along the bank of the Congo River. How sad!...
A boat pushes barges loaded with merchandise and hundreds of passengers towards Kisangani
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