Personal: Missing Mobutu on my birthday

Me

September 2, 1974

Photo: Paris-Studio, Kisangani, Zaire

Bear with me on this ranting, folks. I’m writing this on my birthday, after drinking 4 crisp cold patriotic Samuel Adams lager at Bcafé, in Brookland, D.C—one of the beers, courtesy the owners of Bcafé (check this place out if you happen to be in this neighborhood: great lunch and dinner; outgoing waiters and waitresses; and 2 young formidable owners). I just turned down an invitation by housemates—a couple, two  kids from Catholic University of America—to go out to Chinatown for “free concert, and food” as  one of them billed the soirée. And for good reason…

On this very street, on Thursday, November 15, 2007, at 8 PM, I was shot by “two hoodlums” (“two hooded black guys”). Here’s how I described the shooting on my other blog in French (though this particular post was strangely written in English):

“A neighbor---a white guy who’s worked in Sierra Leone---sees me, says hello, and crosses the street on the side where I am. He tells me he’s just returning from the ‘Brookings Institute,’ the liberal think-tank, where Hubert Vedrine, the former French Foreign Affairs Minister, has given a talk. Suddenly two hoodlums---two hooded black guys---cross the street towards us. The guy on my left is holding a handgun trained at me, and shoots, aiming at my left eye from a distance of less than 3 meters!  I hit the ground, hollering, and I badly hurt my knees on the pavement. My neighbor, who thinks I’ve been hit, runs back, hollering too. The two hoodlums flee the scene on foot. I pick myself up, go where my neighbor was standing and both of us attempt to get into the house of this guy who’d just opened his door: he immediately shuts the door in our faces! Detectives, called by my neighbor from his cellphone, arrive on the scene, secure a perimeter, and quickly find the casing of the bullet.”

One of the detectives told a family member who’d heard the shot from the front yard of our house as I was on phone with her and driven to the scene after hearing the gun report: “It’s kids, ma’am, high on some drugs, who wanted to shoot at someone! Had they been professionals, they’d not have missed… Plus: they’d have finished him off as he [me] tells me he couldn’t get up having hurt his knees.”

Another detective, “a burly guy called Joseph Radvansky(,) gives me his card on which he’d written the number of my case: 157141 (Fifth District)… I would’ve been just another statistic today: horrible!”

What I didn’t mention in that contemporaneous account of the event was that one of the detectives told me the “kids” were probably wannabe gangbangers who were after my neighbor, who’s white—as such a "white-boy kill" could have been given them extra credits in their induction ritual!

Good grief! You kidding me, dying for an “Induction Ritual”? Are these guys the Mungikis of the First World or something?  BTW, I used to go back home at impossible hours in Nairobi, and had never been once bothered by the Mungikis or the ma-diambazis (hoodlums). In Kinshasa, besides being roughed up one night by rogue cops, I’d never felt threatened there. But this is D.C., my friends, where hoodlums could kill you for the sake of an induction ritual…

In Kinshasa, such an auspicious occasion as my birthday would have been celebrated by my buddies at some "nganda" (sidewalk bar) in the neighborhood of Matonge with many Skol and Primus beers—and, for good measure, two or more huge joints of potent bhang from Bumba, in the Equateur Province.

In any case, the person I miss the most today on my birthday is Joseph-Désiré Mobutu aka Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Zabanga.

The photo above was taken in Mobutu’s heyday. I was then a sophomore in my hometown university, now called the Université de Kisangani (at the time it was called Université Nationale du Zaire (UNAZA)—Campus de Kisangani).

I had a government scholarship—virtually every single Zairian university student had one, except the really extreme morons who couldn’t pass the required test that consisted in multiple-choice questions of this kind: “What’s the state capital of Alaska?”—that paid me 35 zaïres (at the time 1 zaïre was worth 2 dollars; today, $1 = 950 Congolese francs when I flew from Kinshasa on June 20).

This was a lot of money! My dad had retired a couple of years earlier from CEGEAC, the Compagnie Générale d’Automobile, a Belgian Ford importer. During the colonial period, my dad had worked as a “boy” for the “Bruxellois” Baron van den Bruck, who had a sizeable share in CEGEAC. At independence, Baron van den Bruck had my dad reconvert as a carpenter at the workshop of the CEGEAC garage. But by the time my dad retired, he would only get paid his meager pension every quarterly: the country’s social security system was already bankrupt. And it was with my scholarship that I put food on my family’s table for four long years…

Mobutu’s government also subsidized my primary and secondary schools—expensive Catholic schools where I rubbed shoulders with the sons of the Zairian elite (at that time Catholic schools were all non-gender-mixed schools)… BTW, today, the Congolese elite send their kids to school in South Africa, Europe, or here, in America (war-profiteering bastards!)…

We lived in peace; we didn’t know about Rwanda or Kagame (fuck the bastard!); and on Saturdays, we’d go to a movie theater with friends...

There was also a sophisticated system of public libraries left by Belgians. In fact that’s how I learned English. I had to repeat the 10^th grade because I had failed English, Math, and Physics. I then decided to be an expert on those subject-matters. During the school holidays of my 10^th grade debacle, I went to the public library of my hometown and stole a volume titled The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. That’s where I learned my stammering English: in the fascinating Song of Hiawatha. Uncannily, it was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I landed and stayed when I first got to the U.S. And to this day, I feel bad for not going to pay my respects at the grave of Longfellow at Mount Auburn Cemetery… Well, I’m Congolese, and we’re scared of cemeteries and the spirits of the dead!... Oh, I forgot: beside the Song of Hiawatha, there was also a VOA program called “Special English Program.” The deep voice of one Al Ross still rings into my ears: “This is the Voice of America. The News. Read by Al Ross.” I just googled the string “Al Ross” as I was writing this and I got this sad hit (from WashingtonPost, April 5, 1987): “Al Ross, Ex-Radio Radio Show Host and VOA Broadcaster, dies” (the guy was 71)…

Mobutu has been long dead; there are no schools left; there are no movie theaters; and Congolese students now graduate from high-school and college without having once read one short novel in their short miserable life.

Now, there was a UNDP report that came out last year which, according to the BBC, “concludes that since 1970 there has been significant progress” in the Third World. With this damning caveat however:

“In Africa only three countries have gone backwards since 1970 - the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and Zambia - the first two because of conflict and bad government, and the last principally because of HIV/Aids.”

Well, the Democratic Republic of Congo didn’t go “backwards.” In fact, the country was faring better “backwards” than it is right now… As I recently told a friend, the DRC has gone out of the axis of its own history…

In the meanwhile, to end this rant, I open the last Sam Adams of my six-pack, and, before sipping it from the bottleneck, I say cheers to Mobutu, Longfellow, and Al Ross...in the approximate order of their appearance in my life!

***

UPDATE:

Tin Cup Gypsy
Hill County (Barbecue, Market)
July 8, 2010
Washington, DC
(iPhone Photo: T.R.)

We got back home at 00:48 HRS—military time, so to speak—masterly driven by Lexie, a Virginian CUA senior—a dazzling young woman…

Well, I ended up yielding to the “peer pressure” from the CUA kids. They were bent on getting me “shit-faced” on my birthday after all. There was no way I could escape. And I obliged… grudgingly…

They knew exactly where to have me trashed: at a "Texan" joint called “Hill Country (Barbecue Market), Honoring the Barbecue & Live Music, Capital of Texas” (don’t scold me, I’m only reading the business card of the joint), on 410 Seventh Street NW, downtown D.C. I’m told this joint opened about 4 months ago in DC (no wonder I never stumbled upon it: I was in Kinshasa): this is definitely a new DC “hot spot.” Check it out when you happen to be in the world capital.

There were four of us: Trevor & Bridget (housemates); Mike & Lexie; and your humble servant: me!

The joint reminded me of the Plough & Stars of Cambridge, Massachusetts—except that this place is huge. A vast swath of eatery and bar on the first floor; and, in the basement, a bar with a live band (they tell me there’s another space on the second floor). The band playing tonight was the Tin Cup Gypsy—and check out their website here. (BTW, by association of ideas, I think of the Gypsy’s Bar in the Westland neighborhood of Nairobi.) These guys even featured me, with two other birthday guys: a man and a “girl” (so embarrassing: the CUA kids arranged this)…

I’m too tired to say more... But I still remember my beer count: 7 Sam Adams (on top of the earlier six-pack); 4 PRB (tepid, but, hey!, one PRB goes for $2 and you get another bottle for free: how can you beat that?); and 4 or 5 shots of Tequila… (Comment from a friend, July 9: No one can drink that much alcohol and sit up to write about the stupid suicidal feat on the same night: sophomoric drivel!!!) I almost forgot: I also ate (barbecue chicken and a birthday cake, complete with a candle: these guys spoiled me)…

Well, I didn’t get drunk! There was one crucial thing missing though: a fat joint! Fun is too “policed” with these kids, and in DC (I don't really have buddies here)… So, it ended up not being like the Dionysian late nights of Cambridge or Kinshasa or Nairobi. It was fun enough though… But before I went out with the CUA crowds, my friend Lorraine Thompson aka Bilonda wished me to have fun, by all means, though a minute later she texted me this philosophical riddle: “Hmmmm are ‘have fun’ and ‘be wise’ oxymorons?”… No, Bilonda, they aren’t oxymorons; and this soirée is proof positive of that: I had fun and I’m still wise as of this writing...

And thanks to these kids for making me overcome my PTSD!