Stringer by Anjan Sundaram Read Free Book Online Page B

Congo I had made contact with a student conservation group protecting rare mangrove forests. I wanted the environment to be a theme of my reporting, and the students were enthusiastic to show me their fieldwork. But more than anything, I was curious to get out of the city.
    The coast was not too far away: we traveled most of the way by bus, passing forests and market towns, and then made a short ferry ride, until we came to the gushing mouth of the Congo River. The ferryboat curved around the continent, and to the port of Banana.
    We lodged at a defunct resort on the beach. The rooms only provided shelter, without beds or electricity. Water had to be fetched from a nearby village. I walked with the students along the mangrove forest, with its stunted trees that seemed raised on stilts. We waded in the rivulets that flowed into the ocean. The students showed me some grunt fish that the locals hunted for food. In the evening we sat on the sand, watching the sun set over the waves. And at night the horizon seemed dotted with several suns—appearing almost as bright as during the day:Congo’s minuscule twenty-five miles of coast was rich with oil; the lights were the flares of oil rigs.
    Each morning on the beach I watched a dozen fishermen push out their boats. By evening, when they returned, their fine nets had caught pebble-sized juveniles and discolored adults coated in black film.
    It was for these sights that I had come. I conceived of this, my first trip outside Kinshasa, as an exploration of the context surrounding the capital: the sprawling grasslands, the ghostly villages, the gushing river, the giant Japanese suspension bridge ordered by Mobutu, the ships at the port cities (an American naval vessel was docked at one), the heavily guarded oil company premises (visitors were not even allowed to stand nearby). And already I felt my notion of Congo expand: the city had swamped the senses with its movement and noise, but the countryside had an intellectual, less accessible complexity—for whom had the Americans come? There had been no news in Kinshasa. Was the ocean being poisoned, emptied of fish? How much had the petroleum company paid the oil minister? Here the machinations seemed beyond the scrutiny of the people and able to proceed in silence, secrecy.
    It would have to be from the city outward that I would grasp Congo. The excursion ended too quickly: the weekend was barely over when we left for Kinshasa. The students piled into the bus with boxes of specimens. We rumbled up the hills. And as much as the trip had progressed in friendly atmosphere, the journey home was marred by misunderstandings: the students had assumed that I, as the foreigner, would pay for their hotel, food and bus tickets. Worse, they believed I had promised. After several arguments—which effectively ended our friendship—I agreed to pay half.
    We approached the suburbs of Kinshasa and passed through them one by one. Each seemed a separate city, with a differentvibe: cordial, lazy, tumultuous. Our bus traveled alongside container trucks bringing food and merchandise from the ports. There were the tankers, spilling what seemed like gasoline in a trail from their bottoms. On the tall trees hung black balls like pendulums—weaverbird nests. We drove beside rows and rows of pylons that brought electricity from the massive river dams, and we followed the wires into the city.
    The reception at home was cool. Jose and Nana were preoccupied with paying the electricity bill and the rent. Corinthian was hardly around, passing his nights at the church compound. There was some news: the Opposition Debout had marched peacefully on the Boulevard, to which the government had sent riot police. It created bad sentiment in the neighborhood. At the bars, the corner shop, and around the kiosks the discussions centered on the new wave of government reprisals; and like everything at the time the authorities were also blamed when it emerged