The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuściński Read Free Book Online

everything was comprehensible. Whether he liked it or not, the tribal organization gave him one thing: a balanced life. He knew that if he found himself in situation X, he should resolve it by method Y. Such was the custom. But in the city a man found himself alone. In the city there are the boss, the landlord, the grocer. One pays you, and the others have to be paid. There are more of the latter and that’s when the trouble starts. Nobody cares about anybody else. Work finishes and you have to go somewhere. People go to the bars.
    To tell the truth, Lumumba’s career begins in the bars. In the clay-hut districts of Leo you can find 500 of them. TheAfrican bar has nothing in common with, for instance, the Bar Lowicki back home in Warsaw. In the Lowicki a guy stands in line, gets a shot of vodka, munches a pickle and disappears. If he wants another drink, he has to stand in line again. A crowd, haste: cultural life is out of the question.
    My favourite bar in Africa is called Alex. Often the names are more suggestive: ‘Why Not?’ ‘You’ll Get Lost’ or ‘Only You’. Recently, more high-flown signs have been hung out, like ‘Independence’, ‘Freedom’ or ‘The Struggle’. Alex is a small one-storey shack but decorated like an inn for a country wedding—gay and extravagant. It stands in the shade of the palms, among billboards advertising Coca-Cola, Martell and Shell. In the morning it’s virtually empty, but in the evening it draws a swarm of people. They sit on tin chairs at tin tables and drink beer.
    There has to be beer. A lot of bottles and a lot of glasses. The bottle caps ring against the floor. From these caps the black pussy-cats make belts, which they wrap around their hips. The pussy-cat walks and the caps rustle. This rustling is taken to be exciting. There has to be jazz. And raspy Armstrong. The records are so worn out that they no longer carry melody, only that rasping. But the bar dances. It makes no difference that everyone is sitting down. Look at their feet, their shoulders, their hands. You can talk, argue and flirt, do business, read the Bible or snooze. The body always dances. The belly undulates, the head sways, the whole bar sways until late at night.
    This is a second home. In their own homes they cannot sit around because it’s cramped, grey, poverty-stricken. The women are quarrelling, the kids are peeing in the corner, there are no bright crêpe dresses and Armstrong isn’t singing. Home is constraint and the bar is freedom. A white informer will not go to a bar because a white person standsout. So you can talk about everything. The bar is always full of words. The bar deliberates, argues and pontificates. The bar will take up any subject, argue about it, dwell on it, try to get at the truth. Everybody will come around and put in their two cents’ worth. The subject doesn’t matter. The important thing is to participate. To speak up. An African bar is the Roman Forum, the main square in a medieval market town, Robespierre’s Parisian wine cellar. Reputations, adulatory or annihilating, are born here. Here you are lifted on to a pedestal or tumbled with a crash to the pavement. If you delight the bar you will have a great career; if the bar laughs at you, you might as well go back to the jungle. In the fumes of foaming beer, in the pungent scent of the girls, in the incomprehensible roiling of the tom-toms, names, dates, opinions and judgements are exchanged. They weigh a problem, ponder it, bring forth the pros and cons. Someone is gesticulating, a woman is nursing a baby, laughter explodes around someone’s table. Gossip, fever and crowding. Here they are settling the price for a night together, there they are putting together a revolutionary programme, at the next table somebody is recommending a good witch-doctor, and further on somebody is saying that there is going to be a strike. A bar like this is everything you could want: a club and a pawn shop, a boardwalk and a