The Other Shore. Michael Jackson
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tusks from elephants slaughtered near Lac Leopold II, bone ornaments blackened with shoe polish, hand-painted postcards, black market cheese, canned fruit, and cigarettes.
One weekend, a Dutch friend and amateur lepidopterist asked me to accompany him to Pic Mensi, a forested uplands in the Bas-Congo. Hank laid out his baits in a forest clearing—fermented mangoes mixed with his own feces. We watched and waited as rare blues, every bit as brilliant as the ultramarine windows in Chartres Cathedral, fluttered and drift ed through shafts of sunlight before settling nervously to feed.
Hank netted several, and showed me how to handle them, gently squeezing the life out of their bodies before transferring them to a collection box. Each one, he explained, was worth a small fortune on the European market. But this was not why he collected them. He was enthralled by their beauty and fascinated that such beauty had evolved simply to attract a mate, so that in a lifetime of no more than a few days, these creatures were driven by little else than the exigencies of reproduction. Their own life had no other meaning than to create another life, to perpetuate their kind.
We camped that evening on a grassy plain. As night fell, a young man passed up the track, holding a mbira on his head and playing a melody that seemed to mingle with the stars. A warm wind murmured in the long grass.
In the middle of the night I woke to hear an animal splashing across a stream, crashing into the forest beyond. Unable to sleep, I walked out into the grassland and lay on my back, looking up at the stars. I was ecstatically happy. And yet, when I contemplated the conditions that had made that moment possible (Hank’s passion for butterflies, the fruit pulp and fecal matter that he carefully prepared to capture them) and the sheer contingency of things (the swallowtails that survived his net because they were far more common than the brilliant blues, the lives of insects, sustained only for as long as it took to breed, and the countless ants gutting the fallen bodies, tearing the veiled wings, filing away with them along the forest trail), all this conspired to suggest that my happiness had been won at someone else’s expense, and that simply by being in the Congo I was participating in, and perhaps perpetuating, a history of terrible wrongs. And I remember the longing I felt, as we drove past the village of Bibwe and onto the main road to Léopoldville—to live in such a village, to get to know its people, to give up trying to change the Congo for the better and suffer the transfiguration of myself.
Not long after my excursion to Pic Mensi, a dusk to dawn curfew was imposed in Léopoldville. At ONUC6 headquarters, several “nonessential” personnel packed up and flew back to Geneva or New York. Travel outside the city was banned. Some of the Haitian girls at Le Royal responded to the curfew by throwing all-night parties. It was fun for a while. A welcome distraction. I would drive my jeep home at dawn. Women would be walking along the side of the road with basins of manioc, firewood lashed with lianas, and bundles of clothing balanced on their heads. I felt like driving out of the city and into the interior, as far as I could go.
I had a companion for a while. A girl I met in a nightclub called Le Carousel—une fille de joie. We would spend the evenings drinking and dancing in the hotel bar, and the nights at cross-purposes. I tried to persuade Sophie to take me on a visit to her home, but her life was off limits, like her real name.
Lips caked with lipstick
and the smell of booze
you dance with the man with 10,000 francs
until the music moves him to
take you to the room where the rite will be.
Preferring him not
to put out the light
you remove a bonnet of dead women’s hair
beneath which you jealously preserve
stiff braids of an African coiffure.
Down to your silken underthings
and his own undoing scarcely seen
you are the cur under midnight heat
of a mad dog doing it
for what in Europe would have been love.
Then I met Dominique at one of the Haitian parties, and I thought I was in love with her. But love was as tantalizing and elusive as the villages I romanticized, the lifeworlds I longed to enter, the rites I wanted to see, the masks I wanted to try on, the drums I wanted to hear.
She was French, and married to an entrepreneur. They had an apartment in Parcembise—a suburb inhabited, in colonial times, by Léopoldville’s élite. Its streets were shaded by jacarandas. Villas were enclosed by high walls, topped with broken glass and barbed wire. Behind wrought-iron gates, guard dogs salivated, bared their fangs, and barked at Congolese passing up and down the street. The air was scented with frangipani and bougainvillea.
I was oppressed by the contradictions. The beauty and order that accompanied such entrenched inequality. The civilizing mission that masked racism, violence, and delirium. I thought of the rare blues in the forests of Pic Mensi, lured to their death by a white man’s feces.
How could I be in love with someone whose lifestyle seemed like a studied insult to the servants who made it possible? How could I attend the cocktail parties at Dominique’s when the man who served us drinks had to support his family on the pittance he was paid? How could I stand in the same room as the gangly Australian complaining about the roadblocks, telling us that the Congolese had been in the trees so long that they all wanted to be branch managers? How could I give friendly pats to the dog that had been trained to fly at the throat of any and every black man? And how could Dom respect a husband who was doing everything in his power to obstruct her brother’s marriage to his Rwandan fiancée?
Though I had been admitted to this social circle on account of my color and my work, I nonetheless tried to stand apart from it. Like Sophie, I suppose, keeping from me her thoughts, her family, her village, her name.
It was about this time that the Congolese Prime Minister, Moïse Tshombe, hired an Irish-born mercenary, “Mad” Mike Hoare, to lead a group of 300 South African mercenaries against the rebel Simbas in the eastern Congo. The rebellion was momentarily and violently suppressed, but it took a terrible toll. As the mercenary columns drove along potholed roads between tall brakes of elephant grass and through remote villages, they made no attempt to discriminate between friend and foe. An African was a savage: stupid, ungovernable, and untrustworthy. And so the mercenaries opened fire on whoever hindered their progress or was seen as a potential threat or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
With Kasai “pacified,” I was dispatched to the region on a reconnaissance tour, to see whether any ONUC projects had survived the war.
I remember the stench of death. Outside Albertville, there were corpses on the roadsides. Emaciated dogs fought over the bloated bodies, snarling and scavenging. In the main street, not a building remained unscathed: windows had been smashed, interiors looted, buildings torched. The town was deserted, save for groups of gun-toting boys in ill-fitting fatigues, half-crazy on hemp, who mimed what they would do when they got their hands on anyone who had consorted with the rebels.
One afternoon, I went down to the lake. Though the dead had now been buried, the sand hills were still littered with shell cases and scraps of clothing.
A small boy approached me with cupped hands. He was indistinguishable from all the other orphans that begged or hung about us as we worked, except he was alone like me, in a place where no one now set foot, and he held out his hands in fatalistic submission. I said I had nothing, but if he accompanied me back to town I would find him some food. I asked, as one did through habit, the pointless question, Where is your family? And he told me, as if I needed to know, that they were all dead.
That night he slept outside my billet, and for the next two days he dogged my heels, until it was time for me to leave.
He wanted to come with me. “That isn’t possible,” I said. “I have to go far away. I cannot take you.”
As I crossed the tarmac to the UN C-130, he clawed at my sleeve, imploring me not to desert him.
On