The Dusty Lands of VaCongolaise

I slept like a dead man.

Not that I felt dead; I was curved like a handball at the back of the bus, my knees digging into my ribcage – breathing was becoming a luxury I was too crammed in to afford. There was simply not enough space to stretch my legs so I could enjoy my fitful sleep.

The soil at the Kasumbalesa Border – which separates the Zambians from the Congolese – is so fine a conman could succeed in selling it off to you as cement. As the buses and gonyetis ooze towards the exit point from the Zambian side, their tyres are actually buried halfway in the quicksand-like clayey-loam; leaving soft ditches and raising enough dust to bleach everything and everybody in the 5km radius of the national boundary.

I think I may have told some of my friends that the Beitbridge Border town is the worst pace I have ever been to. But now that I have been here, I can apparently see how  so wrong I was – Kasumbalesa will beat them all systems down.

Ignorant that their place of business can actually be classified as non-ecumene in some states even in Southern Africa, the professional border authorities actually take the temerity to let us rot in that dusthole for one long night, because we got to the border a minute before it closed. It is late, and we know not a soul in this place who could help our weary, travel-battered bodies which have been on the road for the second day running; with a roof and a bed to sleep in.

I am hungry; and I thirst for a Lion Lager. The smell of fried chicken and a lot of other delicacies I cannot fathom at the moment, mingles with the dust as it wafts its way up my nostrils. I can just but sigh – there is food out there and the noise of blaring component systems tells me there is an ice cold lager anywhere I wanna look. But I am also a recently married man; traditionally married to a fine girl whom I met five years ago and only made a right woman of just a week ago. I did not even get the time to consummate the marriage before I was whisked into the jungles by Mr. JOB. Just thinking of her, I can feel junior man rising to protest his rights; and I think of her only twice – night and day. So you can understand my longing to let the supper cup pass me by in Kasumbalesa – just the sight of anything female clad in skimpies is enough to drive me over the edge. But the wife is so good I have no desire to do anything to lose her trust or bring her to the grim reaper’s alter on a silver plate through some few careless magazine unloading moments.

I will stay put in the bus until we leave this place – even if it means my feet will look like a pestle.

When I wake up the next morning the hunger has pared my bones almost into fossil fuel, and is now gnawing at the innards of my very soul. But for my legs, which have sadly expanded into something worse than just a pestle and approaching elephantiasis, you could knock me down with a dove’s feather. I feel so frail from the belly up that, in my stuporous state of famine, I give in to the mirage that I’m a bread crump. And I feel so heavy from the waist down that each of my legs could be tied to a gonyeti-load of black granite from Mutoko.

But we drag ourselves through the border bric a brac and red tape without much ado; except of course for Didela the Shark who spent the whole night drinking like a shark he is and predating some $5 pussy. When he finally catches up, the crew is huddled around the last barrier into the land of The Congolese. The only true shark, Didela looks obviously unloaded down there, and the whiteness on his mouth suggests it has lost a night-long battle to stay away from burning liquids. It also suggests something else; something akin to panic. I can imagine.

At our allocated living quarters a la Tshondo Primary School – a name which would sound expletively mischievous in my mother’s tongue, everybody has forgotten to concentrate and will respond to only two words. Food. Sleep. In that order. Even when the advance party warns us not to keep our hopes high about the living conditions in this place – it is a seminary and a primary school, not the HIT or some no-star hotel in uptown H-town – we only can do all but listen. It can’t be really worse that sleeping a bus, can it?

Oh; yes it can – save for only that Hoi Polloi now has the luxury of reposing in a proper supine position, and not dose off in fits and starts while culled into a ball in an upright position at the back of the bus. Sadly, that is the only luxury; the luckiest among us – who cannot be mentioned by name, lest we may be struck by Samanyika’s maenza Bolts of lightning – get to share a room for two. But the rest of hoi polloi is a loosely collected travelling party of second class citizens; here second class citizens get second class treatment.

The room actually looks like a ballroom or a classroom or a barrack, with three rows of double-storey bunk beds placed foot-to-foot, only leaving some little space for two narrow aisles between the rows. In other rooms you bite your nails pondering how the shallow underfoot-deep dam of water came to fill up the corridors; were the caretakers washing off the dirt, or the water actually flows through here? And in others, the flow is actually coming from above. God. This is going to be a disaster. Everybody is thinking it, but only a few say it. Nobody counters them.

The well-travelled athletes among us, who have been to almost every SARPCCO Olympics since their inauguration more than a decade ago will not help matters by rummaging into the dustbin and digging up war stories about all the best places they have been to. In South Africa they stayed in a five-star hotel baby. Five-star. It was the same in Botswana. And in Malawi they stayed at a university campus so beautiful they dreamt making love to beautiful Chewa-speaking students all night every night. Oh they have been to all beautiful places they say. And they have been to worse places.

But they have never in their waking and subconscious lives made to live through any squalor like this. Even Hades would be a welcome respite.

Hades. Now my head is starting to spin; because hell to me is just like sex. Sex is Kafkasque – as a child, my mother told me sex was painful. At school, the teacher taught us that sex brought diseases. And the pastor preached to us that sex was a sin. Yet in my dreams sex was the very pleasure of kissing the Lord himself’s feet. And nobody lectured me on how to keep my urges away from the almighty temptation of pain, sin and disease.

Having cut my teeth as a law-keeping journo only a few moons ago, my experience with the Sarpcco Olympics is between none and very limited. I have never been to a five-star hotel to pass judgement on whether the squat hole that is just as big as the size of my actual King Hole is the best or the worst sanitary facility I have ever used; inclusive of even the bush system. And I have never been to any international university vicinity to tell if a shower that has to be begged to produce a few drops is better or worse.

I could go on and on about the doors that simply refuse to close; never mind about locking; the mosquitoes whose expensive lullaby actually keeps you up the whole night instead of guiding you in to the arms of Morpheus and the food, which sometimes does not reach all of us. And do I really have to narrate the stranger than fiction fact of shit handlers who forbid you to toss away the used tissue into the squat hole with the shit after doing your business; the funny guys insisting that you place your tissue in a perforated plastic bin at hand instead. God knows what they do with it; I really do not want to know.

Needless to say, my head might be small and my experience of these things might be virginal, but there are things I do know; things I have seen and heard. I do know that the DRC has – just like me – no experience whatsoever with the SADC police Olympics. They have never been here before, whether as hosts or visitors – asking them to get everything right the first time is just like asking a day-old baby to walk. The cruelty of it is almost nauseating

The Democratic Republic of Congo is a state that has bitten more than its fair share of chewable cud in recent years. Who hasn’t? They have been under dictatorship for so long – first from the Belgians, then from Mobutu Sese Seko, in whose ouster our very own Zimbabwean army troops had a major say – the art of keeping time is really something of a luxury to them. One could say they are real Africans who are still stuck in the era where the clock never made the man. Giving them just two years to prepare to host an event whose processes, systems, norms and values they have absolutely no experience with whatsoever is in my view something akin to a chargeable offence. South Africa was given six years to prepare for the first ever soccer world cup shows on African soil – for the DRC, the SARPCCO Games were what the World Cup was to South Africa. Momentous. A grand spectacle that simply needed more than two years to get ready for.

I blinked a myriad times as I fought off the sting of tears when I saw the awe in the sea of faces that converged to watch as SARPCCO athletes marched into their very own Stade Omnisport De La Kenya. Parents, grandparents, children and grand children, most of whom think Governor Moise Katumbi is a god whose mere sight means praise songs and chants like Igwee have to be sung until one goes hoarse.

They might be used to the magic touches of Patrick Mphutu and his Tout Puissant Mazembe during the fierce derby against FC Lupopo, but they have never before witnessed such a mass of multinational sportspeople gathered in one place for, as they might call it here, an omnisport gala lasting two weeks. How magnifique can things get, one local asked me.

For their desire to spread the Games to all corners of the SADC region, Sarpcco’s back has to be patted; for by doing that they are spreading the spirit of oneness among the peoples of southern Africa. The theme for this year’s games says, All United for Security, a telling theme indeed – do we need any more proof of how committed the policing efforts in southern Africa are to promote peace in the whole region? The only thing that put a damper on the regional Nkwazis’ efforts to spread the peace efforts across all the skewed corners of SADC was their molly coddling handling of the progress the host nation was making in its preparatory journeys. They should have done it the police way – haranguing and harassing the organizing team into getting things right in time.

Kudos must be rendered to all the countries that made the efforts to attend this year’s finals. But for financial inelasticity, the Mozambicans would certainly have brought a contingent as large as that bussed in by Zimbabwe or flown in by South Africa. But they realised the need to keep alive the spirit of ubuntu and stand by a fellow SADC brother during the time when he is trying to rebuild his house from the ashes of war; and brought in only ten athletes. And Malawi only touched down on match day 3 – but they were there; that was all that mattered. Four of our very own friends failed to make it – some not by choice, others, arguably through prejudice.

In 1945, the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development, better known as the World Bank was created to help rebuild the battered economies of states knocked out by the squashing fist of World War II. Now, in Southern Africa we do not talk of money, for the simple and only reason that we do not have enough of it. But we can build a bank of ideas; a bank of solidarity. A commitment to all our fellow SADC brothers that we swear to stand by them especially in times of greatest need; that we will hold their hand and never let go as they try to rise again.

The Sarpcco chair himself said it all: “Sarpcco appreciates the time, efforts and financial investments injected to stage an event of such magnitudes as the Sarpcco Games.” It is not just a walk in the park. As argued before, for green horns like the DRC, when organising for such humongous events, mistakes have to be expected: everything might be done five hours after its scheduled time, accreditation cards might take the duration of the games to be completed, the traditional dance troupes might leave their bejour in harm’s way during the opening ceremony, a chess venue might not exist at all; and the rig to stage a high jump contest might prove forever elusive.

But they have got most of the major decisions right – the venues for big sports are good to go. There is even a command centre and a website for the Games! Did that ever happen at world-class host cities which provided five-star hotel accommodation for their visitors?

And to think of all the business we have brought to the sprawling suburbs of Lubumbashi, especially Kenya where most athletes live – the airtime vendors, the cleaners, the flea market traders and the caterers – it might be a drop in the ocean, but it IS a drop and Pastor Aaron Rusukira might compose a song for us – nekuti takapa zvekuisa pasara.

Because what we saw during our sojourn to this great place is that the common people of the DRC are not ones to hide their poverty; they couldn’t do it anyway, for it is so widespread you could suffocate from its stench in the dusty atmosphere – but they are people keen to show us how they enjoy their life and what it has to offer. They are on the way there; it might take them a gazillion years to get there, but they are surely on the way. And our job is not hurt their pride by sneering when they get stuck in the mud, but to pull them out and urge them on.

So we will eat their bitter cassava leaf and funny little balls of bukari while grinning from ear to ear, saving the grimaces for the underside of the dinner table. For, by doing this, we are proving to the world that we have grown out of small-minded nitpicking, and are truly helping a brother find his own footing in this cauldron of harsh realities we call life.