CONGO 1

It was a dumb thing to do. I made a decision. I had never been able to make decisions.

As a kid, in the morning, I would stand at the top of the stairs whining "Mama, what should I wear? " and she would sneer at me for asking, so I would put something on and then she would tell me to go and change because what I had chosen looked awful.

but when I saw the ad for a French teacher at the American School of Kinshasa I didn't hesitate. I wrote a letter. I filled out their application form. I signed a two-year contract. 

My friends in Astoria thought it was a terrible idea. I taught Latin and French at Astoria High School, a small but quaint port at the mouth of the Columbia River. My French was actually not that good since, I had majored in Classics, and most of my French courses were in Old French but What the Hell! 

For some reason, though, I had always been interested in Africa. Maybe it was because of watching "King Solomon's Mines" as a kid, but I read everything I could find about Africa, made friends with African students in college, and had gone to Kenya the year before on a fly-by-night Charter.

My parents were the only ones who encouraged me. I was told to ship two trunks and to bring a pillow along on the plane since there were apparently no pillows in Kinshasa. I was also told to bring cake mixes. That seemed weird. I had never been a great user of cake mixes and had never thought of cake mix as a necessity but I dutifully put boxes of cake mix in my trunks. 

CONGO 2

At Ndjili Airport there were no motorized vehicles to pull the luggage from the plane to the terminal. Two impressive clusters of men, one in front pulling and the other in back pushing, rolled the baggage cart across the sweltering tarmac.

The Superintendent of the American School, Paul Preddy, met me at the airport and drove me to the American School. I had been told to be there by August 15 but none of the other teachers had arrived. The school was located on the other side of the city from the airport on a hill called Ngaliema, just past the Presidential Compound where President Mobutu lived surrounded by soldiers in the army base and, surprisingly, by an international, multi-cultural horde of doctors. Was the dictator a hypochondriac? At any rate, two American doctors ministered personally to the great man. Truckloads of soldiers would pass the school singing two songs: "Oh, Mobutu a raison!" (Mobutu is right) and "Mobutu likes work" in Lingala.

The American school consisted of a number of squat concrete structures with tin roofs and bars on the windows, each containing two classrooms. Teachers were housed in similar structures consisting of four studio apartments. Between two studios was a connecting door which was locked for privacy or open to create a larger apartment for married couples. Inside were a plastic sofa, not a hide-a-bed, which had to be made each night, a desk, a table in the passage between the living room/bedroom and the kitchen, which featured a monstrous aluminum cauldron for boiling water. Any water for drinking, washing vegetables, or rinsing dishes had to boil for twenty minutes to kill the dysentery amoebas.

I had been told to arrive August 15 but aside from Superintendent Preddy and the bursar/quartermaster/business manager/supply manager Frank Epp and their families no one was there, so it was pretty boring at first. In Nairobi it had been possible to hop on a bus and explore . I abandoned that idea when I saw the buses, crammed full and with clusters of people hanging on to the outside and standing on the bumpers. Even worse were the fula fulas, vans with barred windows cut into the body. Their brakes often gave out and they and their passengers ended up in the river. Hoping to meet the locals, I wandered down the road to a small market but changed my mind and went back after a soldier's wife told me to give her my watch.

I had expected lush tropical vegetation, but there were only a few mangy ironwood trees, small and scrubby. There was one by my door, which I appreciated, but it was infested with termites and was cut down the week after my arrival.

CONGO 3

I had been told that there were lots of swimming pools and to bring a swimming suit, but there were none. Nor were there any tennis courts. People swam in the river.

The whole compound was surrounded by a forbidding chain-link fence with a gate which was locked at sundown with a chain and a padlock. The gate was less to keep evildoers out than to keep the teachers in. There was a gatekeeper, a "sentinelle," who was theoretically supposed to let people in and out. Expatriate residences and businesses usually had a sentinelle who reclined near the door or gate on a low wooden chair whose back was at an angle conducive to dozing. Most sentinelles dozed near the entrance but woke up when someone needed to go in or out. The ones at TASOK, as the American School of Kinshasa was called, disappeared when the sun went down and you could yell "Sentinelle! Uzali?" ("Sentinelle! Where are you?") until you were blue in the face. You were stuck outside. Frank Epp said that the sentinelles needed to rest and should not be disturbed.

When the sun went down the bars began to swing and the air was filled with the sound of Congolese jazz. When people think of African music they think of Myriam Makeba or the haunting traditional music of South and east Africa. Congolese music is heavy on electric guitars. I suppose you could call it lilting, but imagine a lilting herd of elephants. A taste for Congolese music must be acquired and I acquired it, as had the director of the British Cultural Center, who himself started a band called Peter Hyde and the New Africa.

The teachers at the American School had not acquired a taste for Congolese music. "Why do these people make so much noise on a Saturday night?" said one, who came from Corn, Oklahoma.

CONGO 4

Number One on the Congolese Hit Parade was a song called "Meso Maniman Mbote " and you heard it everywhere, even in Swahili-speaking Kivu, where nobody could understand the words, which were in Kikongo. Congolese friends told me it was about a man who had a goat (nkombo) he wanted to give his fiancée's father as bride price but he needed a crate to put it in and he asked a white man (Mundele) to give him one, hence the punch line in the song, the one everyone liked to yell: "Mundele! Donnez-moi la caisse! Je veux y mettre le nkombo, le nkombo qui a quatre pattes ! Qui marche kwatu kwatu! Qui crie 'Meeué!'": "White man! Give me the crate! I want to put the goat in it; the goat who frisks and bounces; who cries 'Mééuhe!'"



The "Donnez-moi la caisse " part was slightly ambiguous, as in a different context it means "Your money or your life". 

Teachers began trickling in to start the school year. One couple had climbed Kilimanjaro, another had gone to South Africa. Some had gone home to the States but had signed a new contract and come back for two more years. Many had spent the summer in various missions scattered throughout the Congo, and I realized with horror that most of my colleagues were Evangelical missionaries. 

The Belgians, colonial masters of the Congo, had been eager to pillage its natural resources but less eager to spend money on health and education for the population who harvested the rubber and worked in the mines. Health and education were thus handed over to various religious groups who carved up the Congo into sectarian territories: Mennonites, Pentecostals, the Salvation Army(!), the Catholic Church, and a variety of Baptists, to name a few. Mennonites and Quakers were considered Conscientious Objectors during the Vietnam War, so there were a number of Mennonite teachers and a Quaker couple, who lived comfortably, enjoying the services of a houseboy, while their contemporaries back in the USA were being shipped off to Vietnam or jailed unless they fled to Canada. In Astoria High School, where I used to work, two colleagues were drafted. One was sent to Vietnam. The other was in such distress that he developed an ulcer, which saved him since he became 4F. 

What surprised me was the fact that these Mennonites were individually not particularly peaceful and didn't seem to feel any sympathy for the anti-war protestors or the Civil Rights Movement.