It’s not as if the people here are fundamentally different from people anywhere else. They all have basic needs and enjoy the miseries of human nature. They are hungry and proud and hot and tired and happy and sad and everything we are predisposed as humans to feel. I was riding around today and thinking about what I’ve said previously when I started to notice which people were paying attention to tidiness and dress and social graces. Men were walking along an overgrown lawn with machetes trimming back weeds. Three garbage trucks lined up together next to a mound of trash on a sidewalk, with men picking up the pieces one by one. The woman I visited earlier in the week, who lived in an aged concrete structure I’d only ever seen in Soviet war movies, wished I had come a week later after she’d applied a fresh coat of paint. And all of this reminded me of Christian’s comment about the will of the people. People live real lives here and have hope for a better future. Life goes on and they’re doing something about it, whether the people with the power have the will or not.
The other night I was re-reading the introduction to Adam Hoshschild’s tale of terror in colonial Congo,
King Leopold’s Ghost, when the following passage resonated deeply with me in my struggle to bring Kinshasa to you through the web.
Although Europe has long forgotten the victims of Leopold’s Congo, I found a vast supply of raw material to work with in reconstructing their fate: Congo memoirs by explorers, steamboat captains, military men; the records of mission stations; reports of government investigations; and those peculiarly Victorian phenomena, accounts by gentlemen (or sometimes lady) "travelers." The Victorian era was a golden age of letters and diaries; and often it seems as if every visitor or official in the Congo kept a voluminous journal and spent each evening on the riverbank writing letters home.
One problem, of course, is that nearly all of this vast river of words is by Europeans or Americans. There was no written language in the Congo when Europeans first arrived and this inevitably skewed the way that history was recorded .… We do not have a full-length memoir or complete oral history of a single Congolese during the period of the greatest terror. Instead of African voices from this time there is largely silence.
Christian has been incredibly helpful in maneuvering me about the city and the various neighborhoods, or communes, so I asked him today to write a small piece about when he first came to Kinshasa and learned about these neighborhoods and the people here himself, to record his impressions from a Congolese point of view. At first he didn’t understand. He frequently asks me to narrow the scope of my questions because he says I ask things way too broadly. Do I want to know this part of the answer or do I want to know that part of the answer? I ask him why he can’t tell me all parts of the answer; I have time. He says he will say things that get him in trouble. I say that’s not possible, but he disagrees, especially on the point of writing his impressions of Kinshasa. He can’t be sure who will see his ideas. I ask him to write only good things, or to write about how people are different here than in South Kivu, where he was born, than in Tanzania and Kenya, where he has traveled, or South Africa, where he met his wife. He looks at me as if I’ve said something stupid. He says even if he starts to say something good, it will always come back to bad, and you can never know who will see that and whether that will have some bearing on his fate.
The fate of people here and what they believe about themselves and each other has been weighing on my mind since the night I arrived. I am of no mind to come here and judge another’s culture (I haven’t said one word about the food the whole time, not a peep) but I can’t get this out of my head. Every day these faces haunt me.
Human Rights Watch: DRC Street Kids 
