is this what it sounds like when doves cry ?
Ooops, a few things have happened in the DRC since I last put pen to paper, and I fear that my entry today could just roll on and on and on. I think I will however restrict my commentary on the events that took place in Kinshasa three weeks ago at the risk of my blog descending into an overtly political rant, which would risk getting me and my colleagues into plenty of trouble with plenty of interested parties.
Suffice to say it, while my colleagues and friends were holed up in their homes and offices in La Gombe, under gun, tank and RPG fire, the sunset over Kasaï, full of reds, oranges and golds made for an incredible sense of wellbeing. Sunsets in Kananga are incredibly dramatic after a heavy downpour. It was very difficult to imagine that anything was amiss in the capital, and it made me wonder whether such an entity as the Democratic Republic of Congo really exists.
We sipped out beers in an makeshift beer garden beside the behemoth Belgian administration complex, and giggled, slightly nervous at our good fortune of not being in Kinshasa. I found it hard not to draw the parallel of mad Emperor Nero who played his fiddle while Rome was engulfed in flames…
Street fighting lasted for about 48 hours in Kinshasa. The official death toll was 65 people; numerous other (respectable) sources have put the figure at between 500-600 people. Congolese TV aired a chilling ‘No Comment’ report on down town Kinshasa: a morbidly prolonged reel of footage showing a proliferation of shell casings and corpses along the main arteries of the city.
Travelling down Boulevard 30. Juin two weeks later, normality seems to have been largely restored. Many buildings are seriously bullet riddled, including some European embassies, which caused indignation from the EU, who collectively declared the violence an infringement of the Vienna Conventions; in the great tradition of the so called western democracies, a denunciation of the collateral damage to one’s own property whilst failing to condemn the unnecessary slaughter of hundreds of Congolese people. At the junction between the Boulevard and Avenue Nelson Mandela there is a crude sculpture of a huge white dove alighting on the globe. A high velocity bullet has pierced the doves chest: a powerful, maybe even prophetic image for the status quo in DRC; in my cynical soundtrack of flow of consciousness, I can hear Prince singing: ‘this is what it sounds like when doves cry.’
I spent Easter weekend in Kinshasa, lodging in a palatial residence on the hillsides above Kitambo Magasin. The joy of being with friends, of eating frog’s legs for the first time in my life and of spending a day discovering the Bonobos will have to be reserved for another chapter in this story. What was remarkable about the weekend was the extent of normality after such turbulent times.
Comme même ça bouge, Kinshasa! Which I guess makes it one of the most fascinating places on earth.
Suffice to say it, while my colleagues and friends were holed up in their homes and offices in La Gombe, under gun, tank and RPG fire, the sunset over Kasaï, full of reds, oranges and golds made for an incredible sense of wellbeing. Sunsets in Kananga are incredibly dramatic after a heavy downpour. It was very difficult to imagine that anything was amiss in the capital, and it made me wonder whether such an entity as the Democratic Republic of Congo really exists.
We sipped out beers in an makeshift beer garden beside the behemoth Belgian administration complex, and giggled, slightly nervous at our good fortune of not being in Kinshasa. I found it hard not to draw the parallel of mad Emperor Nero who played his fiddle while Rome was engulfed in flames…
Street fighting lasted for about 48 hours in Kinshasa. The official death toll was 65 people; numerous other (respectable) sources have put the figure at between 500-600 people. Congolese TV aired a chilling ‘No Comment’ report on down town Kinshasa: a morbidly prolonged reel of footage showing a proliferation of shell casings and corpses along the main arteries of the city.
Travelling down Boulevard 30. Juin two weeks later, normality seems to have been largely restored. Many buildings are seriously bullet riddled, including some European embassies, which caused indignation from the EU, who collectively declared the violence an infringement of the Vienna Conventions; in the great tradition of the so called western democracies, a denunciation of the collateral damage to one’s own property whilst failing to condemn the unnecessary slaughter of hundreds of Congolese people. At the junction between the Boulevard and Avenue Nelson Mandela there is a crude sculpture of a huge white dove alighting on the globe. A high velocity bullet has pierced the doves chest: a powerful, maybe even prophetic image for the status quo in DRC; in my cynical soundtrack of flow of consciousness, I can hear Prince singing: ‘this is what it sounds like when doves cry.’
I spent Easter weekend in Kinshasa, lodging in a palatial residence on the hillsides above Kitambo Magasin. The joy of being with friends, of eating frog’s legs for the first time in my life and of spending a day discovering the Bonobos will have to be reserved for another chapter in this story. What was remarkable about the weekend was the extent of normality after such turbulent times.
Comme même ça bouge, Kinshasa! Which I guess makes it one of the most fascinating places on earth.
posted by Gabriello Princip at 8:35 AM
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