At the end of a ‘road,’ 70km from here, a road that really only exists in the colonial maps of the Belgian civil engineers, lies the Cite de Ndemba. The road snakes its way between Kananga and Ndemba like a parabola along a baseline that is the railway, the chemin de fer, linking Lubumbashi to the railhead at Illebo where goods arrive, and depart on the Kasai river en route for Kinshasa. Apparently, in the day (dans l’epoche, as people around here love to refer to their golden age when Papa Mobutu was doing great things for Zaïre) there was a regular passenger service up the Kasai river to the capital, nowadays the occasional barge chugs up the Kasai and joins the Congo to descend on Stanley pool in a journey that takes more or less a month. The town of Illebo is currently coming to terms with a devastating outbreak of typhoid fever.
Sounds like a great trip, and a great way to use up all my accumulated leave days, luckily I belong to the school of thought where process is as important as result, and where journeying is about being in a state of movement, not about arriving anywhere in particular.
One journey I was happy to terminate however my road trip was on Wednesday to Ndemba. Even before leaving Kananga any hint of a tarmac road evaporates into a sandy clay track. The road is crowded with caravans of Bayanda. Men who travel over hundreds of miles with bicycles laden with agricultural produce, maize whiskey, cloth, chickens…. You name it. In Kasai the beast of burden is the bicycle. Every single day you see the immense agricultural wealth of Kasai pouring out of the villages along dirt tracks to the market centres, and you cant help but thinking: if these farmers and traders had even a slightly improved road network, they would without a doubt become prosperous, and fat.
But the agricultural economy is undermined by a darker, more seductive business, which drives the subsistence farmers further and further from prosperity and development.
The story is not one that you could have a Leonardo di Caprio re-enact, because there has never been links between organised militias and the diamond trade in the Kasai. But as far as I can see, these diamonds have got blood on them too. Ndemba is a fairly typical small town of the Congo, a few remnants of a more developed past, a hospital and health service that functions with heavy support of NGOs. Schools full of children in white shirts and navy blue trousers, a proliferation of evangelical churches and at the head of the town the mission station. You can tell the houses where the diamond traffickers live. They are brightly painted adobe structures, often distinct because they have a hedge and a garden instead of a dusty yard. On the exterior walls are crude drawings of diamond helixes. You can also easily spot the traffickers in town too, dressed in designer clothes, designer sunglasses, driving too fast along the dirt tracks on scramblers. Their wealth is ostentatious.
Twice a week on Saturdays and Mondays, the diamond market opens up. Twenty or thirty middle men set up shop in the market place, Congolese, Lebanese, even Chinese with minute weighing scales to trade in rocks. A group of South African prospectors left Ndemba the day I arrived, loading sack upon sack of soil into their helicopter and departing directly for South Africa.
In order to exploit the diamonds of the Kasai, you need a mining permit from Kinshasa, obtained by paying off the relevant official. There are inevitably more bribes to be paid to the Administrateur de Territoire and his cronies in situ, but still the region represents rich pickings for the diamond miner.
The impact of the trade on the economy has so far been negative. I see two large negative impacts of the industry in terms of economy and in terms of societal impact. First of all the diamond trade fuels the extreme over inflation of cost of consumable products in the province. Riding on the back of the trade, business people import packaged food into Kananga and the other towns of Kasai selling them with an enormous mark up. Goods that are already inflated in price by the mafia controlled consumer market in Kinshasa are often double the cost in Kananga, and reportedly goods in some areas, such as Kalomba can cost as much as 3 times higher than the Kananga cost: justification, transport cost. Real reason, greedy traders making a fast buck on the back of the diamond trade.
The sociological impact is even more worrying. Diamond miners employ local farmers to dig in the mainly opencast mines. The farmers (already notorious for neglecting their agricultural duties to their womenfolk), leave to work in the mines, and their wives are simply overwhelmed with the volume of work involved in tilling the soil and in bringing up children. Money raised from mining usually goes into luxury items and into drinking alcohol. Net result: family breakdown, malnutrition.
So why tell this story of woe? Surely nothing to be done about it ? What I would argue is that in the Kasai the diamond industry must be forced to commit to a higher level of corporate social responsibility.
Right now the very wealth of this land is keeping the people poor.
Maybe its alarmist to draw a link between child morbidity and an extractive industry, but the reality is not far off that. Something that we can start to though is talking about this, engaging with the market to impress up on it its potential role for social upliftment and for justice for poor people.
In Ndemba I stayed at the mission station, a band of matronly Carmelite sisters rather partial to a wee drop. The mission station doubles as a watering hole for the diamond traffickers, local salesmen and itinerant expatriates like me. Every night the cloisters of the convent are filled with the unholy drunken songs of people making merry and elated with the fact that diamonds, square cut or pear shape… are still a girls’ best friend!
In my head the tune playing is the very sinister Hotel California, apparently a song about much more than a lodging house in Santa Barbara….. /Then I said to the captain/ bringing me my wine/he said/ we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969/.
….Strangest convent I ever been to!
