Danceynewsy

My first venture onto Youtube is an oscar winning short film of a bunch of little sticky girls doing a very funky dance in Kasai Occidental... enjoy

Coordinating a Catastrophe or catastrophic coordination: the Kakenge Rail accident.

On Wednesday night, at about 11pm a cargo train was derailed about 170 miles away from here. The train was travelling on the Illebo to Kananga stretch of the colonial rail link, constructed to convey copper and other ores to Kinshasa from Katanga. In any other country a cargo train derailing would not really be newsworthy. However, Congo being the way it is, the train was carrying more than 100 clandestine passengers. The death toll after 5 days is in the region of 90 with 130 casualties. The road linking the crash site to Kananga is a dirt track, so treacherous that it takes a day to make the journey.

The next day the Provincial Inspector, the head of the ministry of health in the province, came to my office for a meeting to discuss the response to the accident. It seemed, hours after the accident, the best response would be to equip the Ministry of Health with sufficient surgical materials, anaesthetics and antibiotics to respond to at least 200 injured people. We also proposed logistical support to the MoH to med evac. the injured, however finally the UN offered a helicopter reducing an 8 hour road trip to 40 minutes. The Provincial inspector departed in the helicopter with a team of nurses and surgeons.

The next day the UN called for a meeting of international agencies to coordinate the response. The meeting took place almost 48 hours after the accident, reports coming in that the injured were being transported by bicycle to nearby hospitals, and that many of them were succombing to their wounds.

The next day a high level delegation of ministers - representatives of President Kabila - members of the UN, BBC, Reuters, photographers and entourage descended on sleepy little Kananga to visit the crash site.

In a typically Congolese chaos most of the delegation discovered on arrival that they were not going to travel to the crash, since with only 18 seats on a UN chopper, at least 50 impeccably dressed Kinois were left behind to sample the delights of Kananga. Three days after the event the UN and NGO community had collected meds for the crash victims: about 400kgs of drugs ranging from ORS to Atesunate, entirely inappropriate meds. As they loaded these huge quantities into the chopper we cynically estimated the delay time before these drugs, (which had no delivery notes, or packing lists) would appear for sale in the pharmacies of Kananga.

Seeing a chaotically organised disaster response was heartbreaking, with NGOs and UN and government all trying to play a lead role... Hearing a UN representative explain that the helicopters could not be used to med evac the remaining crash survivors as they were reserved for the visiting VIPs.

What makes it worth even commenting on this incident? Trains derail, busses crash, choppers go down in some place on the globe almost every day. I guess it has disgusted me for two reasons: first of all there are train accidents all over but rarely in such inaccessible places and rarely in places where there is no infrastructure to respond. The train accident amplifies the predicament of the Congo: criminal neglect and dilapidation of a country that once functioned as a country. Secondly I write about it because I am nauseated by the inadequacy and inappropriateness in the response of the authorities: a lack of unity of international players and then the arrival of the Kinshasa circus (a huge expense to the UN who provided helicopters, and two passenger planes). Of course I am glad that the crash made CNN, but I felt such deep cynicism at the barrage of domestic and international journalists flying into the most marginalised province of the country for a horror story of the crash and the blood-on-the-tracks photographs.

In a country experiencing excess mortality of 10,000 people per week as an indirect consequence of the internal armed conflict, 89 deaths in a train accident seems like a tiny blip. Is my heart becoming too hardened toward humanity ?

Can anybody find me a Piano Tuner

Last Saturday was a particularly unusual Saturday in the great tradition of unusual Saturdays in the life of Fergus Thomas. It has taken me the whole week to mull over it and formulate my thoughts. Putting it down on paper, it does not sound like anything remarkable, but last week Kananga experienced the first piano recital in over 50 years…. and a piano recital in a city of 1.3 million people and only two pianos, neither of which could really be described as being in tune is breaking news!.

The Pianist, Kristian is a young IT professional working with an NGO in Kananga; when you meet him, you sense a wistfulness in his eyes: is the fact that he is an artist, that his gaze is constantly fixed in somewhere in the undefined middle distance? Or the sadness of displacement and loss that gives him the air of a profoundly pensive and yet optimistic individual?

Kristian sometimes drives me to distraction, his office, a den of laptops and hard drives emitting a manic profusion of piano sonatas that he has downloaded from the web. He has been talking for months about giving his first concert in Kananga, stealing into my office when no one else is around to conspiratorially confirm that he has identified a location, a functional piano. He’s been talking about this for so long that I was beginning to doubt that he was a pianist at all.

Finally last weekend he invited a select audience of 20 music lovers to a dilapidated and sprawling Belgian villa in the city of dilapidated colonial houses for a concert of his personal selection of pieces, followed by the invitation to a ‘cocktail’ of luke warm Skol.

Kristian was visibly nervous as he took his place at the keyboard and launched with great gusto into his renditions of Bach, Chopin, Vivaldi and even ‘Rule Britannia’ (which, embarrassingly twinged in me a slight feeling of patriotic pride, I must must must go to confession ASAP); It was obvious that Kristian was out of practise, with small slips from time to time, however to the untrained ear the overall effect was incredibly uplifting.

My eyes filled with tears as I recognised his unique approach to pieces of music: to attack with the greatest energy and gusto as possible and not give up till the very last bar; additionally I realised fast that Kristian was playing intricate minuets and sonatas completely from memory. Of course I remembered someone else very important in my life and how he would play the piano that way.

In a flash of an instant of a morsel of time, the concert concluded to enthusiastic appreciation by the audience and visible relief from Kristian.

Kristian’s effort stimulated great enjoyment in the crowd and has motivated Kristian to perform more. On a much deeper level this was a significant achievement for Kristian, a rediscovery of something that has been long suppressed by traumatic memories. Kristian belongs to another place; his strange otherworldly aura is because he is otherworldly…. for Kananga. Kristian was born in Lubumbashi, where he grew up as a happy bright student learning the Piano at the conservatory there; eventually he became he pianist accompanying the Lubumbashi choir. In 1993 when ethnic hate and killing was beginning to ferment in Rwanda, and apparently unknown to the outside world, another genocide was well underway in Katanga, which ultimately resulted in the entire Kasayan population being expelled to their ‘home’ province of Kasaï, (although in reality the majority of Katanga Kasayans had no links with Kasai). Many returning Kasayans starved to death in a crisis that was not sexy enough to make the international media. Kristian was lucky; he came to Kananga with his family intact: he is certainly a rare exception, most of the other raffoullés traumatic tales of killing and loss.

Kristian played many, many times in public in Lubumbashi; there he had a piano in tune, and sheet music. When he fled from his home, he did not have time to rescue his piano or his sheet music from the burning and the riots. Now he has no sheet music.

After 14 years then, Kristian played his first concert, from memory. My hope for him that this performance is a symbolic act of looking towards the future and of healing from a very fractured past. In the meantime classical music lovers of Kananga are rubbing their hands together in eager anticipation of Kristian’s next performance, but we really do need to find a piano tuner!