Disagreeable Woman in DRC

You look around Kinshasa and you see lots of men. You see women too, but the men are everywhere. They hang out, they sell random things. One man was dangling a tiny puppy and a tiny kitty from each hand in an effort to get someone in traffic to stop for him. They saturate the lounge at our hotel: the powerful men in their fancy suits, who most likely are in some sort of favor with the country’s current president.

On one evening, I did attempt to go a block up the road to a nearby restaurant that someone—a woman—from USAID had recommended to me. The restaurant made pizza, and man was I craving it. Well, within a half a block I knew it would be impossible. There they were: the men. I didn’t smile back and I kept on walking, but the attention didn’t stop. It was only when one overly eager fellow, probably in his 50s, started yelling, I decided it was time to turn around head back to the hotel. I killed my dream of that pizza slice.

“Tu es jolie!,” he said once, then louder twice. He then began yelling. He was reaching to grab one of my hands. If I had been in the DR Congo longer, I might have yelled back at him, or at least had a skin thick enough to keep on walking toward my destination. But I’m a newcomer, and as a newcomer, I always take precaution. It was still light out when I left the hotel, but the sun would be falling soon and there was no reason to have an incident to remember for the rest of my life. It was another dinner at the hotel for me. The life of a woman abroad.

It’s true. Men do rule DR Congo. But I guess that’s not so different from most of the world. Here, it just seems more pronounced. They are the politicians, the investors, the bankers, the leaders, and even the nurses in many of the communities where we work. They are the drivers, the housekeepers at the hotel, and a large portion of the servers. They are the majority of our country office staff, although our few strong women make up for the dearth in numbers. They are the reason for the 5 million deaths that took place in various DR Congo’s internal and regional conflicts from 1996 until 2003 and into present day. They are why more than 200,000 women were raped during those wars and why gender-based violence is still such a huge problem in the country.

I know there are good men in DR Congo. There are good and bad men everywhere, but in the book I’m reading, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, it is evident that men have the power and the sway in DR Congo. They are the root of the country’s many problems. In fact, I want to write a letter to Jason Stearns, the author of that book, to please write a second account, one that tells the history of DR Congo from the female perspective. In his book, it is just one man sabotaging the country after the other. I wonder what the women were saying during those wars, if they had the chance to say anything at all. I’d like to write that book, actually, but then I would need to live in the DR Congo, that man’s world, for long enough to gain the trust of Congolese women. And that would be near impossible.

Jason Stearns, in fact, was back in the DRC when I was, reporting on violence in the north east of the country. I just read that as I was packing my bags to return to the US, the government expelled him from its soil. I do not need to find out what the government might do to a disagreeable woman like me.

***

I never wrote about my “friend” from the flight I was on from Paris to DR Congo. He knew Jason Stearns and was anonymously interviewed for his book.

I spent about three hours practicing my French with this man on the plane. He lives in Switzerland with his Swiss wife and two kids, but is originally from DRC. He works in "security systems" for unsecure countries. We talked about his job, my job, Congolese politics, his impending divorce, and my divorce (although I didn’t dare tell his the sex of my ex). We argued about Donald Trump, his pick for the next American President. He was very interested in the fact that I was reading Jason's book. 

He not only knows Jason, but he is also a close comrade of President Joseph Kabila’s. He is the Congolese elite: the money and the power and perhaps, but I can’t prove it, la corruption.

The first night we landed in Kinshasa he had asked my colleague and I to get a drink with him. But I had declined. I was just too tired. I didn’t think any more of it.

After I returned back from Mutshatsa, there he was, hanging out in the chic lounge with the other Congolese elite. He was with two friends who looked a lot like him. Big, solid, tall, Congolese men dressed to the nines.

I had sat down in the chic bar to read my book for a while before heading back up to bed and he approached me. “Bonjour, Laurel!”

Oh boy.

He summoned me to the table with his friends. I didn’t want to be rude, but I also didn’t feel like engaging. I approached the table to introduce myself, hoping the conversation would be short. It was, to some extent. I had a short argument in my broken French with one of his friends, a Pentecostal pastor, about family planning. He asked why “us family planning people” tell women how many children to have. I told him, nicely, that that is a misconception. Our work is based on fertility preferences, which means, a woman (with her partner) can decide how many children they want to have and when, when offered access to contraception. A woman can choose the method she wants, if she wants one at all. I told him we support contraceptive access, in turn to support the health of women and their families.

“But what about the men?” he asked. “What do you do for the men?”

Oh boy.

I told him that whenever possible we engage men in decisions about family planning: a) to win their support for allowing their wives to choose the contraceptive she wants (because women in this country and many others do not have the social power to make decisions on their own); and b) so that they too might use contraception, most importantly, condoms for further protection, particularly from sexually transmitted infections.

Soon after the little discussion, his friends disappeared and it was just me and the Swiss man. And soon after that, a glass of red wine was traveling toward our table. He wanted to continue our discussion, but without his friends. I decided in a public place it would be fine to have a glass of red wine, maybe even nice, and he hadn’t done anything to make me mistrust him, yet, so what was the harm?

About five minutes into our conversation, he began hitting on me. I learned the word for seductive in French and he pleaded with me to meet him for dinner the next night, dancing out at a club, or at least breakfast in the morning. I said I didn’t think I had time, and that I had to work, and that I just wasn’t interested, not even in the most remote sense of the word.

I went back to my hotel room and thought about what I had been reading in my book, about his friends in high places, and maybe even about him. They buy their way to power. They finance killing and corruption that keeps them in high places while the majority of their fellow Congolese live in abject poverty. They take what they want. They control the destitution.

It is no wonder Mr. Swiss likes Mr. Trump. They have a lot in common. They are rich. They are aggressive. They are misogynistic. They are everything that makes me a proud, righteous feminist.