From South Korea, with Love

I can't remember how long it's been there. It is gnarled and dark and appears to have been forged with the first dawn of time. I drive by it several times a day and marvel at its ugliness. Apparently it was a gift. I had to stop the other day and actually walk up to read the plaque to believe this. Who would give such a thing and even worse, how do you receive something so monstrous?

To be fair, I mentioned my thoughts to a friend and she didn't exactly agree. While she didn't go so far as to proclaim beauty, she did state that she never thought of it as ugly. "Looks like a wrestling statue....or something." I snapped a few (bad) photos with my phone, which can't really do justice to the artwork. But it's a dark sculpture and I am not even sure I could capture it with my regular camera.

The general outline is apparent, that's really all you can see driving by as well

The round nodules are faces contorted in pain

  There are a few leg like structures that melt into each other. Faces jut out at odd angles and all seem in agony. The sculpture is coarse and rough and forged with darkness.  It stands just across from the grounds of Camp Tshatshi, a military camp that surrounds our school. It is near the entrance to the old "zoo" which, legend has it, used to boast wild animals like zebras and elephants. Apparently in tough times, the zoo was loosed and all the big game were eaten. The community registration building of Ngaliema rests just behind the statue. People come here for any number of legal documents and weddings can be viewed on most weekends.  It's an odd juxtaposition.

The plaque declares this a 50-years-of-independence gift to the Congolese people, who have endured terrible hardships and wishes them solidarity in the face of a radiant future. Grand words for such a bleak statue.  I have read recently about the phenomenon of "dark tourism" - sites of mass death that draw in visitors. Congo certainly has a history of its own holocaust and could join its peers in erecting some kind of memorial to honor the tragedies of history that have taken place here. The statue seems to kind of fit in with this theory. It's the only one I can come up with that really makes any sense. Of course, I guess any site in DRC would be more of a living, breathing work of art-  as the tragedies haven't quite ended yet.