Kinshasa is a physical place. I know her curves and turns, her backroads and short cuts, her dark narrow paths and her wide -open boulevards. Kinshasa streets are overflowing with movement and people, with vibrant energy that is nearly visible. I sway with the rhythms of mechanical noise: horns- whistles- the rev of engines and the banging on metal rooftops signaling to drivers that the taxi bus has filled up and needs to move out. I am seduced by the sounds of neighborhood destinations sung into the crowds : Victoire, Victoire, Boulevard, GDC-Sola, Sola, Zando. I move my feet to the click clack of the shoe shine boys announcing their presence and the cling clang of scissors on machines as ambulant tailors search for a hem to sew or a rip to repair right there on the spot in a city street where a young man will kneel down and paint my toenails with the care of a mother I never had here in Kinshasa everyone calls me auntie, mama, eeh mama! Kinshasa where everyone is related especially if you have a dollar or a franc to spare, to share, because in this community what’s yours is mine and mine is yours and yet, we’re all connected but somehow, not. Because in this city, belonging means being part of the crumpled masses, struggling to survive to stand up to be seen, belonging is tucked in the crevices of loss and grief and frustration.
In Kinshasa, belonging means sharing but the kind of sharing that moves beyond freely giving and into barely holding on while others take, pulling, pushing, shoving, fighting to have what I have what you need what we both want or don’t want or can’t find but we know it’s here because the masses are closing in on us crushing down to take that small thing we are trying to protect. We’re so distracted by this small thing we forget the big things, the real things, the children in the streets who are watching, repeating, pushing, shoving, defiantly standing in front of cars who have no space to go around because living in the city means one next to one next to one next to one… sharing the spills, the smells, the suffocating embrace of a neighbor whose come to give story to their troubles and offer a piece of the little bit of nothing in their pocket.
Kinshasa is lux, extreme VIP, diamonds, gold and minerals shining in the night sky like a star twinkling just out of reach so you grab whatever is close and you wring its neck before it has a chance to turn on you and admit that without that sparkling, shiny bit of bird’s nest treasure you’re really just one of the masses nothing special education on a fancy paper printed out at the cyber café on the corner whose walls are crumbling cement cracks running across the ceiling if you look up there is always someone waiting there to take your place and so you hold on and pay out dollars you don’t really have to dress better and drive faster than the masses you are stealing from.
Kinshasa is self- hate and group love, trying to find pride in a people who are not sure where they’ve come from but have a definite vision of where they want to go. Kinshasa is speaking a language that’s not your own and living another voice inside where you keep it dark and hidden because you don’t want to pass it on to your children but those children in the street are making their own language when they got cast aside and thrown away because the people of God proclaim there is no God but spirits working their evil in the youth and the family is a sacred construct but only if you have a dollar or some francs to share to build their business of preaching the word whose roots lie in the destruction of culture and the erasure of an entire community
of people whose bond is deeper than language, deeper than the terrain they share, the forests, lakes, the little slice of ocean, it’s a people whose loss and trauma cuts deeper than the wounds of generations upon generations bleeding into the soil that’s been ripped open and gouged out to prop up the kingdoms and institutions of art and culture and knowledge on foreign ground where people lock themselves in offices and houses and separate little fiefdoms, hoarding their material wealth as if it had meaning, looking down on the survivors of those they’ve slaughtered with contempt and disgust in order to mask the responsibility they share for the murder and destruction of the original spirit of community
Kinshasa is resilience, never willing to give up or let go but showing up every day, women raising their voices, youth who will not accept a future that has no place for them and together they rise above a past that’s born them into poverty, despair and loss turning these struggles into strengths, giving their time, their energy and their voice to call out and re-claim the riches of this land as rightfully their community,
