Free In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz by Michela Wrong

effectiveness of the Congolese women hit-squads who had taken to systematically shoplifting designer labels in the area.
    â€˜It’s time to repay the colonial debt. On va kobeta’ (‘We’re going on a raid’), the women would say, as, with the rumbustious energy only an African market trader can bring to her task, they set off in search of Versace and Yamamoto jackets, Gianfranco Ferre and Jean-Paul Gaultier slacks, Kenzo accessories and Church shoes—anything decreed cool by the trendsetters of the day.
    The designer shops had only themselves to blame. They were, after all, displaying their goods within temptingly easy striking distance of the poor Congolese ghetto that nestles compactly in the covered galleries and cobbled streets of Ixelles, just off the Porte de Namur. Few districts in the Belgian capital can rival ‘Matonge’, focal point for the Congolese community, when it comes to juxtaposing inordinate personal vanity with the chronic inability to meet the cost of a heightened sense of style.
    Nicknamed after Kinshasa’s heaving popular quarters, because, like its namesake back home, this is a district where ‘ça bouge’ (things move), Matonge is like a long draught of Congolese essence that has been decanted and boiled down to its purest concentrate. There is something brave, almost foolhardy, about the way this tiny ghetto turns its back on the Belgian present of tramlines, dark streets and narrow houses to recreate a more familiar reality.
    In the hairdressers—and every second shop seems to be a hairdresser, its window crammed with wigs and hair extensions—Congolese women have their hair straightened or young blades chat. The greengrocers here sell fat stalks of sugar cane, nobbly sweet potatoes, heaps of the greens used to make pondu, the Congolese alternative to spinach, deadly red chillies and small, pale green aubergines. The front pages of Congolese newspapers, Le Soft, Le Palmarès, Le Phare —with all their tunnel-vision, their obsession with the domestic political scene—are stuck against café windows; ‘waxes’, the bright Dutch prints used to make women’s wraps, lie folded ondisplay in neat rows and even the gold on sale in the jewellers has that pinkish tinge associated with Africa.
    Restaurants serve chicken in peanut sauce, fish wrapped in palm leaves and it is even possible to find such delicacies as caterpillar, crocodile—the oysters and caviar of Kinshasa’s culinary scene—or chikwange, the leaf-wrapped blocs of fermenting cassava paste that, to the uninitiated, resemble nothing quite so much as warm carpet glue.
    In the old days, a tailor here turned out the awkward abacost jackets made obligatory by Mobutu. The ghetto even has its own radio station. Broadcasting from an abandoned military barracks, Radio Panik feeds its listeners a diet of Koffi Olomide, Zaiko Langa Langa, Papa Wemba, or whoever dominates the Congolese music scene of the day, plus, most crucially for a public hungry for information from home, a weekly résumé of Congolese news.
    Sitting squat in the city centre, Matonge is a psychological world away from the leafy suburbs of Rhode St Genesè, Uccle and Waterloo to the south of Brussels, where Mobutu’s former aides live in marble-floored mansions, over garages where the Mercedes is parked alongside the BMW. Just as the presence of Mobutu’s château in Brussels’s chic suburbs acted as a magnet for the Congolese elite, who set up their court around the big man, Matonge, at the other end of the social scale, owes its existence to the Maison Africaine, a hostel where those shaking the red dust of the continent from their feet could stay for next to nothing, often lingering for years on end.
    Cafés sprang up serving the food homesick new arrivals missed, as did music shops and the nightclubs, Le Mambo, La Référence, Hollywood City, which only come alive in