Free In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz by Michela Wrong Page A

the early hours. Matonge became an area the 15,000 Congolese living, studying and working in Belgium recognised as a second home, a place where the Congolese genius for finding creative solutions to the problems of existence surfaced.
    Family in dire straits at home? There are agencies here where you can go, deposit 100 dollars, sure in the knowledge that a dependant at the other end in Kinshasa will receive another 100-dollar bill,all without going through a bank. Relatives going hungry or can’t afford the price of an electrical appliance? The same procedure is available for a sack of rice or a fridge. And when disaster really strikes you can even, through these tiny offices, arrange a funeral back in Congo.
    The entrepreneurship extends well beyond the law’s reach. A vibrant trade in second-hand cars, drugs and forged cheques, prostitution and fake visas, plus the designer brand shoplifting, has prompted Belgium’s police to establish a unit specialising solely in crime committed by members of the Congolese community, something of a mark of distinction given the far greater numbers of Moroccans and Turks in Brussels.
    Despite all the cheering inventiveness, there’s a tragic poignancy about Matonge. The alliterative Lingala slang residents use to refer to life abroad is premised on vaunting ambition, but the aspirations come tinged with a sense of inferiority. For those abandoning Kinshasa, despairingly dubbed ‘Kosovo’, Belgium is ‘lola’, or ‘paradise’. Paris, another favourite destination, is known as ‘Panama’. Europe is ‘mikili’, ‘the promised land’, inhabited, appropriately enough, by ‘mwana Maria’, ‘the children of the Virgin Mary’—whites.
    This is a community determined to outstay its welcome, made up of forty-year-old students with a smattering of children and fistfuls of degrees; of young men playing up their brushes with the law in Kinshasa in the hope of winning the sobriquet of ‘political asylum-seeker’; of youths plotting marriages of convenience with Belgian mates: all and any methods are acceptable in the quest for the ultimate prize—a permit allowing an indefinite stay in Europe.
    When it is won, such documentation rarely goes to waste. ‘Whites say that all blacks look alike,’ explained Leon, a philosophy graduate studying accountancy, ‘so someone with papers will lend them to a friend who wants to cross into France or Switzerland, who will then post them back to Brussels.’ Without the paperwork, work outside the informal sector is impossible. So Brussels’s restaurant kitchens, its building sites, its minicab firms, are staffed by Africa’s most well-qualified students.
    The sense that only the West offers hope of improvement is enough to make even the uninspiring seem acceptable. ‘I have friends who are vegetating here. They do nothing, they stagnate, but they don’t dare go back,’ said Leon. ‘In the eyes of their families, returning from Europe means they have failed. And the worst thing you can have happen to you, the most humiliating, is to be expelled.’
    Other African communities forced into exile organise guerrilla campaigns from abroad, hatch plots, or draw up political programmes for the distant day when they hope to take power. For decades, Eritrean émigrés ran an efficient informal tithing system which funded the rebel movement that eventually pushed Ethiopian occupiers out of their territory. Despite boasting one of the continent’s most formidable dictators as an antagonist to rally against, the Congolese have nothing to match this. If a rebel campaign is being fought in the east of their country, amongst the young men of Matonge there is no talk of donning camouflage and signing up. The biggest opposition party had closed its offices ‘for security reasons’, I was told, but administrative incompetence was more