Congo Picnic

When we went into the bush, Daddy would stop at villages to look at the schools and churches he had built, and to talk to the village leaders and elders. Mama and Danny and I would be left to wait in the kombi. Women and children, even missionaries, were not important enough to attend the meetings with the village elders and leaders. It seemed like these meetings took hours, while we waited in the hot kombi, made even hotter because Mama kept the windows rolled up to keep the crowds of children from reaching in and pilfering our belongings or touching us.

I never had an African playmate because Mama said that if I singled out a child to play with, the other villagers would be envious and it might cause trouble. If we let an African child into our yard or our home and they saw the things we had, they might become envious. Envy was one of the seven deadly sins.

The children were as fascinating to us as we were to them. I thought they were so exotically beautiful with their dusky skin and nappy hair. Girls my age and younger, wearing a hodge-podge of mismatched ragged clothing, held their baby brothers or sisters on their hips, the babies wearing nothing but a string of beads around their waists. Smaller children wore very little, their bellies swollen with malnutrition and parasites nearly hiding what sex they were. The African children out of curiosity wanted to touch our bright clothes that were not rags. They wanted to poke at our blond, straight hair and probe at our white skin. They wanted us to share what we had with them - they were so poor and we had so much.

Mama kept the windows rolled up to keep out the little hands and we sat miserably sweating in the stifling heat of the closed up kombi. I know now, that Mama was protecting us from germs and diseases, but in my child's mind, I saw it as putting us, the white skinned people above the little Africans, like they were just not good enough - and maybe if they weren't converted, their sins like their germs, some of their "blackness" would rub off on us. Sins and germs and blackness seemed to go together. It said so in the Bible, and everything seemed to be either decaying or diseased or contagious in the Congo.

Yet I wanted to jump out of the hot kombi and play with the babies, and run freely around the village with the children. I wanted to know what they knew about their world, what games they played, what they thought about, what their dreams and worries were. I had not felt that kind of freedom anywhere as a child, not in the Congo, the land of my birth or in the United States, the land of my heritage, since before Independence in 1960, before we moved from Mutoto Station to Luluabourg (Kananga) where we lived behind high walls. My whiteness and my American wealth set me apart. I would never, could never, fit into their world. I would always feel a stranger, closed in behind the glass windows of the kombi or the high walls of our fenced in yard. I would feel a mixture of relief and sadness, and some shame over those feelings, when some village tatu would come running out to the kombi, waving a switch and yelling threats, scattering the children, squawking like the village chickens that ran away with them.

Whenever we traveled in the Congo, we had to carry what we needed with us. There were no conveniences of fast food restaurants, no bright, shiny coin-operated machines dispensing cold drinks, or service stations with clean restrooms on the trips into the bush. Toilet paper was always packed in the road lunch box. Before we ate, we would walk up the road away from the vehicle. We never went back down the road from the direction we came. There was always a chance of meeting someone who had followed the slow moving kombi as it passed through the last village. When we thought we had walked far enough, we would step off the path a little ways, just enough to be hidden by the tshisuku. Someone always carried a stick to beat the tshisuku ahead of us to chase away any hidden snakes or animals. Someone always stood guard with a stick. We hoped what we had been told all our lives was true, that the wild creatures were more fearful of us than we were of them. Then we squatted where we stood, taking turns. No one lingered, and our bodily functions were done quickly and quietly so we would not attract any attention. Who knew what was lurking in the tangled vines, watching a solitary group of brightly dressed white women and children with their pants pulled down around their knees, to come creeping and sneaking back through the tshisuku to sniff at and investigate what we had left behind.
Mama always packed a "road lunch" of Spam or corned beef and mustard sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper that had been wiped off and reused so many times it was limp and transparent. There was no mayonnaise in the sandwiches that would spoil in the tropical heat. Food poisoning was always a risk. As Mama handed out the sandwiches, she would always remark that she hoped they were all right and that maybe they had kept cool enough, tucked in the box beside the jug of ice water. I always secretly wished that when Daddy said the blessing before we ate, instead of thanking God for the food, he would ask God that we would not be poisoned by the food.

If worrying about food poisoning was not enough, the wax paper around the dried out sandwiches was often crawling with tiny black ants (tunkaneni) that needed to be brushed off before we ate. We had no other choice. In Africa, everyone and everything seemed to be so hungry, and one did not waste good food.

The hard-boiled eggs and tangerines were a little better than the sandwiches. They came in their own wrappers, and the tunkaneni could not infest them. We carried our boiled drinking water in a jug and each had our own little metal cup to drink from. The water had already warmed in the dusty heat, the sloshing ice cubes melted hours ago, in the struggle to keep our sandwiches cool. I will not forget the choking feeling of swallowing hardboiled eggs washed down with tepid water, tinged with a warm metal cup flavor.

It seemed to me that these road lunches were eaten hurriedly, almost guiltily, before being discovered by someone. Shame on the white Americans, sitting in a vehicle beside a rutted dirt track in a jungle in hungry Congo, caught eating and not sharing. I could almost feel the furtiveness and secret fear that Adam and Eve had when they hid from God in Eden. If we stopped too near a village and if we stayed too long, we would soon be surrounded by mobs of little Africans, searching for scraps like the tunkanenion the wax paper wrapped sandwiches.

Sometimes a solitary Congolese hunter or fisherman would pass us on the road, his weapons and catch of the day slung over his shoulder, calling out greetings, trying not to show any surprise at seeing us so far from civilization, before continuing on his way. As he passed, I would duck down in my seat in the back of the kombi, ashamed at being caught eating. The Bible said to share with the poor. To the Africans, we seemed to have so much, yet to us it seemed we barely had enough. Mama always seemed to be worrying and counting things. Counting the American cans of meat and vegetables stacked in neat rows on the pantry shelf. Counting the cups of weevil-infested rice left in the barrel on the pantry floor. Counting the mouths she had to feed. Counting the days left on the calendar. Would she have enough for a few more meals for her family? Would there be enough if she were suddenly called upon to feed company? Would canned peas and corned beef and buggy rice be good enough to serve if company came?

You knew that the hunter/fisherman would never go far. Just around the bend in the road out of sight from us, you knew he would stop and hunker down to wait patiently until he heard our engine start and the kombi lumber away. He would hurry back to our picnic place trying to beat other scavengers who might have watched us picnicking, to see if we had left anything of value, before decay set in. Our trash was always someone else's treasure. I always felt sorry that he would never find anything except the peelings of our eggs and tangerines, things he had himself in his little village hut. He would not even find our waxed paper. We always handed it back to Mama, who carefully wiped it clean, folded it, and tucked it away to be used again. "We are not in the 'Land of Plenty,' you know," she would say with a smile. Mama was a child of the Great Depression. She had been trained early and well about hoarding and saving.
As we drove away, I would look back, wondering if the hunter/fisherman would find our toilet spot after he had investigated our picnic leavings. It shamed me to think that even my body wastes might be interesting enough to probe at and investigate just because I was a white American in the Congo.

Written by Becky Washburn Scott, A former Presbyterian MK from Congo (Zaire)


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