MAR 19, 2025
Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. You can read previous and following posts on Substack and below.
As the rainy season approached once again, I thought back to The Fight the previous year, and how astonishing it was that the torrent had held off until moments after Ali’s victory. Had it started before the fight (as feared) it would have been disastrous, for a rainstorm in Zaire is like nothing you’ve ever seen. In a letter home, I seem bent on rhapsodizing about it:
“In Zaire, everything loves a rainstorm. Things that elsewhere would go under cover, here come out. Color, for example. Rainstorms are usually gray. Not in Zaire. Just before they come, in late afternoon toward evening, the sky turns a vivid yellow, so that everything is shot through with it. The usual lush green is charged with yellow. As soon as the rain comes, the yellow clears. The sun sets pink in one part of the city, a pink that spreads wider than any dry sunset. And then the sky turns silver. A luminous silver behind shining dark-wet green trees.
“The lightning, too, is brighter than any I’ve seen — even against the silver sky — and it flashes a blinding white. The white flashes in complete silence, broken eight or 10 seconds later by awesome gurgles and groans, turning into jagged boulders of sound, rolling from one horizon to another, reverberating like a base speaker that can’t handle the volume.
“Everything moves and sways. The trees — so heavy and hot in the blanketing heat — are released into movement. For the big old mango trees, this means slow swaying of heavy limbs, each branch softly muting the next on its swing back and forth. For the bamboo, which grows so high that its normal position is diagonal, the winds bring low balletic dips and slow, smooth lifting, then a low dip to the other side. Their papery leaves — in tiny millions — seem to stretch and stroke the breeze.
“It’s the palms, though, that seem made for these storms. Each frond meets the wind and rides it in its own way — ostrich plumes blown by invisible fans, lifting and curling, dropping and flinging straight — until the wind is finished playing and comes on powerfully strong. Then the palm is like a little girl whose long hair is blown straight sideways, baring her tiny head. The birds, too, love the rain in Zaire. They sing loudly in their trees as it begins. They’re followed by bats, who swoop dark, high and low against the silver sky.
“As the storm exhausts itself, the sky turns a bruised lavender gray like an old film. The lightning now looks gold against the darkening sky, and it’s hard to tell bats from the wind-borne bamboo leaves.”
That Thanksgiving of 1975, we took a wonderful multi-day trip into “the bush” to the east of Kinshasa with friends with Land Rovers. We drove through stately forests wreathed in vines and lush with butterflies. We crossed rivers and streams on rusty old ferries and makeshift bridges, and plowed through mud and waterholes on the roads in between.
We stayed in Catholic missions and with Peace Corps volunteers. We saw arts and crafts being made throughout the region — masks, tapis, dolls representing Pende dancers. And we saw a beautiful waterfall that, were it in the United States, would have been a major attraction. Here, it seemed to go utterly unnoticed.
What consumed most of our free time during this second school was planning for the big trip we intended to take once the term ended. As I wrote in a letter to friends:
“We had intended (and still hope) to buy some kind of van (such as a VW combi) and outfit it here with the help of school carpenters and friends. Then we would head north to the Central African Republic (we would probably have to put our vehicle on a riverboat to get out of Zaire, given road conditions), then throughout West Africa and (if possible) across the Sahara. Then we’d travel throughout North Africa and continue on to Europe, where we’d spend several more months traveling and living out of our van. We‘d’ then return to the States in late spring of 1977. (As it turned out, we moved to Paris for a couple of years instead. But that’s another story).
“We began attempting to implement this plan in early September upon our return from our summer adventures and found — to our great dismay — that no new vehicles are coming into the country. Zaire is in the midst of an economic crisis. It has little or no foreign reserves and, consequently, is defaulting on its loans and not paying its bills. In an attempt to straighten out this mess, the government is not permitting the importation of any vehicles. The used-car market is almost non-existent, and the few who are selling are getting astronomical prices for their cars.
“So we have been having a helluva time finding anything. We have recently come upon a used Peugeot van for sale. It is quite roomy and so would surpass the VW in livability. But it is lower to the ground, and whether or not it can be sufficiently raised by new wheels, larger tires, spring adjustment or whatever, we are now in the process of determining. If it cannot, we may consider going by boat to Bangui, driving to Dakar and then shipping it to Casablanca, as crossing the desert would not be feasible.”
Then, in a February letter, this development: “We’ve decided on a used ’72 VW bus, which we found for sale for $2,500. We’ll have to pay duty, as well, and buy new tires and all the spare parts. The way things go around here, who knows what we’ll really end up having to pay?
“We’ve also decided to collaborate with a couple of fellow teachers to run a month-long summer school, which should net us at least $1,000 per person. Since the VW won’t be available to us until 1 July anyway, the timing will be perfect.”
On our spring break we flew to Johannesburg to buy backup car parts and tools, material to build sand ladders, English-language books and other necessities unavailable in Kinshasa.
But there would be one last grand adventure in Zaire before that. Over Christmas break, we hiked up to the snowy 10-mile massif of the Ruwenzori Mountains and hitched rides through the Ituri Rainforest, home to the nomadic hunter-gatherers called Pygmies and to the rare and lovely okapi, the only living relative of the giraffe.