The Sweetest Melons: Memories of the Congo

Photo by Aravind Sivaraj CCx2.0

By Jenni Gate

We drove down the hill from our home through the city of Kinshasa. Just outside the city, the jungle was thick. The road was full of pot holes and ruts. Our car bounced along on the rough pavement, heading towards vast stretches of farm land. About 8 miles from Kinshasa, we turned off the road into an open area with several low, concrete-block buildings spread out around a farming compound. Rice paddies stretched into the distance, surrounded by jungle. It was the summer of 1970, and we had arrived at the Chinese Agricultural Research Center. 

The circumstances of our visit were this: Dad, an agriculturist, was working with a Taiwanese agricultural mission in coordination with U.S. efforts to develop rice varieties to help ease the food shortages in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). But they had a problem—the Congolese people would not plant or eat the rice in production from the Chinese Agricultural Research Center. Dad commented to his Chinese counterparts that he couldn’t understand why the Congolese rejected the rice, because all rice tastes the same. The Taiwanese were shocked. The Head of Station invited all Americans and their families out to the farm to taste the different varieties being developed.

Oryza sativa

My sisters and I jumped out of the car, eager to stretch and explore. A group of Taiwanese and Chinese men came to greet us, smiling and nodding at each of us. I don’t remember their names after so many years. They were dressed in tan, gray or black slacks with white, button-down shirts, and polished leather shoes. A few of them wore tightly woven straw hats. A couple of the men gestured at their young sons to come and meet us, and we were soon running and playing tag on lush, green grass in front of the Center.

We toured the farm, learning that the land for the project was provided by Mobutu. There were papaya and mango trees, citrus trees, bananas, and coconuts dotting the landscape near the driveway. Surrounding the homes and research buildings were the rice paddies, each marked with signs bearing numbers representing the variety being produced. The plants looked like long grass in the water, with some that grew as high as 5-ft. tall. Most of the rice was about 3-ft. tall.

Photo: IRRI CCx2.0

We were led through Quonset huts where we saw rice and other vegetable and fruit seedlings in nurseries. In broken English and French, but with great pride, our hosts showed us a large variety of rice seedlings. There were several varieties each of long, medium, and short grain rice plants.

In one Quonset hut, we saw many melons, from honeydew to watermelon. At the time, all watermelons had seeds, so we were impressed when we discovered that the Chinese Agricultural Research Center had developed seedless melons. The seeds inside the melons were miniscule, which  was great news to me. Dad had always told me the big, black seeds that I accidentally swallowed every time we ate watermelon were going to sprout inside my stomach and grow. I didn’t really believe him but, then again, I had no desire to find out.

Seedless by Scott Ehardt CCx2.0

At dusk, the Taiwanese brought us indoors for dinner. We ate a gigantic steamed fish and a dish called Lion’s Head Stew, which was ground meat cooked in a rice-pasta pouch. It was so delicious that I’ve searched for Lion’s Head Stew on the menu at every Chinese restaurant I’ve been to since then, including when I visited Hong Kong years later. I’m still searching, without success. Our hosts had us sample several rice dishes of different varieties of rice. We sampled white, creamy, and brown rice in every shade imaginable. Some rice was white and sticky and tasted like the rice we were used to eating. Some of the rice was almost sweet. A lot of it tasted like cardboard. This was the reason the Congolese would not plant and eat the rice produced by the Center. The rice available in sufficient quantities for use by local farmers had no flavor. But there were many varieties still being developed. When we tasted one variety of rice with a clean, nutty flavor, Dad said, “I want 100 kilos of that.” Our hosts exclaimed that it was their favorite as well.

Red, White, Brown & Wild Rice by Earth100 CCx2.0

For me and my sisters, the best part of the meal was dessert. Iced platters, bearing slices of cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon, and yellow-flesh watermelon, all garnished with curlicue shavings from the rinds, were brought out and passed around. The novelty of melons without seeds kept us awestruck.

It was summer in Africa, and those melons were sweet and refreshing.

Photo by Kelly-Wikimedia CCx2.0

That summer treat, exploring all the flavors of rice and melon, has stayed in our family memory for decades. I still love melons, especially honeydew, and the memory of those flavors on that hot summer day still outshines the mundane, commercial flavors of the rice and melons we eat in the States today.

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As a side note: Years later, Dad took a flight from Jakarta to Hong Kong. He sat next to a young, Chinese man who had been to Jakarta to buy rattan. As they sat talking, the young man mentioned he had been to Zaire. In a flash of recognition, Dad said, “I remember you! You were at the Research Center.” The young man remembered my dad bringing him with us to the Embassy swimming pool on occasion. They exchanged contact information, both commenting on what a small world it is. Indeed, it is.

Great Travelers in History: Mary Kingsley

1862-1900

By Jenni Gate

The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.

Albert Einstein

Mary Henrietta Kingsley traveled paths few in history had ever explored in a time when women never traveled alone. Her journeys within West Africa expanded Europe’s knowledge of the region. Despite the inherent racism of colonialist England during the Victorian era, she became an advocate for the people of West Africa, often suffering ridicule as a result. Ignoring popular opinion and the expectations of society, Mary Kingsley paddled up little-known estuaries, walked through jungles, endured insects and reptiles, climbed mountains, and stoked fires on steamships. She met and befriended cannibals and missionaries alike, though it would be fair to say she preferred the former to the latter. She collected specimens of fish wherever she went, and took copious notes of her experiences. Her life was extraordinary but short.

Although she had no formal education, Mary Kingsley grew up in a house full of books about science and memoirs of explorers. Her father, a doctor and writer, traveled extensively throughout his own life. He contracted rheumatic fever on his last journey and returned home where his daughter cared for him until his death. She had nursed her mother for years. Coincidentally, both parents died within a few weeks of one another. Mary Kingsley, then age 30, decided to travel. She had a few academic connections through her brother, who was in law school at that time. Mary read what was known about Africa, asked her acquaintances for advice about traveling there and was roundly told not to go. She was repeatedly warned that it was too dangerous to go to West Africa.

Ignoring all advice, in 1893 she headed to Liverpool and boarded a ship for the Canary Islands, then pushed on to Sierra Leone. She arrived in West Africa with few possessions other than her high-necked shirts and floor-length skirts. Traveling the coastline by steamboat, she made her way past the oil rivers of Nigeria and on to Angola. 

Region traveled by Kingsley

It was the Victorian era, and women did not travel alone. Her shipmates assumed she was a missionary, and they were scandalized to find her still on board the ship after all the other missionaries disembarked at the Canary Islands. Even in Africa, local women continually asked where her husband was. She frequently went into dangerous areas alone, but most often journeyed with African men who helped her by cooking, translating, making camp, and finding pathways.

On her second journey to West Africa a year after the first, Kingsley traversed the rivers of the French Congo and climbed Mount Cameroon (the first English person to climb it). She met and befriended the Fan (or Fang as some sources name them) people, who were known to be cannibals. Exploring by steamboat and dugout canoe, paddling the swamps and streams of the Ogooué River in Gabon, she collected fish from the rivers and lakes to take back to the British Museum as specimens for study. She was thrilled to have this work taken seriously by the zoologist who helped sponsor the trip, Dr. Albert Gunther. At least three previously unknown species of fish were named after her.

Mary Kingsley documented travels on the rivers throughout West Africa. Her writing is evidence of a humorous and curious mind. In Travels in West Africa, she described the dangers of paddling through the tidewaters of African rivers in dugout canoes:

Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in a small dugout canoe, and that crocodile and his relations are awake – a thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming along – and when he has got his foot upon his native heath – that is to say, his tail within holding reach of his native mud – he is highly interesting, and you may not be able to write home about him – and you get frightened on your own behalf.

About encounters with insects in West African Studies, she wrote:

But it’s against the insects ashore that you have to be specially warned. During my first few weeks of Africa, I took a general natural historical interest in them with enthusiasm as of natural history, it soon became a mere sporting one, though equally enthusiastic at first. Afterwards a nearly complete indifference set in, unless some wretch aroused a vengeful spirit in me by stinging or biting. I should say, looking back calmly upon the matter, that 75 per cent of West African insects sting, 5 per cent bite, and the rest are either permanently or temporarily parasitic on the human race. And undoubtedly one of the many worst things you can do in West Africa is to take any notice of an insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying lobster and the figure of Abraxas on a Gnostic gem, do not pay it the least attention, never mind where it is; just keep quiet and hope it will go away – for that’s your best chance; you have none in a stand-up fight with a good thorough-going African insect. …

Of course you cannot ignore driver ants, they won’t go away, but the same principle reversed is best for them, namely, your going away yourself. 

And later in the same work:

While in West Africa you should always keep an eye lifting for Drivers. You can start doing it as soon as you land, which will postpone the catastrophe, not avoid it; …it may be just as well for you to let things slide down the time-stream until Fate sends a column of the wretches up your legs. … The females and workers of these ants are provided with stings as well as well-developed jaws. They work both for all they are worth, driving the latter into your flesh, enthusiastically up to the hilt; they remain therein, keeping up irritation when you have hastily torn their owner off in response to a sensation that is like that of red hot pinchers.

After her second trip to West Africa, Kingsley toured England and spoke widely of her travels. She lectured on diverse topics from opening trade to Europeans in the region to the harm caused by missionaries converting native people and destroying whole ways of life in the process. Her opinions, formed from personal experience and observation, were controversial, sometimes creating a backlash in the press. Yet her work was influential in establishing perceptions of West Africa in Europe, and many of her observations are still relevant.

Volunteering as a nurse for the Second Boer War, Mary Kingsley returned to Capetown, South Africa in the late 1890s where she died of typhoid on June 3, 1900. In England between journeys, she had met Rudyard Kipling, striking up a friendship of mutual respect and admiration. In her work, Kingsley often quoted Kipling. At her death, Kipling gave her eulogy before her burial at sea with full military honors.

About her own writing, Mary Kingsley was humble and humorously self-deprecating, as the following story illustrates:

Alas! I am hampered with bad method of expression. I cannot show you anything clearly and neatly. I have to show you a series of pictures of things, and hope you will get from those pictures the impression which is the truth. I dare not set myself up to tell you the truth. … It is a repetition of the difficulty a friend of mine and myself had over a steam launch called the Dragon Fly, whose internal health was chronically poor, and subject to bad attacks. Well, one afternoon, he and I had to take her out to the home-going steamer, and she had suffered that afternoon in the engines, and when she suffered anywhere she let you know it. We did what we could for her, in the interests of humanity and ourselves; we gave her lots of oil, and fed her with delicately-chopped wood; but all to but little avail. So both our tempers being strained when we got to the steamer, we told her what the other one of us had been saying about the Dragon Fly. The purser of the steamer thereon said “that people who said things like those about a poor inanimate steam launch were fools with a flaming hot future, and lost souls entirely.” We realised that our observations had been imperfect; and so, being ever desirous of improving ourselves, we offered to put the purser on shore in the Dragon Fly. We knew she was feeling still much the same, and we wanted to know what he would say when jets of superheated steam played on him. He came, and they did; and when they did, you know, he said things I cannot repeat. Nevertheless, things of the nature of our own remarks, but so much finer of the kind, that we regarded him with awe when he was returning thanks to the “poor inanimate steam launch”; but it was when it came to his going ashore, gladly to leave us and her, that we found out what that man could say; and we morally fainted at his remarks made on discovering that he had been sitting in a pool of smutty oil, which she had insidiously treated him to, in order to take some of the stuffing out of him about the superior snow-whiteness of his trousers. Well, that purser went off the scene in a blue flame; and I said to my companion, “Sir, we cannot say things like that.” “Right you are, Miss Kingsley,” he said sadly; “you and I are only fit for Sunday school entertainments.”

Mary Kingsley wrote two books, Travels in West Africa, published in 1897, and West African Studies, published in 1899, and she published several articles. Her writing was descriptive and full of detail about the surroundings and observations of the people she encountered. The humor infusing her writing makes reading her work still a joy today.

Food Challenges of the Congo: Do Whatever It Takes

By Jenni Legate

I started this post with light-hearted, childhood memories of meals we had when my family lived in Kinshasa, Congo. Then a news piece caught my eye, and I realized how frivolous my food challenges were in comparison to people living in the country today.

I like good food, but there are times when it's better to eat than complain, namely, when you are hungry and in the Third World.

Our morning routine in Kinshasa was to pour stale Corn Flakes into a bowl, add re-constituted powdered milk, wait for the weevils that infested the cereal to float to the top, scoop them off and onto a plate, and then eat our cereal with gusto. I never questioned this routine.

Mom made freeze-dried cottage cheese that she reconstituted for a meal. She made freeze-dried sweet potatoes which were horrible when they were reconstituted, but we gagged them down when we were hungry anyway. We made our own sausages and patties. We boiled and filtered endless amounts of water. We soaked our vegetables in iodine. Our kitchen was like a mad scientist’s laboratory with giant kettles of water boiling, a series of stainless steel filtration and storage containers, racks for drying foods, a large pantry, and food in various stages of preparation.



Mango tree by Robert McLean
CCx2.0

We had fruit trees, mango, lemon, lime, guava, and pomegranate. When we ate mangos, the sweet juice ran down our arms. Sugar cane grew in our back yard, mixed in with the snake-infested bamboo. One piece of sugar cane was savored and sucked on all day. Wisely, my parents only allowed this as a special treat, or my teeth would be rotted out by now.

Our favorite trip into downtown Kinshasa was to a French bakery, where we made a point of going on baking days. The warm, yeasty scent of fresh-baked bread filled our heads. We selected horn-shaped pastries filled with cream, and we always bought two long loaves of fresh-baked bread: one for the ride home, eaten while still warm, and one for our dinner.

One year, we had a luau for Christmas. It was warm outside, so we planned a pool party. Dad stuck two pigs and hung them in my sister’s bathtub to bleed out. It was horrible and stunk and Susie was nearly sick looking at the pigs’ sagging faces and vacant eyes staring down the drain; slit throats with blood oozing out. We roasted the pigs on a spit over a couple of fire pits we dug in the back yard near the swimming pool. Our guests exclaimed at how tender it was, how easily it pulled apart. We made cracklings from the skin. We ate pork for weeks after that. Susie could not eat it.

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Mobutu - Wikipedia
photo

We left the Congo in 1971 before the worst of Mobutu's policies came to fruition. "Zairianization" had yet to spasm into a wave of nationalism and expropriation of foreign-owned properties and assets. Mobutu's tacit approval of theft and corruption was already ingrained in the public psyche, but the infamous Article 15 had yet to be adopted as a way of life throughout the country. Article 15 was a sarcastic reference to a statement made by a diamond mining boss of Katanga province in frustration at repeated appeals for help from refugees fleeing violence in the area: “Débrouillez-vous pour vivre,” (do whatever it takes to stay alive).  Mobutu's dictatorship was brutal, crime was rampant, and the poor struggled to find ways to make a living, but food was still abundant when we moved. Desperation was becoming a way of life for many.

Mobutu’s corruptions eventually brought the Congo to its knees. The country then became embroiled in over two decades of civil war that spilled over the borders after the Rwanda genocide. That conflict continues today. Life for most Congolese is a daily struggle. Over 50 percent of the population lives on under a dollar a day.

Congolese women at water station by Julien Harneis CCx2.0

In 2012 in Eastern Congo, the UN estimated that over 1.5 million people were on the move, fleeing the fighting. A UN news article dated May 3, 2013, stated that Mai-Mai fighters in the east have propelled over 200,000 people into flight since April, and there are at least 354,000 internally-displaced refugees trying to escape the conflict in the Katanga province alone. The UN’s World Food Programme is working to provide food security to more than 3 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in spite of warfare, bad roads, and the isolation and distance between populations being served.

During times of warfare, the fields and rivers are too dangerous for people to farm or fish. During peaceful times, cassava is a staple food of the Congo. Plantains, palms, nuts, fruits, fish, and bush meat supplement their diet. When we lived there, lots of Congolese people ate crickets as a delicacy. Grubs and caterpillars are also sought out for their protein.

Piri piri peppers by Orrling CCx3.0

Tim Butcher’s travel memoir of the Congo, Blood River, recounts his meeting with a village chief in Mukumbo near Lake Tanganyika who reminisces about his country’s history. The village used to be served by buses and cars and other symbols of modern life. Since the conflict, nothing remains. When fighting nears, the villagers flee into the bush, which they have learned is the safest place for them. Their village is continually being destroyed and must be rebuilt. Butcher comments, “The normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary, and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.”

Centuries of colonialism, slavery, corruption, and warfare have thrust the country into survival mode where food insecurity is the norm and food choices are a luxury. Progress is being made slowly, but the situation is fragile.

Meals in the Third World can be a challenge, but this is true nowhere more than in the Congo.

I also blog at Nomad Trails and Tales. I hope you'll stop by there to read more about my travel adventures and life growing up among worlds.

Joyful Noise: Pop Culture in Africa

By Jenni Gate

From some of the least hopeful places on the planet comes some of the most hopeful music. Throughout Africa, the trend in pop culture is for musicians to uplift and inspire, with folk instruments, upbeat rhythms, and lyrics.  They sing of their own transitions from desolation to optimism, or give tribute to the struggles of their compatriots.

BOMBINO Photo: By Modiba Productions (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Last week, Bombino, one of Africa’s fastest-rising musicians, released the album Nomad to critical acclaim. The album was produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, and the result is mesmerizing. Omara Bombino Moctar is a Tuareg born in Niger in 1980 in the midst of cultural and political upheaval. The Tuareg are a nomadic ethnic group common throughout northern Africa from Burkina Faso to Mali, Niger, Algeria, and Libya. Due to their nomadic lifestyle, they have been the subject of violent suppression since the days of colonialism. With North African governments seeking to restrict their movements as population growth stresses the desert environment, the Tuareg have found themselves marginalized and repressed. This led to several uprisings and reprisals from the 1960s through the present. Bombino grew up in the midst of violence. His family was forced to flee Niger several times to neighboring Algeria and later to Libya. During his years in exile, Bombino taught himself to play the guitar, watching videos of Mark Knopfler, Jimi Hendrix and others until he mastered their styles. In 2007, the government of Niger outlawed the guitar and executed two musicians, forcing Bombino to flee once again. His sound is electrifying with a voice like butter accompanying high-energy guitar and in the process encapsulating the sounds of rebellion and optimism. His music speaks of peace and rights for the Tuaregs spread throughout the Sahara.

This video about the making of Nomad includes background about Bombino and the history of the Tuareg people: 

Watch Bombino’s performance of a simple, yet beautiful Tuareg dedication song:

Listen to sample tracks from the album Nomad and discover more about this fascinating nomadic musician here: 

http://www.allmusic.com/album/nomad-mw0002494357
 

Photo: Harry Wad, CC by SA 3.0

Africa’s most inspiring musical couple is Amadou and Mariam. Amadou Bagayoko became blind at the age of 16, and Mariam Doumbia lost her sight at age 5 due to measles. Amadou and Mariam, both from Bamako, Mali, met in 1975 at an institute for the blind. They married in 1980 and began touring, recording, and playing at festivals worldwide. A 2004 collaboration with Manu Chao, a world-famous Latin musician, to produce the album Dimanche à Bamako propelled the couple to worldwide fame. Their music blends rock and blues with traditional Mali, Middle Eastern, and Indian instruments. Their French lyrics uplift and inspire, giving hope for the downtrodden of Mali. Many of their songs are love songs, like Je Pense à Toi. Themes of friendship, happiness, and community infuse their music.

In the midst of the current conflict in Mali, the couple has joined with several other musicians to speak out against the violence. See the story about this effort at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2013/01/18/169730172/watch-a-supergroup-from-mali-sing-for-peace

Je Pense à Toi:

A recent video about the current political situation in Mali:

Watch and listen to their official videos and songs here: http://www.youtube.com/amadouandmariam

Baloji. Photo: by Peter Forret, CC by 2.0

An edgy R&B rapper is making a mark on the African and European music scenes with a compelling personal story of triumph over adversity. Baloji, whose name means sorcerer in Swahili, was born in 1978 in Lubumbashi, Congo to a Congolese mother and Belgian father. When he was 3, his mother sent him to live in Belgium with his father. His father lost his fortune in Congolese investments when Baloji was 7 and deserted him. Baloji grew up in a school for delinquent children run by nuns. Angry, alienated, and out of sync with mainstream Belgian culture, he ran away at age 15 and joined a rap group. The group eventually became known as Starflam. They cut an album, Survivant, in 2001 that went platinum. Due to disagreements, Baloji quit the group in 2004, turning his back on music altogether.

Out of the blue, he received a letter from his mother who had not been in contact since 1981. His mother commented in her letter that when she sent him to Belgium she had intentionally sent him to the land of Marvin Gaye. Baloji deeply considered that musical legacy contrasted with the current condition of people in war-torn Congo. He realized that his life perspective was skewed. Rather than being a victim of a cross cultural childhood, he was fortunate to have escaped the intense poverty and violence of the Congo. When they spoke by phone, his mother asked him what he’d been doing for all the years they were apart. He produced his first solo album, Hotel Impala as a way to respond with the highlights of his life. Compelled to return to Kinshasa, a city built for 500,000 people but now home to over 12 million, he began a journey of exploration and self-discovery. Music in the Congo had not changed much in 25 years. Caught up in the feverish energy of the city, Baloji turned his confused cross-cultural identity into a strength. In just six days, he recorded the album Kinshasa Succursale with Congolese bands Konono No 1 and Zaiko Langa Langa. The album reworked several songs from Hotel Impala with several new songs, all blending Congolese instruments and rhythms. Gritty music videos were filmed on the streets of Kinshasa.

Karibou Ya Bintou (meaning Welcome to Limbo) is the signature track. It tells the tale of how he evolved from an angry young man to a music sorcerer, a creative spirit fully engaged with his cultural identity. Here is the video with English subtitles [for mature audiences only]:

Mellower sounds abound in Le Jour d’Après, which harkens back to the more constrained musical days of Independence.

If you happen to be in Britain this summer, catch a train tour called the African Express. About 80 musicians, including Amadou and Mariam and Baloji, are riding a train across country to promote the best in African music. Many of these artists have compelling personal stories, coming from war-torn areas, or overcoming lives of turmoil. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/26/africa-express-bound-for-glory