21 February 2013 –
I saw a dead body on the
street today. It was lying face down in the dirt alongside a road in
downtown Kinshasa. A fully clothed man’s body, one leg was bent at
the knee and spread slightly. The other leg was straight with the
foot in an uncomfortable, toes-directly-down position. Indeed, if
comfort were relevant.
I was alone in my rental
car. I had given my driver the day off. The traffic was
jammed going my way. I sat, transfixed, for nearly twenty minutes
watching this dead body across the road do, well, nothing. Cars
drove by on the other side of the street, however, but nobody stopped. People
walked by both ways without even pausing to see what the matter was. Stark
reality took on an almost cartoon setting.
I stayed in my car with
the doors locked, the windows up, and the air conditioning on. You
see, in 2009, just before we had arrived the first time in the Congo, there was
an automobile accident with injuries in downtown Kinshasa. A
foreign, white doctor stopped his car and tried to render assistance. He
was beaten to death by the assembling crowd. Consistent with the
culture here, if you are a foreigner and try to help, you may quickly be seen
as the problem.
It is frowned upon to
take public pictures in the Congo. Therefore, the attached picture
was not framed every well. I took it quickly and returned the camera
to its case, out of sight. The body didn’t move any more in real
time than it does captured in a picture. It isn’t the first dead
body I have seen, not even the first one in the streets of Kinshasa. But
the perversity of the easy flow of pedestrians and cars without any regard for
the absolute stillness of the dead body struck me hard.
The women who is walking
by in the picture didn’t look down at the body. Nobody who passed
looked at the body more than once. They all knew that this dead body
wasn’t their problem. Nothing is anybody else’s problem or
responsibility here. Nothing is long-term. Everything is
for the moment and for one’s self only. Death, decay, and corruption
reign. If ever there were a metaphor for the conditions in and
around the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it was this dead body on a busy
street in the most dysfunctional city on earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment