A msungu in Kadutu
If you’ve never been to the Congo and you’ve never stepped on the dusty roads, full of holes, of the Bukavu city, if you’ve never entered the Kadutu market you do not know what it means to be black men (the euphemism we whites use to define blacks). Black-skinned men, dressed in old-fashioned and clean clothes and always smiling … but here, due to the logic of proportions, the colored men are those like me, the whites.
To get to the market of Kadutu, located in a predominant position in the district called with the same name, you have to walk for a while under the looks of people who ask what you do there, observed by thousands of eyes that scrutinize your intentions and accompanied by little boys who follow you step by step.
The dusty road, with a canal that acts as an open-air sewer, becomes increasingly narrow, the motorbikes pass you while cars, minibuses and off-road vehicles make absurd maneuvers trying to dodge the holes and invading the lanes; moreover, the direction of travel makes no sense here, the sense in fact is given by the holes to dodge, sometimes tens of centimeters deep. Nobody, however, take care of them, in the inevitability of events, they need to overcome the holes to reach the destination so time is delayed, to make few kilometers it takes hours.
People gather in the narrow street and come towards you, I feel their bodies rub against mine, inhale their breaths and I see their wide-open pupils searching for a reason: why a msungu, a white man, is here in the middle to that confusion, to those shimmering colors, to those dazed and sometimes challenging faces?
Yeah, what’s doing a msungu in Kadutu, a white man among thousands of blacks?
To get to the market you have to climb a small path, full of people on the sides who ask you for money or want to sell something; colorful mangoes rich in minerals, papayas, pineapples, sweet bananas, maracuja with very fragrant pulp and much more (maracuja are also called “passion fruits” because of the shape of the corolla of the flower that looks like the crown of thorns worn by Christ during his crucifixion).
I climb up to the top, women with sewing machines show me fabrics to make shirts or trousers and in this organized confusion everyone has his own corner to propose something, someone does it in the local language, the mashi, others in French and someone else in English.
After a few minutes you are in their midst, perfumes and smells mix and you realize your true dimension: you are a lonely and unarmed white man, you know that nothing matters your status or even your riches, you know that there you are only the one that you are, a white man in an immense community of blacks. You know that if only they wanted it would be enough to attack you and no one would defend you, but this does not happen and the crowd that crowds welcomes you like a mother. The tension is palpable, a foreign body is creeping into that world, but then the smiles are obvious and shortly after you are a white man respected for the courage to have arrived there, to meet them.
The Congo that has everything, but where nothing works, Bukavu with its dusty confusion and Kadutu with its colorful market have brought me back to true values: the meaning of life and death, friendship and love, the gift of smile and the kindness of everyday gestures. There I felt last among the last, but basically like all of them sharing the few hours of electricity, the water that sometimes comes down from the tap and a hopping internet connection, but always with a smile, always happy with that little that there was.
If you have not been to Bukavu you can only imagine that world so far from where we have everything, but we are unhappy, always tense in the search for something, but always dissatisfied with what we have.
In Kadutu I reconciled with the world, free from paradigms and false concepts and free from illusions, I am mirrored in the eyes of those people, who have nothing, to find myself.
