I am a great fan of the Congo(s). Everybody talks about the Amazon and I always wonder why the Congo Basin is so easily forgotten? Okay, in size its rainforest it plays only second fiddle to the Amazon but hey, it offers a real chance to see forest elephants, lowland gorillas, chimpanzees and even Bonobos (the primates guys who separate sex from reproduction but treat it like some sort of social glue to avoid or solve conflicts, and, imagine, who even perform oral sex to each other). Whereas, what can you really see in the Amazon?? 

If at all thinking about the Congo, everybody thinks about the DRC, the big boy. Almost nobody thinks about Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic and the real small boy, the Republic of the Congo., so-called Congo-Brazzaville. I travelled twice to the latter, each time by ferry from Kinshasa which upon sight let’s you immediately wish that you have doubled your life insurance indemnity. It’s just a 6km ride on the huge Congo between the two cities, but each time when I came to Brazzaville it feels at least half an African world apart from the frenetic chaos of Kinshasa. Where in Kinshasa there are slums on stilts built into the Congo, in Brazzaville there is almost a river promenade in front of the Radisson Hotel. Everything is smaller in Brazzaville, the touts are less aggressive, the restaurants more savoir -vivre than survivre, the people more gentle. Is it because their ancestors experienced in the former French Congo fewer horrors than their brothers in the Belgian Congo on the other side? 

When I was boarding the ferry back from Brazza to Kinshasa I could at first not explain why there at least two dozen of wheelchair users on board with merchandise, mostly clothes and plasticware from China, so highly piled on their limbs that they almost disappeared behind them. The mystery was only lifted upon arrival in Kinshasa: While everybody else’s’ luggage was checked and “taxed” the wheelchair  users passed customs thanks to a “no tax for wheelchairs”-rule unharmed. Shortly behind customs I saw the  “handicapped” men hand over their towering merchandise hand over to waiting trucks, park their wheelchairs and – walk away on foot!

My Brazilian friends would call jeitinho, my Congolese friends just call it “survival”.