Energy and hope: the youth of Congo in Kindu diocese (Photo: (c)Steve Burgess/CMS)It’s not every day you meet someone who’s walked off the pages of a best-selling travel book and in through the doors of CMS.
But here is Louise Wright, who features in the Richard and Judy-recommended Blood River, politely putting to rights the account of Congo given by its author, Tim Butcher.
“Read it – but don’t be depressed about Congo,” she urges. Butcher’s view of the country is that it is “Africa’s broken heart”.
“It is quite true what he says, that you go to a place and they’ll show you this was the post office, this used to be the bank, there used to be a ferry across the river here.
“All these things are true – but they haven’t left people depressed the way he gives the picture.
Louise Wright(Photo: (c)Steve Burgess/CMS)
“People are immensely full of initiative and doing amazing things to survive.”
She says the view of the traveller is inevitably influenced by the fact that they are just passing through what she describes, after 19 years there, as “the most beautiful country”.
Although she praises Butcher’s book for some “wonderful” descriptive passages, she uncharacteristically bubbles with frustration when she says, “The rest of the world is incredibly negative about Congo.
“You see that on the BBC: when there’s something going on in Congo, they’re always talking to the English-speaking Rwandans or Ugandans to get a view of what’s happening – and they’ve got a very negative view of Congo because the relationships [between the countries] haven’t been good.”
Congo’s image as a primitive land of fear, death and chaos was fixed in the minds of the West by The Heart of Darkness, the novel by Joseph Conrad written at the height of the colonial era. It portrays the way in which a European soldier’s efforts to civilise an African society descend into horrific brutality.
Now, five years after the end of a war which killed more people than any other since World War Two, Louise argues that it can be easy to get Conrad’s stereotype of the country reinforced if you only talk to certain kinds of people.
“The way Tim Butcher travelled,” says Louise, “he met mostly French-speaking people, who’ve worked with non-governmental organisations or aid agencies. [These are] people who know what Europeans expect to hear, as it were, and also people who want to get more help, people hoping he’s a person of influence – so they go on about the hardships, more than you find when you live long term with people and speak Swahili with them.”
Louise met Butcher when he visited her in Kindu at the diocesan training centre where she would often help out.
In the book she appears as “the last English missionary in eastern Congo” (not quite true if you count the entire east of the country with its border from Sudan to Zambia).
Butcher describes her as “living the life of the Poisonwood Bible”, another bestselling book about Congo, with its fictional account of a fundamentalist preacher who takes his family as missionaries to Congo.
“I don’t mind the comparison,” she says, “as long as you don’t think I’m like the father in the Poisonwood Bible. The mother – I would like to be like her in many ways, the way she could make do and cope with anything.”
Making do is a trait Louise clearly admires. The ingenuity to get by on virtually nothing is something she finds in the Congolese, like the young men in Kalima, the former tin-mining town where she has lived for the last 12 years.
“People are extremely energetic and positive. The boys in Kalima are always digging up tin – they pack it into sacks and get it out and get their money and get things in to sell. There’s constantly great enterprise – brilliant schemes for making money and making do and find clever ways out of things.
“I think that sort of creativity and imagination, perhaps [Butcher] didn’t see as much as I do.”
She is careful not to play down the horrific fighting and raping which goes on around Goma, but emphasises that everywhere else is at peace – and roads are being built.
Technology is bringing both employment and empowerment, especially the mobile phone system.
“Almost every month a new antenna goes up so we can speak to more and more people around Congo. That’s a great weapon against the depression of feeling that the ‘big ones’ are running things and you’ve got no say in matters.”
The church, too, plays a critical role. “Because it’s been the only thing that kept going during the war, it really does give people hope and energy and optimism.”
In Kindu the local Anglican school hosts a technical training school, financed by the World Bank, where ex-combatants from various rebel groups learn bricklaying, carpentry, sewing – skills to help them leave the life of a soldier.
“The whole process of making people feel responsible for their own lives is what’s going on now.”