Last Chance to See

beaming in his purple tunic, wearing glasseswith frames that were black at the top and transparent at the bottom. The missionaries, the mission school teachers, and the American couple who were merely very interested in missionary work climbed smiling out of the plane, and we, pausing to pull our camera bags out from under our seats, followed them.
    We were in Zaïre.
    I think the best way of explaining what goes so hideously wrong with Zaïre is to reproduce a card we were given by a tourist officer a few days later.
    One section of it was written in English, and is for the benefit of the tourist. It goes like this:
    Madam, Sir
,
On behalf of the President-Founder of the MPR, President of the Republic, of his government and of my fellow citizens, it is agreeable for me to wish you a wonderful sojourn in the Republic of Zaïre
.
    In this country you will discover majestic sites, a luxuriant flora and an exceptional fauna
.
    The kindness and hospitality of the Zaïrean people will facilitate your knowledge of the tradition and folklore
.
    Our young nation expects much from your suggestions and thanks you for your contribution in helping it to welcome the friends you will send us in a much better way. Minister of E.C.N.T
.
    That seems fair enough. It’s the other section that makes you begin to worry a bit about what you might in fact find. You are meant to show it to any Zaïrois you actually meet, and it goes like this:
    Zaïreans, Help Our Visitors
    The friend holding this card is visiting our country. He is our guest. If he wants to take photographs, be polite and friendly to him. Do your best to have him enjoy his sojourn, and he will come back, bringing his friends with him
.
    By helping him, you help your country. Never forget that tourism provides us with returns which allow us to create new jobs, to build schools, hospitals, factories, etc
.
    On the welcome that our guest would have received will depend our touristic future
.
    It’s alarming enough that an exhortation like this should be thought to be necessary, but what is even more worrying is that this section is written only in English.
    No “Zaïrean”—or Zaïrois, as they actually call themselves—speaks English, or hardly any do.
    The system by which Zaïre works, and which this card was a wonderfully hopeless attempt to correct, is very simple. Every official you encounter will make life as unpleasant as he possibly can until you pay him to stop it. In U.S. dollars. He then passes you on to the next official, who will be unpleasant to you all over again. By the end of our trip, this process would assume nightmarish proportions, by comparison with which our entry into Zaïre was a relatively gentle softening-up process, and only consisted of two hours of rain and misery in huts.
    The first thing we saw in the customs hut was a picture which gave us a clue about how our expedition to find endangered wildlife in Zaïre was going to go. It was a portrait of a leopard. That is, it was a portrait of part of a leopard. The part of the leopard in question had been fashioned into a rather natty leopard-skin pillbox hat which adorned the head of Marshall Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, the President of the Republic of Zaïre, who gazed down on us with a magisterial calm while his officials got to work on us.
    One was a large and fairly friendly man who occasionally offered us cigarettes, and the other was a small nasty man who kept on stealing ours. This is, of course, the classic interrogation method, designed to bring the victim to the brink of pathetic emotional breakdown. It’s obviously a techniquethey learned somewhere and have just found the habit hard to break, even though all they actually wanted to know from us was our names, passport numbers, and the serial numbers of every single piece of equipment we had with us.
    The big man in particular seemed to wish us no personal ill as he guided us gently through the insanity to which it was his duty to subject us, and I came to recognise a feeling I’ve heard described, when oddly close and touching relationships develop between torturers and their victims or kidnappers and their hostages. There is a feeling of all being in this together. The forms we had to fill in were headed “Belgian Congo,” crossed out, with “Zaïre” written in in pencil, which meant that they had to be at least eighteen years old. The only form they didn’t seem to have was the only one we actually wanted.