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One woman's account of trouble in paradise
Book review: Bongo Bongo Bongo, I Don't Wanna Leave
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July 27, 2009
By Beverly Roos Muller
Bongo Bongo Bongo, I Don't Wanna Leave
The Congo (A Memoir)
Veronica Cecil
(Kwela)
There are people who spend their lives looking for safety and comfort. And then there are the few who seem to attract turmoil, risk and extraordinary circumstances.
This very readable book is one of those larger-than-life true tales, a witness account of what happened in the Congo in the 1960s.
Author Veronica Cecil has had the wisdom and skill to pen this memoir through the eyes of the young wife and mother she was then, making it not a political treatise, but a straight-forward story of her experience.
Living in London in the early 1960s - with pea-soup fog, pollution, drabness and cold - she and accountant husband David jumped at the chance to move to the (Belgian) Congo when David was transferred there. Though her compatriots' casual racism had revolted her, she saw the opportunity to bring up her children in cleaner air, a better climate and, with some luck, financial security.
The New York Times had, in the summer of 1963, described the state of affairs in the Congo as a "stagnant calm". Few realised newly elected Patrice Lumumba was to be murdered with the connivance of Western intelligence agencies and the Belgians.
"The company (in the business of palm oil) was pretty gung-ho," she recalls years later in Rondebosch.
Oblivious to the swelling danger, mindful of the swelling pregnancy of a second child, she packed optimistically. It was only on her arrival (fraught with all kinds of delays), that she realised how poorly they were prepared.
Food was already an issue. There was not enough and the variety was limited. She quickly realised, instead of luxuries, they were in dire need of staple foods and clothing.
Her experience of the Congo was the opposite to Joseph Conrad's assessment of "the horror", as he moved further away from "civilisation" up the river into the interior. "I found the urban areas upsetting, like the colonies I had grown up in, except worse. But as we travelled up the river further inland, it improved. The plantations were wonderful. There was a feeling you were surrounded by great beauty and calm."
After wet and dismal England, it must have seemed like paradise. But then reports about destabilisation in surrounding areas began to filter through. And her second baby was due. Yet the company kept reassuring people on the large plantation, about 200km from Stanleyville, and life went on as normal.
Suddenly, Stanleyville was overrun while she began to show the first signs of labour. Women with small children were evacuated first in boats and then tiny planes.
She abandoned her family albums and heirlooms in place of food for her son and nappies for the imminent infant. They crossed the river by boat and then crammed into a small aircraft as her pains began. She wondered how she would give birth on the plane, as the only available place in the overcrowded fuselage was on the cramped lap of the woman next to her.
As always in a crisis, the characters' true natures were revealed. "I am very practical in emergencies," says Cecil, who has seen more than her fair share. "I decided I was not going to die, and neither was my child nor my unborn baby."
During this calamity, unintended humour, as always, creeps in. There was a vast row about a massive trunk, belonging to the managing director's wife, being left behind on a runway. It was packed with her children's English school uniforms, which, she claimed, they needed for the beginning of their new school term.
The most traumatic experience, once reaching the relative safety of chaotic Leopoldville, was trying to find someone to care for her son while she had the baby. Those she had counted on as friends made excuses. Eventually a Hungarian woman acquaintance came generously to the rescue.
Jennifer was safely born in the only single room available, and the family was reunited and evacuated back to the UK. I noticed she had subsequently had two more daughters, and joked I hoped they had been born in more peaceful circumstances.
"Well actually," she said in her calm voice, "my next daughter was due when we were living in Nigeria, and we had to be evacuated from Lagos. She was born 24 hours after we touched down in England. When my fourth child was due, I went to bed in my home in England and stayed there."
I wondered why, after all these many years, she had decided to write Bongo now. "Whenever I thought about it, and the horrors in the Congo since then, I felt my story seemed trivial - even facile. I had written a short account of it when I first got back to England.
"Then it struck me. I'd lived an awfully long time, and I was a witness to what had happened. I tried to be an honest witness, to go back and find the person I was then."
But the Congo evacuation had its aftermath. "After some months I plunged into depression. One day my husband came home and told me quite casually news had come through that, after we had left the plantation at Elizabetha, the soldiers had shot 12 people." The book begins by imagining the scene - the kind nuns, the frightened Ghanaians, discarded in a monstrous mess.
"I'm pretty sure that's what happened to them. The Ghanaians, who had been invited in as management, were simply left behind. The company did not see their nationality (that as non-Congolese they were in mortal danger), they only saw their colour."
What would she like to have known before she went? "I would have liked to have been told straight out about the problems - that there was no food, no law and order, chaos. That it wasn't safe for children."
Cecil went on to write radio and television plays and, after the death of her husband, became a radio journalist, producing a BBC series from Afghanistan in 1996. She tells me she has just returned from there, after working on her next book.
"I am writing two books at the moment," she says, cheerfully. "One is connected to my early years in India. The other is about the murder of a relative in 1932, which I think I may have solved. That was why I had to go back to Afghanistan."
Veronica Cecil was not born to live a dull life. As readers, that's good news for us.
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