It was a bizarre army that helped Laurent Désiré Kabila, the father of the current Congolese President, to gain power in 1996/97. Its ranks numbered 4,000 generals, 2,000 colonels and just as many majors aged 55 and over, who had already tried their hand at insurgency in the 1960s in the commodity-rich province of Katanga in the east of the country and ultimately assassinated Patrice Lumumba.¹ However, the veterans alone were not strong enough to overthrow Mobutu.
»My two best friends were kidnapped by the rebels and forced to undergo military training. Later on they came back and convinced me that we have to fight for our country,« recounts Yaoundé. »From Kinshasa we went all the way to Kimbembe to get tactical training from Korean military personnel, and from there we went on to Équateur to fight in the battle between Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba. A few years later we were demobilised. I agreed to be demobilised as I was expecting a pay-off, but I was very disappointed. I was called up when I was twelve. I haven’t seen my parents since then.«²
In the Espace Masolo in Kinshasa street kids and demobilised child soldiers like Yaoundé have been learning since 2003 how to make puppets, with which they perform their own plays. Espace Masolo grew out of what were originally three local initiatives organised by puppeteer Malvine Velo, story-teller Hubert Mahela and actor Lambert Mousseka in cooperation with Gilbert Meyer, director of the Tohu-Bohu Théatre in Strasbourg. Former homeless people from Emmaus Strasbourg supported the initiative with an annual sales campaign. An association assisting the scheme aims first and foremost to provide elementary schooling for the children through sponsorships.³
For the project also includes classes in reading, writing and arithmetic three mornings a week. The young people learn craft skills to help ease their way into a job in a sewing atelier and a carpentry workshop that cooperate with Espace Masolo. While making sculptures out of scrap with French artist Daniel Depoutot, they learnt welding: Espace Masolo sees itself as an open network, which offers space to individual initiatives, rather than limiting its role solely to the puppet shows. One programme works with three-metre-tall figures, whose bodies are made out of a wide piece of cloth; another developed masks and even arranged a carnival procession. The children, who have been running wild and fighting street battles with the police at night, are of course taught basic hygiene as the very first step and given new clothes.
»It is amazing to see how little it takes to change something in their behaviour«, says Stefanie Oberhoff, an actress and artist from Stuttgart, who joined the project somewhat later. There is a high success rate: almost none of the children drop-out and only one has gone back to the army. Several young people have instead found their way back to their families. Platini, who is especially gifted, wants to work on drawing animated films. In the meantime a generational shift is underway. The older children receive certificates of qualification and become self-employed, the younger ones go to boarding school and continue to receive back-up from Espace Masolo. Plans are afoot for a whole village outside Kinshasa, which will make it possible to receive visitors from outside and at the same time to provide more intensive support to the children than is viable in the middle of the metropolis.
An actor is sitting, legs spread wide apart, in front of a bowl, dipping his fingers into it with great pleasure. But a dark figure is already creeping up from behind, and will soon bash him over the head with a polystyrene cudgel and take his place. However, the usurper counted his chickens before they were hatched – there are already two more figures lurking in wait, envious of his feeding bowl: the plays are evocative, entertaining, satirical. A lion, in a trap until just a moment ago, tells his liberator to his face: »Come here, you could solve my problems. I’m hungry. « Another play depicts a sinister church service: »Let us pray for our brothers setting out to steal«, the text asserts. »Praise be to you, Lord. Stealing an onion is pointless. Please, Lord, let me find a sack full of money, so that I can steal it. Have mercy, Lord, let me steal real money, or at least a mobile phone!«
The marionettes attempt to elevate the word in places where it has trouble surviving, says Gilbert Meyer, whether this is for social, economic, pathological or political reasons.⁴ One of these reasons is that the Democratic Republic of the Congo, »one of the poorest countries in the world«, is, paradoxically, very rich. In the commodity-rich regions in the east of the country, the area where Henry Morton Stanley once caused havoc and the setting for the climax of Joseph Conrad’s autobiographical novel »Heart of Darkness«, more people have lost their lives in armed conflicts than anywhere else in the world since the Second World War.⁵
It’s not that modernity somehow didn’t arrive in the Congo. It’s much more the case that it could not have taken place without the Congo. The agents of King Leopold employed unimaginable cruelty to force the country’s inhabitants to collect raw rubber, which European industry needed so urgently in the decades after 1890.⁶ Now the story is repeating itself: there are deposits of copper and cobalt, uranium, diamonds, and gold in the east of the republic, as well as the world’s largest reserves of coltan, which primarily leaves the country via Rwanda. Warlords control the terrain; blackmail and forced labour are the order of the day. But without coltan mobile telephony would not exist.⁷
And so the loop closes: Western countries are monitoring an election in which the democratic opposition is not participating.⁸ Rwanda and Uganda control the market and at the same time support the major candidates. Western companies, primarily from Belgium, but also from Great Britain, the USA and Germany, profit from trade flows.⁹ A programme for street kids cannot change this situation.
Gilbert Meyer nevertheless describes Espace Masolo as a pilot project for international civil society cooperation. In the local language, Lingala, »masolo« (singular: lisolo) means »dialogue, discussion, conference«, but is also used to refer to the stories that children tell each other, drawing them in the dust of the dirt tracks at the same time. As Lambert Mousseka emphasises, the centre gives the young people a rare opportunity to reflect on their situation and their future. In the process they develop clear insights: »When I started out with the puppet theatre, I thought it was just a toy«, says Guelor. But he learnt that he can earn money with it: »My mother bought food with the money and I could buy clothes for myself. In this country – in the Congo – parents are not able to buy clothes for their children.«

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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