Читать книгу Escape to Africa - Henri Diamant - Страница 7

01. Congo, The Ultimate Destination

I was eight years old in 1938 when our parents told us, my older brother Harry and me, that we were going to leave our home in Brno (Czechoslovakia at the time, Czech Republic today) and move to some country called Romania. I had never heard of Romania, and could not grasp why we were suddenly leaving our relatives and friends, and moving far away from home. But several weeks later I overheard our parents deliberating about lost passports, a missed opportunity in Romania and father’s acceptance of a position in Africa. Now that really made me sit up and take notice. All I had to hear was the name of that mysterious and thrilling continent and, just like that, my reluctance to leave friends and family vanished in a flash. And, while I will give further on more details about the strange set of circumstances that led us to Africa, I think it appropriate to disclose right now the thoughts that popped into my young mind the minute I heard about our impending move to the “Dark Continent”.

Mystifying AFRICA...Wow, and triple wow, I just could not believe that I was destined to live on the African Continent. How lucky can a guy get. After all, that mysterious continent was synonymous with adventure, pygmies, jungles and pets. And not just any pets, but the exotic, fascinating and wonderful pets of the Rain Forest. The proof of all this could be readily seen in every Tarzan movie that was ever made. Just think of that everlasting bond between Tarzan and Cheetah. For me, a kid who always fantasized about animals, travel, and adventure in exotic lands, this was the ultimate prospect of things to come, of dreams merging into reality. And so, I started at once to collect silver foil candy wrappers, since I knew for a fact that this was by far the top currency in Africa (I read all about it in one of my adventure books). And although I could not even guess as to how much foil was required to get a couple of chimps, I felt deep down that it had to be quite a lot. Wonderful pets like chimps and monkeys do not come cheap. But as I pondered about all this, I suddenly had two contrasting thoughts. The first one was quite tempting because it urged me to consume large quantities of candies in order to accumulate a good hoard of those precious foil wrappers. But the flip side hinted that over-eating candies usually brought on the misery of indigestion. However, in the scheme of things, this was a small “sacrifice” to pay and I quickly put my plan into action, just like any other eight year old boy would have done under the same circumstances. By the way, my name is Henri, or Jindrich in Czech.

My very active imagination started to work overtime when I learned that we were actually on our way to the Belgian Congo, a country deep in the very heart of Africa. It is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but it had two prior names in the recent past. At independence, in that momentous year of l960, it was The Republic of the Congo. But in 1971, for the sake of something called “National Authenticity”, President Joseph Desire Mobutu, changed it to the “Republic of Zaire” (which is, the native name for the Congo River). He also replaced some of the colonial-era names; Leopoldville, the capital, became Kinshasa, Elisabethville became Lubumbashi, etc (I will be using the colonial-era names, but the current names will appear in a comparison chart at the end of this memoir). He even altered his own title to “President Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngwendu Wa Za Banga “, a title that did not bode well for the future. It translates as “The all-powerful Warlord who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake”. In the end, his dictatorship brought only death, misery and poverty to a country that should have had a bright destiny.

In 1973, Mobutu took other steps. He nationalized many of the large enterprises owned by European Expatriates, and arranged for Zairien managers to take full control of these companies. He did all this, the name changes and the nationalization of large properties, in a desperate attempt to unify a country with no sense of nationhood, a country that was still divided by strong tribal allegiances. Prior to European encroachments, nationhood was an unknown concept, and it did not help, when Congo was carved out of south central Africa in the late eighteen hundreds, that no consideration was given to social, ethnic, or tribal boundaries. By the way, this particular region, largely unexplored until the early 1900’s, was eventually found to be an inhospitable place with an extremely unhealthy climate and deadly tropical diseases.Plus, if that wasn’t enough to keep you away, there were many vivid reports about cannibalism and other gruesome customs. However, there were also persistent rumors of vast mineral deposits, and that was what eventually shaped Europe’s thrust into Africa.

I was too young to give any thoughts to potential dangers, but my parents must have been fully aware of them.Yet they had the courage to take their young sons and move to this forbidding land where even the language loomed as a large obstacle to them. The official language in the Congo was, and still is, French...a language my parents did not understand at all.

Later on, as I grew older, it became clear that our parents’ concern about the threatening situation in Germany, and their deep sense of foreboding about the future of Czechoslovakia, made them persevere in their resolve to leave Europe, even if it meant moving to that unknown and dangerous country in Africa. I will forever remain grateful to them for doing this, despite all the appeals and arguments that the rest of the family used to make them change their minds.As a result we lived to see Hitler’s defeat, while most of our relatives perished in the Holocaust.