74 The EconomistJuly 20th 2019
S
ince the best place to pick up a fare in Kinshasa, Congo’s capi-
tal, was outside the Grand hotel (for a time, the Intercontinen-
tal), that was where Pierre Mambele usually parked his car. There
he would wait, with a bottle of Sprite, under the trees for shade.
His car was nothing fancy. It was a dark blue 1976 Fiat which had
seen service on plenty of bad roads. The side mirrors and wind-
screen-wipers had long gone, good riddance to them. The front
doors could fly open at speed, so sometimes had to be tied to the
chassis with plastic bags. The exhaust trailed. This car limped
from one criminal mechanic to another, but as long as it ran, and
people were willing to pay him for a ride, he wasn’t bothered.
His clothes were nothing fancy either. On most days in fashion-
proud Kinshasa he wore a greasy t-shirt and dirty jeans. His thick
glasses, mended with Sellotape, had never been much use. Yet he
drove crazy-fast, pedal to the floor, roaring round the city. He was
not a Kinoishimself, one of that snooty so-sophisticated lot, and
the other drivers outside the Grand called him “Kisangani” after
the city where he was born, in the east. He spoke Swahili as well as
Lingala. But he had been a taxi-driver in the capital for decades,
and knew the ramshackle place like the back of his hand. Kin-la-
belle, now Kin-la-poubelle, as everyone said.
Driving fast also showed his contempt for any sort of authority.
Soldiers toting guns in the road were a joke: pas sérieux, quel ci-
néma! As for the roulages, the yellow-helmet traffic cops who
would leap out to bang on his windscreen and demand money for
some offence he hadn’t committed, he would shout and argue with
them until it came to fists, and they gave up. A cop got in his way
once when he was doing a three-point turn outside a grocery store.
He just kept going, with the idiot spreadeagled on the bonnet.
Because he was so audacious, and had good instincts, and
would go to places other drivers wouldn’t, his taxi became the car
of choice for Western journalists. It was good money, $35 a day inthe 1990s (though the best money came from Western tvcrews, if
they turned up in town). His regular passengers for years included
Michela Wrong and Stephanie Wolters of Reuters, Howard French
of the New York Times, Dino Mahtani of Reuters (and The Econo-
mist), on whose office sofa he would take naps, William Wallis of
the Financial Times. Though he spoke no English and growled
thickly in French, often just to himself, they all knew what he was
grumbling about. He was the conduit through which they, and
their readers, came to grasp what was happening in Congo.
None of it was good. C’est pas bien, c’est foutu, finger wagging an-
grily as he careered along. He had ulcers, his stomach hurt and his
wife was divorcing him, but his country pained him more. Every-
one was corrupt. Everything was screwed. In his lifetime Congo
had gone from brutal Belgian colonialism to brief independence
under Patrice Lumumba to dictatorship under Mobutu Sese Seko,
before the Kabila clan took over. He had met Lumumba at rallies in
Kisangani, and liked him. For Mobutu and his henchmen he had
no time at all. Nor for the Kabilas, whose claims to be rassembleurs,
unifiers, made him laugh out loud. His hopes lay with Etienne
Tshisekedi, “the Sphinx”, founder of a party for democratic change
without violence. But Tshisekedi never made it to president, and
his son Félix managed it only by villainy, like all the rest.
There had been one golden moment. It came in 1974, the year he
started driving a taxi. Congo, then called Zaire, won the African
Soccer Cup and hosted the Rumble in the Jungle, the heavyweight
boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. Kin-
shasa was suddenly swarming with Americans, hands full of dol-
lars, needing a cab. Even better, one evening Ali himself, his hero,
came out of the hotel. One of the younger drivers tried to spar with
him, and he, Pierre, stepped between them like a referee to shout
“Break! Dégage-toi!” He saw that fight, which Ali won, and loved
ever after to drive his journalists past the May 20th Stadium,
remembering it.
He could show them other good things, too. He took many to eat
fish and cassava at Maluku on the Congo river, and encouraged
some to meet Papa Wendo, the ancient father of the Congolese
rumba, or to listen in on meetings of intellectuals who conversed
in English. He wanted to display Congo’s best side—the really im-
pressive side, not the overweening official villas on the hill in
Binza towards which the little Fiat would trundle, then expire, and
need to be jump-started while the sharp suits stood and stared.
Some of those officials, the grosses legumes, he knew, and they
gave him a certain respect, both because he kept turning up with
Western journalists and because, clearly, he was fearless. This
made him useful as a fixer, though he was a driver first, and ran the
same risks the journalists did when he strayed into presidential
compounds or, as in the 1990s, into riots. But he and the car, as its
bashes showed, would drive through anything. He had to get his
journalists, first, to where they wanted to go and, second, safely
back again. If bad stuff happened, and they ended up hauled from
the car or in jail, he would stay until he had rescued them—some-
times because he knew the right person, often by shoving and
shouting. He became their protector and friend. In return they
gave him money to buy a better car, but he preferred to get a cheap
one and, in his chaotic style, fritter the rest away.
At times he found he was thinking like a journalist himself,
pushing his charges to get closer to the action when something
newsworthy occurred. He wanted to be there in the sweat of it
when history happened. Yet history seemed to have slowed almost
to a stop in Congo. Nothing changed, and nothing would. Its lead-
ers were idiots. The economy was bust. Some parts were given over
to constant war. Fewer journalists came to cover it, so it was hardly
worth waiting even outside the Grand. Il n’y a rien, il n’y a rien, he
would mutter down the phone to his journalist friends who had
gone home. In response they sent him clothes and money for the
hospital where eventually he had to go; they had not forgotten
Congo. Sadly, it seemed to him that the rest of the world had. 7Pierre Mambele, taxi-driver, died on June 8th, aged 74Congo’s wheels
Obituary Pierre Mambele