Wiping away the sweat is what it’s all about these days. The Prado thermometer read 39 Celsius yesterday. It makes you develop a twisted kind of affection for the office air conditioning, the kind of deranged affection someone, erm, lacking in air might display. But what we really crave here is a little of Europe’s winter snow. Just for a day, just to spread the love. If they are having it hard taking a chill pill at home, maybe they could check in here for a sobering lesson in meteorological relativism.

About 20 seconds is what it takes in this heat for a shirt to grip your skin. And the hottest month has yet to arrive. That’s February, and the only relief between now and May will be the huge tropical storms that dump torrents of water in split seconds, but in their wake leave a few hours of plausibly stiff air. When that happens you float on clouds, serenely breathing in the draught to lubricate your mind and your gut, and out again. Life is so balmily good the smirk won’t lift from your face, but the next roll of oppressiveness is no further away than the other side of the dawn. So you buckle up and pray the interval to the next rain is brief, and meanwhile dream of frosted fields and iced tarmac in Ireland.

It’s worlds apart here, of course, in more ways than the weather. It might take you three months, or six, to get a sense of most places, but in Congo that’s about the length of time it takes for you to dispense with your fancy notions and take it on the chin: it is not supposed to make sense. You may scour the minds of westerners who have been here a while, like Ben at the British Embassy, for some guidance on how to get it across. “You can’t.” How one could put it into a sequence of words, to convey an idea of the place. “You can’t.” Ok then.

Dichotomies warp the mind. A State in a state, a Stateless land in a state of disrepair, a State beyond the point of no repair, perhaps. There is no State! The rusted morsels of Kinshasa were inherited by the undergrowth generations ago, every layer since came to rest through 50 years of stagnation. It is stuck in neutral. Seen ‘28 Days Later’?  Or ‘Shawn of the Dead’? They wouldn’t seem so spooky anymore.

How does a city stay standing on its feet after generations of rot and neglect? The rains carve cavities in the streets so deep traffic must take detours. Nobody ever comes to patch them up. Refuse is not collected unless the EU happens to have a rubbish directive at the time. Only one crossroads in a city of eight million is served by traffic lights; otherwise at key junctions a traffic ‘facilitator’ mounts a little pulpit in the middle of the street and directs operations with his contrived bundle of hand gestures. These are some of the heroes of a city which has only entertained large volumes of traffic since the turn of the millennium. They earn around $40 per month, but like teachers, doctors and policemen or anybody dependent on ‘government’ salaries, often they receive nothing. This in a place where food and commodities can be more expensive than in Europe.

“But the bottom line here Ben, is…that the people in control…”
“… don’t give a f**k.” Ok then.

The street kids are known as sheges. They are the bottom of the barrel, below even the kids who never manage to sell the tissues in the plastic orange packaging. They roam the boulevard imploring the white men and the four by fours, begging at the driver window, the bigger the vehicle the more relentless the performance, always falling on deaf ears. The ones with polio have it even worse, peering up from the concrete hoping for any semblance of response. It’s every man for himself, and that’s where the equality ends.

Businessmen forfeit durable client relationships for the sake of short-term gain, money for nothing and your chicks certainly not for free. There is no such idea as ‘good service’, an elaborate western notion which there is no incentive to provide. If somebody did they might just become a millionaire, but white men are millionaires and they might just hand over the money anyway. So what’s the point? Everybody from polio boy to the president is ‘on the take’ because it is the only modus operandi that holds currency. “A day to day existence is all they’ve ever known”, says Ben, so they’re not inclined to plan for tomorrow.

The western mind is already incapable of squaring any of it but this is the point at which he stops trying: he is invited to a Sunday gathering by his French friend and Congolese wife. Guests are a mixture of well-paid white Europeans and well-educated black Congolese. Drinks and nibbles complement the conversation, before his wife and her church-choir friends rise to perform.

These black gospel voices quiver with the power of angels, transporting a mesmerised audience directly to the gates of heaven. For perfection of harmony and rhythm, he has heard nothing like it, ever. Where does it come from, this sound of amazing purity? It is such a state of elevated beauty. But how to square with the ugliness and the horror? Trying to reconcile such things is beyond him, just like it is beyond everybody from the outside.

Are the secrets written in the wind? The one that whips up in 30 seconds, tossing the dust about with a reckless indifference, heralding the angry rains that, peculiarly enough, everyone longs for; because if there is one time you can’t go without here, it is the time to clear the air.

Ronan Goggin