Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

198 PLANET OF SLUMS
port of Antwerp. Sometimes I travel by broomstick, other times on an
avocado skin. At night, I'm 30 and I have 100 children. My father lost
his job as an engineer because of me - then I killed him with the
mermaid. I also killed my brother and sister. I buried them alive. I also
killed all of my mother's unborn children. 83
Beeckman contends that because there is no functioning child
welfare system in Kinshasa, the family expulsion of accused witches is
not just rationalization for abandonment, but also "a chance to place
them in a religious community, where they will receive some sort of
education and food to live on, or to get them into one of the centres
run by an international NGO." But most child witches, especially the
sick and HIV-positive kids, simply end up in the street, becoming part
of the urban army, at least 30,000 strong, composed of "runaways,
child abuse victims, children displaced by war, child soldiers who have
deserted, orphans and unmarried."84
The child witches of Kinshasa, like the organ-exporting slums of
India and Egypt, seem to take us to an existential ground zero beyond
which there are only death camps, famine, and Kurtzian horror. Indeed,
an authentic Kinois, Thierry Mayamba Nlandu, in a poignant but
Whitmanesque ("the shanties, too, sing Kinshasa ... ") reflection, asks:
"How do these millions survive the incoherent, miserable life of
Kinshasa?" His answer is that "Kinshasa is a dead city. It is not a city of
the dead." The informal sector is not a deus ex machina, but "a soulless
wasteland," yet also "an economy of resistance" that confers honor on
the poor "where otherwise the logic of the market leads to total
despair."85 The Kinois, like the inhabitants of the Martinican slum called
"Texaco" in Patrick Chamoiseau's famed novel of the same name, hold
on to the city "by its thousand survival cracks" and stubbornly refuse to
let gO.86
83 Vincen Beeckman, "Growing Up on the Streets of Kinshasa," The Courier
ACP EU (September-October 2001), pp. 63-64.
84 Beeckman, "Growing Up on the Streets of Kinshasa," p. 64.
85 Thierry Mayamba Nlandu, "Kinshasa: Beyond Chaos," in Enwezor et aI., p. 186.
86 Chamoiseau, Texaco, p. 316.
I
Epilogue
Down Vietnam Street
The promise is that again and again, from the garbage,
the scattered feathers, the ashes and broken bodies,
something new and beautiful may be born.
John Berge?
The late-capitalist triage of humanity, then, has already taken place. As
Jan Breman, writing of India, has warned: "A point of no return is
reached when a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour
process becomes stigmatized as a permanently redundant mass, an
excessive burden that cannot be included now or in the future, in
economy and society. This metamorphosis is, in my opinion at least,
the real crisis of world capitalism."2 Alternately, as the CIA grimly
noted in 2002: "By the late 1990s a staggering one billion workers rep­
resenting one-third of the world's labor force, most of them in the
South, were either unemployed or underemployed."3 Apart from the de
Sotan cargo cult of infinitely flexible informalism, there is no official
scenario for the reincorporation of this vast mass of surplus labor into
the mainstream of the world economy.
1 John Berger, "Rumor," preface to Tekin, Beryi Kristin, p. 8.
2 Breman, The Labouling Poor, p. 13.
3 Central Intelligence Agency, The World Fac/book, Washington, D.C. 2002,
p. 80.