An Occurrence of Nonsense at N’djili Airport
Sometimes you just have to go for it.
I have heard savvy travel stories in the common rooms of youth hostels and guesthouses. The raconteur tells of his quick thinking in the face of bureaucracy or venality or danger, narrates how he sidestepped a wicked border guard, sliced through red tape, or just had the wherewithal and impeccable timing to pay somebody off: “So I slipped him twenty ducats.”
That’s not me. In travel, as in daily life, I am much more likely to refuse an extra fee than to arrange one. The only occasions when I have paid dubious fines—and half the time I couldn’t tell you if they were bribes, tips, or legitimate transactions—I’ve done so only after officials have pulled me with embarrassing patience, like a donkey up a stairwell, to that outcome.
I do not know how to outwit officials. I always prefer to outwait. That suits my sometimes nervous, sometimes passive, and usually lazy nature (behavior which, sadly, breaks all the rules of good story plotting).
This is to say that I am not a savvy traveler.
However, there are moments on the road when I become goofy. It’s not a strategy. It’s more of a character defect, I think. I can’t predict when it will happen, and I can’t always explain why. But it happened not long ago in the middle of Africa.
N’djili Airport in the Democratic Republic of Congo was, according to some online forum I had browsed, a cauldron of bureaucratic molestation. Passengers crossed the sun-warmed tarmac from South African Airlines Flight 50 on foot to a terminal painted the color of couscous. But inside, the arrival hall felt darkish. We formed lines and edged past concrete columns, blue to the halfway point and white to the ceiling. Officials with stubble-shaved heads that were beaded with sweat whirred here and there, their underarm musk trailing like a scarf behind. Ahead were wooden kiosks where uniformed women checked passports.
In front of me was a Spanish businessman who’d been coming to Kinshasa for three years. We’d exchanged a few words during the flight. He had his coat folded over his arm, and in his hand was a passport. I noticed the yellow edge of a document protruding from that passport. That yellow thing was an international vaccination card, as any savvy traveler knows. They will also know that a vaccination against yellow fever is required for entry into the DRC.
I often experience, when traveling, a sudden panic that I’ve lost or am missing something. Where the hell is my ticket? Where’s my passport? A wash of heat spreads over me. This reptilian-brain stress-out lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes—until I discover my passport or tickets in the outside pocket of my shoulder bag or in the pages of a book I’m reading. It’s a weird self-induced panic, when the body physically creates a worse-case scenario based not on evidence, but on doubt, uncertainty, and fear.
On this day in Kinshasa there was no doubt. There was no uncertainty. I had an International Vaccination Card with evidence of inoculation against yellow fever, and I knew exactly where it was.
It was in the top drawer of my desk. My desk was in the school where I taught English in Kuils Rivier, a town not far from Cape Town, South Africa.
The oozy warmth spread from my face and neck down my back, moving the same way liquidy oatmeal would, if someone had tipped over a bowl on my head. Sweat followed and gripped at the fabric of my shirt.
In the second most corrupt bureaucracy in Africa, I had just set myself up for a royal screwfest.
“Excuse me,” I said, to the Spaniard, who had some experience in Congo. “Do you have an International Vaccination Card?”
“Yes,” he said, and showed me. “You must.”
“I forgot mine,” I said. I wanted a reassuring reply.
“That is not good,” he said. And then there was a space of a few seconds, and he repeated, “That’s not good.”
Someone ahead finished at the arrival kiosk, and we shuffled forward a few steps. Now the Spaniard was standing on a red line painted across the floor. He was next to passport control. Then me.
The Spaniard turned to me and said, “Just be strong.” The tone of this was somewhere between warning and advice. “If not, perhaps they will give you the injection here. You do not want an injection here. Be strong,” he said again.
I did not have much time to formulate a plan. How should I go about being strong?
Now, the Spaniard moved ahead to the kiosk. A girl of twenty-five took his passport from a half circle cut into the bottom of a pane of glass. For a moment I saw her face—menacing and put out—it takes special training to get this effect from healthy young women—then she lowered her head.
What scared me most was the nurses. They milled about on both sides of the arrivals kiosks, in their white blouses with red epaulettes and neck scarves. They were checking vaccination cards.
I was now at the red line on the floor where the word STOP was painted. The nurse spoke to me in French. I did not reply.
Ignoring isn’t a good strategy, but once in a blue moon it works and a problem will just—poof—disappear. I didn’t have a better plan.
When the Spaniard moved off, I stepped ahead and pushed my passport through the semi-circle into the window.
The young customs lady spoke in French. The hall was a swirl of sound, heat, smells, and voices. I stopped and pushed my forehead up to the glass.
“Repeat, please,” I said in French.
She wanted to know if I was a South African citizen.
“Non,” I said. “Americain.” And I pointed through the glass at my passport, which she was holding and on which were printed the words “United States of America.”
“Where did you receive this visa?”
“Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in South Africa. Johannesburg.”
She flipped through my pages. There were a lot of them. It was a jumbo passport. She took some time and punched at her keyboard. I straightened to find that I had left the print of my forehead on the window. I refused to look to my right, where the nurse was still hovering.
The passport girl lifted her face, spoke to me through glass and the smudge of my brow.
“You can not receive a visa in South Africa. C’est impossible.”
This seemed strange. I had a visa. It was there in my passport. Ergo, I can. But it would not do to have an attitude. So I kept to the facts.
“I have a visa. It is there.”
The nurse was now at my side. “Votre carte,” she said.
The Spaniard’s advice jumped into my head: Be strong. I did not know what that meant.
The kiosk girl was talking again. I had to push my ear closer. “Your nationality is not South African?” she said, fingering my American passport.
“No, it is American.”
“Applicants must apply for visas in their own country. You must apply in America.”
No doubt this was terrific advice for some. Less so for Americans at N’djili Airport.
“I applied in South Africa. And I obtained a visa. Here is the visa. In my passport. I am an American.”
This information seemed to irritate her, and she stood up and exited the back of the kiosk.
The nurse saw her chance and moved in again: “Your international carte of inoculations. Do you have it?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
“One moment. It’s on my computer.”
“No, you must have a carte.”
“Yes. I have a carte. I have a scan of the carte on my computer.”
“No,” she said. “You must have a carte.”
The customs woman re-entered the kiosk. “Go with him,” she said.
Now on my right appeared a blue-uniformed customs officer, my passport in his hand. He fanned it, in a gesture to fellow him. For a moment, my hopes rose as he led me forward—inexplicably past the line of kiosks in the direction of baggage claim—and deliverance. But then, just as inexplicably, we looped left to the far wall and around the crowd, crossing back again to end up at a row of small offices, only thirty feet from the kiosk where we’d started. At least we’d lost the nurse.
The office contained several desks and officials, a few passengers and not much else. Everyone was talking to someone. My escort said, “Wait here,” and he pointed at a chair facing a desk, then he went away. I sat down in the chair directly across another official, blue-suited and stubble-headed like the rest. But he was older, physically wider, more brooding in expression than the younger ones. He stopped the conversation he was having and looked me over. “What are you doing here?”
Forgive me for interrupting myself, but here is where the story might take a savvy twist:
Here I am in Kinshasa, Congo, facing off with a bureaucrat with beads of sweat on his pate. He wants to know just what I’m doing in a chair at his desk.
“Let me explain,” I say in excellent French.
I open my wallet. His eyes follow. I remove my Santa Clara County Public Library card, which really, is mostly blue, and doesn’t look like anything. But I get my finger on the word Library, which he will recognize from the French librarie, a book store, and I inform him that I have been sent to Kinshasa to ease the procurement of a shipload of children’s books from SCCL, which is a small but esteemed international organization that works indirectly with Livres Sans Frontiers—which I’m sure monsieur has heard of—and how I would love to get these books, tout de suite, to the noble but needy children of his country.
“Hmmm,” he says to me, rising. “This sounds so legitimate, well-arranged, and philanthropic that it would be a shame if we delayed your entrance into our country a moment longer.”
To be on the safe side, I slip him twenty ducats.
But I had no library card. So back to reality:
“What are you doing here?” the official wanted to know.
“I’m waiting,” I said. The closed-ended nature of the questions I’d been getting, coupled with the limitations in my French, necessitated absurdly literal answers.
But the wide man seemed to find this answer acceptable, and he resumed his conversation.
Soon my young official returned and asked me to sign a long form written in very small French print. After looking it over, I determined it to be an admission that despite all regulations and good sense I had premeditatively, with full knowledge that I was an American citizen, obtained a Congolese visa from Congolese diplomatic mission in South Africa. Was I certain about that? No. There could have been hidden confessions of treason and criminality. (It’s easy to understand how people can sign things under duress. It had taken me all of five minutes before giving in.) The young official went off with my document and passport.
Not long afterward, a new young official came for me. He was the most chipper I’d encountered. He took me outside the little office, back through the noisy hall and outside into the hot and seeping daytime. He said in English: “What is wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
And it was true. It was often the case in my travels, despite having visited a hundred countries and lived overseas for ten years, that I often didn’t know, that I was often just bewildered.
“Yes,” he said. “I see.”
We walked away from the terminal directly toward South African Flight 50, on which I’d arrived.
Was it conceivable that some junior official would suddenly escort me back to the plane, without even a whiff of a chance for bribery? In fact, I realized, even though I’d had exchanges with five or six Congolese officials at this point—as brief and tautological as they’d been—not one of them had made the slightest overture that a payment might resolve matters. Nor had they left any obvious pause in negotiations in which I was to explore that avenue. Or if they had, I had completely missed them. No, everyone had for the most part been wandering to and fro in a way that, like worker ants seen from outside the society, appeared to be chaos but must have had some kind of purpose.
“Everything is good,” my young man said, practicing his English. I liked that. And I liked the South African plane sitting there. It was comforting. If everything went to pot here at the airport, if they refused my visa, or they demanded to jab me with a needle, I could just refuse, jump ship as it were. O.K., some money would be lost by the agencies sponsoring my week of teacher training in Kinshasa, but governments are accustomed to that. I could be on that plane. In two hours I’d be in Jo’burg. In another two hours I’d be back at my apartment in Cape Town where my Belarusian girlfriend was waiting. Maybe there was even some sherry left in the cupboard.
Everything is good.
Without any conscious understanding of my actions, I put my hand on the young man’s shoulder. And since my hand was on his shoulder, I called him “mon ami,” which I hope did not sound as corny or captious as “my friend” would in English. “Everything is good.”
This was not calculated to achieve anything. It was not a play. I didn’t know what I was doing. But the stress and uncertainty was gone, replaced by a wonderful apathy. I suddenly didn’t care.
My ami looked around the tarmac, and then not seeing what we wanted, turned and walked us back to the terminal. He got my passport from somewhere, guided us to the same kiosk as before, and handed it to the unhappy woman behind the glass. She looked things over, took a stamp, and pounded my passport. And that was that.
Except the nurses hadn’t forgotten. Most of the other passengers were gone by now. They were waiting.
“Votre carte,” the main one said.
I was not nervous in the least. I was happy to fly back home to South Africa if need be.
“Bonjour mademoiselles! Ne vous inquiétez pas—ma santé c’est extraordinaire. I have a scan on my computer. I will show you.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. Stern.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s a nice photo. Tres beau.”
“No. Carte.”
“I have many photos. You will like them as well.”
“No, you pay a fine.”
“Ah hah. Les jeux sont faites.”
“I will give you a receipt,” Mademoiselle Nurse said.
“You really know how to sweeten a deal,” I said in English.
The Mademoiselle Nurse took me into a little one desk-office cubicle, three other nurses following us. They offered me a seat at the little desk.
“How much must I pay?” I was already fingering a five-euro note, and putting on an air of magnanimity.
“Fifty dollars.”
“And in euros?”
“Forty euros.”
“Unacceptable!” I said. “Exchange rate—terrible. Pas juste. Pas juste.” Outraged, I slapped my five-euro bill on the desk. “D’accord. Vous avez gagné. Cinq euros.” You win. Five euros.
“No,” she said, “Fif-ty.”
“Oui, oui,” I said, “Fifty,” and pointed at my fiver.
The nurses were looking at each other and wondering what was wrong with me. Mademoiselle Nurse got out a piece of paper. In large letters she wrote “50.”
I leaned forward to examine the figure. “Exactement!” I said. And with one finger I tapped at the digit five.
“No, fifty!” She used two fingers to touch both of the digits. We went back and forth on this for some seconds until everyone thought I was a complete moron. But they had started to smile about it.
Finally, I produced forty U.S. dollars, which aside from my five euros, was all that I had—visibly at least.
“Fifty!” I said, pointing at it.
“O.K.,” she agreed. “Fifty.”
She took the forty dollars and wrote up a receipt. She even returned my five-euro note. Everyone seemed happy.
Mademoiselle Nurse gave me her email address. I took her photo, we said our goodbyes, and I entered the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kevin McCaughey is a traveling teacher-trainer. He began wandering a week after his eighteenth birthday, alone and shy in Europe. Since then he’s been to more than one hundred countries.