As best I could understand his French, the security official said, “These are for the Zairese. They are not for the outside world.” Going through my backpack, the men had found several handmade pins of Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire, whose leopard-hatted likeness was everywhere in the country in the mid-1980s, among other items I had bought in my travels.
The trouble had begun earlier that afternoon, as I was chatting and taking photos with people in a streetside bar that also operated as a brothel. Now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zaire had attracted me for what I perceived as its perch on the knife edge between order and chaos. I had sought a challenge.
There were legendary overcrowded riverboats that plied the Congo River; I intended to board one in the north and ride it all the way to the Atlantic. I had hatched an idea to roughly trace a journey that Henry Morton Stanley of “Doctor Livingstone, I presume” fame had made in 1877, down the Congo Basin to a village named Banana on the coast. I never got farther than Bukavu.
Things happened quickly. One moment, I was having a beer with new friends, the next I was being marched by men in ordinary clothes to a waiting pickup truck where we crammed together for a ride to a spartan office elsewhere in town. As I pieced it together, the men believed that I and another American traveler were secret agents and that I at least required a sharp interrogation, probably for all the pictures I had taken. In retrospect, I think I was too young and too dumb to be frightened.
As the men examined the contents of my backpack, they took anything I had bought that they deemed to have been from the country, mostly carved wooden trinkets that I had been told by the people who sold them, “Iko zemani,” or, “This is old.” That was probably my mistake, buying pieces of cultural heritage from people desperate for Western cash, which was likely illegal. Anything Kenyan or Tanzanian I could keep, and I could also hang on to a grocery-bag-sized wad of Zairean currency so devalued by inflation that the men who had detained me evinced no interest in it.
Eventually I was let go, and within a day or two I left Zaire for good. A Christian mission plane ferried me back to Nairobi, but during an overnight stop in Tanzania, I dumped the rest of my Zairean cash in a hotel room, only then feeling shaken from the experience.