It is hard to think of a place where the politically-correct approach to disability has made fewer inroads than Africa. Most Africans I know make no attempt to mask the instinctive shudder of horror, the automatic shrinking from contact. It is an approach whose only merit is its complete lack of hypocrisy.
Handicapped children-mainly victims of polio outbreaks their parents could not afford to vaccinate against-are not sent to school: why waste the investment? As adults they are barred from jobs, overlooked in hospitals and considered unsuitable candidates for marriage. In former Za?re (now Democratic Republic of Congo), poverty and desperation have increased the likelihood that families will throw them out, to join the blind men and sun-blistered albinos who beg at crossroads. Many of them also join the gangs who run a Mafia-style system based on the principle that a man with no legs can achieve little, but a score of them demanding action can command attention.
Touring local stalls and shops in force, these gangs threaten to smash windows and block entrances unless shopkeepers pay tribute. The sight of a crowd of angry cripples on their tricycles gathered outside a shopkeeper's premises is usually enough to persuade him to pay up, but the paraplegics have been known to systematically hunt down their enemies in packs. To the physical fear of the able-bodied is added another concern: that the disabled possess evil powers, compensation for the rotten hand they have been dealt by Fate.
It was specifically to avoid resorting to such gangster tactics that Ntambwe Mpanya set up the Ngobila Beach Handicapped Mutual Benefit Society. Ntambwe has a shrivelled left leg and walks with an ugly swooping motion that plunges him earthwards every second step. But with 213 members, men and women, the Society plays a large role in commercial trade at Ngobila Beach, the landing point for the ferry linking Kinshasa with Brazzaville, Congo; and, Ntambwe claims, it is the only paraplegic association that manages to make a living. "We were determined not to be beggars. Because no one out there would give us any work, we decided that we had to go out and create it for ourselves."
Each morning, scores of paraplegics gather at the warehouses in the narrow streets off the port. Sitting on their hand-pedalled tricycles, they wait while their young assistants load up the specially-designed compartments at the back with goods. When the tricycles can take no more, they head for the riverfront, drivers straining at the handles and sweating, helpers pushing from behind. Each evening the same bizarre procession wends its way back from the port, equally heavily laden, but with a different range of goods.
Few business niches can be more fragile than this. The Society owes its commercial viability to a quirk of law which until recently allowed cripples to travel the ferries at a discount. The disabled travellers could afford to set lower prices for their goods and thus became the favourite go-betweens for the Mama Benz-the ferocious, buxom merchant women who sell in the sprawling markets on either side of the brown river.
The paraplegics also enjoy another advantage. Because officials shrink from touching them, terrified of the cripples' curse, they pass through the frontier with a minimum of inspection and cursory customs charges. They are thus perfect conduits for drugs, foreign currency and other small, precious items an exporter would not want to declare.
But the real skill is to exploit the short-term scarcities which develop in each capital city, whether rice, milk, flour, sugar or margarine. "We bring from Kinshasa what is missing in Brazzaville and what is missing in Kinshasa we bring from Brazzaville," explains Ntambwe. Not far from where we sit, at a caf? near the port, a paraplegic is busy capitalising on the latest twist in market forces. Helped by friends, he is struggling to balance a pair of giant gerrycans filled with petrol on to the back of his tricycle. Kinshasa's petrol, itself in short supply, is selling high across the river, high enough to justify this polio victim running the risk of becoming a firebomb on three wheels if a cigarette spark goes astray.
"Policemen are the main enemy of the handicapped," says Ntambwe. "They treat us worse than rabid dogs. For the officials at Ngobila we are not human. The UN talks about the rights of the handicapped, but here we have none. It is an African disease."
But try as he might, the president makes an unconvincing victim. He is a survivor with a thuggish belligerence, a carapace against a hostile world. Struck down by polio at the age of one, Ntambwe was so determined to get on in life he used to follow friends to primary school in defiance of his parents until they agreed to enrol him. He got some education, but never as much as he would have liked. Now he is hailed respectfully as "president" wherever he goes, owns a motorised Vespa worth $800, and manages to support a wife and eight children. He has expansion plans-he wants to buy a second Vespa for the society's communal use, and dreams of running training courses in shoe-making and poultry farming.
When we meet, the president and his general secretary (who was paralysed by a bungled injection) are troubled by the fact that the Kabila government is refusing to recognise the special privileges disabled travellers enjoy at the port. Touring the area, Finance Minister Mwana Nanga Mawapanga has just made it clear that he regards the Society's members as no better than smugglers working to cheat the government.
I express my sympathy. It is hard to imagine how a group of paraplegics could change the government's mind. But thinking about those wheelchair gangs blockading caf? doorways or hounding their victims across town, I feel sure that the paraplegics of Ngobila Beach will somehow find a way.
