Pierre Mambele drove crazy-fast, pedal to the floor, roaring round Kinshasa
, the yellow-helmet traffic cops who would leap out to bang on his windscreen and demand money for some offence he hadn’t committed, he would shout and argue with them until it came to fists, and they gave up. A cop got in his way once when he was doing a three-point turn outside a grocery store. He just kept going, with the idiot spreadeagled on the bonnet.
Because he was so audacious, and had good instincts, and would go to places other drivers wouldn’t, his taxi became the car of choice for Western journalists. It was good money, $35 a day in the 1990s . His regular passengers for years included Michela Wrong and Stephanie Wolters of Reuters, Howard French of the, Dino Mahtani of Reuters , on whose office sofa he would take naps, William Wallis of the.
There had been one golden moment. It came in 1974, the year he started driving a taxi. Congo, then called Zaire, won the African Soccer Cup and hosted the Rumble in the Jungle, the heavyweight boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. Kinshasa was suddenly swarming with Americans, hands full of dollars, needing a cab. Even better, one evening Ali himself, his hero, came out of the hotel.
He could show them other good things, too. He took many to eat fish and cassava at Maluku on the Congo river, and encouraged some to meet Papa Wendo, the ancient father of the Congolese rumba, or to listen in on meetings of intellectuals who conversed in English.
At times he found he was thinking like a journalist himself, pushing his charges to get closer to the action when something newsworthy occurred. He wanted to be there in the sweat of it when history happened. Yet history seemed to have slowed almost to a stop in Congo. Nothing changed, and nothing would. Its leaders were idiots. The economy was bust. Some parts were given over to constant war. Fewer journalists came to cover it, so it was hardly worth waiting even outside the Grand.
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