Zaïre part 2: the Military and a Horror

“All Along the Watchtower” was playing in my brain when all of a sudden, a small group of soldiers began heading towards us from across the small park. It was very, very scary. They all held machine guns and of course were dressed in the latest military gear with berets and camouflage uniforms. At 1 o’clock in the morning on a street in the capital of Zaire, Kinshasa, yes: it was very, very scary. We had been smoking marijuana and we knew that if they wanted to take us in, we wouldn’t have a prayer. My adolescent brain was sizing this possibility up, but I was actually wondering if they would just shoot us to save themselves the trouble.

We had no choice but to stand our ground.

We were very lucky in that my elder brother Chris was in a wheelchair; the result of muscular dystrophy. Probably, none of them had ever seen one before. This novelty alone broke the ice. There must have been a leader; I can’t remember now. But as fast as you could say “Execution,” cigarettes were lit by all parties and banter was started. These guys were barely older than ourselves; most in their 20s and it was quite obvious it wasn’t part of their training to come across a small group of white adolescents smoking dope in a city park at one o’clock in the morning.

After the initial tension and apprehension everything mellowed out and there were a few laughs on both sides. But I couldn’t help feeling that it could have gone the other way.

Once, when I was in school in England, the military police (were they soldiers or policemen? It was one and the same) had heard my elder brother Chris (he of the wheelchair) practicing with his band one rainy afternoon. This meant drums and bass and amplifiers and noise emanating from the front room of the house.

Neither of my parents was home, and a group of soldiers barged into the house, terrifying the servants, flashing their machine guns, and began threatening Chris and his horrified bandmates, right within the very bedroom in which they were practicing. Again, Chris’s bargaining skills and a few cigarettes calmed everything down, but it must have been tense.

But that was not the worst feature of downtown Kinshasa. The military were a constant threat, but the packs of wild dogs were downright frightening. They would roam, eight or ten dogs at a time, through the streets, in a pack. It is unimaginable to me now, but it was like a horror movie in slow-motion then. Instinctively, you knew that you had to get to a safe place where they couldn’t get you, behind a wall or something, but occasionally you just had to freeze in place and hope they didn’t notice you.

And one night our luck ran out. We were listening to music in the house when we heard the terrible yelps and screams of many dogs in a struggle. I raced outside onto the terrace and witnessed a horrible scene: at least five mangy, ragged dogs were attacking our dog, a six-month-old razorback/Alsatian we’d named Santana. The sounds were hideous. I will never forget them.

Then, after what seemed an eternity, our frightened human yells drove the attacking dogs off the terrace and back onto the street. Every single one of us, Santana included, was shaking like a leaf.

And that was that, I thought. But that was not that. About ten days later, we had a party. It was the usual affair for the time; a whole bunch of high school kids from the American high school, and our African and Belgian pals would come over and we’d party on the terrace and listen to music. I was doing speed at the time — one could freely buy it, as a 15-year-old kid, directly from a pharmacy — thus, it was commercial-grade, not trafficked — so I was wired to the gills.

And we — everyone — noticed that Santana was actingly strangely. He’d wander up to you as if to lick you, as he always did, but then upon getting close would suddenly shrink and growl.

It only became noticeable in hindsight. Two days later, when my sister and I were ready to go to school, smoking a joint on the front porch and waiting for the driver, Santana came up the steps. And, for a 6-pound, tiny tyke of a dog, he was downright frightening. He wasn’t the Santana we knew. He would whine, as if reluctant, saying to us “I don’t know what I’m doing but I don’t want to hurt you!” He wanted desperately to be patted but at the same time was growling, his eyes focused at us as if he wanted to bite us and was thinking of the best way to do it.

Laurie and I were under no illusions. Adolescents though we were, we suddenly knew he had rabies.

The house immediately went into lockdown. My elder brother Geoff tried at one point to capture Santana so that he could be taken to the vet, but was bitten. That day remains etched in memory. The American doctor became involved. This was a big deal in semi-colonial Zaire. Geoff had to undergo the first of several rabies shots — the old kind, the ones in the stomach. Just after the shot, he collapsed. Allergic reaction. Only a major shot of scotch (an old-time remedy) would be effective enough to “bring him around”.

And it only got worse: all of us would have to have the shots, and all of the people who had been at the party as well. And we had to tell them! The shots themselves were no big deal. The fear of contracting rabies was a very big deal: I combed the Encyclopedia and asked the doctor what the symptoms were but he refused to tell me, fearing I would psychosomatically develop them. It was okay; I knew every one of them by heart by now and was already analysing my difficulty in swallowing. It was an incredibly stressful time . . .

Santana got worse and worse. Rabies is a very, very nasty thing. And to watch it unfold in an animal is a terrifying ordeal, especially when he is your beloved pet.

We had to lock him in the garage. We had to let him die because the doctor told us we couldn’t put him to sleep because they had to let the rabies manifest itself so that they could diagnose it, and that was only possible if he died of it.

The next two days were easily the most harrowing of my young life, and, I’ll warrant, the worst for everyone within a mile. Santana, trapped in the garage, not being able to eat or drink and ravaged with the rabies virus that had attacked his brain, began to howl. A hideous, constant howl that went on, hour after hour, with no cessation, all through the day and all through the night. For two days. We could hardly imagine what this, our darling, happy dog was going through. We took peeks through the slats of the garage door but could never dare to go in. We had to watch our dog starve and thirst to death . . . in Surround Sound.

And finally, he died. He’d wandered into a drain on the side of the garage and been trapped there for many hours. They took him away and cut off his head and put it in our freezer for the autopsy.

Needless to say, he had rabies.

That evening, there was a bizarre yellow sky . . . I’ll never forget it. And, just after we had adjusted to the sudden silence of no more howling, we learned that our cat had just been hit by a car on the street in front of our house. We consoled each other with the fact that she would have had to go through the rabies injections and that maybe she was better off . . .

This is a true story. No one, certainly not me, could make it up . . .