AFTER THE town of Goma, in Eastern Zaire, was taken over by rebel Tutsis of Zairean birth, the people went on a looting spree. What else could they do? They no longer had a government of their own: they did not know when next they would have work, or who would pay them. So they decided to steal what they could and use it as barter.

One of the things they did not steal was money. Before the town fell, such money as they had was devalued practically every fortnight. Zaire was, and is, run by a dictator called Mobutu, currently recovering from cancer in one of his many luxurious villas in France.

DISCARDED MONEY

I followed the looters into a barracks which the army of Zaire had vacated in a hurry during the rebel onslaught. A desk in the main office was covered in stacks of Zairean notes – money which was due to be paid as wages to the soldiers. It had never been paid over, because come every pay-day it had already been devalued and was worthless. For example, it would take a fifty thousand franc banknote today to buy what a five franc banknote would have bought three months ago. That’s an inflation rate of ten thousand percent.

While the looters surged by, I sat down and counted out the stacks of old money. It was either that, in the shade, or sun-burn outside. I counted one hundred million francs while I was there, then I got bored.

So I went back out into the street, which was littered with discarded money, the way O’Connell Street is littered with sweet-wrappers after the St Patrick’s Day parade. The looters had moved into a printing shop. Children were sifting through the business cards of lawyers and such who had ordered a supply and then left town in a hurry. That paper, too, was worthless to them, and they were busy chopping up furniture for firewood. Wood is precious in Africa, being the main source of fuel for cooking and heating.

I tried to explain to one of the little girls that the bookcase she was attacking with a machete would fetch a lot more on the market when the white people who had come to help the blacks went shopping for furniture for their new offices. There being a language difficulty between us, I got nowhere and anyway she was in a hurry to bring the firewood home to mammy.

One little boy was staggering under a huge bale of brown wrapping paper, the size of a bag of coal. His intention, it was clear, was to add it to the bonfire outside in the street, a great source of amusement to people who no longer had any jobs to go to. Using sign language, hands and much pointing to my nether regions, I indicated that the brown bale would come in very useful as toilet paper.

In my own youth, before people could afford to buy two-ply toilet rolls, it was the duty of Irish children to cut up the weekly newspaper into little squares, punch holes in them, thread the squares onto a piece of cord and hang the bundle on a nail on the wall beside the outside lavatory. The little boy gazed at me in deep amazement before adding his fuel to the flames.

Then I wandered with a group of adults into an abandoned villa, lately the property of a Protestant evangelical group of missionaries. Everything of value had been taken by the time we got there – the TV set, computer, telephone, ware and cutlery. However, there was a tasteful three-piece suite in black leather in the living room. Nobody would touch it. Your average sofa does not fit into your average room in shanty-town Africa.

Then it became difficult to follow the looters. This was because humanitarian aid agencies had arrived in Goma and were hiring black locals to help them. Aid workers are white people, on the whole. So everywhere I went, people thought I was the boss-woman with jobs galore to hand out. I felt like that film-star whose name escapes me, the foreman who worked on the docks in On The Waterfront. Actually, I felt worse than him, because I had no work to give them.

ALMIGHTY DOLLARS

Some days later, half a million refugees came streaming through Goma, on their way home to Rwanda. They all came at the one time, so movement was slow, to put it mildly. I walked in among them, to see how they were getting on. At one stage, we were stuck, completely, at a halt on a road that went uphill. This was somewhat frightening since I was the only white person in the crowd, they had nothing but the clothes on their backs and bedding on their heads and it would have been accurate for them to assume that I had almighty American dollars in my pockets. Equally, it was accurate for me to assume that some of these half-million Hutu refugees had taken part in the massacre of one million Tutsis in 1994.

We were stuck together for at least an hour on the road up that hill. Nobody robbed me or made the least frightening gesture. Then some people had the bright idea of leaving the road, clambering down a ditch and robbing the potato field. I clambered down with them. One refugee family very kindly offered me a raw potato to eat, to keep me going while they made a stew of boiled green leaves and spuds.

Africans! I haven’t a clue what to make of them.