1990/1991 Jane Goodall Visits Kinshasa

By
a strange coincidence, Jane got caught up in the 1991 looting that
paralyzed Kinshasa for three days. Holed up in the sixth floor of the
USAID building apartment with Dr. Dumont, the U.S. embassy doctor and
his wife, she watched the chaos in the streets below, and fretted about
the fate of the chimpanzees at the Zoo at N'Sele.

It took three
days for things to calm down enough for the embassy to evacuate
Americans and also Jane Goodall. One evening at the Dumonts, I watched
the video they’d taken, showing French commandos infiltrating in order
to stabilize Kinshasa during the looting. From Grains of Golden Sand:

"Inadvertently,
the film captured the death of one of the soldiers as he was shot in
the neck at the intersection below. His comrades leaped to his aid and,
as quickly, commandeered a pastel blue truck to carry off the body. It
was sobering to observe from above, the looters running in and out of
the back of the grocery store called SEDEC. The people came out with
the goods piled high in shopping carts and quickly scattered down the
side streets.

"I’ll never forget something else in the video—an
overloaded military truck piled high with furniture that tried to
navigate at high speed the circular intersection in front of the train
station. Like a heavy-bodied goose slowly taking wing, the uppermost
mattress lifted off. Narrating voices in the film’s soundtrack tittered
as the wind gripped the bed and it flapped in undulating animation. It
hovered in an air pocket over the truck and then gently lifted up and
pitched over the side. That wayward mattress symbolized to me the
irreversible path of self-destruction that Zaire seemed so determined
to take."