Cape Town, South Africa – They were businessmen, engineers and college students.
Their dreams were as big as the potential of their country, Congo, where gold and diamonds once seemed to sprout from the earth.
But their dreams died as Congo plunged into Africa’s deadliest war, and militias and national armies wrestled over the country’s natural riches.
In the past decade, the violence has killed 4 million people and sent refugees fleeing in all directions.
Thousands came to industrialized and newly independent South Africa, hoping like immigrants everywhere for stability and opportunity. The reality has been different.
Despite their education and aspirations, many Congolese refugees are working as parking-lot attendants, security guards and carwash men in cities such as Cape Town, a shimmering but segregated seaside metropolis.
Without immigration papers – which few Congolese are granted – and with a language barrier – most don’t speak English well – these are the best jobs they can get.
In this deeply xenophobic country, where two in five people are unemployed, the Congolese are resented for taking even these lowly jobs, and they’re often the victims of street crime. Poor and alienated, they cluster with other immigrants in ramshackle apartments in dark, dingy neighborhoods.
“Life isn’t easy here. Every day I struggle,” said Moses Nyanga, a slight 36-year-old with weary brown eyes. Nyanga washes cars six days a week in a gym parking lot in a leafy Cape Town suburb.
Nyanga and his wife share a one-room apartment with a closet-size bathroom and no kitchen.
Even after four years, he isn’t comfortable with English – he prefers his native French – and with customers he usually manages just a smile and a few words.
Now, with Congo trying this year to hold its first free elections since 1960, relief agencies want refugees to return.
For Congolese in South Africa, it’s a difficult choice: Stay and subsist in their new home, where they largely feel unwelcome, or return to Congo, where the future is uncertain.
“But it’s a question of security,” Nyanga said. “Congo is a beautiful country, but you don’t know if one day violence will start again. In South Africa we are not exactly comfortable, but there’s no war.”
Reliable statistics are elusive, but in 2004 the United Nations estimated that 380,000 Congolese were living in neighboring countries, not including South Africa. South Africa’s Ministry of Home Affairs says nearly 42,000 refugees and asylum- seekers are from Congo – more than any other country – but the total number of Congolese in the country is higher.
For most immigrants, daily life remains a struggle.
“We fight; we go and look for work every day,” said Patrick Nkashama, an outgoing 28-year- old with broad shoulders and an easy laugh.
In Lubumbashi in southeastern Congo, he was two years from a degree in electrical engineering. Since he arrived in South Africa four years ago, he’s trolled for odd jobs at a taxi rank, parked cars, painted houses, washed cars and briefly worked as a security guard.
He got that job, he said, by forging identity papers with the help of a friend. He lasted a few months before his then- girlfriend, after a fight, turned him in.
He’s embarrassed that he doesn’t have any money to send back to his family in Congo.
He calls less and less frequently. So far, he hasn’t followed the Congolese election campaign. His ties to his home country have frayed almost completely.
“When I talk to my mom, she thinks I’m OK here,” Nkashama said. “I’m not OK. But you can’t say that. If she knew what it was like, she’d die of a heart attack.”
