Congolese Commerce

Shopping in Kinshasa: Everything from fresh fruit to shoe repair is available on the street.

A friend recently asked that I write about life in Kinshasa and after 2+ months here I have noticed some interesting things. The best way to imagine life in Kinshasa is to think about all the services the government provides (postal service, trash pick-up, public transportation, etc.) and remove those services. Next, take all your notions of normal commerce (supermarkets, wal-mart, target) and minanturize them or place them on the street. What I mean by this is anything that can be sold for a profit, is sold in Kinshasa. Often times, however, the only place to buy it is from a make-shift vendor on the street or to ask either the guard of your building or your "domestique" to buy it for you. This latter option is often preferable because it saves enormous amounts of money--buying on the street yourself, since you can't hide your nationality here (even African-Americans are easily recognizable), usually shoots the price up about 300%.

We recently spent way too much money on a pair of metal shelves for dry food storage. The only company to once have produced such items in the Congo has since gone bankrupt. There are however, two competing street vendors not far from our apartment. So we went on a Saturday morning, bought two sets of shelves, only for them not to fit in our car. So we waited for someone to show-up with a wrench (which is the nice thing about a country where everyone wants to sell you something--what you need inevitably walks by) only for our guards to tell us we spent way too much money and next time to just send them instead (of course they would make a commission but we still would have saved lots of money). Nonetheless, the experience was a good one. It would be no fun to live here if we didn't go interact with the people and learn how and where to buy what we wanted!