51 f T
he chief accompanied Marre on the plane back to Kin- sasha. “I was sitting next to him. They came up to him with the menu for the flight, which was sticky buns and fizzy drinks and the chief said. ‘I can’t eat any of this. I’m king of the Mangbetu. Bring me something else.’ They said we’ve only got what’s on the menu. So he stood up and looked at the passengers and said ‘Well bring me the pas- senger list!’ And everyone picked up their newspapers and hid, all terrified of his reputation.”
Becoming food became less of an issue as lightning struck the plane causing a big crack to appear. It turned upside down, fell 32 thousand feet, the lights died, there was no oxygen in the masks, a woman was giving birth and everybody was thinking the worse was going to happen. “The pilot announced finally when we were just above the trees that he was going to crash land. We hit the ground quite hard at Kissingani. We all slid out, me, the King and the anthropologist who was suffering from cerebral malaria at the time. We stayed in this airport in the middle of nowhere for three days, during which time various mercenaries came and looted everything out of the aircraft. Eventually a relief plane flew us to Kinshasa. I had nothing. Everything had been stolen. I managed to get onto the very last Lufthansa flight ever to leave Kinsasha, and all I had was this pot from the Mangbetu. I arrived back in Febru- ary via Berlin in a sweaty T-shirt and no shoes.” I don’t point out he did at least have a pot to piss in.
Arriving back in Kinsasha for the seven-week shoot, Marre was again relieved of all his equipment, this time by customs at the airport. The British Embassy, on discovering that Marre and his team, although filming for the BBC were employed through Marre’s company Harcourt Films, refused to help. Her Majesty’s representative in the Congo was not to have his South African golfing trip stymied. Happily, although co-productions are mostly fraught with difficulties, Marre had set up a deal for the film with the American Museum Of Natural History. “So we went to the American Embassy and explained what had happened. A couple of phone calls to the Museum later we went downstairs to a truck with huge, heavily armed American Military Police and drove straight into the airport. They were all holding automatic weapons and, slamming down money on the table, said: ‘Now you give them their equipment.’”
But then up North, things got frightening. Arrested as spies their passports were taken. “They said they were too good to be genuine. We were imprisoned and threatened for two days. You don’t want that to happen in the middle of nowhere in the Congo. It was very uncomfortable. Then we were allowed a couple of phone calls. I phoned the British embassy. ‘We don’t know what you’re doing up there, we don’t have any record of you being here.’ At the American embassy, their attitude was ‘We get our people out of there.’”
Called out on the third evening to an uncertain fate, they were relieved to have their passports returned and Marre and his two-man crew spent a pleasant ensuing seven weeks with the for- mer cannibals. “The tribe were very welcoming and happy to have people there who had respect for them. They were outcast, feared. Politically the Mbutu regime was very unstable and the Mangbetu were themselves afraid that people would come in and get rid of them. They knew that museums in the West would be showing the film, that it would be on TV, so it offered them some security and status that they were very happy about.”
“Three years later out of the blue I got an email from the chief. Someone had fixed up electricity there and given them computers. It was so bizarre to think the chief could send an email, from a place so incredibly remote. It was a happy message saying he remembered us all and everything was good. I sent him more photographs.”
Filming Ladysmith Black Mambazo for 1979’s Rhythm Of Resistance
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