Essential French phrases

Hello, in Tshiluba — literally life. This is Luba country: Tshiluba is the language of the street and of the home, French is the language of paperwork, and neither Lingala nor Swahili is the local tongue. Arriving with mbote or jambo marks you as someone who has been somewhere else in the DRC.

Thank you, in Tshiluba. Longer than merci and much better received. If you learn three words here, make them moyo, bimpe and tuasakidila.

Good, fine, well. The answer to how you are and the verdict on almost anything. 'Bimpe' closes a transaction as cleanly as a handshake.

A person of Kasaï. Regional identity is strong here and its history is not decorative — the South Kasai secession of 1960 and the displacements that followed are within living memory and shape how people talk about the state.

The city's own name, and a Tshiluba lesson in itself: mbuji is goat, mayi is water. Goat water — the river the settlement grew on. The place was called Bakwanga before 1966 and older people still use it.

The Société minière de Bakwanga — the state diamond company that built this city, powered it, employed it and, in its decline, took a great deal of that with it. Almost every conversation about work, electricity or the past routes through MIBA sooner or later.

An artisanal digger — the person who works the diamond gravels by hand outside the industrial concessions. It is the largest form of employment in this region and the subject of most of the international attention it receives.

A licensed diamond buyer, the tier between the creuseurs and the exporting comptoirs. The word marks a formal, regulated role — and a scene a foreigner should be extremely careful about drifting into casually, because the licensing, tax and export rules around it are serious.

The article of the constitution that never existed: fend for yourself. It is the national shorthand for improvising around an absent state, and in a city that has been supplying its own electricity for thirty years it is less a joke than a description.

'There is no road.' Said flatly about journeys that look short on a map. A 1991 inventory found under 20 km of paved road in the entire city, all of it in poor condition, and that number is the honest starting point for any conversation about getting anywhere.

The neighbourhood open-air bar — plastic chairs, grilled meat, crates of beer and music at volume. The same institution as in the rest of the DRC, and the same rule: it is where you actually learn how a place works.

The stiff cassava or maize staple eaten by hand with a sauce of leaves, beans or fish — the Kasaï version of what Kinshasa calls fufu and Katanga calls bukari. One dish, three names, three regions.