by Tim Butcher
‘Sure, doing business in the Congo is unconventional, but try to look at it from a strictly business point of view. The fees we pay to the government are no different from taxes paid in other countries. Everything we do is legal to the extent that there is any law in this country. If the regime says we pay for this licence, we pay for the licence. It just so happens the money might be paid in a big, black plastic bag delivered at night to a politician’s house.’
Clive was a white Zimbabwean. He was thickset, assured and very well connected within the Kabila regime. Cited in a United Nations report for profiteering from the war in the Congo, he had been forced to spend twelve months clearing his name, arguing (successfully) that he should not be persecuted for the lack of accountability in the Congo’s own government. The argument persuaded the UN inspectors, and his name was taken off their proscribed list.
‘It would be better if the money we paid in “taxes” went to the people of the Congo, rather than a few unelected members of an unelected regime. But you cannot really blame someone like me for the failings of those that run the Congo.’
I met him through a friend in Johannesburg and it was my first major lucky break. Born in what was then Rhodesia, he was an expert on African history and took great interest in my plan to cross the Congo.
‘When I was a child we came up to the Belgian Congo for our holidays. Friends of mine drove all the way from Rhodesia to Goma for their honeymoon. It was possible to do that in those days. Now things are a bit different and God knows what goes on up in the east of the country, where you want to start. But if there is anything I can do, get in touch.’
His connections to the Kabila regime would be useful if I ever made it through to Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga province, where Clive’s cobalt-mining operation was based, but my biggest problem remained the Congo’s chaotic east, where no miner or peacekeeper dared venture. To follow Stanley’s route, I would have to travel overland through this dangerous eastern sector for about 500 kilometres from Lake Tanganyika to the headwaters of the Congo River before heading downstream. I knew the river descent would be hard, but the thing that worried me most was this overland section. For months I emailed every aid agency and missionary group, no matter how loose their connection with the Congo, but they all said the same thing: overland travel was simply too dangerous.
In 2002 I had my next lucky break, when a peace deal was signed between the factions who had been fighting since 1998. I got back in touch with Adolphe Onusumba, my rebel contact from Goma, who, under the terms of the treaty, was invited to move to Kinshasa to take part in the transitional national government.
His response was the most encouraging news I had heard since embarking on my Congo project:
Tim,
I think now time has arrive for your trip, because looking at the way the proccess is moving even slow, we can expect something positive to come.
All the best and waiting news from you.
Dr Adolphe ONUSUMBA YEMBA
Vice-Président de l’Assemblée Nationale de la RDC.
I replied immediately, but he urged me to be patient, promising to ask his colleagues in the transitional government, on my behalf, for permission to travel in the east of the country. By the time another year had passed, I had grown tired of waiting for Adolphe to deliver.
While my work as a journalist has taken me to numerous war zones, I have always taken the most cautious route, reducing risk as much as possible. Climbing mountains has always been a passion of mine and I borrow from the language of climbing. Climbers talk of two types of danger – subjective and objective. The subjective is the danger that it is in the hands of the climber to influence – having the right equipment, maintaining the correct level of fitness or skill, gleaning as much information about a target mountain as possible. Climbers aim to reduce the subjective danger as much as they possibly can. Objective danger is different. This is danger from random storms closing in, or an unpredictable break in a piece of equipment. It is a danger over which climbers have no influence. They accept a certain amount of objective danger when they set about a potentially life-threatening route. It is regarded fatalistically. While something can be done about subjective danger, there is nothing that can be done about the second type – it is an occupational hazard.
I apply the same rules to my journalism. I will do everything I can to reduce risk, but if, finally, there is no alternative than to cross an active frontline, even with a likelihood of being shot at, then I am prepared to do it. As long as I know I have reduced all the risks that are in my power to reduce, then I am prepared to accept this secondary type of risk as an occupational hazard.
By mid-2004, I was approaching that stage with the Congo. I had done everything I could to glean advice and information about crossing the country. My notebook was full of contacts, some less savoury than others, and I had waited patiently for the longest lull in the country’s fighting for a decade. But it slowly became clear that there was nothing else I could reasonably do. If I was serious about crossing the Congo, I would have to go there and try. Realising this was a moment of personal release. For so long I had fretted and plotted. Now, all the plotting and fretting was done.
The peace treaty meant that the Congolese national airline was just starting to operate again after years of being grounded. In August 2004 I booked a flight from Johannesburg to the Congo, wrote my first will and kissed Jane goodbye.
2.
The Final Frontier
H.M. Stanley’s collapsible rowing boat, the Lady Alice
MYSTERY HAD SWIRLED around the Congo River since 1482 when Diogo Cão, a Portuguese mariner, became the first white man to set eyes on it. Portugal was the dominant maritime power of the Middle Ages, and it was around Africa that many of its greatest discoveries were made in the search for a sea route to the East Indies. By the time Cão left Lisbon in 1482, previous missions had already discovered the major rivers and headlands of the upper west African coastline, the Gambia River and Sierra Leone River, where the continent bulges westwards into the Atlantic Ocean, and the swampy, mangrove-clogged delta of the Niger River. But as Cão reached further down the coast than any of his predecessors, he came across something sensational.
Shortly after crossing the Equator he watched the Atlantic turn sedgy-brown. Through his eye-glass he made out an immense river mouth, guarded by two long spits of sand reaching far out from the mainland like the mandibles of a giant insect. He knew immediately that the river was greater than any so far discovered in Africa.
Modern hydrographical surveys show the outflow of fresh water from the Congo River is so strong that it has carved out of the seabed a submarine canyon 1,000 metres deep reaching almost 200 kilometres out into the ocean. In the late fifteenth century Cão did not have the benefit of such surveying equipment. He measured the river’s force more prosaically – he recorded that the outflow of fresh water was so prodigious that far out to sea from the river’s mouth it was possible to drink water straight from the ocean. His discovery was later described by a Portuguese historian:
So violent and so powerful from the quantity of its water, and the rapidity of its current, that it enters the sea on the western side of Africa, forcing a broad and free passage, in spite of the ocean, with so much violence, that for the space of twenty leagues it preserves its fresh water unbroken by the briny billows which encompass it on every side; as if this noble river had determined to try its strength in pitched battle with the ocean itself, and alone deny it the tribute which all other rivers in the world pay without resistance.
Cão turned his small caravel towards the river mouth and cautiously nosed his way up Africa’s mightiest river. A leadsman at the bow of the vessel reported an immense depth of water, and the boat struggled against the powerful eight-knot current running out to sea. After battling a few kilometres upriver from the mouth, he put ashore on the left or southern bank of the river, and his crew’s landing party became the first Europeans ever to set foot on
Congolese soil.
Cão’s crew reported seeing a group of natives as the boat approached the river bank. One can imagine the suspicion and fear on both sides as the landing party descended over the side of the caravel and headed towards the shore. They took with them a large, stone column or padrão, which the Portuguese explorers routinely used as a sort of calling card. Similar padrãos were used to mark the extent of other journeys by Portuguese explorers, but the wording of the declaration inscribed at the top of the column left by Cão is intriguing:
In the year 6681 of the World and in that of 1482 since the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most serene, the most excellent and potent prince, King John II of Portugal did order this land to be discovered and this pillar of stone to be erected by Diogo Cão, an esquire in his household.
The planting of the padrão was not a moment of colonisation or acquisition. The contrast between Cão’s behaviour and that of the outsiders who arrived subsequently in the Congo is stark.
Some of the natives came forward to speak with Cão. Members of his crew knew dialects from further up the African coast, but they had never heard words like those spoken by these river people. Cao heard the name Kongo being repeated. Following the pattern of other African groups, they explained they were the BaKongo people and called their language KiKongo. Inland, they said, was the capital of their tribe, MbanzaKongo, where there lived a powerful leader or king, the ManiKongo.
When Cão asked them about the river, they replied that in their language it was called nzere, or nzadi, meaning ‘the river that swallows all rivers’. It remains a wonderfully appropriate name. The main river reaches almost 4,500 kilometres across Africa, draining every marsh, lake and watercourse in a river basin larger than the subcontinent of India. Three of the Congo River’s tributaries are longer than the Rhine, western Europe’s longest river. The Congo River is fed by snow melt from the freezing summits of volcanoes in central Africa, floodwater spilling from Lake Tanganyika, Africa’s oldest and deepest lake, and rainwater from the second-largest rainforest on the planet.
By the time it reaches the sea, ‘the river that swallows all rivers’ pumps out more fresh water into the ocean than any other river in the world except the Amazon. It has another extraordinary feature. Unlike any other major river system, the outflow of the Congo remains steady all year round. Other rivers – even mighty ones like the Nile and the Amazon – have dry and wet seasons when the flow dips and rises, but the Congo River is relentless. Its catchment straddles the Equator, meaning that all year round at least part of the river system is experiencing a wet season, so at its mouth the flow is both prodigious and permanent.
After his first encounter with Congolese people, we know that Cão explored a short distance up the river. He did not reach the impassable rapids that lie 120 kilometres from the Atlantic, but the enormous flow of water and the wide, navigable channel dotted with large, bush-covered islands convinced him he had found an artery reaching deep into Africa.
Cão decided to make contact with the ManiKongo. He chose four crew members – Africans pressed into service on his ship from coastal communities further north and baptised as Christians in Portugal – and dispatched them as emissaries to the ManiKongo. They were to be guided by tribesmen from the river mouth, who warned Cão that the round trip to the kingdom’s capital would take weeks. So after dressing the four ambassadors in the finest clothes he could spare and giving them gifts to offer as tribute to the ManiKongo, he sailed back out into the Atlantic and turned his ship south.
He pushed on a further 500 kilometres, before turning north again, clearly anxious to find out what his four crew members had learned. He was disappointed to find they were not there. He waited for a few days but, growing impatient, decided on drastic action. He abducted four natives, sent a message to the ManiKongo that he would only free them in exchange for his four crew members and headed home.
It was a clumsy start to the Congo’s relationship with the outside world, but not as cruel as it might at first seem. The four Congolese were treated well and when the ship reached Lisbon in 1484 the court of the Portuguese monarch, King John II, showed none of the assumed superiority of white over black that would characterise the relationship between Africa and the outside world for so many centuries. The four men were given rooms in the palace, groomed, fed and clothed as royalty and immersed in Portuguese life. They were taught the language, taken on tours around the kingdom and exposed to Christianity in its fullest pomp. Cão’s discovery of a great river on the west African coast, and his account of its potentially rich African kingdom, whetted John’s appetite, but instead of using force of arms to secure a Portuguese foothold there, his strategy would be one of persuasion, not coercion. By impressing these first Congolese visitors with the wealth and sophistication of a modern European kingdom, John would forge a link with the newly discovered kingdom on the edge of the known world.
It worked well. The emissaries were shipped back to the Congo, where they made their way eagerly to the kingdom’s capital, dressed in European clothes and carrying a vast stock of gifts as a gesture of goodwill for the ManiKongo. On their arrival they found that just as they had been well treated by their new patrons, so had the four crew members whom Cão had left as pro-tem diplomats. The ManiKongo wanted to take the relationship with Portugal further, so he allowed the four outsiders to leave, accompanied by four new ambassadors of his own people. This time, he would be represented not by tribesmen plucked randomly from a riverside village, but by the sons of senior members of his court, led by a prince called Nsaku.
They carried with them the finest gifts the kingdom could offer – ivory and cloth woven from raffia palms – and showed themselves willing to embrace the religion of the white man. When these newcomers reached Lisbon, John himself attended Nsaku’s baptism, where the African prince was christened Lord John of the Forest. Like the earlier party of Congolese guests in Lisbon, Nsaku was treated royally and shown all the majesty Portugal could muster, before being put on a ship heading back home to forge the next bond between Portugal and the newly discovered kingdom of Congo.
He did not make it home, but was killed by an outbreak of plague that struck the flotilla shortly after leaving Lisbon. In retrospect, it seems an accurate omen for the relationship between the two peoples. The Congolese were willing to embrace the Portuguese, only to discover later they had unleashed a force that would destroy them from within.
*
The next two decades marked the Golden Age of relations between Portugal and the people of a territory that European cartographers were already calling the Congo. In 1491 the first Portuguese visitors finally reached MbanzaKongo, the capital, after the long sea journey to the river mouth and a three-week overland journey inland from the coast. The ManiKongo, who was called Nzinga a Nkuwu, staged a royal welcome that fits the most lavish stereotype of a first meeting between white and black. Surrounded by his various wives, princes and courtiers, the ManiKongo sat on a wooden throne inlaid with ivory, which had been placed on a raised platform. He was dressed in cloth woven from raffia, and the Portuguese visitors noticed that he was also wearing a piece of damask, a remnant of the tribute left for him by Cão a decade earlier. In a gesture of welcome to the leader of the Portuguese group, he bent down, picked up a handful of dust and pressed it against his chest and then against the visitor. It marked the start of a brief alliance of equals.
What we know about the kingdom of the Congo, we know from the Portuguese. With no written language, Congolese history was maintained by oral tradition, and the Portuguese used this to construct a lavish picture of a vast kingdom covering thousands of square kilometres, with a population of several million. But it is important to remember that this history was written with hindsight. The first written account of the 1491 visit was assembled a hundred years after it happened.
Drawings by early European explorers present the capital, MbanzaKongo, as any European city, with large, multi-storey buildings laid out a
long tidy streets, leading up to a crenellated castle atop a rocky outcrop overlooking a river. This was fanciful nonsense. If you go to the site today, it is a long way from any river and the ground is not high enough to dominate the surrounding area. No European-style castle ever existed.
Some modern historians describe the Congo of old as one of Africa’s greatest kingdoms, although there is no way this can be verified. With little historical material on rival African kingdoms in the area, it is impossible to gauge the Congo’s place in comparison to other local communities. But it was the first African kingdom below the Equator discovered by the white man, and the Portuguese presumed to talk up its importance, not least because for a brief period towards the end of the fifteenth century they regarded it as Europe’s most significant discovery anywhere in the world.
Something that is certain is that the kingdom of the Congo was not at peace. Raiding parties from neighbouring tribal groups were a constant menace, attacking villages, claiming outlying territory and slaughtering the king’s people. And we know the king sent out expeditions of his own warriors to do the same in retaliation. It is safe to conclude that the king’s willingness to welcome the Portuguese was partly due to his zeal to acquire the modern weaponry the Portuguese brought with them.
He swiftly agreed to accept the religion offered by the first Portuguese visitors in 1491. Within weeks, an elaborate ceremony of conversion was held and Nzinga a Nkuwu was christened King John. Only a short time later he dispatched his first war party, supported by armed Portuguese soldiers. They routed their enemies, forging, through war, an initially warm relationship between Europe and the Congo.