Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

  My most positive lead had come from Michel Bonnardeaux, a civilian UN employee from Canada who had been based in Kalemie, on and off, for more than two years. When he arrived, the war was raging in the eastern Congo and Kalemie was filled with refugees, but since the 2002 peace treaty Michel had seen a small but steady improvement in the security situation. While most of my e-correspondents had dismissed my plan to follow Stanley’s route as being either impossible or insane, Michel was one of the few who did not reject it out of hand. It might have been his contagious enthusiasm for local Congolese history or just his upbeat positive nature, but like a drowning man to a piece of flotsam, I latched firmly onto Michel and his advice.

  According to Michel, the 500-kilometre route overland from Kalemie to the upper Congo passed through the land belonging to the Banga-Banga tribe. From the many Banga-Banga refugees living in Kalemie, he knew the security situation in the area had improved enough to allow a trickle of people to arrive in town by foot. Many came pushing old bicycles laden with produce, which was then traded at the port for salt, soap and other commodities. The distances were immense and the tracks tiny, but if you could get a bicycle along them, Michel reckoned, you could also get a small motorbike along them.

  The security situation remained the great unknown. The peace treaty had technically ended the war, but gangs of armed militia still roamed the forest and savannah west of Kalemie. Many of the bicycle bearers arrived in town with stories of atrocities in the anarchic region between Lake Tanganyika and the upper Congo. Cannibalism was common, and rape was a ghastly routine for villagers populating this vast swathe of territory.

  The one thing I had going for me was the scale of the place. After Kalemie, the next UN base was 700 kilometres away on the upper Congo River, at the town of Kindu. The distances were so enormous that if I could move quickly by motorbike, and not advertise my plans in advance to anyone minded to arrange an ambush, I gambled that I could get through safely. But whether I would manage to find a lift on a motorbike, let alone someone prepared to act as guide and interpreter, were great unknowns. Language would definitely be a problem, as my French would only be of use in the Congo’s larger settlements, where I could be sure to find village elders with the remnants of a school education. In the rural areas I would need someone who spoke Swahili to ask for help and directions from villagers we met. There were no reliable maps of the area I wanted to cross, so I would have to rely on local directions.

  Peacekeepers from MONUC would not be able to help because they had a policy of only going to places that could be reached by jeep – in the case of Kalemie, this meant that they operated within a few kilometres of the town centre. The MONUC bases at Kalemie and Kindu were linked only by air, so I turned my attention to the few aid groups operating in the eastern Congo to beg for help. The problem was not one of expense – I could afford the few thousand dollars cost of a bike and wages for a guide. The problem was more simple – finding anyone who was prepared to travel overland through such hazardous terrain. One by one the aid groups turned me down. They had, after all, their own important work to do, and helping out an adventurous hack did not fit readily into their schedules.

  In the months leading up to my trip I had finally made contact with a group that offered me a glimmer of hope. Care International had been developing its network of contacts around Kindu and I heard that its country director, Brian Larson, had personally organised a convoy of motorbikes that ventured 200 kilometres south of Kindu, to see how viable it was to move supplies down jungle tracks to people who had received no humanitarian aid for years. For me, this was precisely what I was looking for: someone who was prepared to take a calculated risk to open up areas viewed for a generation as impassable.

  We exchanged emails. Brian jokingly dismissed his motorbike adventure as an ‘interesting way to get a sore backside’ and I eventually summoned the courage to ask him directly if I could borrow a motorbike and a guide from his Care International staff. The fact that he did not turn me down flat meant I was in with a chance. He promised to mention my idea to his staff around Kindu and urge them to see if they could coincide one of their reconnaissance trips with part of my itinerary.

  These half-chances suggested by Michel and Brian had been the grounds for my decision to fly to Kalemie but they were not enough to convince Jean-Claude (‘Call me J-C’) – a third-generation Belgian colonialist who worked for Clive’s mine operations. He seemed to take a mawkish pleasure in telling me my trip was doomed.

  When I told him that all I had with me was my ‘To Whom It May Concern’ letter introducing me as a writer following Stanley’s route, he snorted dismissively. ‘That won’t be enough. You will need written authorisation from the local intelligence service. They are very strict here and without their permission you won’t get anywhere,’ he said. And when I told him I had a satellite telephone, he snorted even more loudly. ‘You won’t get far with that unless you get permission from the military police. They will take it away from you the moment they find it. It will cost you a lot of money if you try to get it back.’

  I was beginning to take against J-C.

  ‘I’ve got a map here. Come and show me where you want to go,’ J-C said on my first day in Lubumbashi, unfolding an out-of-date map of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

  I stood over it and pointed to Kalemie, the port on Lake Tanganyika. Technically it is in the same province as Lubumbashi, Katanga, but it lies 1,000 kilometres to the north. As I described the major sections of the trip, overland from the lake to the headwaters of the Congo River, J-C rather irritatingly sucked in his breath and shook his head, uttering something like ‘not possible’ or ‘cannot be done’.

  After I finished he launched into a hugely pessimistic declamation.

  ‘I know all this area really well from when I was younger. This area is not a cobalt area like down here in the south of Katanga, but a gold area. Not big-scale stuff, but artisanal, small-scale gold mines. So with the presence of these mines, you are going to get people with guns wanting the gold action. And I am sure you know what happened up here recently.’ He was pointing at Bukavu, the scene of the attack by pro-Rwandan rebels just a few months earlier.

  ‘Well, all the government troops have now gone into the town to punish the rebels. And so those rebels have fled into the bush about here.’ He was now pointing to an area close to Kalemie.

  ‘And that means the militia who were already living in the bush have been pushed further south, to where you want to go.’

  He shook his head and, with a final flourish, pronounced his judgement. ‘You don’t stand a chance.’

  I had had enough of J-C and took solace in the house’s South African satellite television. I turned on the news and could not believe what I heard. The anchorman told me that 156 ethnic Tutsis from the Congo had just been murdered at a refugee camp across the border in Burundi where they had sought sanctuary from the turmoil caused by June’s events in Bukavu. I tried to follow what the anchor was saying about who might be responsible. His version was muddled and confusing, but one thing was perfectly clear to me. My journey had just got a whole lot more complicated.

  4.

  The Pearl of Tanganyika

  Laissez-passer issued to the author, August 2004, by Congolese authorities in the province of Katanga

  THE BELGIANS CALLED the port of Kalemie the ‘Pearl of Tanganyika’ and I was hoping it would gleam for me as I approached on the UN flight from Lubumbashi. The light aircraft bucked and yawed as the pilots slalomed between skyscraper storm clouds, but my face stayed firmly glued to the tiny porthole, anxious for my first glimpse.

  Lake Tanganyika is a scientific oddity. Scientists believe it to be the oldest and deepest lake in Africa, with many of its own unique species of water micro-organisms and creatures. And unlike the other Great Lakes of Africa, it is drained not by a large, permanent river but by a more modest stream, the Lukuga, which acts like an overflow in a bath. For much of the year the river is s
tagnant and silted up, only surging into life during the rainy season when the lake level rises.

  Folklore among the tribes who live on the lake’s edge says it was created as a punishment. The tradition goes that a family, living on the sweltering savannah of central Africa, had enjoyed their own private spring for generations, drawing from an unlimited supply of cool, fresh water and feasting on the sweet-tasting fish that lived in the pond formed where the water issued from the ground. The family was sworn to secrecy about the source of the water and the fish, and was issued with a dire warning that all would be lost if the secret was betrayed. One day, the family’s matriarch began an affair while her husband was away. The lover was treated to a feast of fish, his thirst slaked with the cool, fresh spring water. He became so enraptured with the sweet taste of the water and fish that he insisted on knowing where they came from. The woman was initially reluctant, but finally gave in to temptation and the spell was broken. At that moment the earth was rent and a great flood welled up from below, drowning the lovers and creating the lake we see today.

  When I first read this fable, I was struck by how good an analogy it is for the entire Congo. Local tribesmen had survived in peace for generations before outsiders – Arab slavers and white colonials – turned up and beguiled them into giving up first slaves, then ivory, then rubber and mineral wealth, before the traditional Congolese way of life was overwhelmed by the outsiders.

  Five hundred kilometres or so east of my flight path, on the other side of Lake Tanganyika, was the air space of Tanzania. Light aircraft would be a common sight there, ferrying tourists between Africa’s biggest mountain, Kilimanjaro, and the country’s world-famous safari parks. But on my side of the lake, visitors to the Congo were rare and light aircraft rarer still. It had taken a month to negotiate my way onto the plane, but I had no other option. Like all UN missions, MONUC can be criticised for being bureaucratic and inefficient, but in the absence of any meaningful government in the Democratic Republic of Congo, MONUC was the closest the country came to a genuinely national organisation and, for me, it provided the only way to reach Kalemie.

  Sadly, the ‘Pearl of Tanganyika’ did not glimmer for me that day. The cloud cover was too thick and all I saw of the lake was a slab of grey in the distance as the aircraft made its final, frantic lunge for Kalemie before bouncing to a halt on the bumpy strip.

  The airstrip might technically be described as a UN military installation, but such a term would be an overstatement. The runway was unfenced, crowded on all sides by unkempt scrub, and the old grey tarmac of the strip was pitted with divots and splodged with dark repair patches. The only military structure was a white, wooden watch tower, with a platform just three metres off the ground, where I could see a UN infantryman. His tin helmet was painted UN blue, crammed low on his head, while his shoulders were bulked up by a flak jacket, also blue. The gap between helmet and body armour was tiny and his anxious, beady eyes looked like those behind the prickles of a balled-up hedgehog summoning forlorn defiance at an approaching lorry.

  Our plane was the sort in which the pilot has to inch his way, bent double, back through the tiny cabin to free the passengers. I followed, slowly unfolding myself from my boxed-in sitting position, relieved to be able to stretch, as I went down the three-step ladder onto the ground. I might not have been able to see the lake but I could smell it now – a rich, sedgy aroma in the still, steamy atmosphere. Although Kalemie is in Katanga, the same province as Lubumbashi, the eco-system is radically different. The city lies on a dry plateau or veld, but the lakeside port is surrounded by lusher, more tropical forest. By the time I finished stretching, I could feel the first drops of sweat pasting my long-sleeved shirt to my back.

  There was not a single building in sight, although the MONUC soldiers had set up a bunch of prefabricated containers to act as an arrivals hall. These white, box-like units are a common feature of any UN operation around the world. If connected to an electrical generator and a water tank, they can provide an anodyne, air-conditioned living space, no matter whether you are up a snowy mountain in Afghanistan or in the deserts of the western Sahara. They ensure each UN mission operates in its own little bubble. There might be a war going on outside, but UN peacekeepers can expect to have one of these little white boxes in which to work, sleep, eat or even connect to the Internet.

  ‘Please follow me,’ said a white girl wearing a crisp uniform of blue and grey. Her English had a Slavic accent and her name tag bore the flag of her homeland, Croatia. The outside atmosphere was hot and cloying, but she was wearing several layers of clothing – her workspace was heavily air-conditioned. After following her inside to have my name ticked off the passenger manifest, I shivered. I hurried back outside to wait for Michel Bonnardeaux, the UN worker whose optimism had brought me here in the first place. He had promised to meet me off the plane, but as I stood there with the sedgy smell of Lake Tanganyika in my nostrils and my shirt increasingly sodden with sweat, there was no sign of him.

  Kalemie was one of the first settlements developed by Belgian colonial agents in the Congo after Stanley’s journey of discovery. When the explorer finally reached Britain in 1878 with proof the Congo River was navigable for thousands of kilometres halfway across Africa, he first tried to persuade London to claim the territory as a British colony. He failed. At the time the British colonial authorities were not impressed with the returns offered by Britain’s relatively modest African holdings. Vast fortunes were being made in India and the Far East, but Africa, in the age before its large gold and diamond deposits had been discovered, was not nearly as attractive. Maintaining the Cape Colony around Cape Town at the foot of Africa was costing Britain a great deal. British troops were being lost in a series of frontier wars with the Xhosa and battles with the Zulu that would lead, within a year, to the disaster of Isandlwana and the defence of Rorke’s Drift. The timing of Stanley’s approach was not good and his suggestion that Britain should colonise the Congo River basin was firmly rejected by Whitehall.

  In Brussels, Leopold proved more receptive. He had been dreaming for years of establishing his own colonial empire, but he had failed to locate the right piece of territory. When he learned of Stanley’s success in charting the river, he invited the explorer to his palace in Brussels and made sure Stanley was treated lavishly. Within a few weeks the pair had hatched an ambitious plot. The ruler of one of Europe’s smallest and youngest nations (Belgium was founded in 1830) commissioned the Welsh-born, naturalised American to stake the entire Congo River basin as the private property of the king. Stanley would be paid handsomely and Leopold would have the foundation for his empire.

  Just two years after he crossed the Congo as an explorer, Stanley returned as a coloniser. This time he came by ship to the mouth of the river, before heading inland with a party of road-builders, determined to construct an access route through the Crystal Mountains that guard the impassable lower reaches of the river. It took two years and cost the lives of hundreds of African labourers, who were literally worked to death, but slowly some of the most inhospitable terrain in Africa was tamed. It was this display of indefatigability, as much as any of his other actions during his African expeditions, that earned Stanley the Swahili soubriquet Bula Matari, or Breaker of Rocks.

  In keeping with the prevailing attitude of racial superiority assumed by almost all white visitors to Africa, Stanley paid little heed to the millions of native Congolese. There were times where he went through the motions of arranging ‘treaties’ with local chiefs, drawing up documents that effectively ceded the rights over the land to the ‘king over the water’. It was hardly a negotiation between two equals, as the chiefs knew perfectly well what would happen if they did not sign. They would be overrun by the motley gang of well-armed colonial pioneers and camp followers accompanying Stanley. And just like the European slave traders of 400 years earlier, Stanley was adept at playing the tribes off against each other, providing arms, clothing and alcohol to one group so that it could
conquer its local rival. Like dominoes the Congolese tribes fell, one after the other, to Stanley and the early colonial agents of the Belgian king as the white man’s influence crept steadily inland across the immense river basin.

  Leopold’s colonising coup in the Congo led the other European powers to reconsider Africa. France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Britain had largely ignored the African interior until now, but the acquisitiveness of the Belgian king forced them to think again and in the early winter of 1884 the great European powers gathered at a grand conference convened in Berlin to carve up what remained unclaimed in Africa. Leopold was able to present his colonial claim over the Congo as a fait accompli and, when the conference ended in February 1885, the Act of Berlin gave its legal recognition to the Congo Free State. With a surface area of more than three million square kilometres, it was claimed not by Belgium, but by the king himself. Never in history, neither before nor since, has a single person claimed ownership of a larger tract of land.

  The territory was mostly virgin rainforest and savannah, crisscrossed by the Congo River and its countless tributaries, inhabited by millions of Congolese, but in those first years of colonial rule it was not the natives who posed the greatest threat to Leopold’s interests. Arab slavers in the east of the country – the ones whose stories of a mighty river in the centre of Africa first attracted Livingstone and Stanley in the 1860s and 1870s – were a much greater concern for Leopold. Many of these Arabs had already lived for decades in the east of the country, organising raiding parties to plunder slaves and ivory, which would then be transported by caravan back to the large Arab trading centres around Zanzibar. But the Berlin Conference had been a white man’s meeting. The Arabs of east Africa had not been invited.