Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

  Various half-hearted attempts were made to forge peace treaties between the early Belgian colonists and the Arab slavers, but an increase in tension was inevitable as the Europeans grew steadily more avaricious. The rising tension culminated in a brief but bloody war that began in 1892. Both sides used Congolese tribesmen as foot soldiers and both sides committed atrocities, but modern European weapons meant that the Belgians prevailed, mopping up Arab resistance in a series of battles and skirmishes, as the white colonialists sought to purge the Congo of its Arab population and to draw up a clear frontier once and for all for the territory claimed solely by Leopold.

  Lake Tanganyika was a convenient boundary marker. It is only seventy kilometres across at its widest point, but from north to south it runs for 650 kilometres, and the Belgian pioneers quickly focused on it as a natural border for the easternmost limit of the Congo Free State. First, they had to deal with the large local Arab population on the lake’s shore. Ever since they first reached the Congo in the early nineteenth century, the Arab slavers had arrived on boats crossing the lake. A large settlement had grown at their principal landing site on the western shore of the lake, Mtowa, a short distance north of the mouth of the only river that drains the lake, the Lukuga.

  On 5 April 1892 a Belgian sergeant called Alexis Vrithoff clashed with an Arab raiding party on high ground next to the river mouth. He was killed, but after the Belgians eventually crushed the Arabs, the site around the estuary was developed into the Congo’s most important inland port, serviced by a railway, completed in 1915, that brought goods from the Congolese interior, and by ferries and steamers that crossed the lake to ports in what is now Zambia, Tanzania and Burundi. In honour of Albert I, the Belgian king who succeeded Leopold, the town was named Albertville – its name was changed to Kalemie in the late 1960s – and, according to my 1951 Travel Guide to the Belgian Congo, the construction of this great transport hub meant the port was ‘destined to have a great future’.

  I saw little evidence of this ‘great future’ once Michel finally picked me up at the airstrip. From a distance Kalemie looked regular enough, and as we approached, bumping along on a sandy track contouring round the edge of Lake Tanganyika, I could see the town’s main church, a white building with a rather elegant bell-tower standing proud on a headland, against a knobbly horizon of tree-covered hills, commanding a fine view over the lake. In the foreground, among the green of coconut palms and banana trees, there were two distinct columns of rust-red, corrugated-iron roofs flanking what appeared to be a main thoroughfare. And in the distance there was a small harbour tucked in the lee of a graceful breakwater, next to a railway terminus and marshalling yard.

  But as the jeep laboured around the lake and we got closer to Kalemie, the most extraordinary thing happened. The fabric of the town grew flimsier until it seemed to vanish altogether.

  What I had taken to be an estate of factories, damaged in the recent war in the Congo, turned out to be a ruin dating from a much earlier age. Faded advertisements could just be made out on the walls, although the logos dated not from the 1990s or the 1980s, but from half a century ago. Grass grew long and untroubled through the railway sleepers on the approaches to the disused station, and the sandy soil on either side of the tracks was drummed hard by generations of feet that had turned the old carriageway into a simple, arrow-straight footpath, walled on both sides by reedy grass swaying way above head height. An old railway carriage – built decades ago in South Africa and still bearing instructions in Afrikaans forbidding smoking – stood rusting in the tropical heat. In one of its compartments someone had made a small cooking fire on the floor, now surrounded by various dirty pots, and the carriage had the smell and stains of a doss-house.

  Instead of a functioning high street, what I found was a dusty space filled by gaggles of meandering locals. A few hawkers sat behind small piles of stale biscuits or flat bottles of orange soda smuggled into Kalemie by boat from Tanzania on the other side of the lake. The more ambitious traders offered things like batteries and radios, but while the names on the Chinese-made packets sounded familiar, the misspellings of Philipps or Pannasonic suggested that nothing was genuine. Pedestrians could peruse at their leisure. They had no reason to worry about being run over as in the entire town there was only a handful of vehicles, mainly UN jeeps and one venerable Land Rover owned by some missionaries. And even when I saw one of these vehicles actually moving, they could only manage a walking pace, to avoid bucking and rearing uncontrollably over various potholes, uncovered drainage ditches and other obstacles in the town centre.

  There were bicycles, old-fashioned things with solid frames painted black and primitive lever brakes, manufactured in China, propped up in the shade of the roadside trees, as their owners waited to offer them as taxis for customers willing to pay twenty Congolese francs, or four pence, to be taken from one end of the dusty strip to the other. I watched as women, wrapped in printed cotton cloth, some clutching salted fish bundled up in banana leaves, took up genteel side-saddle positions on the padded cushions attached to the racks above the bicycles’ rear wheel, while the taxi boys heaved in the heat against the pedals. I could hear the soft chiming of Swahili as two women passengers chatted to each other while they were being slowly pedalled in parallel along the roadway.

  Of the buildings themselves, there was little left beyond the fronts. Rust had not just coloured the roofs, but eaten out huge holes, through which tropical rain had flooded for countless rainy seasons. Damp, seasonal flooding from the nearby lake and collapsed foundations meant the interior rooms were mostly empty. Pipes that once brought mains water to each building lay broken and there was not one working light bulb. The town’s main terrace of shops looked like one of those Hollywood filmsets, which from the front has the appearance of solidity, but from the back is nothing but a few beams propping up a façade.

  Without cobalt or diamonds or gold to draw outsiders’ interest here, Kalemie had been hollowed out by the years. Where once there had been a substantial settlement, nothing but the husk remained.

  As we drove into Kalemie, Michel quizzed me on my motives. He was extremely knowledgeable about the local history, and seemed delighted to have found in me someone to share his interest.

  ‘So you are the man crazy enough to want to follow Stanley’s route. The history of this place is extraordinary – the slavers and their ivory, the Belgians who fought battles right here where the town now stands, and the wars since independence – but I have never met anyone who comes here just for history’s sake. History is a luxury people cannot afford around here, where the more pressing things are where the next meal is coming from or the next drink of clean water.’

  He spoke slowly, concentrating hard on steering the jeep along the bouncy road into town, sitting forward in the driver’s seat, anxiously trying to see over the bonnet to anticipate the next pothole.

  ‘It’s not the worst town in the country I have been to, but things are pretty basic here. The town is meant to get its electricity from a hydroelectric plant in the mountains north of here, built back in the 1950s – it’s the one that Che Guevara attacked – but it’s pretty intermittent these days. Some places are lucky enough to get a day of power, now and then, but we’ve had nothing for weeks now.’

  I had read Guevara’s diary about his time in the Congo. It was 1965 and he arrived here fired with revolutionary zeal, willing to risk his life in the fight against the Mobutu regime that America was in the process of installing. It was an era when the Cold War was being fought in numerous proxy wars all over Africa, and Guevara flew from Cuba to communist-controlled Tanzania to stage his insurgency across Lake Tanganyika. During a brief stopover in Tanzania he spent time with Laurent Kabila, then a young Congolese dissident and opponent of Mobutu. It would be more than thirty years before Kabila eventually replaced Mobutu, but at his first meeting Guevara was not overly impressed with Kabila’s revolutionary credentials. He described him as a drunken womaniser rather than a tr
ue freedom fighter.

  With heavy historic irony Guevara, the anti-colonialist par excellence, arrived in the Congo just as Stanley, the colonial pioneer, had done – by small boat. Guevara came under cover of darkness with a raiding party made up of trusted Cuban revolutionaries and a few anti-Mobutu Congolese rebels. Their landing place could only have been a short distance from the spot where Stanley made landfall in his British-built, collapsible boat, the Lady Alice, and after landing Guevara’s team slipped into the heavily forested hills to the west of Lake Tanganyika, where they spent a few weeks trying to strike a blow against the Mobutu regime. Guevara sounds increasingly miserable in his diaries. His zeal for revolution steadily diminished as his fellow African revolutionaries proved incapable of organising basic supplies or communications.

  It all ended in a chaotic attack on the hydroelectric plant at Bendera, about 150 kilometres north of Kalemie. The plant was one of the last construction projects completed by the Belgians, in the late 1950s, and involved an ambitious plan to dam a river in a steep-sided gorge halfway up a mountain, before piping the water through turbines. The terrain meant the project was difficult to complete, but it also meant it was difficult for Guevara to attack. When the assault failed, he blamed poor communication among his fellow fighters and the tone of his diary suggests the fiasco made him lose faith in his Congolese collaborators. He simply thought they were not up to the task of running a revolution. Within a few days Guevara was back on Lake Tanganyika, this time heading to Tanzania under cover of darkness. He never returned to the Congo.

  Michel asked me in detail about the route I hoped to follow, from Kalemie all the way to the upper Congo River.

  ‘I would love to go through that area. I have read about it and flown over it, but I would love to see what is happening there, on the ground, after all this chaos.’

  ‘So why don’t you come with me?’ I asked. ‘It would be great to have some company.’

  Michel shook his head. ‘My bosses would never let me. Our security rules would never allow it. Especially now, after the latest news from Burundi. I assume you have heard what happened?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, the very latest is that the leadership of the pro-Rwandan rebels have left Kinshasa in protest at the killings. And one of the rebel leaders has been quoted as saying the whole peace treaty is off and the transitional government suspended. If that is true, then I guess we can expect the war to be back on in a couple of days.’

  For two years Michel had worked at the UN mission in Kalemie as a sort of combat disc jockey, learning Swahili and immersing himself in the traditions and lore of the local Congolese tribes. He ran the local office of Radio Okapi, a UN hearts-and-minds operation broadcasting to the 200,000 Congolese crowded into the town. Kalemie might be one of the biggest towns in the Congo, but it has no state radio or television, no newspapers, no landline telephones and no Internet access. I arrived the day after the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympics in Athens but, were it not for Michel’s radio station, the event would have passed unnoticed in Kalemie.

  We passed the ruins of the old airport, a single-storey 1950s building perforated with bullet holes and surrounded, on all sides, by puddles of shattered, red roof tiles. It had been shot up so many times that I was sure even the bullet holes had bullet holes. On top of one of the piles of broken masonry sat a Congolese militiaman, who seemed to scowl directly at me, idly waving his assault rifle, as our jeep crawled past.

  Michel noticed me wince and tried to sound reassuring. ‘In town itself, things have been pretty quiet since the peace treaty. As you probably know there was some pretty bad fighting back here during the war and air raids by pro-government war planes, but the rebels, the mai-mai, and the government troops now seem to be getting on.’

  I was only half-listening as I watched a group of charcoal-burners struggling to bring the produce of their day’s work into town. Large chunks of charcoal had been crammed into floppy cages woven from thin strips of brown bark. The cages were then flung across the handlebars and frame of old bicycles, with more cages piled on top. The crazy, tottering loads were on the final leg of their journey, heaved through the sand into town by the bare-chested men, whose already dark bodies were streaked with smears of sweat-congealed, jet-black charcoal powder.

  But then Michel said something that brought my attention straight back to him.

  ‘As you probably know, like all of the eastern DRC, we had a bit of a wobble a few months back. If you look over there you will see what I mean.’

  Kalemie was just a few hundred kilometres south of Bukavu, the scene of the June attack by pro-Rwandan rebels. It had prompted a backlash by the Congolese authorities against anyone linked with Rwanda, especially the Banyamulenge, a tribal group from eastern Congo who trace their ancestry back a few hundred years to the Tutsi tribes of Rwanda. No matter that the Banyamulenge have been in the Congo for generations, their association with Rwanda was enough to see them murdered and persecuted today by the Congolese.

  ‘There you can see our local Banyamulenge,’ Michel said as we passed in through the gate of the UN base in Kalemie. He was pointing at a 200-strong crowd, mainly of children, gathered around a standpipe where they were messily filling bright-yellow, plastic water containers. ‘They arrived at the gate one day in one big group and said they feared for their lives. They have been here, living right there under plastic sheets out in the open for the last few months. We don’t know quite what to do with them, but for the moment we are happy for them to camp at our gate.’

  *

  Evelyn Waugh was not overly impressed with Albertville when he passed through here in 1930. He arrived by ferry, spent two nights in the town and then headed west into the Congo proper by train. He wrote a travel book about his journey called Remote People, in which the Congolese section of the trip was described in unflattering terms. The relevant chapter is entitled ‘Second Nightmare’ and in it Waugh grizzles at length about the petty bureaucrats responsible for immigration at the port and the lack of anything for the visitor to do in Albertville, although he is fairly complimentary about the service he enjoyed at the port’s principal hotel. He describes how he took out his portable typewriter and wrote some of the early chapters of the travel book as he was dive-bombed by mosquitoes, before he got into a steaming row with an irksome ferry-boat captain, who marooned him on the Congo River.

  Michel told me it was not possible for me to stay at the UN base, so we went in search of the hotel Waugh described as offering ‘fairly good food’. What we found was a two-storey ruin on the main street with flaking paint and broken windows. A spacious first-floor balcony was supported by a number of elegant, fluted columns, but they were all pock-marked with what appeared to be bullet holes, and when I looked further up the front wall I could see why. The hotel had been converted, years after Waugh passed through, into an officers’ club for the Congolese army, and the name still painted on the front wall, Mess Des Officiers, made it suitable for target practice during any of the town’s subsequent periods of instability.

  ‘Try the Hotel Du Lac along the road,’ a man shouted from the balcony when I asked if I could have a look around. ‘This is a military building now. You cannot come in.’

  A larger three-storey structure, a short distance away, bore the hotel’s name. Its construction in the 1950s came during Albertville’s belle époque, the period when the town was booming, and at the time it must have been an impressive place, the largest hotel for hundreds of kilometres. I stood back on the other side of the road and tried to picture it with cars parked outside, music coming out of the dining room, fans spinning in the rooms to keep down the heat and the mosquitoes. It took quite a leap of imagination. Fifty years after it was built, the hotel had no electricity or water and the rooms were mostly empty shells. Some people sat on chairs on what was once a terrace in front of the hotel, but when I asked about rooms they shook their heads.

  I cursed silently. The American journalist w
ho had tried to follow Stanley’s route in the mid-1960s had passed through Albertville. The civil war was already five years old when he arrived in Albertville, and he described his euphoria at making it safely to the port. After all my own troubles reaching this spot, I recognised the same sense of euphoria in myself, but what I did not recognise was the town he portrayed, with its comfortable, functioning hotel offering hot water in every room.

  I had one other option for accommodation. During my research I had made contact with the International Rescue Committee, an American aid group, which kept an office in Kalemie during the war. I had tried to contact the office manager, Tommy Lee, by email, but he was using a fairly intermittent system that relied on a satellite telex that only worked a few hours each week, so I was not entirely sure if my messages had got through.

  ‘The IRC house is just down the road, but before I take you there, I want to show you something you might find interesting.’ Michel was really getting into his role of Kalemie Tour Guide.

  He drove me back along the main road, past the bicycle taxis and the derelict terrace. The awful road surface meant we only managed a walking pace and Michel was forever greeting people in Swahili, joshing and waving out of the jeep window, before he steered the vehicle up a steep hill, bouncing violently over some exposed tree roots and parked in front of what looked like a pair of giant, brown beetles.

  ‘What on earth are those?’ I asked.

  ‘Go see for yourself,’ answered Michel.

  It was as I got out of the car that I spotted the gun barrels emerging from under the scarab-like metal covers that looked like overturned, oversized woks.

  ‘First World War naval guns,’ said Michel. ‘The Belgians brought them here when Albertville was worth defending. I guess they remind you that once upon a time Europe thought this town worth fighting over.’