by Tim Butcher
It took some time to track down the town’s last white, Belgian resident. Michel had lived there for two years, but he had only ever heard mention of the mysterious woman, who kept herself to herself, living in an old villa on the hill behind the main church.
Geneviève Nagant’s house was tucked some way off the main road. It took some finding, and I had to clamber through rough bush before I finally found the front door and knocked. From inside, I could hear various locks being undone before it was opened by the smiling seventy-seven-year-old. The door opened into a hall and ground-floor room that were musty and full of books. The humidity had caused most to swell and lose their bindings. Many had been rewrapped in unmarked, brown-paper wrappers. It looked like the study of an eccentric Oxford don, an image Mlle Nagant reinforced as she fussed about, apologising for the mess, thrusting books and pamphlets at me, before shooing me upstairs to a much fresher, first-floor living room, which opened out onto a balcony.
On entering the room, something immediately caught my eye. On the wall there were two pictures. They were crayon drawings of tribal figures, paddling a canoe against a backdrop of thatched huts and bush. It was a hot afternoon, but the pictures gave me goosebumps. They were exactly the same as the ones my mother bought when she passed through this town in 1958.
‘Do you like these pictures?’ Mlle Nagant had noticed my reaction.
‘They remind me of my home in England. My mother bought some pictures just like these when she travelled through the Congo before I was born. Seeing them makes me think of the stories she told about her journey.’
Mlle Nagant smiled and for a moment we looked at the pictures together. ‘In the late 1950s, Albertville was the best it ever got. The trains would arrive at the station and the passengers could connect with the liners. I remember you could hear the whistles of the ships as they left the port, and sometimes you could even hear the band playing on the top deck in first class.’
We went to sit outside on her balcony. The house stood on the headland near the church and from up there I got a fine view of the lake. The sky was clear and the bright sun made the water sparkle for the first time during my visit to Kalemie. At last I could see why the Belgians knew it as the ‘Pearl of Tanganyika’.
‘I was born near Liège, but arrived here in 1951. I was in my twenties and my job was as a teacher of social science. My duties were to teach Congolese ladies who came from villages about life in towns such as this one. We had classes in water hygiene, cooking, baby care and that sort of thing. People remember the Belgian colonial rule as a time for cruelty, but towards the end progress was being made across all of society. I used to live with a nurse who worked on a health programme that was successful in ending leprosy in the area and much of the malaria. Can you imagine that? Today, leprosy and malaria are killing thousands of people all over the Congo.’
In 1960, within days of independence being granted to the Congo, the first violence broke out. In Albertville, almost the entire Belgian community left within a matter of weeks. Why had Mlle Nagant stayed?
Her elegant reply revealed that she was a rare breed of Belgian colonial, one who genuinely cared for the local Congolese people. ‘Because when you plant a seed you must tend it before it will blossom.’
Since independence, she had lived through four decades of chaos. Her tiny Belgian civil-service pension used to be sent here through the post office, but when the postal service collapsed in the 1970s she began relying on the kindness of Belgian missionaries, who would courier the small amount of money back when returning from leave.
And how does the situation today compare with what Mlle Nagant has witnessed since 1951?
‘I am sorry to say that today is worse than ever before. I have got used to the lack of water. I have got used to the lack of power. I have got used to the lack of supplies in town. But the thing that makes today so bad is the lack of the rule of law. There was a time when at least there were some police who could keep some sort of order, or even soldiers you could go to, but today there is nothing. Everything is upside down. Today, a driver for the UN here is paid ten times more than the provincial governor from the government. How can you run a government in circumstances like that? As I said, everything is upside down.’
She went inside and emerged a few moments later with a clinking tray. On it was a recycled wine bottle and two glasses. We watched as the blue of the lake steadily darkened with the dipping of the sun, and she toasted my health with her home-made white wine.
I asked her how she filled her days and she explained that she was writing an anthropological thesis on the early Congolese tribes discovered by the first Albertville residents in the last years of the nineteenth century. She was particularly interested in a local man, Stephano Kaoze, a priest who became the first black abbot of the Congo. It had become her life’s work to record the thoughts and writings of Abbot Kaoze.
When I told her about my plan to travel overland to the river, she thought for a moment and went to get something from the chaos of her study downstairs.
‘Here it is – this is one of the sayings of Abbot Kaoze, which might be of value to you.’
I took the flimsy notebook she offered me and read what she was pointing at. In the late 1890s Abbot Kaoze had this to say about travel. ‘When going on a journey it is not just the strength of a man’s legs, but the provisions he prepares for the trip.’
I walked back through the derelict ruin of Kalemie thinking about my own provisions and preparations. My mind was working as I tried to decide what I should do in the aftermath of the killings in Burundi and the resulting threat by the pro-Rwandan rebel group to rip up the peace treaty.
If the war restarted, there was no way I would take the risk of trying to cross the Congo. Michel said the UN alert state had already been raised as a result of the killing, but the UN was waiting to see the next move by the various rebel groups before it began the subsequent stage of its security plan – withdrawing all civilian staff, like Michel, from the Congo.
I had until 5 a.m. the following day to make up my mind. Benoit and Odimba had been away from their Care International base for more than a week and, with the security situation deteriorating, they were anxious to get themselves and their precious motorbikes back to base as soon as possible. They told me they would be leaving at 5 a.m., with or without me.
The sun had set and the town was deathly quiet as I walked down the hill past the empty plinth, where a statue of the Belgian king, Albert I, had once stood before an angry crowd had ripped it down in the aftermath of independence. I continued past the silent railway station, where my mother had arrived in the 1950s, and the ruins of the hotel, where Evelyn Waugh stayed in the 1930s.
It had taken me four years of research and patience to get to this point. If I did not take my chance tomorrow, there was a risk it would be years before the next opportunity would come round.
5.
Walked to Death
Hairstyles from eastern Congo as recorded, above, by H.M. Stanley in 1878 and, below, by the author in 2004
AS I EMERGED from the house on the morning we were to leave Kalemie, Benoit appeared to be wrestling with eels. It was still dark, and with my head torch all I could make out was his shape, leaning over the back of one of the motorbikes, struggling with various long, black things with a springy and clearly disobedient life of their own. The eel image was reinforced by Benoit’s outfit. He was wearing a bright-yellow plastic raincoat, with heavy gloves, kneepads, goggles and black, shiny wellington boots. He looked like a ninja North Sea trawlerman.
‘Can I help?’ I asked without much conviction.
He ignored me and, in between the grunts and curses, I worked out what was going on. He was using old bicycle inner tubes as luggage straps to attach my kit to the back of his motorbike. Knowing the balance of his bike and how it depended on the loading, he insisted on doing it by himself. Eventually, after much stretching, snapping, knotting and restretching, he stood back, let out a si
gh and pronounced himself satisfied everything was secure. To me, it looked anything but. The 100cc motorbike was now sitting heavily on its rear wheel, with my rucksack, a jerrycan and various other pieces of gear bulkily taking up most of the rider’s seat. Above the handlebars was another hulking arrangement of fuel bottles, water canisters and other bundles, trapped in its own web of straining inner tubes. And on top of it all, Benoit was wriggling into two rucksacks – one on his back, the other slung in reverse across his chest.
He could see I was sceptical. ‘It’s okay; these bikes are amazingly strong.’
I found him reassuring. The same cannot be said for Fiston. My ‘local hire’ motorbike-man had turned up stinking of booze, swaying extravagantly and mumbling something about needing more petrol. The day before I had impressed upon him the importance of having a full tank when we set out, and had paid him part of his fee in advance so that he could make sure it was full. In retrospect, this was a stupid thing to have done. He had clearly spent the cash on getting wasted. I grimaced, but, yet again, Benoit was the one who dealt with the problem.
‘I thought this might happen,’ he said. ‘Last night I bought another few litres of petrol for emergencies.’
In a town like Kalemie where there are no petrol stations, fuel is sold on an ad hoc basis. It is of dodgy provenance, having been smuggled here by boat from Tanzania, and of even dodgier quality, ‘watered down’ with palm oil or any other suitable solvent. It is sold in old bottles, jars or cans and nobody cares too much about making sure they are clean. By torchlight I watched Benoit filling Fiston’s tank from a plastic bottle. Instead of throwing it away, once he finished pouring he carefully crushed it flat, screwed the top back on and tucked it under one of his tame eels.
‘Never know when you might need that,’ he said quietly.
A frantic footfall announced the arrival of Georges. He barged through the gate, panting an apology for being late. As he caught his breath, there was a brief conflab about who would ride where. Benoit would ride alone with his unfeasibly large luggage load; Odimba, Benoit’s colleague from Care International, also dressed like a ninja trawlerman, would follow with Georges as a passenger; and I would sit behind the sozzled Fiston and pray for him to sober up.
The engines of the three bikes stirred into life. It would be an exaggeration to say they roared. But in silent Kalemie even these puny machines sounded pretty impressive and we made quite a din as we swept out of town. In eastern Congo, a land of pedestrians and bicycles, the 100cc motorbike is king.
In our headlights I could see we were approaching the iron bridge across the Lukuga River on the northern edge of town. A Royal Navy officer, Commander Verney Lovett Cameron, had been the first European to explore the river. Cameron was one of the great ‘what if’ figures of African exploration, an adventurer of no less ambition than Stanley, but who somehow never quite staked his own place in the public’s imagination. He never came up with a soundbite as memorable as ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Cameron actually beat Stanley to this spot by two years. He, too, had heard tales from the Arab slavers about an immense river somewhere out there to the west. And he, too, was willing to trek through the bush for week after week to check if it were true.
But, unlike Stanley, he failed to make the river descent. Once he reached the upper Congo River he tried to persuade local villagers to take him downriver in their canoes, but they refused. He spent several weeks camped on the swampy river banks becoming more and more frustrated with the intransigence of the river tribes, and more and more sick from malaria. Eventually he abandoned the plan to follow the river, setting off overland due west instead, ending up on the coast of what is now Angola. Cameron’s journey was an amazing achievement, one of the earliest and most significant trans-African treks, but his failure to solve the riddle of the river has seen history pass him by. What if Cameron had descended the Congo River? What if Cameron, more of a British establishment figure than his parvenu rival (Cameron dedicated his book, Across Africa, to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, while Stanley dedicated his to the newspapermen who commissioned him), had returned to London having charted a navigable river reaching across Africa and had successfully persuaded Britain to stake the land as a colony? How different would African history be, had a British Congo, not a Belgian Congo, dominated the centre of the continent?
Not so different, is my conclusion. I have met British colonial types in Africa who scorn what Belgium did in the Congo and try to draw a distinction between the colonial system imposed by Brussels and that imposed by London. So much crueller than any British colony, they say, so much more brutal towards the local Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa, from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and elsewhere, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the pro-independence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder, torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside world’s tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee stability and an end to civil strife.
Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it, but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent’s colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but colonialism in its purest, basest form.
I thought of Cameron as our bikes clattered over the loose planks on the river bridge, because his first attempt to reach the Congo River had begun right beneath us, on the Lukuga. It is the only river that drains Lake Tanganyika and the young naval officer was convinced he could descend it by boat, all the way to its confluence with the much bigger, then-unknown river somewhere out there to the west of Lake Tanganyika. What he had not understood is that the Lukuga is impassable by boat because of the odd geographical feature that it only moves when the lake level rises during the rainy season. Cameron managed to get his small boat just a short distance down the Lukuga before he hit an immense and impenetrable barrier of silt and reed beds. He struggled for days, trying to hack his way through. He described how his heart sank as the channels he cut were immediately filled by matter floating up from below. It must have been wretched work – sweaty, insect-plagued and, ultimately, doomed.
Within minutes of crossing the bridge we left behind the sticky atmosphere that tormented Cameron. The air began to cool nicely as we followed a track climbing up and away from the lakeside still. Nightjars roosted on the path. I would pick them up in our headlights and watch as they sat frozen to the spot, exploding at the last second from underneath the lead motorbike, peeling up and away into the darkness. Although Kalemie had appeared asleep as we left, for the first few kilometres I kept spotting ghostly figures on the roadside. They were women, with baskets and tools perched on their heads, making their way out to the bush to tend plots of cassava and other crops. From a distance I would make out their dark shapes against the lightening sky and then, for an instant, they would be caught in the headlights, the colours of their cotton wraps bright and their wide eyes frozen in surprise.
I love starting a journey very early in the day. It offers the comforting sense that if something goes wrong, there is still the whole day to sort it out. As we left Kalemie before dawn that August morning, I felt a strong sense of well-being. The track was overhung with dew-drenched branches and twigs, and within a few minutes my wet clothes showed why
Benoit and Odimba were wearing waterproofs. But the fact that I was soaked did not dim my spirits. After all the planning and worry, I was finally on the track of Stanley in the Congo, picking my way from Lake Tanganyika across ridges and through valleys that he had traversed in 1876. I can remember feeling excitement. And I can remember just how the euphoria began to ebb a few kilometres down the track when we had our first flat tyre.
I was bouncing happily along the track, tucked up behind Fiston. The fresh air had sobered him up and although the track was appalling, he was riding well, anticipating the divots, holes and obstacles, slowing down with his gears and using just the right amount of power to manoeuvre round them. For the first hour or so everything seemed perfect. August was the last month of the dry season and the rising sun had quickly dried the dew from my clothes. In spite of the track, we were skipping along at a healthy speed, peaking sometimes as high as 30 kph. But all of a sudden I saw Odimba, the rider ahead of us, slowing, peering down at his rear wheel and stopping.
The tiny form of Georges slipped off the back of Odimba’s bike. Within a few minutes Odimba had undone the wheel, slipped off the tyre and begun searching for the leak in the inner tube. It reminded me of repairing punctures on my bicycle as a child.
Dawn had now broken and the low sun lit the feathery heads of the long grass on either side of the track. Without the sound of the bike engines, it was a scene of still beauty. We were within a few degrees of the Equator, but the early morning temperature was comfortable and the bush was still relatively open savannah, not the dark, claustrophobic hothouse of true rainforest. With good rivers, heavy dew and rich soil, no wonder the early Belgian colonialists here believed they had found an Eden.
Behind me I heard murmuring. I turned to see Odimba hand Benoit something. It was a rusty, bent nail about three centimetres long. Since we had left Kalemie an hour back we had seen nothing modern or man-made and yet we had managed to find an old nail.