by Tim Butcher
I was watching the slowly changing forest when Odimba’s bike suddenly coughed and died on us. There was something horrible and ominous about the sudden silence. Out here in remotest Katanga, silence meant no engine, no bike, no chance of getting out.
Odimba remained unperturbed. Together we heaved the bike to a flat section of track and by the time Benoit had come back to find out what the problem was, Odimba had unpacked an oily rag wrapped around his tool collection. It might not have passed muster in an engineering support vehicle on the Paris–Dakar rally, but his battered pliers and rusty spanners were up to our needs. He undid the fuel line running out of the petrol tank, skilfully placing the empty plastic bottle, which Benoit had been so careful to keep this morning, underneath to catch the sprinkle of petrol as it leaked from the bottom. He handed it to Benoit, who delicately poured the teaspoonful back into the tank. With no chance of any fuel supplies until Kasongo, 400 kilometres away, we could not afford to lose a drop.
Odimba continued to fiddle with the guts of the bike. I heard him say something about the carburettor and the fuel line, but in essence the problem was this: the petrol sellers in Kalemie had given us dirty fuel. At one point Odimba put his lips to a pipe and blew. Chunks of grit flew out the other end. Benoit smiled.
‘The fuel line was blocked. That will have cleared it,’ he said.
As the pair put away their tools I felt a sense of being watched. Turning round, I was shocked to see that we were not alone. A man in rags was watching us, leaning heavily on an old bicycle laden with large plastic containers. He asked if I had any water. I handed over my bottle and he raised his lean face upwards. The sun gleamed on cheeks taut from hunger. He skilfully poured in a mouthful without actually touching the bottle to his lips. He thanked me and prepared to continue on his way, but I asked him where he was heading.
‘I am walking to Kalemie. I am a palm-oil trader. My name is Muke Nguy.’
I was stunned. He still had well over 100 kilometres to walk before reaching Kalemie.
‘I have already walked two hundred kilometres. It has taken me sixteen days.’
I found his words difficult to take in. He was on a 600-kilometre round trip through heavy bush in the equatorial heat, with no food and no water. His bicycle was so heavily laden with palm oil that it had long stopped functioning as a means of personal travel. He could not even get to the seat and, even if he had, I noticed the pedals were missing. His bicycle was a beast of burden, a way to haul goods through the jungle. If the thin, snaking bush tracks were the veins of the Congo’s failed economy, Muke and his heavy burden were just one, solitary blood vessel. He could not afford to bring along food or water when every possible corner of carrying space was used to maximise the load. The only things on the bike I could see that were not tradable were a battered silver bicycle pump, a roll of woven grass matting and a coil of ivy.
‘I drink when the path crosses streams, and at night I eat what I can find in the bush. I have my mat to sleep on, but sometimes the insects are very strong and they eat me at night. If I get sick, I have no medicine.’
He smiled when I asked him what the loop of ivy was for. ‘That is from a rubber tree. If I have a flat, I break the ivy and a glue comes out that will mend the puncture. It is the repair kit of the forest.’ For the first time his gaunt face softened to a smile.
I have always fancied myself as a long-distance athlete. I am large and slow, but at least I have stamina. After that conversation with Muke, I no longer have any illusions about the extent of my stamina. I could not conceive of the strength – physical and mental – needed on a forty- or fifty-day round trip through disease-ridden tropical forest. And it was not as if the rewards were huge.
‘I carry eighty, maybe a hundred litres of oil. Maybe I can make ten or fifteen dollars profit when I get to Kalemie. So I spend my money there on things we do not have at home, like salt or lake-fish. When I get home, I will see my family for the first time in months and sell some of the salt for another ten or fifteen dollars profit.’
All this effort for $30 and a fish supper. I was stunned. Congolese like Muke are out there now, as I write this, sleeping in the bush, swatting insects, kneading blisters on unshod feet, toiling along a Ho Chi Minh trail of survival that shows just how willing many Africans are to work their way out of poverty.
Muke then asked me something.
‘Did you see any soldiers? Any gunmen on the road from Kalemie? Because if they see me they will take what they call “tax”. Maybe a litre of oil, or maybe what is in my pockets, or maybe even more. Sometimes I can lose all of my profit in a second because in the Congo there is no law.’
Muke was only one of many bicycle hauliers that I saw. Some carried canisters of palm oil, a few carried meat – antelope or monkey, sometimes still bloody, but often smoked – and there was even one with thirty or so African grey parrots in home-made cages. The haulier proudly said he was going to make the long and perilous journey from eastern Congo all the way to Zanzibar, more than 1,000 kilometres to the east, where he might get $50 a bird from tourists. It echoed the slave era, when Stanley saw Arab slavers in this region driving chain gangs of prisoners for the same long march to Zanzibar to be sold.
By late afternoon we were making much better progress. Benoit had given up on making Kabambarre by nightfall, but he was confident we could get out of Katanga and deep into Maniema before stopping. His confidence untied the knot in my stomach and for the first time all day I began to feel hungry. Since 4.30 a.m. none of us had eaten anything, although I had been nursing on my precious bottles of filtered water, gulping every so often and sharing with Odimba.
The track continued across flat ground, but the savannah began to blend with greater numbers of high-canopy trees. Stanley noted that while Swahili had just one word for forest, the tribal language of Maniema had four special words – Mohuru, Mwitu, Mtambani and Msitu – for jungle of increasing impenetrability. I had brought a pocket-sized Global Positioning System machine to record my exact route. Every so often I took it out and read the display. It told me were tracking almost due north, but were still a few degrees south of the Equator and the true rainforest.
My backside was beginning to ache and I began to daydream of a comfortable car seat, instead of the sliver of hard plastic I was perched on, bracing my buttocks each and every time Odimba swerved. I thought of Talatala, a raunchy short story published about the Congo in the 1940s by Georges Simenon, the Belgian author and creator of Maigret. Simenon’s contempt for the Congolese colonialists was clear. He satirised the small-minded bureaucrats, who insisted on wearing a stiff collar and tie at remote stations deep in the bush, and the double standards of colonials who slept with their Congolese maids, but expected their European wives to remain faithful. The thing that came back to me as we made our way through the bush was Simenon’s description of road travel. In Talatala an eccentric retired British army officer keeps a racing car at his elephant-training farm in eastern Congo, driving at high speeds down jungle roads. And the other characters all move freely around the place, driving long distances between coffee plantations and border posts and colonial offices. That part of Simenon’s work was entirely plausible half a century ago, but today it would be pure fiction.
When Kalemie’s cotton factory was working, it was supplied with raw cotton from the area I was now entering. Warmer and wetter than the lakeside, this region was perfect for cotton growing. The raw material would be collected by lorry and driven from here to Kalemie. The tracks I travelled along were about as lorry-unfriendly as it is possible to be. During the colonial era, the Belgian administration set up an army of cantonniers or workmen, who were responsible for every kilometre of the colony’s road network. Paid a small monthly retainer, thousands of cantonniers across the country would keep the roads free from the advancing jungle, the culverts clear of debris and the bridges in sound working order. By 1949 the colonial authorities boasted 111,971 kilometres of road across the Congo. By 2004 I d
oubt if there were more than 1,000 kilometres left in the entire country.
The hours dragged. My backside got more and more numb, and adrenalin struggled to contain my hunger. After darkness fell, Benoit started to look for somewhere to spend the night. He turned on his bike’s headlight and I watched it sweep the dark forest, searching for a friendly village. After a couple of false leads, where he announced the village was too big or too spread out, he pronounced himself satisfied with a settlement called Mukumbo. I checked the distance on the bike’s odometer and my GPS. After sixteen hours of travel we had covered just 211 kilometres from Kalemie, and were not yet halfway to Kasongo.
I will never know what Mukumbo looks like because we arrived there after sunset and left before dawn. As I got off the bike and regained my land legs, Benoit said he must show the correct courtesy to the village headman by asking permission to stay. He disappeared into a thicket, following a small child wearing rags who offered to lead the way. With no moon, it took some minutes for my eyes to get used to the dark, but when they did I found that Odimba and I were now surrounded by a crowd of silent children. They led us past a hut and there on the ground I could see the faintest glow of a wood fire. It was arranged in exactly the same way I had seen used by the Bushmen of southern Africa, with four or five long branches radiating out from a small, hot core. Only the tips of the branch actually burned and once the tips had fallen into the fire and turned into embers, the fire appeared to have gone out. But a prod of one of the branches, sliding the tinder-dry unburned tip over the embers, had the effect of turning the knob on a gas stove. Almost instantly flames began to dance and the fire was ready for cooking. After a few words from Odimba, someone slid one of the spokes over the embers and within minutes a pot of water was beginning to simmer.
As the flames grew, light caught the eyes of the children, who were all staring at me with the same cheerless expression of the boy at the skull village. Like most bush children in the Congo, they have learned that outsiders rarely bring anything but trouble.
By the time Benoit returned with the chief, an old man by the name of Luamba Mukumbo, a large pan of sweet tea had been prepared by Odimba. I poured some into my mug and sipped slowly. After a day of gulping tepid water from plastic bottles, it tasted like ambrosia. I could almost feel the sugar leaching into my drained system. The interaction between Benoit and the chief was intriguing. The old man wore rags and had no signs of authority or wealth, but the young outsider was polite and deferential. I heard a few references to muzungu, Swahili for ‘white man’, and a small boy was sent running off into the dark with some whispered instructions from the chief.
‘The chief welcomes us and is sorry, but there is no food to offer,’ Benoit was now acting as translator. ‘He said the mai-mai passed through here a few days ago and they took all the food before they left in the direction of an old gold mine, the Lunga mine, down the track. He said his village is still nervous and all his people have been gathered in for the night, but he said there is a hut you can sleep in. I will go and check everything is okay.’
I returned to the puddle of firelight and began a piecemeal conversation with the chief. He said he thought he was sixty years old, but he could not be sure. I asked him what he remembered about his country’s history.
‘When I was a child I went to school in Kalemie. It was a great honour for one from our village to go to the big town and I was chosen because I was the son of the chief. My family walked with me through the forest to the place not far from here where the bus passed. I will never forget that first bus journey.’ He fell silent for a moment, staring into the fire.
‘I was still at school when independence came in 1960, and in Kalemie I remember almost all the white families fled across the lake because they were scared. I came home and since then I think I have been to Kalemie maybe two times.
‘Our village here, the one you are sitting in, used to have cars come through it every few days. Just a few kilometres away is one of those guest houses the Belgians built. They called them gîtes and they were always open for travellers coming through by car. But all of that went with the fighting.
‘Now when we hear the fighting coming our way, my people and I just flee into the bush. We have learned it is the safest place for us. We know how to survive there. And when we come back, our village is almost always destroyed and we have to build it again.
‘Over the years, things have got worse and worse. We have lost the things we once had. Apart from what we can carry into the bush, we have nothing. I think the last time I saw a vehicle near here was 1985, but I cannot be sure. All these children you see around you now are staring because I have told them about cars and motorbikes that I saw as a child, but they have never seen one before you arrived.’
He carried on talking, but I was still computing what he had just said. The normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.
Benoit returned to lead me to the hut that the chief had had prepared for me. It had walls of dried mud on wattle, a roof of heavy thatch and a door panel made of reeds woven across a wooden frame. Without a hinge, it worked by being heaved across the doorway, which I soon found had been cut for people quite a bit shorter than me. There was nothing modern in the room whatsoever. On the beaten-earth floor stood a bed – a frame of branches, still in their bark, lashed together with some sort of vine. The springs of the bed were made of lengths of split bamboo anchored at only one point halfway along the bed, so that when I put my hand down on them they bent horribly and appeared close to collapse. But the design was ingenious because, when my weight was spread across the entire structure, the bamboo screen supported it easily, giving and moving with the contour of my shoulders and hips. It was a Fred Flintstone orthopaedic bed and I found it amazingly comfortable.
I slipped outside to see Odimba and Benoit heaving the bikes through the small doorway into their hut next door. ‘We don’t want to leave anything outside to say we are here,’ Benoit explained. ‘The sort of people who move around after dark are the sort we don’t want to meet.’
As I walked to the village latrine I stumbled over something soft on the ground. I turned on my torch and there, below me, lying on the earth wrapped in a tattered piece of cotton, was a baby. As the beam of the torch moved I spotted another child, and another, and then another. The soil was still warm from the day’s sun and the mothers had left their children outside to enjoy the last traces of heat.
Back on my reedy bed, I struggled to hang up my mosquito net. Predictably enough, the picture on the bag of the elegant square shape, airily and comfortably arranged over a sleeping figure, was beyond me. After much vain wafting of the delicate cloth and careful spreading around the four corners of the bed, I ended up tightly bundled in it like a shroud. To be honest, I had stopped caring. I was done in and after one last sweep of the room with the head torch, when I spotted a russet antelope skin with white spots, creased up in the corner covered in congealed blood, I fell asleep to the buzz of mosquitoes in my ear and the scrunch of much bigger insects apparently ransacking my rucksack.
My watch said 3 a.m. when I heard Benoit’s voice. ‘Let’s go, our journey is a long one today.’
I escaped from my mosquito-net-cum-sleeping-bag-cum-shroud and shivered. Even though the heat soars during the day in this region, a temperature inversion at night means that the small hours get amazingly cold. Most of the outsiders who have written about travelling here remark on the unexpected chill. Che Guevara described how he needed extra blankets while plotting his attacks in the hills of eastern Congo, and Stanley often referred to the additional clothing he donned at night even though he spent the day bathed in sweat.
I wrapped myself in my fleece, packed my gear and heaved everything outside. Again, Benoit used his eel-taming trick to load the
bikes, and again he and Odimba dressed themselves like combat trawlermen. The noise of the bike engines starting sounded loud enough to wake the gods. I noticed that the babies who had been left outside to sleep had been gathered in. Nothing stirred as we left Mukumbo and rejoined the track.
In the pitch dark there was little for me to look at and so, after a few minutes of bumping and grinding behind Odimba, my mind started to work. We were about 100 kilometres from Kabambarre and needed to travel another 200 kilometres beyond to reach Kasongo. I had planned to be able to refill my water bottles with boiled, clean water overnight, but we had got there too late and left too early. I was sure I could get clean water in Kasongo, so that meant I had to eke out the remaining three bottles of water for 300 kilometres. Okay, I thought, that meant one bottle per 100 kilometres, and I can always ration further myself if things are getting tighter later on.
Those 100 kilometres to Kabambarre felt painfully long. I was by then aching with hunger. The only food I had with me were energy sweets, given to me as a bit of a joke by an old running partner in Johannesburg. ‘In case of emergencies,’ he said when handing them over. He will never know how important they turned out to be. To keep my luggage down I had gambled that the villages we passed through would provide food, but I had not taken the pillaging habits of the mai-mai into consideration. The sweets were the only things I had to eat. I devoured them greedily, but they were still not enough.
Maybe it was my empty stomach that got to me. Or maybe it was because the first few hours were in complete darkness and I had nothing to focus my mind on. Either way, I felt increasingly irritated and ratty. The river stops felt more irksome. I burned my hand badly on the exhaust as we dragged the bikes over one of the stream beds. Then we started to reach some hilly sections too steep for the heavily laden bikes to cope with, so I kept having to jump off the bike and heave myself and various pieces of luggage to the top of the slope. And then an overhanging branch caught me on the forehead, drawing blood and leaving a painful sore. As I got weaker, Benoit and Odimba carried on as if this was quite normal. They had drunk and eaten just as little as I, but they coped much better.