Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

  We had been going for two hours before the sun finally rose. Where the track opened out into less overgrown sections, I watched the long shadow of the bike, Odimba and me dancing across the red earth. The heat began to grow, so I shed my fleece, but not the feeling of torpor.

  I knew what the problem was – dehydration. The bottles I had drunk the day before were simply not enough, and I had not had a drop of water overnight, leaving me with a whopping headache and a pain behind my eyes. In this failing mental half-light, Kabambarre had become the focus of all my faculties. I clung on to the bike, looking over Odimba’s shoulder counting down on the odometer the 100 kilometres until we reached the old mining town. As I stared, the track seemed to get ever more difficult, the rotation of the meter numbers slowing as if in glue.

  The sudden appearance of Kabambarre took me by surprise. I got no sense that I was approaching a place of human habitation until we actually reached it. It was the same with all the other settlements in the eastern Congo: the bush was just as thick, the track just as frail, yet all of a sudden you turn a corner and there is a place where large numbers of people live. In Kabambarre the population is measured in thousands, but still there was nothing to indicate we were approaching a town until, at the top of a particularly steep valley up which I had plodded behind the two bikes, Benoit pointed to something next to a tree. It was an old road sign, indicating the way we had just come and describing it as the National Highway. I could not even manage a wry smile. The sign was rotten and lopsided, much like the entire town.

  Kabambarre was a major crossroads of nineteenth-century exploration. David Livingstone stayed here for months in early 1871, recovering from a fever caught on the upper Congo River. He was the first white man to discover its headwaters, although the achievement was slightly diminished because he got his rivers muddled up. He thought he was looking at a tributary of the upper Nile and did not make the connection with the Congo River that the Portuguese had discovered 400 years earlier, flowing into the Atlantic 1,000 or so kilometres to the west. Livingstone failed to persuade the locals to let him descend the river, so he began trekking eastwards, towards Lake Tanganyika, before collapsing from illness here in Kabambarre.

  The Scotsman had been left frail and weak after twenty years of tramping across southern and central Africa, but it was not just the fever that troubled him in Kabambarre. His soul was wounded by what he had seen of the Arab slaving methods. He watched them descend mercilessly on Congolese villages, shooting anyone who put up resistance, pillaging anything that could be carried and pinning able-bodied Africans together with vast wooden collars for the slow, often fatal, route march all the way to the Indian Ocean and the slave markets of Zanzibar. It was around Kabambarre that Livingstone’s loathing of slavery hardened into his life’s work and led to this plea against slavery inscribed on his tomb in London’s Westminster Abbey:

  *

  All I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven’s rich blessing come down on every one, American, English or Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world.

  When Cameron passed through here in 1874 he met village elders who spoke warmly of the Scottish explorer. I doubt if they said the same of Cameron. In his writings he shows little of the humanity that was Livingstone’s hallmark. The two appeared to belong to totally different exploring worlds. While Livingstone travelled armed only with his Bible, Cameron insisted on more elaborate luxuries:

  And it was also needful for me to keep in rear of the caravan in order to prevent my men from straggling. With all my care they often eluded me and lay hidden in the jungle till I had passed in order to indulge in skulking. The men carrying my tent and bath were especially prone to this habit although their loads were light, and I frequently waited long after camp was reached for these necessary appliances to come to the front.

  When Cameron reached Kabambarre, he was, like Livingstone and me, feeling terrible. He was exhausted by the sudden gain in altitude and the endless series of ridges and dips that had to be negotiated. And when he arrived, the villagers of Maniema did not let him down, providing him with an image that fits snugly into the Victorian era’s patronising view of Africa. He was serenaded by village minstrels on the delights of eating human flesh:

  I was entertained with a song setting forth the delights of cannibalism, in which the flesh of the men was said to be good but that of women was bad and only eaten in time of scarcity; nevertheless, it was not to be despised when man meat was unobtainable.

  When Stanley passed through Kabambarre, he too met locals who spoke highly of the ‘old white man’, Livingstone. This was the tribute to Livingstone from the village chief recorded by Stanley:

  He was good to me, and he saved me from Arabs many a time. The Arabs are hard men, and often he would step between them and me when they were hard on me. He was a good man, and my children were fond of him.

  The Kabambarre I discovered was an eerie place. For 300 kilometres since Kalemie I had seen nothing but grass-roofed mud huts, but here, at last, were some traces of a more modern world – buildings of cement and brick. But even more so than in Kalemie, they were in ruins. All of the sharp edges associated with modern towns had been eaten away by corrosion or smudged by layers of vegetation. The entire roofline of a terrace of buildings was askew, with tiles dislodged by thigh-thick ivy and gaping holes caused by collapsed beams. In front of the terrace I could just make out the trace of an old road junction, around a triangle on which had once stood a memorial to Belgian colonialists. The bronze plaque had been ripped off the concrete plinth and the roads had been reduced to footpaths meandering through thick undergrowth.

  At least in Kalemie there was the UN presence and the occasional vehicle to keep the main roads open. Here in Kabambarre there were pedestrians and a few bicycles that had made it here only after being pushed through the bush for hundreds of kilometres.

  My 1951 travel guide to the Congo records Kabambarre as one of the oldest Belgian settlements from the ‘heroic period’, meaning it was one of the places secured by Belgian gunmen in their war for supremacy against Arab slavers in the 1890s. They built a fortified storehouse and, while my travel book has a photograph of the old stockade, I saw no trace of it. Benoit was not interested in looking. He was much more focused on retrieving a plastic jerrycan of petrol that he had had the foresight to leave here on his trip to Kalemie and on getting back on the road. He drove straight into the overgrown garden of an old house and parked under a large mango tree. Odimba followed, but when I got off the bike I struggled to find my land legs. I lurched up against the tree’s trunk, panted loudly and began to lose all peripheral vision.

  Benoit could see something was wrong. Behind me I heard scurrying as he barked orders at someone.

  ‘Bring a chair, bring a chair.’

  Slowly I turned round and, instead of just Benoit and Odimba, there was now a forty-strong crowd of villagers who must have come running after hearing the sound of our bike engines. I was too weak to have heard them approach. From within the group a wooden chair – home-made with a woven grass seat – appeared not a moment too soon. I collapsed into it. Benoit did not stop. I watched him retrieve the jerrycan, fill both fuel tanks, rearrange the luggage and check over an engine problem spotted by Odimba. It was all a blur and I don’t remember very much about Kabambarre, apart from stuffing myself on bananas that appeared out of the crowd, and the moment when the villagers insisted we take a photograph. The result is one of my most haunting images from the Congo, showing me crumpled and empty-eyed from dehydration, surrounded by a mass of earnest, unsmiling faces. Strip away my modern watch and the threadbare Chelsea soccer top worn by the man sitting on the arm of my chair, and the image could be straight out of the nineteenth century – the white man, offered the best seat in the house, surrounded by curious but watchful natives.

  Time and again during my journey with Benoit and Odimba, I was struck by just how much tougher and more resilient than me they were. Travelling so c
lose together, I had watched how rarely they drank and ate, but somehow they had a strength and stamina that were lacking in me. It gave me an enormous respect for them. I was lucky to have them on my side.

  There was little time to talk or take notes. Benoit knew we still had 200 kilometres to go to Kasongo and we had spent almost half the day reaching Kabambarre. He was fretting to leave, but I did take down the name of one English speaker, a man who described himself as an English teacher, Kabinga Sabiti, and a few notes.

  ‘Thank you for coming. Since the war came we have not seen many outsiders. The UN came here once, but only by helicopter and they touched down and left in just a few minutes. Please help us find peace.’

  His plea was almost lost in the sound of Benoit gunning his engine. There was nothing I could do to help Kabinga. I felt ashamed.

  We mounted up and sped through town. I could see Kabambarre had been a big settlement, built on top of a plateau with views over tree-covered countryside. A line of single-storey buildings faced onto what must have been a common back in the Belgian era, but the open ground was now badly overgrown. There were no market traders or hawkers. The only people I saw were standing around the ruins of the buildings staring at us. In the tropics concrete can actually rot. It goes black and begins to flake. I have seen it in a number of places, but here in Kabambarre on the façade of one of the blackest, darkest, most manky-looking ruins I could just make out the outline of some words painted in metre-high letters: Post Office.

  The next 200-kilometre-long stretch was grim. It began well enough with a relatively fast track out of Kabambarre along a well-forested ridge. This was the main access road into the town and I spotted a group of soldiers guarding the entrance to the town. They were gathered around a cooking fire in the ruins of a building, but Benoit repeated his old trick of speeding up, and though the soldiers jumped up, grabbed their weapons and shouted after us, we had already slipped by.

  The track then became strikingly beautiful. It was following what had clearly once been a carriageway wide enough for cars, lined on both sides by high banks. Huge trees grew on these raised earthworks and their canopies spread and met, creating a shady, green tunnel effect. Some of the trees were giant palms with huge, elegant fronds, plaited by the breeze into a natural roof of thatch.

  Our next landmark was the Luama River. All the nineteenth-century explorers referred to wading and paddling across the Luama, one of the Congo’s larger tributaries, although Benoit assured me that an old Belgian road bridge was still standing and we had no need to look for canoes. Again, the bridge did not announce itself in any way. After several hours of bouncing down an earthy track, through villages identical to those we had seen in Katanga with not a single trace of modernity, we emerged from a thicket onto a huge, iron girder bridge, spanning the brown waters of the Luama.

  Benoit shouted to take care as he picked his way past holes in the planking on the bridge, but I wanted to stop and walk around. The girders were brown with rust but, to my layman’s eye, they seemed sound and functional. The bridge stood ten metres above the water, so was clear of the threat of being washed away by floodwaters. But what struck me was the folly it represented. A solid bridge capable of carrying heavy trucks and traffic had been designed, built, brought here and eventually assembled on the assumption that heavy trucks and traffic would be able to reach it. Since the Belgians left the Congo, that assumption had collapsed, so there the bridge stands, a memorial deep in the jungle to the folly of planners who never dreamed that the Congo would spiral backwards as much as it has.

  The rest of that day was pure purgatory. My backside had stopped being numb and had moved into a painful phase, each buttock screaming to be relieved of the pressure of being squashed against the plastic of Odimba’s motorbike seat. I learned to lean on one side and then the other to alleviate the pressure, but it was agony.

  Much worse was my thirst. With only two bottles of drinking water left, I rationed myself to a gulp every fifteen minutes, so, instead of watching the landscape, I started to examine my watch, urging the hands to sweep round to the quarter-hour so that I could take the next gulp. I thought of one of the nastier episodes of the early Belgian colonial period that took place around here. The Belgians may like to refer to the early years of their Congolese colony as the ‘heroic period’, but there was not much heroism in the way they treated Gustav Maria Rabinek, an Austrian adventurer who set himself up as an African explorer and trader in these eastern forests of the new colony towards the end of the 1890s.

  The early years of the Congo’s colonisation were all about control. Leopold’s agents fought the Arabs of eastern Congo for control in the mid-1890s. After they defeated the Arabs, they turned their attention to monopolising all trade emanating from the territory, setting up agencies and companies claiming exclusive rights on all merchandise. Rabinek bought all the necessary licences needed to trade in eastern Congo, but the Belgian authorities took against him. He was arrested early in 1901 on trumped-up charges alleging smuggling and was sentenced by a military tribunal in Kalemie to a year in jail. When Rabinek demanded the right to appeal, he was told his appeal would indeed be heard, but that the only court senior enough to deal with the case was in Boma, the trading post at the mouth of the Congo River, then the capital of Leopold’s colony. The problem for Rabinek was that Boma lies 3,000 kilometres west of Kalemie and he was told that he would have to walk all the way.

  It must have been around June 1901 when Rabinek passed through the area where I now found myself. The Scottish skipper of a steamer on Lake Tanganyika had described the parlous state of the prisoner when he set out from Kalemie. By the time he got here he was close to death. He made it to the Congo River, but died on board a steamer heading downstream on 1 September 1901. The Belgians had walked him to death.

  Images of Rabinek staggering through the jungle, starving, riddled with disease as he slogged his way to the Congo River, filled my muddled mind as the journey went on. My trip from Kalemie had started out exciting and become exhausting, but now it was a mess. If we ran into trouble, I no longer had the wits to deal with anything. By the time darkness came I was slumped half-asleep against Odimba’s back. Every so often, I would lean over and stare at the odometer trying to count down the kilometres until Kasongo. There were times when, as I stared at the little numbers on the meter, my mind played tricks, convincing myself they were going backwards.

  Night fell. We had been on the go since before dawn, but our journey was not over. The darkness was complete apart from the headlights of our two bikes. Every so often I saw huts on either side of the track and knew we were passing through villages, but the only light I saw was the occasional glow of a cooking fire.

  I had lost all sense of time when I suddenly spotted a much brighter light up ahead. We were still moving, and it kept disappearing and reappearing between trees and bushes. Finally, I convinced myself it was something other than a cooking flame. It was an electric light, the first for 535 kilometres. We had reached Kasongo and the modest house maintained by Benoit’s aid-worker colleagues from Care International. I remember little about the arrival, apart from the vast jug of filtered water that I gulped down and the smell of the previous night’s hut on my mosquito net, in which I wrapped myself before collapsing.

  6.

  The Jungle Books

  European explorer crossing eastern Congo, circa 1913

  Author crossing eastern Congo, August 2004

  THE SOUND OF singing woke me on my first morning in Kasongo. There was not a breath of wind, but the toffee-thick drone of the male voices seemed to stir the tropical air as I slowly came round. Dawn had broken and I could see my surroundings fully for the first time. I was in a room of a cement and brick building, maybe fifty years old, lying on a sagging mattress surrounded by old bits of clothing and luggage. The room was modern enough to have a window complete with glass pane, and a door, although this was kept shut by a bent nail. A patina of dust and grime covered everythin
g. It was a replica of the room where I stayed in Kalemie, a staging post for itinerant aid workers.

  Walking out onto the front porch I found Tom Nyamwaya, the head of the Care International operation in Kasongo, sitting on a home-made wooden chair. The success of my trip so far was entirely down to Tom and his willingness to risk two of his staff and two motorbikes. I started to thank him, but he silenced me with his hand and I could see he was straining to listen to the singing. He only spoke after the voices finally fell silent.

  ‘Those voices you hear are the voices of soldiers. I don’t like it when they start singing. The last time they did that was in June after the Bukavu crisis. I have sent someone to try to find out what is going on.’ Tom’s English was clear with a heavy accent from east Africa. He was Kenyan, employed by Care International to run this outpost deep in francophone Africa, and he was clearly happy to have someone to speak to in English.

  ‘It’s a problem when I have to speak French. I only just started lessons and I am not finding it that easy.’

  Over breakfast I explained more about my trip. Tom and I had only had a brief email exchange and he seemed interested to learn he was living in a place that once played a central part in the colonial history of the region. But what he wanted to know, more than anything else, was how I had managed to dodge the mai-mai.

  ‘We were lucky,’ I said stuffing my mouth with a hunk of sticky, browning banana. ‘The only ones we saw were friendly enough and we somehow avoided all the others.’