Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

  Tom shook his head.

  ‘Well, you must be as crazy as Stanley. God knows what they would have done to you if they caught you. What makes you do this sort of thing? I would not travel anywhere in this country except by plane. You would have to be mad to go out there into the bush. This place is like nowhere else I have ever worked. You never know when trouble is going to start. At the time of the Bukavu crisis, we were under pressure from our head office to evacuate. I was in two minds, because we are the only aid group in Kasongo. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on us – and only us. So when we went to the airstrip, the guys who call themselves the authorities and police, the same ones we have been working with for months, turned on us. One of my staff was pistol-whipped. We were all threatened. It blew up in a second and all of a sudden things were out of control.’

  I was curious. ‘How do you feel about living out here? There are no UN peacekeepers here, no other aid groups. You are as exposed as the first Belgians slaughtered here in the 1890s.’

  ‘Well, it’s not the best feeling. The uncertainty. The instability. The volatility. I don’t think I can stand more than a few months and I will leave as soon as I can. There are some jobs like this in the aid world, which you have to do to get on. It’s just the way it is.’

  He explained more about the conditions he lived in. His was the only home in the old ‘white’ suburb of Kasongo that was still inhabited, and this was because his aid-group employer was able to maintain supplies using aircraft. But the air bridge was fragile, with irregular flights made haphazard by tropical weather conditions and non-existent facilities at Kasongo’s airstrip. Across that rickety bridge came everything for his work and home life: food, fuel, communications equipment and work supplies. Everything had to be flown in.

  I wanted to know how I could reach Kindu, the port on the upper reach of the Congo river, 200 kilometres further north.

  ‘You look tired and ill, so maybe you should rest for a while here. The journey to Kindu is a tough track, which takes a few days by motorbike. Two of our bikes are due to head that way some time next week, but first you must drink more water. You look terrible.’

  It was only three days since I had left Kalemie, but already I was feeling groggy and feverish. I began to worry. I still had thousands of kilometres ahead of me. Maybe I was not strong enough to cope physically with a Congo crossing. My anti-malaria pills did not help. They made me feel even more nauseous after I took them each morning.

  But after a day of rest in Tom’s house, I began to feel stronger and convince myself the sickness was down to my stupid miscalculation over water. I had made a huge mistake assuming we would have time to boil water as we travelled through Katanga and had not anticipated the urgent need to move as quickly as possible. Next time I would prepare adequate water supplies before I set out. I would not make the same mistake again.

  The town of Kasongo is an Atlantis of central Africa, a once major city now swamped by the advancing jungle. The scale of its decay was breathtaking, but what made it so intriguing for me was how it reeked of the worst excesses of Belgium’s involvement with the Congo.

  Kasongo was the epicentre for the 1892 war between Belgium and Arab slavers. The Arabs had developed it into the capital of their slave state. It was near here that Livingstone witnessed the raids that made him such an ardent opponent of slavery. In Kasongo the Arabs built slave markets where tribesmen, caught by raiding parties, were traded; prisons where slaves had their necks wedged into timber yokes, so heavy and cumbersome they made escape impossible; storehouses where elephant tusks and other booty pillaged from the local villages were collected before being hauled back to Zanzibar by chain-gangs of slaves. These early Arab invaders of the Congo were not bootleggers looking for a quick profit. They took the long view, happily staying ‘up country’ for years, taking native girls as wives, merging and mixing bloodlines to create a complex social structure of Arabic overlords, Arabic-African mulatto foremen and African vassals.

  The most notorious of them all was Tippu-Tip, a bear of a man described by Stanley as ‘tall, black-bearded, of negroid complexion, in the prime of life, straight and quick in his movements, a picture of energy and strength’. Tippu-Tip moved his base a great deal, but he lived in Kasongo for many years. It was his son, Sefu, who was involved in the incident that gave the town its notoriety.

  What the Indian Mutiny was to Britain, the 1892 Kasongo incident was to Belgium, a moment of anti-foreigner brutality used to justify decades of colonial control. It took place during the war between Leopold’s colonial agents and the Arabs. Ever since Stanley came back to the Congo in the early 1880s to set up Leopold’s colony, Belgian officers and agents had spread across the Congo River basin staking the land exclusively for the Belgian monarch. The size and importance of Kasongo made it an obvious target, so two Belgian soldiers, Lieutenant Lippens and Sergeant de Bruyne, arrived here as early ambassadors to Sefu in the early 1890s. By the time they reached Kasongo they were riddled with fever and exhausted, but the Arabs began by looking after them well, offering them a comfortable villa next to Sefu’s.

  But when the first skirmishes of the Belgian-Arab war broke out, the position of the two men became precarious. There is some dispute about whether Sefu was directly involved in what happened next. What is without dispute is that both men were murdered by a mob. One version has it that de Bruyne was dragged from his writing desk by the killers. Both were disembowelled and had their hands and feet cut off and sent to a nearby Arab leader as proof of their murder.

  The Belgian response was ruthless. After coercing as allies one of central Congo’s fiercest tribes, the Batetele, who enjoyed a bloody and entirely justified reputation for cannibalism, a Belgian-led expeditionary force descended on Kasongo. With modern European weapons they routed the Arabs, storming the city on 22 April 1893, plundering the villas abandoned by the Arabs and allowing the Batetele to indulge in some gruesome revictualling.

  Kasongo’s association with blood did not end there. It was in remote centres like Kasongo that early Belgian colonialists committed unspeakable cruelty at the end of the nineteenth century on behalf of Leopold. When he persuaded the European powers at the Berlin Conference to recognise his claim to the Congo Free State, he presented it as an exercise in using free trade to bring civilisation to backward African tribes. This was a sham. From the very beginning, the Congo Free State was an exercise not in trade, but in plunder. It began with ivory in the 1880s, then the most valuable commodity found in the Congo, but moved on to rubber in the 1890s as demand for tyres surged with the mass production of cars. One of Congo’s many natural resources is a thick, fast-growing ivy that occurs naturally in the rainforest and produces a sap from which top-quality rubber can be produced.

  Belgian colonial officers in backwaters like Kasongo were told to do whatever it took to maintain the flow of ivory and rubber. They did not pay for what they took, devising ever more violent ways to acquire it. Playing tribe off against tribe, they gave guns to some of the people and unleashed them on their neighbours, uninterested in what methods were used to bring in the ivory and rubber. Pour encourager les autres, whole villages would be slaughtered, women raped and children taken as slaves. The Belgians developed their own particular way of spreading fear among tribesmen by ordering their henchmen to cut off the hands of their victims, spreading terror across a wide area and ensuring obedience. This did not just happen once or twice. It became such common practice that early human-rights campaigners travelled all the way to the Congolese jungle to gather evidence of these atrocities. A black-and-white photograph taken by one such campaigner around the end of the nineteenth century shows Congolese tribesmen staring impassively at the camera. Only at second glance do you notice they are holding human hands, trophies from one of these raids.

  The Congolese forest is so impenetrable, so laden with hazards, that even today places like Kasongo have a terrifying sense of isolation, a feeling that the normal rules of human decency m
ight break down here. I felt it strongly as I explored the decaying ruins of the once-sizeable town, troubled by images in my mind of African villagers fleeing from wanton violence unleashed by Belgian colonials, smug in the knowledge that places like Kasongo were too remote for them ever to be held to account.

  These images played on my mind as I followed footpaths snaking through the undergrowth, deviating round large trees that had grown in the middle of what had once been wide boulevards, occasionally tripping over an old fence post, broken pipe or other remnant of the old order. I was trying to picture what it must have been like back in the days of white rule. I could tell where the colonial properties had stood because through the native undergrowth pushed huge flamboyants, a tree with a distinctive red blossom, originating in Madagascar and non-indigenous to central Africa. It was a standard ornament for colonial gardens across all parts of Africa, a botanical calling card left by white outsiders.

  In Kasongo, I saw many flamboyants. They would once have stood in the front gardens of the city’s smarter houses but, while the trees remained, the buildings had rotted to nothing.

  Walking through a section of open grassland, next to what might once have been an avenue, I was amazed to find the mayor’s office still standing. I was even more amazed to find there was a mayor inside.

  Verond Ali Matongo was born two years after the Belgians gave Congo independence in 1960. His story summed up perfectly what had gone wrong in Kasongo ever since.

  ‘I was two years old when the uprising against white rule came to Kasongo. It was started by Pierre Mulele, a leader from northeast Congo, whom no-one in the town had ever heard of before. All of a sudden we were told his followers, the Mulele Mai, were coming and we must leave. They attacked anything they associated with the outside world, they killed white people or anyone they believed to be with Belgium. It was chaos. Of course, I was too small to remember anything, but I have been told the reason my life was saved was because I was lucky – the deputy commander of the rebel force took pity on me and made me his godson and I was taken to the bush. It was years before I came back here again, when Mobutu had taken control of the country. I have no idea what happened to my real family.’

  He was speaking in the old chief administrator’s office. Outside I could just make out a decaying sign carrying the old slogan from the 1970s Mobutu period. It said ‘Peace, Justice, Work’ – three of the things one would least associate with Mobutu’s bloody, criminal, indolent dictatorship.

  Mayor Matongo’s office looked as if it had not been touched since the 1970s. There was a desk, a table, some chairs and an old bookshelf, teetering under the weight of some large, dusty books. His entire authority resided in a circular, plastic stamp and well-stamped ink pad, the sort of thing that can be purchased at a stationery shop in Britain for a pound or two, which sat on his desk. He wielded it on the rare occasions when he actually had pieces of paper to deal with.

  ‘What do you actually do now?’ I asked looking around. ‘What powers do you have?’

  ‘I am the mayor, appointed by the transitional government in Kinshasa. But I have no contact with them because we have no phone, and I can pay no civil servants because I have no money and there is no bank or post office where money could be received, and we have no civil servants because all the schools and hospitals and everything do not work. I would say I am just waiting, waiting for things to get back to normal.’

  ‘And when was the last time things were normal?’ His smiling face suggested he did not find my question overly rude.

  ‘The 1950s. From what I hear, that is when this town was last normal.’

  I walked across to the bookshelf and picked up one of the thick books. The spine was bound with canvas and the A4 pages had a line printed down the middle, with Flemish text on one side and French on the other. I picked up another and found it was arranged in exactly the same way. They were an almost complete set of official gazettes from the Belgian colonial period, one for each year from the early twentieth century right up to the late 1950s.

  Some were in an advanced state of decomposition, flaking to my touch as I thumbed the pages. Others were more solid and the print was clearly legible, listing that year’s inventory of ordinances, regulations and bylaws imposed by the colonial authorities in Leopoldville, the colonial name for today’s Kinshasa. They covered topics as arcane as traffic-light distribution and the construction of what were euphemistically called cités, but were in fact the slums occupied by black Congolese. There were long lists of how much each province, city, town and village produced in terms of agriculture or mining. And there were detailed accounts of tax revenue and income. Like so many other colonial powers, Belgium clearly believed in bookkeeping. Handling the tomes made me think of the pettifogging Belgian bureaucrats so savagely satirised by Evelyn Waugh and Georges Simenon, the pompous buffoons who lived deep in the African bush, thousands of miles from Belgium, nitpicking over bylaws.

  ‘Why to do you keep these?’ I asked.

  ‘For reference. One day we will need these jungle books for reference’ was the reply.

  The first I saw of Jumaine Mungereza was his fez bobbing through the shoulder-high grass in the centre of town. He had heard there was a person passing through Kasongo who was interested in the nineteenth-century period of Arab slavery and British explorers, and he identified in me a clear commercial opportunity.

  ‘I am the expert on all these matters of slavery and Mr Stanley,’ he said.

  His appearance was not entirely convincing. Seventy-two years old with grubby spectacles and a wrinkled face covered in a whiskery fuzz, Mr Mungereza did not appear at first glance to be an expert on anything. He was also dressed up like a pantomime Arab, complete with fez and a one-piece cotton gown. I later saw him wearing tattered trousers and T-shirt, so I reckoned his Arab costume had been donned solely for my benefit.

  ‘I used to be an author of books. In 1979 I wrote the best book on Islam in Kasongo, with the help of one of the local missionaries, Father Luigi Lazzarato. If you want to, I can sell you a copy.’

  This sounded intriguing. This was the first person I had met in the eastern Congo with an interest in nineteenth-century history, so I asked him to show me his work. It turned out to be a booklet of crudely photocopied pages, stapled together inside a green card cover. I flicked through to see references to Stanley, Livingstone and Cameron.

  He wanted $50 for a copy, a huge sum in a place as backward as Kasongo. When I hesitated for a second, he dropped the price to $10. He was delighted when I bought his only copy, but before he disappeared I wanted to know more.

  ‘My tribe, the Mamba, were one of the first to be fully Arabised at the beginning of the period of slavery. It was a case of survival. If we had not taken on the Arab customs, we would have been taken with the other tribes as slaves. We adopted Islam, spoke Swahili as fluently as our mother language, KinyaMamba, and for a long time we were the elite of this community. Then the Belgians came and the Muslims were pushed down.’

  He was speaking as we walked through the cité of Kasongo, the crowded African community a world apart from the abandoned cement buildings of the ‘white’ suburb. The cité was a place of subsistence living, but it was still densely populated, with shoals of children swirling between terraces of thatched mud huts, pointing and giggling at me, the stranger. I asked Jumaine if he would show me a mosque.

  Rounding the corner of a thatched hut, we came to an open space of beaten brown earth and Jumaine announced with clear pride in his voice, ‘There it is. The Grand Mosque of Kasongo.’

  Less imposing than the town’s Catholic cathedral of Saint Charles, it was impressive all the same. A rectangular structure, the roof must have reached ten metres from the ground, and the windows and door frames were finished in rather delicate brickwork. The whole thing was the same brown tone as the earth, but as I peered through one of the windows I expected to see a splash of colour – an old Arab carpet, perhaps, or a prayer niche. There was nothin
g. The floor was beaten earth and the walls were muddy brown.

  ‘There used to be many thousands of Muslims in Kasongo who worshipped every day,’ Jumaine was reminiscing as we walked back through the cité. ‘But something happened and the numbers became less. I don’t know what it was. Maybe the old religions of the forest came back.’

  With that, Jumaine, a living relic of the Arab slaving empire of Kasongo, wandered off, his fez the last thing I saw disappearing behind the thatch of a hut’s roof.

  The next piece of headgear I saw made me laugh out loud and feel homesick, all at the same time. It was a cap made of Scottish tweed, the sort of thing I would expect my father to be wearing, black with rain on the banks of a salmon river. It did not look like the most appropriate hat for the sweaty tropical African bush, but that did not seem to bother its owner, an energetic eighty-two-year-old called Vermond Makungu.

  He was one of many elderly characters I met in the Congo who conveyed to me such a vivid picture of a country in decline, a backward community that was not just undeveloped, but undeveloping. They all had stories about how life used to be relatively normal, sophisticated even, but how the modern reality was so much worse.

  ‘I used to work for the big tropical hospital here in Kasongo back in the 1960s and 1970s.’ Vermond seemed happy to have someone with whom to discuss what he called the Good Old Days. ‘I was responsible for buying equipment for the hospital, so I would fly all over the world to buy X-ray machines, respirators and that sort of thing. I went to Kinshasa often. It was there that I bought this hat, from a trade fair. You can see it was exported to the francophone world, because the label here has the French for “Made in Scotland”. But I flew to Japan, to Rome, to Brussels, all over Europe. Now look what has happened. Look at where I live.’

  We were standing in an old shop in what one day had been a terrace close to the Belgian monument in Kasongo. Part of the roof was missing and the damp floor was cluttered with rather second-rate bric-a-brac – broken furniture, stained clothing, dirty cooking pots. Vermond clearly had a thing about hats because among his possessions I spotted a classic icon of Belgian colonial rule, a cream-coloured sun helmet, the sort of topi Tintin wore throughout his Tintin Au Congo adventures. Seeing it made me think of all the black-and-white photographs I had seen during my research of Congolese colonials carrying out the business of colonialism – stalking past railway stations or peering from road bridges or surveying copper mines – and always doing it while wearing one of these topis.