by Tim Butcher
When I explained my ambition to follow Stanley’s original route across the Congo and my interest in the local history, Vermond listened carefully and then started thinking. He turned out to be very dynamic for his age.
‘When we were children in the 1930s and 1940s tourists used to come to Kasongo to see the old sites from the days of the Arab wars. Would you like to see?’
As he led me past the cathedral, I heard something that threw me for a second. It was the sound of a motorbike, the first engine noise I had heard since arriving in Kasongo several days back with Benoit and Odimba. Round the corner came an odd-looking priest. He looked odd not just because he was wearing a trilby and ski gloves in spite of the sweaty heat of the day. He looked odd because, although he was black, he did not look even remotely African. But after introducing himself as Simone Ngogo, he explained that he was very much a local, born just after the Second World War in a nearby village. I could not stop looking at his very Caucasian features and yet African skin. It was intriguing. Perhaps he was proof that Simenon had been right when he described, in his short stories, the colonialists’ sexual domination of native Africans.
I asked him if he remembered when things were better in Kasongo and he nodded enthusiastically. He said after the shock of the Mulele Mai uprising in the early 1960s, Kasongo enjoyed a brief boom period in the early years of Mobutu’s rule. High copper prices meant the country’s working copper mines generated substantial earnings and Les Grosses Légumes, the fat cats of the Mobutu regime, had not yet plundered everything. Towns like Kasongo were comfortably off, he said, and the tropical disease hospital – the one for which Vermond used to procure equipment – was a centre of excellence for the region.
‘But things went wrong when Mobutu became interested only in clinging to power in the late 1970s and 1980s, to putting people in jobs just to win their support. These were people who took everything, but did nothing. The decline began when he created the cult of the personality and self-divination, describing himself as Man-God sent to help Congo, and when he nationalised everything – businesses, schools, shops, everything – and it all went down from there.’
I asked him how he kept in touch with his congregation. He pointed at his motorbike and explained it was how he completed his parish rounds, but only if he could buy fuel flown into Kasongo from time to time. Revving the engine, he raised his voice as the bike belched blue exhaust smoke that spoke of fuel filthy with impurity.
‘This area around Kasongo has known all of the Congo’s wars, one after the other, and the people use Christianity to survive. It’s a struggle, but somehow they survive.’
Vermond led me down the slope at the back of the cathedral. It was badly overgrown, but gradually I made out symmetry in the trees on either side of us as we walked. We were following what had been laid out as an avenue of mango trees.
‘This was the site of the big Arab villas during the slaving period, the main centre of the city,’ Vermond said. I was sweating heavily, but he somehow retained his cool, even with the tweed hat on.
After a few hundred metres he stepped off the track into a particularly thick tangle of nettle, grass and reed, straining his neck. He was looking for something. I heard occasional words as he used his hands to clear a path. ‘It’s somewhere around here … I am sure of it … It’s been such a long time. Cannot quite remember.’ And then a cry of triumph. ‘Come over here. I have found something to show you.’
I joined him, ripping through tendrils of ivy and thorn that snagged my clothes, before reaching an open section. Vermond was standing triumphantly looking at the ground, his right foot resting on a straining bunch of grass stems that he had pushed out of the way to reveal a sign that read ‘Slave Market’.
‘This was the place where the tourists used to come. These signs were made so they could see the old sites, like the slave market. Just over there is another sign marking the site of Sefu’s villa, and beyond it the house where the two Belgians were staying when they were killed. Kasongo played a big part in the history of this place and people were interested enough to come all the way here to see. You must be the first visitor for decades.’
We wrestled our way back to the track, but I could make out nothing of the old villas, long since consumed by the jungle. I was finding the heat intense and we walked slowly back up the hill, talking about decay and decline. He told me about the grim days of the Mulele Mai rebellion. There was genuine terror in his voice as he described the feeling in town when rumours emerged from the bush that the rebels were coming.
‘Some fled into the forest, others stayed to defend their homes. It was terrifying. There were still some white people here then, and I remember two of them decided to try to flee to the river and find a boat. They never made it. The rebels caught them on the road between here and the river.’
We were walking so slowly that I spotted something I had missed on the way down, a stone cross standing proud of the undergrowth, off to one side of the track.
‘That’s the old Belgian graveyard,’ Vermond explained. ‘I think the two men who tried to flee are in there.’
The graveyard had surrendered to the advancing undergrowth years ago, but several of the gravestones were so large they had not yet quite been swamped. The entrance was marked by two mango trees that had grown enormous in Kasongo’s hot, humid climate. Their canopies were so thick that little grew underneath them and we scrunched through piles of dry, dead leaves as we made our way into the old cemetery.
Vermond performed the same trick as before, mumbling to himself as he searched. The first grave he came to had a metal plaque and I heard him scraping away dead leaves and reading out the details of a Belgian missionary who died here in 1953, before shaking his head and moving on to the next one, a Belgian woman who died in 1933. Finally he shouted out.
‘Here they are.’
I climbed through the undergrowth and there were the graves of two men, Leon Fransen and Jean Matz. They were both in their thirties when they died and the inscription described them as agents of the Cotonco, the cotton company that used to be such a large employer here in Kasongo. Their gravestones confirmed that they died on the same day, 11 November 1964.
Tom took me to Kasongo’s weekly market to show me what was available locally. It was pretty meagre. The market consisted of a group of women sitting in front of piles of leaves, or fruit or smoked river fish – tiny things the size of minnows – or white cassava flour, while gaggles of other women milled around, inspecting the wares. Some of the women had teased their hair into long, elegant tendrils. In his diary, Stanley had drawn just such hairstyles. I called the style ‘antenna hair’. But the striking thing was just how painfully thin everyone was. There were no tubby faces. Everyone, seller and buyer alike, had the same haggard appearance, with faces so wan they appeared more grey than black.
‘It’s the cassava,’ explained Tom. ‘It is the only staple for millions and millions of people across the Congo because it is the easiest thing to grow, but in terms of nutrition it is not really any good because it lacks many basic nutrients. And without any large-scale farming or animal husbandry, the main source of protein is the meat of animals from the forest – monkeys, deer, that sort of thing. They call it bushmeat. But the animals have long since been shot out from densely populated areas like Kasongo, so really the only thing left is cassava with the occasional fish. We are seeing malnutrition levels here as if this place was suffering from a full famine.’
During my motorbike journey I had already seen just how pervasive cassava is, in spite of various attempts that have been made to encourage Congolese to adopt more nutritious crops, like maize. An American aid-worker friend spent two years in the province of Katanga during the 1980s working as a volunteer with village communities, on an ambitious national programme trying to wean people off cassava. It failed. The reality is that the ease with which cassava grows makes it the default crop in a country like the Congo where economic chaos makes it unviable to fa
rm anything but the easiest plants.
After planting, cassava grows quickly into a small tree with edible leaves. You don’t need to prepare a field for cassava. A burned patch of forest will do. The leaves are moderately tasty and palatable, but it is the tubers on its roots that are its most valuable asset. Without maize or corn or any other source of starch, the cassava root fills the empty belly of central Africa. The tubers are vast, bulbous things, with coarse, leathery skin stained the colour of the soil in which they grow. They have to be scraped and then soaked in water to leach away harmful toxins that occur naturally under the skin. As we biked over streams, I had often seen spots in the river beds that had been hollowed out and filled with soaking cassava tubers, pale without their skins. After it has been washed for a couple of days, the tuber is cut into fragments and dried. Again, most villages that I had passed through had piles of drying cassava fragments balanced on banana leaves drying on the thatched roofs of huts. By that time it is as white and brittle as chalk, so the next stage is simply to pound it with a pestle and mortar into cassava flour. This can then be made into a bread, known as fufu. I was not surprised to hear about its meagre nutritional value. It looked like wallpaper paste, smelled of cheese and tasted of a nasty blend of both. In the absence of any alternative, I ate a lot of cassava in the Congo and I was left feeling sorry for anyone whose daily diet never varies from the stuff.
Tom sounded downhearted as we continued walking around the market. ‘I come from east Africa, Kenya, where people die of starvation because of drought. There is never enough rain for the crops or the animals. But here in the Congo, they have all the rain they need, rivers full of fish, and soil that is unbelievably rich. If you stand still here in the bush you can actually see plants growing around you, the growth is that powerful, that strong. And yet somehow people still manage to go hungry here because of the chaos, the bad management. It breaks my heart to see all this agricultural potential going to waste.’
We continued through the market. Under a tree a young boy was selling water pots made from red, earthy clay. And against the ruins of a building a woman had hung out some coloured cotton cloth for sale as wraps for women. I asked her where the cloth came from and she told me a story showing that even in a weak economy like the Congo’s, the power of globalisation can still be felt.
‘The best cloth used to come from Britain and Holland, a long time ago, maybe even a hundred years ago, but it became too expensive. Material from China is the cheapest now. It is not the same quality as the old material, but people buy what they can afford and that means the cheapest is best. So this material you see today has come to Africa by God only knows what route. It arrives in Kalemie somehow and from there people bring it all the way here by bicycle.’
I remembered the bike traders I had seen all along the 500-kilometre motorbike route I had just completed from Kalemie. It might beat feebly here in the Congo, but the free market is still strong enough to motivate people to drag bicycles laden with Chinese cloth for vast distances through the tropical bush, to earn a living.
The colours of her display made for a strong photograph, but as I was fiddling with my camera I heard someone shouting.
‘Stop there, stop there.’ The voice came from a big man bustling towards us. ‘This is a security zone, show me your permission to take photographs. Come on, show me.’
He was tall, well-built and clearly obnoxious. He jostled my arm and started to raise his voice again before Tom stepped in. In English, Tom told me firmly to put my camera away and in rudimentary French he charmed the stranger, before nudging me out of the crowd and back to his house.
‘You see that is all that is left of the state. People who have no jobs or income, trying to make money by creating problems for outsiders.’ Again, he sounded very forlorn about the Congo.
Back at Tom’s house, I slowly got my strength back. Living conditions were bleak and I could not stop thinking about the contrast with the luxurious villas the Belgian soldiers found when they conquered Kasongo. Tom’s house was the smartest in town, but even so its comforts were modest. A barrel of rainwater had been set up over a grimy old bath; in the sitting room a collection of old car batteries was connected to a generator that ran only when there was enough fuel; and the kitchen had basically been relocated outside to where Yvonne Apendeki, Tom’s maid, cooked over a charcoal burner. She kept an African grey parrot for company, and most mornings I heard him whistling along with the kettle as she boiled water and fiddled around with the few pans and plates that Care International had shipped in for Tom.
She was only twenty-five but had lost count of the number of times rebels and mai-mai had come to Kasongo, forcing her to flee to the forest.
‘I have one son and one daughter, and I carry them with me when we have to run away. I don’t know who is fighting who here any more. Everyone says they are against the government or for the government. It is not important. We all know it is not safe to stay here, so we just flee.’
As we spoke the parrot started to jump on his perch and become more animated as a man walked around the back of the house and sat down with the air of someone very familiar with the set-up. I introduced myself and asked him his story.
‘My name is Pierre Matata. I was a garden boy when Belgians still lived in Kasongo and I have worked in this house since 1976. Back then the person who lived here was an Italian doctor working in the hospital.’ Like the other denizens of Kasongo he was skeletally thin.
‘When do you think the problems began here?’
‘It was the first rebellion, the Mulele Mai revolt in 1964. It was anarchy, complete chaos. These guys came from the bush and they basically settled grievances that reached back years and years against the outsiders, the Belgians, the Arabs, everyone who was not what they regarded as a real Congolese. But it was not just the whites they targeted. Any Congolese like us who lived in the town were an object for their hatred. They saw us as collaborators with the whites and they were cruel with us. They killed absolutely anyone connected with the white world, the modern world. You see that flask there on the floor?’
He was pointing at an old vacuum flask Yvonne used to keep boiling water hot.
‘If they saw you with that, they would kill you. That would be enough for them to think you belonged to the modern world.’
It was a gruesome story. I thought of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and their attempt to drag their people back to the Year Zero, to rid themselves of external, colonial, foreign influences.
‘And since then we have rebels come through the town every so often. We flee into the forest, they steal everything and we come back and survive on what little is left. That is the cycle of our existence.’
After I had been in Kasongo for three days I noticed Tom becoming more nervous. His satellite message system kept bringing him news from Kinshasa about problems in the transitional government, in the aftermath of the recent killings in Burundi. Various rebel commanders, whose presence was essential to the long-term success of the government, had flown out of Kinshasa to return to their bush headquarters in the east of the country. Tom said he had been ordered to prepare to withdraw his ex-pat staff and close his operation in Kasongo.
‘What happened back in June was bad. We are not going to go through that again. The safest place for you right now is to get to Kindu. At least they have a UN base there. So if you are feeling strong enough, I will send you there by motorbike. Is there anything else you would like to do here?’
The one thing I had to do was give my thanks to Benoit. I found him at the Care International office. It was a short walk from Tom’s house, in an abandoned school building in the old ‘white’ suburb of Kasongo. Care International was the only aid group functioning in Kasongo, but working conditions were grim. They relied on air deliveries for all their supplies, so they could only attempt relatively modest projects such as track clearing or well digging. This was primary-level aid work. More complicated work, like running a clinic, was a far-off
dream for Kasongo.
Benoit was wearing crisp, clean clothes and looked totally recovered from his 1,000-kilometre round trip to collect me from Kalemie. I owed him a great deal, but all I could offer was my thanks and a few hundred dollars. He had not asked for a penny, but I felt I owed him a huge debt for his skill, stamina and efficiency.
‘What happens if they have to evacuate this office?’ I asked before we parted.
‘Well, I will have to make my way home. I am not ex-pat staff, so there will not be a place for me on any plane that comes. I will have to go home by myself. I am not from Kasongo originally. I come from the town of Bukavu itself, the one which had the problems in June. I guess I will have to make my way there. I don’t know how. It will be difficult, but I will find a way.’
I leaned forward to shake Benoit by the hand, but could not stop myself feeling guilty as if I was abandoning him to an awful fate. I found it heartbreaking that a man as decent and talented as Benoit was trapped in a Congolese life lurching from crisis to crisis. I tried to sound positive.
‘If anyone can find a way, you can, Benoit. Thank you for everything.’
Benoit could not be spared by Tom, but Odimba was available. I set off from Kasongo once again riding as his passenger, surrounded by numerous plastic bottles of specially cleaned water. Careering along the track, my head clattering every so often against Odimba’s motorbike helmet, I thought more about Kasongo. During the slavery period it had peaked as a capital city, and during the colonial era its strong agriculture and tropical medicine hospital had kept it alive. But in the chaos since the first Mulele Mai uprising it had been slipping backwards.