Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

  Our leading armoured car was face to face with three enemy armoured cars, evil-looking mock-up affairs, and the gunners were slugging it out toe to toe …

  ‘Bazooka, sir?’ enquired a soft voice behind me in the dark. It was Captain Gordon …

  ‘OK,’ I said reluctantly ‘give it a bash. Watch yourself.’

  Wham! A brilliant flash of yellow light lit up the tunnel of the track as an almighty bang reverberated down the length of the column and the front of the leading enemy armoured car flew into a thousand pieces …

  The crews of the other two cars, panic-stricken, tried to bale out, but all were caught in merciless machine-gun fire …

  The bodies of the dead were strewn on the track ahead of us, but nobody got out to remove them and the column continued after its fright, each vehicle bumping over the bodies in turn until they were reduced to a squashy pulp.

  I was standing at the exact spot described by Hoare. In the 1960s this was a major thoroughfare down which a mercenary column comprising jeeps, trucks, armoured cars and command vehicles could easily pass and where their enemies could plan and execute an ambush. Today it is pristine forest crossed by a single-file track with only a war-damaged armoured car to hint at its bloody past. As I walked back to the motorbike to continue on to Kindu, I wondered if I was stepping where those bodies had been crushed to a pulp.

  I knew Kindu had a large UN base and I was looking forward to feeling truly safe for the first time in two weeks. I had great hopes for the place. Maybe I could even have a wash and a decent meal. I should have known better. A good rule of thumb for my Congo journey was that the more I anticipated arriving somewhere, the more disappointed I was. By that formula, Kindu did not let me down.

  ‘You came from where?’ Marie-France Hélière, who ran the UN operation in Kindu, was astonished when I turned up in her office. She had never heard of any foreigner reaching her town overland and was amazed when I explained the route I had used. In her experience, outsiders only ever flew to Kindu, using the UN-controlled airport, and she seemed initially a little sceptical about my claim to have arrived by motorbike.

  Only my filthy state seemed to convince her I was telling the truth.

  ‘Well, at least you look like a real traveller,’ she said slowly, her gaze creeping from my dirty boots up to my dust-frosted hair. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable, as if I was spoiling the air-conditioned perfection of Marie-France’s office. It was spotless, although she complained she was still retrieving shards of glass from her riot-damaged computer keyboard. Like all other UN bases around the Congo, the one in Kindu had been attacked by mobs angered by the failure of peacekeepers to protect civilians two months earlier. Near the door in her office I noticed a small overnight snatch-bag with her UN livery-blue body armour and helmet. She followed my gaze and explained, ‘We have to be able to leave quickly if we need to.’

  Her door opened and she welcomed two Italian aid workers. I felt slightly embarrassed when she introduced me as an ‘adventurer’. I squirmed, but the two Italians were not that interested. One of them was thin and haggard, and the other fresh-faced and eager. The healthy-looking one was taking over from the ill-looking one, who had just finished a year of service in Kindu.

  ‘What was it like?’ I asked the older hand.

  ‘The Congo is like nowhere else. After a year here, I cannot wait to leave.’

  I thought of the thirteen Italian airmen who died here in Kindu in November 1961. They were flying routine shuttle flights for the original UN mission in the Congo, the predecessor by forty years of the mission that Marie-France worked for. They arrived in two planes at Kindu’s small airport to deliver equipment to the local detachment of Malaysian troops, but for some reason they left the secure confines of the airstrip and headed into town, where they fell into the hands of an angry mob of government soldiers. They were dragged through the streets to the town centre just a short distance from where we were sitting and beaten to death. They were then butchered and eaten. Body parts were seen for sale days later at local markets. I don’t even know if the exhausted, disease-ravaged aid worker I met was even aware of the story.

  I was trapped there for days, struggling to find a way to travel downriver. In 2004 the river was viewed more as a hindrance than as a transport asset, a completely different reality from the town’s heyday in the first half of the twentieth century when Kindu was a principal component of a carefully constructed Belgian transport network. Kindu was a major junction on the route between Kisangani (the colonial river town of Stanleyville) and Lubumbashi (colonial Elisabethville). River boats would arrive here from Kisangani in the north, to connect with trains that would head south to Lubumbashi.

  I have a book by a Belgian hunter, André Pilette, about a safari he went on, just before the First World War, across this part of Africa. Most of the book is standard Great White Hunter stuff – descriptions of how he shot his way through hundreds and hundreds of game animals, dodging death from various wounded beasts – and it contains a fantastic photograph of him looking completely shameless in a suit, shoes and topi, being carried through the Congo on a hammock strung along a pole between two African bearers. But by the time M. Pilette reached Kindu in August 1913, he basically viewed his adventure as over, describing a modern town fully connected to the outside world. His journey home to Belgium began here with a routine ferry downstream:

  All day long you could hear the whistles from railway locomotives or the sirens of riverboats; the sound of cargo being loaded and unloaded. On a Sunday or any weekday, you could see endless industry in the town and you could think yourself transported to one of Belgium’s most important industrial centres.

  By the time I reached Kindu ninety years later, it was a squalid imitation of a Belgian industrial centre. There were some buildings that once belonged to railway officials and built, just as M. Pilette described, on the crest of the hill behind the station, now decrepit and tatty. And I saw my first motor traffic since Kalemie, 700 kilometres to the south and east. The vehicles were almost all UN-owned or jeeps belonging to aid agencies, and at the junction outside the repainted rice warehouse where the UN had its headquarters, a Congolese traffic policeman diligently stood in the middle of the road all day long, whistling and signalling with gloved hands, peering out from beneath a bright-yellow helmet. I found the heat in Kindu grim, but every time I passed that junction I never saw the policeman without those delicate white gloves.

  They were deeply incongruous in this otherwise filthy town. Roads that had once been smooth with tarmac are now potholed and uneven. There are a few shops in the town centre, but they sell nothing but the samizdat tat of low-end trading – cheap, Chinese goods that are brought here on the back of bicycles or on the occasional unregistered flight to Kindu’s small airport. The town had grown up on the west bank of the Congo River, but over on the east bank and about 100 kilometres into the bush there were large deposits of cassiterite, the ore from which tin is made. If Lubumbashi is a cobalt town, Kindu is a tin town, although the relatively low profit margins on mining cassiterite make the whole operation more low-key than the more sexy diamond, gold and cobalt mines elsewhere in the Congo. Along the main drag in town, you can see a few buildings where cassiterite traders do business, buying sacks of ore from artisanal miners who drag it here by bicycle through the bush.

  But without mains water or power, Kindu is a dismal place. Among the UN and aid community Kindu has one of the highest attrition rates for disease out of all towns in the Congo. The Italian aid worker who had looked so eager and healthy in Marie-France’s office at the UN base fell sick almost immediately and, when I next saw him just a few days later, he was pale with a plaster on his arm where a drip had been attached. Without mains water, people use the Congo River as a giant sluice, to rid themselves of all types of waste. During recent fighting, war dead had been tipped into the river, continuing a tradition from the mercenary days of the 1960s when the mercenary commander, Mike Hoare, describe
d the river waters turning red with blood when a boatload of rebels was hit by machine-gun fire.

  Most frustrating for me was the utter collapse of the ferry system. There was not a single working Congolese motorboat left on the entire upper reach of the Congo River. I walked down to the old port to find the carcasses of various boats from the mid-twentieth century lying rusting on the river bank. I encountered the same suspicious, money-grabbing hostility that I had experienced many times over in the Congo, as my curiosity was met with demands from self-styled ‘policemen’ for money and threats that I must pay or get into trouble for violating a ‘security zone’.

  I was beginning to feel lonely and depressed, but I still could not avoid being impressed by the scale of the decay in Kindu. Some of the abandoned boats were enormous, with chimney stacks that reached up through four rotten decks. I struggled to imagine the planning, effort and expense involved in bringing the ships’ components all the way here for assembly in the early twentieth century. But all of that effort lay in ruins, flotsam from a forgotten age.

  ‘You must not give up hope. God will provide.’ The optimism of Masimango Katanda perked me up a little bit. He was the local Anglican bishop and my host during my time in Kindu. I had arrived unannounced at his house and yet he immediately offered to put me up. I was curious about what a Church of England representative was doing in the predominantly Catholic Congo.

  ‘It was the British missionaries in Uganda who are to blame. They crossed the border into the Congo and brought with them their message into the east of the country. We do not have the biggest congregation, but I am still responsible for 20,000 church members in Maniema province alone.’

  After a grace delivered in French, which the bishop tailored specially for me by asking that travellers receive God’s protection, we ate a meal of cassava bread garnished with cassava leaves, before moving outside to talk in the evening cool of his courtyard. The town of Kindu had no power, although I could see a distant glow from the UN base, lit up by its own generators.

  ‘We have had so many rebellions and wars it is difficult to remember them all, but I remember exactly where I was when the latest one started in 1998. I was at the summer Lambeth Conference in London when I heard of the fighting here, so I flew to Uganda thinking I could come overland like those early missionaries.’

  I fidgeted on my plastic chair, trying not to break the bishop’s flow. After the fierce heat of the day the temperature had dipped nicely outside, but I was anxious not to be bitten by mosquitoes swarming in the gloom. I kept moving to make sure my ankles and wrists were not exposed. The bishop’s house was perhaps the finest in town, but it was still basic, without running water or power. As a treat I had bought a plastic bottle of petrol to run his small generator and I could hear the delighted screams of his children gathered around a television inside, watching a low-budget Nigerian-made film about adult women falling in love with a magical eight-year-old boy.

  ‘We stayed in Uganda a month or so before it became clear the fighting was too bad to make it back that way, so we had to come up with another plan. We flew all the way to Zambia and headed north until we crossed into the Congo and reached Lubumbashi. There we took the last train that ran from Lubumbashi to Kindu before the war. It was September 1998 and a journey that used to take thirty-six hours or so lasted nine days. It was grim. No food, no water, no bathroom. But at least we got home to Kindu.’

  During the war the two banks of the river were held by rival militia.

  ‘The town was completely cut off for years. No trains. No bicycle traders. Nothing. You could not even go down to the river because of the shooting sometimes. Our church had land for an educational centre over there on the east bank, but it was in no-man’s-land. It was very dangerous, but now things are better.’

  ‘Do you think it would be safe for me to travel downriver by canoe?’

  ‘It will be very risky. If it was safe there would be regular river traffic, but, even today, there is nothing.’

  One afternoon I crossed the river and went in search of the last English missionary still working in eastern Congo. Louise Wright was sixty-one when I met her, living in a mud hut, speaking Swahili fluently and claiming to miss nothing from home except for a daily cryptic crossword. A former English teacher at a village comprehensive in Norfolk, she had turned her back on a comfortable Western life and spent the last fifteen years in the eastern Congo working as a teacher for the Church Mission Society.

  Clearly loved by her congregation, she had committed herself to one of the least comfortable and most dangerous places on the planet. Even though she was much too modest to accept the comparison, to my eye she was living the life captured so powerfully in The Poisonwood Bible, an award-winning novel by an American author, Barbara Kingsolver, which tells the story of an evangelical Baptist and his family working as missionaries in the Congo around the time Belgium granted independence in 1960.

  ‘I was working in my school as head of the English department in the late 1980s when I saw an advert from the Church Mission Society which read: “Is God calling you to stay where you are?” I don’t know quite why it had such a powerful effect on me, but it made me think that perhaps I could be doing something more constructive to help the work of God.’

  We were speaking inside the educational centre described by the bishop, set up by the Anglican Church on the east bank of the Congo River near Kindu. Outside I had seen a grim feature of local life as militiamen beat up bicyclists and stole their bicycles – there were no cars or trucks to speak of on this side of the river. But inside the compound, things were more peaceful. There were no modern buildings, just traditional mud huts and a large clearing in the bush where women were tending a crop of cassava. I could hear the murmur of voices from an open-sided thatched hall where trainee priests were being taught about the Bible. Louise gave me a tour.

  ‘We have to be self-sufficient,’ she explained as we passed a group of Congolese women clearing the forest so that more cassava could be planted, and another threesome who were milling cassava roots in a large wooden tub. Inside the tub there was a blur of motion as the three women skilfully wielded a thick timber pole each, pounding them like synchronised pistons so that the brittle cassava crumbled into flour. Another woman was sorting the ripe fruit of a palm tree so it could be crushed for oil. I had seen palm oil used in candles, but this woman had another use for it – washing her infant son, who beamed at me naked, but glowing with a fresh sheen of oil. Louise spotted my interest. ‘Pretty impressive stuff, palm oil,’ she said. ‘You can cook with it, eat it, wash with it or light your house with it.’

  Returning to a thatched boma in the centre of the compound, she said something that later I could not stop thinking about.

  ‘The thing about the east of the Congo is that even during the Belgian colonial period, it really was not that developed. Today things are very basic, but the important thing to remember is that things have always been like this here – a very tough, rural self-sufficient lifestyle.’

  This did not fit snugly with my image of the Congo as a once-functioning country that has slipped backwards. I responded, ‘But surely the war and the chaos have made a difference. At least there was some sort of society before, an exploitative and cruel society, but one that was peaceful. Now people are dying in an anarchic free-for-all from things that would not have killed them before – starvation and avoidable disease.’

  Louise thought for a second before answering.

  ‘The war has had one major effect in that there are only two real ways left for Congolese people to get on. Before, there was at least a system of schools to go to paid for by the state, a transport system so that people could reach other parts of the country, a health system so that if you were ill you could stand a chance of recovery. But today all of that has gone, so that you only have two real options – you join a church, the only organisation that provides an education, a way for someone to develop, or you join one of the militias and pro
fit from the war.’

  I found her analysis depressing. The collapse of the state in this large swathe of Africa meant that its people either relied on the charity of outsiders or took to violence. I must have looked bit dejected because Louise tried to lighten my mood.

  ‘From my point of view as church worker, it’s great,’ she said. ‘When I go on leave back to the UK and I go into a church on Sunday, I am the youngest person there by a long way. But here in the Congo, I am always the oldest.’

  As our discussion continued, she made one other important point about how the Belgian colonial way of doing things in the Congo lasted long after independence in 1960.

  ‘The Belgians ran their colony almost on military lines. Black Congolese were only allowed to travel if they had passes from the Belgian authorities, and nothing could be done without the blessing of what was effectively the local Belgian commander. By the time I got here in the 1980s, the colonial era had long gone, but I found that under Mobutu everything was run along exactly the same lines. Nothing had really changed.

  ‘I remember going to see the head of a big mine in the east of the country to ask if one of the congregation could be treated at the mine’s clinic. Well, when I turned up at the director’s office, it was as if the Belgians were still running things. The director, a white man, an old colonial type, was treated like royalty. I remember sitting outside his office for hours waiting for him to grant me an audience. It was as if the Mobutu regime had taken over and decided to use exactly the same methods of control and military discipline that the Belgians had used.’

  Her story reminded me of something written by Conor Cruise O’Brien, the Irish author and politician, about his time serving with the UN in the Congo back in the early 1960s. He served as point man in Katanga for the UN Secretary General, when the province tried to secede, and in his subsequent book To Katanga and Back he writes scathingly about the attitude of Belgian colonialists to the Congolese: