Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

  It was already the middle of the night. Beneath clouds weakly backlit by the waning moon, our small column set off for what passes as Ubundu town centre. Uninvited, Malike, the leader of the paddlers, grabbed my rucksack, balanced it on his head and led the way up a thickly overgrown track between two banks of dense vegetation. I could make out large trees lurking overhead. At times the shadows merged so thickly I thought we had entered a tunnel. Malike said he knew the way to the priest’s house and I was banking on him being right. I followed next, trying to convey an air of control. Falling flat on my face would not have helped, so I took extra care as I picked my way through the web of roots and tendrils underfoot. And behind me came the gunman. I could not see him, but the sound of his footfall was clear and threatening.

  As we left the other three paddlers at the riverside, so we left the roar of the cataracts. I was still being deafened, but this time it was my adrenalin-spiked heartbeat that was pounding in my ears. Sweat poured down my back in the clammy night heat as fireflies began to flicker in the gloomier puddles of shadow.

  Under one particularly thick knot of foliage I could just make out a carved stone madonna. It fitted with the only detailed description I had been able to find of the town, one written by Katharine Hepburn in a diary entry describing an afternoon idled away here while waiting for the train north during the filming of The African Queen.

  I wandered out the main avenue toward the monks’ church … On the way there was a nunnery. Quite high walls lined the avenue. Plaster – mud-coloured – sometimes painted white. Great vines growing over them. Just opposite the nunnery was the nuns’ cemetery … I went in through the gate and stood thinking by the sweet gravestones. Lives of total service … I am not in any sense a Catholic, but one couldn’t help being moved by the dedication of these men and women.

  In the gloom I could not make out any nunnery or cemetery, but the madonna suggested I must be near.

  Malike ploughed on uphill and after a few more minutes we came to an area where the undergrowth had been cut back and in the darkness I could make out the loom of buildings. All was silent.

  ‘Hello, hello, is there anyone there?’ I tried to conceal the tremble in my voice as I broke the silence with a shout.

  Nothing.

  And then a shambling human shape emerged.

  ‘I am the housekeeper. The priest is asleep, but he told me someone might come one of these nights. I will show you where you can sleep.’

  My sigh of relief was so deep that, for a second, I felt dizzy. Malike put down the rucksack and I spent a few minutes in the dark rummaging through its innards to recover my head torch. Under its glare, I carefully unrolled four $50 notes and handed them to him. This was four times more than the price we had agreed, but all my usual nervousness about not appearing too foolishly generous was lost in the thrill of having made it to Ubundu. Malike was silent. He turned the notes in his hands. I flashed the head torch a second time so that he could check each note and confirm I was not fleecing him. My largesse clearly troubled him. Maybe he was disappointed that he had not driven a harder bargain. If I could afford to quadruple our original price, then surely I could have been persuaded to pay even more. Maybe he suspected the notes were counterfeit. A single fifty-dollar note represented a fortune in his riverine village, now several days’ paddle back upstream on the upper Congo. Four was wealth untold. He turned on his heel without shaking my hand and, with my plaintive thanks in his ears, disappeared back down the track to the river. I was closely watching the gunman from the corner of my eye. To my great relief, he decided to go back to his sentry position on the river’s edge, fell in behind Malike and was soon lost to my sight.

  The housekeeper told me to follow him to an outbuilding. As the door opened with a creak I could hear the scuttle of cockroach legs scrabbling on the cement floor. It was a curiously lovely sound. It meant I had made it to the safety of a place connected to the modern world: a place of cement floors, dirty, cracked, vermin-infested cement floors, but cement nonetheless. I fell asleep with a grin on my face, wrestling with my mosquito net, planning how I would cope with the next ordeal.

  The room where I slept was in the precincts of a church, but it was the sound of a drum, not bells, that woke me. In The Poisonwood Bible, one of the child narrators describes the ‘loggedy’ drums of the Congo that she heard while growing up at her Baptist father’s mission station. It was a perfect description for the large, wooden instrument I heard that morning. It was located just inside the door of the church of Saint Joseph’s looking like an oversized piggy-bank. It was made from a two-metre length of tree trunk, stripped of bark with just a single slit in the top. Through that aperture, carvers had scraped out the innards of the trunk to leave a hollow wooden tube. When drummed on the outside, a sound as thick as treacle oozed from the slit.

  A cloudy dawn had broken and I could now see where I had arrived in the middle of the night. The church itself was a large building, dating from the 1950s. Older brick buildings comprising a school and prayer centre stood in front of it, but the whole place was overgrown and badly looked after. When known as Ponthierville, this town had been another important hub in the Belgian colonial project, connecting the upper Congo River with a railway skirting the 100 unnavigable kilometres of the Stanley Falls.

  ‘Nothing is working right now.’ The priest, Adalbert Mwehu Nzuzi, sounded deeply troubled. He had welcomed me in front of his church, but from the moment I saw his cold expression, I knew I was dealing with a worried man. ‘This place is not safe for you. I really think you should leave as soon as possible.’

  After surviving three weeks’ travel through the Congo, I was beginning to feel a bit cocky, so I assured him I was all right. He looked me in the eye, slowly raised his eyebrows and repeated his warning.

  ‘This is a terrible place where terrible things happen. You really must leave before they find you.’

  ‘Who are “they”?’ I asked.

  Before he answered he looked around over his shoulder to check no-one was in sight and whispered a reply. ‘The rebels, the mai-mai, the ones who are under the command of …’ At this point he dropped his voice so that it was barely audible. ‘Kufi.’

  I had not heard the name Kufi before. It was a name that left Father Adalbert petrified.

  ‘I lock myself in at night. We hear the most terrible things. Sometimes it is the sound of gunfire, but sometimes we hear nothing but the screams. That is when they are using “white weapons”.’

  I had never heard the expression ‘white weapons’, so I asked him to explain.

  ‘The old weapons, the ones that do not make a sound: knives, machetes, spears. Once they kill, they throw the bodies in the river and they are washed away.

  ‘There is just no law here. That is what we need more than anything. A sense of the law and the sense that there is someone to enforce it. Without that there is chaos. These mai-mai kill for no reason at all. One day you are okay, the next day you are dead. There is no sense to it. If they are angry with you or don’t like your clothes, they kill and they know they will never face justice.’

  It was a brief but eloquent lament for the Congo. What the country needs above aid shipments or charitable donations is a sense of law and order.

  Entering the priest’s house, I saw on a table a portrait of one of the main culprits for Congo’s legal anarchy. It showed the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. When the Congo won independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960, the African continent viewed it as a moment of great optimism and hope, a time when eighty years of colonial control and exploitation would end and a new era of black emancipation would begin. More than any other single person, Mobutu made sure this dream was never fulfilled.

  Mobutu’s dictatorial reign between 1965 and 1997 created the violent free-for-all of today’s Congo. It was Mobutu who robbed the country of its wealth, plundering national reserves on a scale economists have still not been able to gauge accurately. When he came to power, the Congo had a t
hriving mineral industry, reliant on copper from the south-eastern province of Katanga and diamonds from the central province of Kasai. When he was driven from office in May 1997 to die in exile a few months later, the country was broke and the output of the mines a fraction of what it had been fifty years earlier. Estimates of what he stole vary from millions of dollars to billions, but the truth is nobody will ever be able to arrive at an accurate figure. Dictionaries cite Mobutu’s rule as the perfect example of a kleptocracy, a state where rampant greed and corruption erode normal economic activity.

  Like many other African dictators, Mobutu won power by presenting himself as the only leader strong enough to unite the country. For five years after independence, the Congo had been in a state of near-permanent rebellion, with the attempted secession by Katanga, the Mulele Mai uprising in the east and various coup attempts in Kinshasa. In one of the clumsier features of Belgian rule, Brussels had groomed no Congolese politicians to take control of the vast country at independence – Belgian colonial law barred Congolese from reaching senior positions in the army, civil service, judiciary or other organs of state, and by the time the colonialists left, the country had barely a handful of graduates. Control of the Congo fell into the hands not of a cadre of trained, experienced, educated leaders, but of young turks who suddenly found themselves vying for positions of enormous influence.

  Mobutu had not yet turned thirty when independence came to the Congo but, as violence gripped the country for five years, he used his senior position in the army to artfully convince America and the West that he was the only Congolese leader capable of controlling the fractious giant at the heart of Africa. It worked. The coup that brought him to power in 1965 was tacitly approved by Washington, if only because it promised an end to the turmoil. Mobutu obliged by establishing stability in the most brutal way possible, publicly executing rivals and detaining possible plotters. Pierre Mulele, the rebel leader responsible for the Mulele Mai uprising, was lured back from exile with a promise of an amnesty, only to be disposed of by Mobutu’s troops. He died under torture, after his genitals and limbs had been cut off. What remained of his body was then tossed into the Congo River. Democracy was shunned by Mobutu, who defied calls for free and fair elections and centralised power into the hands of a close-knit cabal of friends, family and cronies.

  There was a certain brilliance to Mobutu’s evil. He was the consummate showman, luring George Foreman and Muhammad Ali to his capital, Kinshasa, for the most famous bout in boxing history, the 1974 ‘Rumble in the Jungle’. Concorde, the world’s only supersonic airliner, would be chartered specially to fly supplies of pink champagne from Paris to his jungle palace complex at Gbadolite in the north of the country. The runway was specially extended so that the jet could land. Symbolically, Mobutu was the first leader of the Congo to tame the mighty river, building the only bridge to span the Congo River, the Marshal Mobutu suspension bridge. And with his leopardskin hat and a sense of the dramatic, he established himself as one of the most iconic African figures of the Cold War. I have a journalist friend who remembers Mobutu flying to the scene of a bush atrocity deep in the Congolese jungle back in the 1980s, quoting Conrad. With the press within earshot as he looked at the mutilated bodies of his countrymen, the Congolese leader effortlessly quoted Mr Kurtz’s last words from Heart of Darkness: ‘The Horror! The Horror!’

  But his showmanship should not disguise the corrosive effect his rule had on Congolese society, destroying completely any national sense of order or justice.

  Long before Stanley passed through here, the Congolese had their own system of tribal justice. Onto these roots eighty years of Belgian colonial rule had grafted its own skewed, white-dominated legal system. Mobutu’s most damaging achievement was to undo this, to create the sense of anarchic self-help that characterises today’s Congo. Under the pre-colonial tribal system, no single chief was powerful enough to hold dominion over the entire Congo River basin. There were scores of tribes – 200, according to early twentieth-century anthropologists – each responsible for a chunk of territory, but the power of any chief was held in check by his people. If a chief grew unpopular, his people could oust him. Oustings were often bloody and brutal affairs, but the point was that a chief could not ignore his people completely.

  These checks and balances were done away with in the post-colonial period as African dictators like Mobutu adroitly used Cold War rivalries between the superpowers to skew the system. Aligning himself with the West, Mobutu enjoyed such generous financial and military support from Washington that he became untouchable. He used these resources to do something no Congolese leader had ever been able to do – to run the vast country as one single fiefdom, centralising so much power that it became effectively impossible for any dissenting rivals to oust him for decades. By distorting the old rules, the post-colonial period became one of anarchy and decay.

  Modern weapons made it almost impossible for Mobutu to be removed, so if you could not beat Mobutu’s methods, there was only one realistic option – copy them. By raiding the national treasury he made sure government employees went without pay. How could one expect an unpaid soldier in the army of the Congo to behave correctly when every other member of the military system followed the country’s leader and simply helped themselves to whatever they could get away with? The corruption that travellers to the Congo have experienced since the early Mobutu reign is an exercise more of self-preservation than of exploitation. If government officials at the airport were not being paid, then it made sense for them to graft cash from anyone unfortunate enough to cross their paths.

  The picture on the priest’s table was the first official portrait of Mobutu I had seen during my trip. Mobutu spent his thirty-two years in power inflating the cult of his own personality, claiming this country as his own personal plaything. His picture hung in every official building; newspapers covered every detail of his life, no matter how mundane; his name was attached to any large bridge, sports stadium or other construction project embarked on during his rule; and national television broadcast his image day in, day out. Just seven years after Mobutu’s departure I found that almost all traces of his cult had disappeared.

  It was rather unsettling to see him there in the priest’s house. Here was an icon of modern African evil, an individual who did more than almost anyone else to set the Congo and the wider region of central Africa on its downward spiral.

  It was an early official portrait, taken in the first few years of his rule when he still called himself Joseph-Désiré Mobutu and described himself as President of the Congo. Some years later, in the 1970s, Mobutu embarked on an Africanisation programme to strip away the remnants of colonial nomenclature. He reinstalled the river’s ancient name, Zaire, and named his country after it. Western Christian names were ordered to be replaced by authentic, tribal names, so Joseph-Désiré Mobutu became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, which translates as ‘the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’. And he dropped Western clothes, preferring what he presented as a more genuine African look of short-sleeved, safari-style tunic, capped with his trademark leopardskin hat.

  ‘I keep it to remind me of the old order. Back in the 1960s this country still had hope. But then, around the time of this picture, it began to go wrong,’ Father Adalbert said.

  I looked closely at the portrait. Mobutu had adopted a very presidential pose, turning his bespectacled and very young face – he could only have been in his thirties when the picture was taken – away from the camera with studied nonchalance. He was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant general, a rank he thought more appropriate for a head of state than the rank he reached as a colonial paramilitary under the Belgians. Under their rule, he made it to sergeant major, still an impressive feat in a colonial force where black recruits were banned from holding the rank of officer. There was a gold chain of office hanging across his smart military tunic, red
flashes on the tips of his collar and rank after rank of medals. This man had almost single-handedly destroyed any chance Congo once had of developing as a normal nation. I found myself shivering in spite of Ubundu’s tropical heat.

  The priest could offer me no food or supplies. He apologised but explained that every two months he would send someone on the roughly 300-kilometre round trip by bicycle from Ubundu to Kisangani to buy essentials like flour, sugar and oil. When I arrived, he was at the end of his two-month cycle and his supplies were out. All there was to eat was some banana fried in palm oil. I noticed that he kept every door locked in all the church buildings, including his house.

  ‘You have to remain prudent every day. Really, you must leave as soon as you can.’ He did not sound inhospitable. He sounded genuinely worried that it would be safer for me if I left Ubundu.

  When I explained my plan to meet up with the aid workers from Kisangani delivering vaccines, he said he knew where they would have spent the night and sent a messenger on foot. While waiting for the messenger to return, I flicked through a pile of old magazines that I had found in the front room of the priest’s house. One was called Zaire Afrique and clearly came after Mobutu’s temporary name change from Congo to Zaire. Inside were earnest articles about some of the crazier aspects of Mobutu’s misrule, such as the period in the early 1990s when he thought it a good idea to allow one of the country’s provinces, Kasai, to issue its own currency in parallel to the main national currency, the Congolese franc. It was cloud-cuckoo-land economics but it met with the approval of the Congolese economist writing in the magazine, who praised Mobutu’s sagacity and grasp of macroeconomics.

  Ubundu had no working cars, so when I heard the sound of engines approaching later that morning, I guessed they belonged to three motorbikes from the International Rescue Committee. This was the same aid group that had put me up in Kalemie, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, so I felt as if I was meeting members of the same family when they circled in front of the house. The riders, all local Congolese from Kisangani, had exactly the same Yamaha bikes that Benoit and Odimba had used to bring me from Lake Tanganyika to the Congo River, complete with the same livery of mud splatters and crazy luggage arrangement of jerrycans and plastic bags strapped down with old inner tubes.