Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

  ‘We were told to look out for someone staying with the priest, but to be honest I did not think you would make it. Where have you come from?’ Michel Kombozi grinned as he shook my hand. When I told him I had come from upriver, his eyes opened wide in amazement. ‘We come here every two months or so to deliver medicines to the local clinic, but we have never heard of anyone coming here along the river. I thought it was much too dangerous.’

  Michel was a big man, a father of nine children back in Kisangani. He was as purposeful and efficient as Benoit, ordering one of his colleagues, a cool-looking man who wore a reversed baseball cap, and wrap-round sunglasses, to strap my gear to his bike as quickly as possible. Father Adalbert continued to look anxious. He was genuinely worried that my presence in Ubundu would cause trouble, so after thanking him I urged Michel to leave as soon as possible. He did not argue. Above the revving engine I heard him shout, ‘The distance is only a hundred and forty-three kilometres to Kisangani, but the track is bad so it takes all day. Let’s go.’

  The three IRC riders showed the same skill and strategy as Benoit and Odimba. Once we got going, they were reluctant to stop for anyone or anything. So after leaving Saint Joseph behind, they started threading their way quickly through the narrow footpaths criss-crossing Ubundu, splashing through puddles, sending chickens squawking out of our way in feathery explosions, and using the momentum from the bikes to surf along the lips of huge muddy furrows carved in the track by rainstorms. I saw a man with a gun take a second look at us after he spotted my white face riding pillion, but before he could raise his weapon we had already moved out of sight. After the torpor of Kindu and the crawling pace of the pirogue, I relished the sense of being on the move again, even though our progress was hardly swift.

  Within moments of leaving Ubundu we entered full rainforest. There were trees so high I could not make out any detail of the leaf canopy tens of metres over my head. Some of the trunks were pleated into great sinews that plunged into the earth, as massive and solid as flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral. And high above my head, but beneath the gloomy leaf canopy, I could make out boughs as square and broad as steel girders.

  The going was much slower than in Maniema and Katanga because the forest here was that much more fecund. Stanley had had a grim time of it here too, dragging his canoes around the seven stretches of cataracts that make up the Stanley Falls. Whenever he left the river, his expedition had to expend huge effort hacking a path through the fringe of the rainforest, along which they could portage their canoes to the next stretch of navigable water.

  The track I was travelling along was the remnants of the main road between Ubundu and Kisangani, which used to have regular four-wheeled traffic back in the 1950s. During my research for the journey, I had had a bizarre exchange with officials from the British government’s foreign-aid arm, the Department for International Development (DFID), in which they assured me the road still existed and was already being upgraded, following the 2002 peace treaty, using British government funds.

  This sounded like good news for my plan to travel through here, but when I pushed them a little harder, the DFID people admitted that they had no further information and that I should speak to a UN official appointed as their agent. In spite of various messages and telephone calls, no-one at DFID was able to track down this mysterious agent and the whole experience left me feeling despondent at the efficacy of the aid effort in the Congo. Here was an important piece of infrastructure – a road around one of the biggest sets of cataracts on the river – and here was one of the world’s most experienced aid providers, DFID, and yet there was a terrible disconnect somewhere. I was saddened by the thought that the DFID people back in London were attending meetings, summits and seminars at which they assured the colleagues in the aid community that the Kisangani–Ubundu road upgrade was in hand when, as I was finding out, this was not the case.

  There was absolutely no work taking place on the road. The advancing jungle had choked it to a single-track footpath, snaking around mature trees growing up from the centre of the old carriageway and past vast mudslides and dramatic rockfalls. Bridges had been washed away, making us pick our way down to the bottom of water courses and then charge up the other side. Recent rains made the whole exercise a dirty and dangerous one as the bikes slithered in the glutinous mud time and again, often pitching me onto the deck. One fallen tree caused a twenty-minute delay as the only route for our convoy of three bikes was up and over the top. This meant unloading everything, carting it over to the other side and then heaving the bikes over the fallen trunk, all the time sliding in mud that stood no chance of drying out because the dense leaf cover kept out any direct sunlight. The sticky heat felt as if we were toiling inside a hothouse.

  At one point an obstacle made us stop in a thicket of giant bamboo. Canes as thick as my leg sprouted close together before splaying out as they grew longer and thinner. I spotted a long, thin black line that looked like a gunpowder trail from a western movie. Walking closer, I saw the line begin to move. At first it shifted as one, but as I got nearer it separated into millions of component parts – a column of ants.

  ‘Get away, get away,’ Michel shouted at me. I had heard stories of Congolese ant columns descending on villages and eating everything in their path. Infants, the elderly and the infirm will perish if left to be consumed by the column. A hunter told me that he would prepare the trophy from an antelope hunt by deliberately finding one of these ant columns and then throwing the dead animal’s skull into its path. When he came back the next day, the bone would be spotless, stripped of every last piece of flesh and gristle, tendon and tissue.

  Stupidly ignoring Michel, I approached to what I took to be a safe distance and started taking photographs. Within seconds I had a bite on my knee, and then one on my thigh, then another on my back. As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my trousers I brushed them off like soot. It took ten minutes to undress and rid every last ant from the creases in my clothes. The worst of the bites stung for days.

  From time to time we would spot other road users, pedestrians carrying heavy loads or pushing bicycle frames laden with food. Just as earlier on my trip, these people carried possessions that belonged not to today’s world, but to an earlier time. Loads were wrapped in old leaves and then bundled up with woven grass into primitive rucksacks carried on a headstrap reaching round the forehead. Several of the walkers had large African snails stuck to the side of their leaf bundles. The snails did not have to be tied on, as their gooey, muscular foot kept them firmly attached until the moment when they were taken off and cooked. The only other food we saw was cassava paste tied in small rectangular leaf packets. Cassava smells pretty rich even when it has just been cooked, but this stuff was even more rank having been carried for days, unrefrigerated, along the sweaty jungle floor.

  I saw a husband and wife plodding along at the pace of one of these mealtime snails. Both were carrying heavy loads borne on headstraps of fibrous bark reaching under the baskets and then around their foreheads. They were sweating heavily and after I persuaded Michel to stop, I took a hold of the man’s basket. I could barely lift it and he was carrying it for 143 kilometres, the distance clocked by my bike’s odometer between Ubundu and Kisangani, with the entire weight borne by his neck.

  I asked the man about an atrocity that happened on this very track in early 1997. Thousands died when a column of Hutu refugees from Rwanda was attacked by rebel forces loyal to the new Tutsi regime in Rwanda. For a few weeks around the end of March and beginning of April, aid workers described what happened here as one of Africa’s worst war crimes. I wanted to know what impact it had had on the local community.

  The man listened to my question and thought for a moment before shaking his head.

  ‘I come from Ubundu, but I don’t know what you are talking about. There have been many attacks and many massacres. When it happens we flee into the bush, but nobody ever knows the details.’

  I was stu
nned. An hour later we stopped in a trackside village called Obila. The IRC maintained a solar-powered fridge there inside a thatched hut to preserve vaccines and medicines, which are given out at a clinic of other thatched huts. Again, I asked about the 1997 massacre. Again, my question was met with shrugs.

  It taught me a lesson about one of the Congo’s chronic problems, its lack of institutional memory. The loss of life during the slaughter on the Ubundu–Kisangani road was of the same order of magnitude as the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, and yet in the Congo there were no repercussions. There was no memorial, or historical account of what happened, or court case to hold the perpetrators to account, or international response. The killings simply got lost in the Congo’s miasma of misery. I wondered what hope there can be for a place if such lessons from the past are never heeded.

  It was during this part of the journey that I had one of my most profound Congolese experiences. Since we left Ubundu several hours earlier we had seen nothing but forest, track and the occasional pedestrian or thatched hut. The scene I saw in the twenty-first century was no different from that seen by Stanley in the nineteenth century or by pygmy hunter-gatherers over earlier centuries. It was equatorial Africa at its most authentic, seemingly untouched by the outside world.

  Suddenly, our convoy stopped. One of the bikes needed refuelling, or one of the riders had taken a tumble, I don’t remember. What I do recall was the sense of Africa at its most brooding. The engines had been switched off and the silence was absolute. There was no birdsong, no screech of monkeys. Everything edible had long since been shot or trapped for the pot by local villagers, and the thick canopy way above our heads insulated us from any sounds of wind swishing branches or rustling leaves.

  The ground was brown with mud and rotting vegetation. No direct sunlight reached this far down and there was a musty smell of damp and decomposition. Above me towered canyons of green, as layer after layer of plant life filled the void between forest floor and treetop. I felt suffocated, but not so much from the heat as from the choking, smothering forest.

  I took a few steps and felt my right boot clunk into something unnaturally hard and angular on the floor. I dug my heel into the leaf mulch and felt it again. Scraping down through the detritus, I slowly cleared away enough soil to get a good look. It was a cast-iron railway sleeper, perfectly preserved and still connected to a piece of track.

  It was a moment of horrible revelation. I felt like a Hollywood caveman approaching a spaceship, slowly working out that it proved life existed elsewhere in time and space. But what made it so horrible was the sense that I had discovered evidence of a modern world that had tried – but failed – to establish itself in the Congo. It was a complete reversal of the normal pattern of human development. A place where a railway track had once carried trainloads of goods and people had been reclaimed by virgin forest, where the noisy huffing of steam engines had long since lost out to the jungle’s looming silence.

  It was one of the defining moments of my journey through the Congo. I was travelling through a country with more past than future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but backwards.

  The railway track belonged to the Equator Express, a line built by the Belgians to circumvent the Stanley Falls, cutting straight through the Equator. Katharine Hepburn described taking the train to The African Queen set, and the grim conditions during the eight hours it took the train to cover just 140 kilometres. Some of the film crew members tried to deal with the heat by pouring buckets of water over themselves, but she judged it a waste of time because the effort of raising the bucket made you sweat even more, so she sat in a puddle of inertia willing the journey to end.

  I heard a rumour that an enterprising Belgian official had placed a plaque alongside the rails to mark the exact spot where they cut the Equator. I would have liked to have tried to find the sign, but our bike track had deviated far from the overgrown railway line at the relevant place. I had to make do with holding my GPS device in my hand as I bumped along behind Michel on his motorbike and praying that it would work. I had used it to follow my journey from Kalemie, six degrees south of the Equator, and wanted to know the exact spot where I would cross from South to North. But to function it needed to pick up signals direct from a satellite and the thick tree cover meant the machine had trouble registering a signal. I cursed.

  Then all of a sudden we reached an opening in the tree canopy and a clearing on the ground for a village. The machine pinged into life and the screen registered a long line of noughts. I was smack on the Equator on the noughth degree of latitude. I tapped Michel on the shoulder and asked him to stop so that I could find out the name of the village, Batianduku, which enjoys the status of straddling the Equator and being in both the northern and southern hemispheres.

  The journey continued with the same rhythm of all my Congolese motorbike experiences. I would peer over the shoulder of the rider, trying to read the track so that I could brace myself for the next pitch forward or lurch to one side, through a blurred tunnel of forest green whipping past the periphery of my vision. Green, green, green, broken only occasionally by the brown of mud huts in a village clearing before more green, green, green. The odometer on the bike’s handlebars counted down the kilometres to Kisangani, but the more I stared at it, the slower it seemed to move. In the end I stopped looking, my mind too numb to care.

  And then, with a rush of light, the forest curtain was lifted and we reached one of the great jungle cities of Africa. Initially I felt excited, but disorientated. The buildings, the wide roads, the crowds of people and moving cars made me feel a little giddy. Kisangani was built mainly on the right (eastern) bank of the river and our track had brought us to the less-developed left bank. Pirogues ferried people backwards and forwards and these were special pirogues, very different from the ones I had used upstream, because they had outboard motors.

  The sun was setting behind us by the time we had found one to ferry our bikes across the Congo River and, with the sun on my back, I had time to prepare myself for the big city. It felt like a moment of discovery. After weeks of mud huts, jungle tracks and hollowed-out canoes, I had found a pocket of modernity. The city docks glowed in the soft light to reveal a line of crane gantries on the wharf, an impressive cathedral with twin towers, a miniature version of Notre-Dame, and even some high-rise buildings. And in my pocket my mobile phone chirruped back into life.

  10.

  Bend in the River

  Final cataract in the Stanley Falls as recorded, above, by H.M. Stanley in 1878 and, below, by the author in 2004

  MY EUPHORIA AT reaching Kisangani did not last long. The gentle sunset on that first evening might have given it the appearance of a regular city, but as I explored I found it to be a shell, prone to spasms of brutal anarchy and chaotically administered by inept, corrupt local politicians. And it owed what little stability it had to the artificial props of a large UN force and foreign aid workers.

  For the first days I was in recovery mode. I checked into the most lavish hotel the town could offer, the Palm Beach, which at $75 a night gave me comforts I had not enjoyed for weeks: a bed with laundered sheets, a shower, a door with a lock. It was built at the end of the Mobutu era and was already more than ten years old, but the two-storey structure was the most modern in the city. Skirmishes during the wars following Mobutu’s death had imbued the hotel with quite a reputation – the bodies of eleven Ugandan soldiers killed in the grounds were stored for days in a bathroom because the kitchen refrigerator had been destroyed, and I kept hearing sketchy and unverifiable accounts of a foreign journalist whose dead body had recently been discovered in one of the rooms.

  None of this mattered much to me during those first euphoric days. The hotel was my sanctuary. I felt I had earned a break from the hardship of Congo travel, so I locked the room down, with the shutters blocking out the light and the noise of air-conditioning drowning out all sounds of the Congo’s second city. The bathroom plumb
ing worked and I took my first proper shower in three weeks. A few minutes later I took my second. It was only after my third that the water stopped running off me milky with grime. I looked at myself in a full-length mirror for the first time in weeks. I had lost more than a stone in weight. My face and forearms were brown as teak, but the rest of my body had the pasty pallor of unpolished marble. My spindly arms did not look as if they belonged to my body. And at the end of these unfamiliar limbs were something even stranger – claws. Ever since childhood I have not been able to stop biting my nails, but in the Congo some subliminal fear of its bugs and diseases made me stop biting. I scrubbed them time and time again, but for weeks they would not lose a grubby tinge of brown. None of these bathroom shocks could keep me from sleep. To the hum of the air-conditioner, I collapsed onto the bed and did not stir for fourteen hours.

  The hotel even had a functioning restaurant. On my first morning I thought I had slept through breakfast, but a waiter in a black bow tie assured me all was in order and ushered me to a table with a clean, white tablecloth. The breakfast menu was short – fruit and eggs – but that was not the point. I was ordering food from a functioning kitchen, a very different experience from what I had encountered so far. The waiter brought me a place setting and on the saucer was a paper sachet of instant coffee. Some of the best coffee in the world used to be grown near Kisangani, but now the finest hotel in the city served only imported Nescafé. I had been longing for a cup of coffee and I felt a bit crestfallen. But all was forgotten when a plate of pineapple arrived. It was the sweetest, smoothest pineapple I have ever tasted. I could feel my internal battery indicator flickering from the red to green as the sugars ran into me.