by Tim Butcher
I spent the first day or so in Kisangani locked in my room. I slept a lot, washed repeatedly, and laundered my filthy clothes in the bathroom. But most of all, I gathered my thoughts about what I had been through and primed myself for the next challenge. I wrote up my daily notes and used the luxury of the hotel’s electricity supply to fire up my computer to edit the digital photographs I had taken. I unfolded my maps and tried to estimate how much more time I would need. It had already taken me three harrowing weeks to cover 1,200 kilometres and I was still not even halfway towards my endpoint, the port of Boma near the mouth of the Congo River. But I consoled myself that nobody had expected me to make it this far and, anyway, the really dangerous bit was now behind me. Surely, my ordeal could not get any harder.
When I planned my trip, I pictured Kisangani as a major milestone on my attempt to follow Stanley, not least because for sixty years the city had borne his name. As a cartographical tribute paid to the explorer for his role in staking the Congo for the Belgian king, the city was called Stanleyville, until it was changed to Kisangani in the 1960s.
Sitting in the dark and cool of my hotel room, I reread Stanley’s account of his trip and how he dared not dawdle when he first passed here.
It had taken him weeks to descend the seven sets of rapids in the Stanley Falls. There were chaotic moments when some of the expedition canoes were caught by the current and dragged into the white water, drowning crew members. Stanley expressed regret whenever he lost one of the crew, but he sounded just as annoyed when one of the expedition’s rifles was lost overboard. One lucky man survived only because he clung to a rock in midstream, just above a cauldron of white water. It took Stanley and the other team members several hours to rig up a rope long enough to reach the man and persuade him to let go of the rock and trust they would pull him to safety. Time after time Stanley’s team had to portage the Lady Alice and its flotilla of canoes around white water, and time after time the expedition fought with local tribes.
The river was inhabited by the same Wagenia fishing tribe that Stanley had clashed with hundreds of kilometres back upstream near today’s Kindu. Jungle drums used by the Wagenia had brought news of an expedition of outsiders coming downriver. Earlier raiding parties by Arab slavers had taught the Wagenia that strangers brought trouble, so when Stanley’s expedition came into sight the first reaction from the locals was hostile. As war canoes were launched from riverside villages, Stanley lined up his flotilla in attack formation, with the Lady Alice in the lead and his pillaged canoes, including the Telegraph, spread out behind. During his river descent Stanley described thirty-two pitched battles and, while he enjoyed a military advantage in the modern rifles his expedition was equipped with, when he ventured ashore to portage his boats he often lost members of his expedition to tribesmen, expert at using the jungle as cover and deadly with bows and arrows carrying poisoned tips.
The town begins right at the bottom of the last set of falls, and when Stanley reached this place he described how he took immediately to the open water, safe at last from attack on the river bank. The expedition paddled as fast as it could out into the middle of the river and did not set foot on the right bank where the city of Stanleyville was to grow. Instead the expedition began the longest river stretch of their journey. It would be 1,734 kilometres before the river was blocked again by rapids near the country’s capital, Kinshasa.
I sat in my hotel room, a hundred metres or so from the river, and plotted how I would follow him downriver. First, I would go and look for a Wagenia fisherman called Oggi Saidi.
A South African television reporter had recommended Oggi to me. In 2003, after the peace treaty was signed, he had flown to Kisangani to travel downriver in a kind of homage to Conrad. The river passage from Kisangani to Kinshasa has been one of the great African journeys since Conrad immortalised it in Heart of Darkness. Conrad began life as a merchant sailor and, more specifically, a professional skipper of steamboats. Steamboat crew in the late nineteenth century played a pioneering role in the Scramble for Africa as the continent fell under white rule, and in the early days of the Congo Free State, when Leopold’s agents developed the colony for the Belgian monarch, skippers were at a premium. Conrad was one of many hired for duty on the Congo River.
In the first part of the twentieth century, regular ferry services covered the 1,734 kilometres between Leopoldville (Kinshasa) and Stanleyville (Kisangani) in less than a week, for those who wished to emulate Conrad. But the journey became more hazardous and intermittent after independence in 1960, and during the war that began in 1998 river passage was utterly impossible.
The South African television reporter had spent months of pleading with corrupt government officials before he found a boat descending the river, but he only got as far as Bumba, a few hundred kilometres downstream from Kisangani.
‘It was the worst experience of my entire career reporting on Africa,’ he said. ‘But if you are going to stand any chance, then go and find Oggi. He knows the river as well as anyone.’
After several days of recovery in the Kisangani hotel, I felt strong enough to search for Oggi. My advice had been to go to the main fishing village closest to the falls and ask there. The village was located just above the cataracts that could be seen from the town centre, so one clear, sunny morning I set off on foot. I walked past the Falls Hotel, once the most glamorous establishment in Kisangani, but now a ruin swarming with prostitutes. Several of them were out on their tatty balconies and when they saw me, the only white man on the street, they started wolf-whistling and cooing terms of endearment in fluent Russian. Clearly, the charms of the Falls Hotel were enjoyed by the aircrew from the former Soviet Union, who fly contraband in and out of Kisangani. Opposite the hotel was a large plinth where a statue of Stanley had once stood. It was taken down shortly after the Congo became independent, and the plinth now bears a plaque commemorating not the nineteenth-century explorer, but the aid group that recently refurbished a water spring below the spot where Stanley’s likeness once stood. When I passed by, some of the women from the hotel were scrubbing their underwear in the spring water.
Behind me I heard a tramping of feet and a chorus of chanting male voices. The street cleared of pedestrians and the washerwomen scuttled back across the road to the hotel. Round the corner came a terrifying sight. About fifty men, wearing ragtag clothes and scraps of military uniform, jogged slowly past in formation, responding as one to the calls of their leader running alongside. Their synchronised footfall and voices had me cowering behind the plinth where the statue of Stanley once stood. It felt for a moment as if the spirit of the old man, my Telegraph predecessor, was looking out for me. Kisangani was supposedly run by a mai-mai general promoted to city commander under the terms of the 2002 peace treaty, but in reality various military formations still lurked in the shadows. From time to time different units would go on the rampage, killing and looting with impunity. No wonder the people I saw on the street fled when they heard the approaching soldiers and it took several minutes for the street to return to normal once they had passed.
It had been a mistake to search for Oggi on foot. The air was still and the heat difficult to bear. Within minutes I was covered in a slick of sweat. My skin was as slimy as a cake of soap left too long in water. For a short distance I followed a tarmac road, the first I had been on since Lubumbashi. I could see it was being eaten away at the edges. Locals were using the hard surface of the road to sharpen their machetes, knives and other blades, rubbing away the tarmac surface little by little, slowly sending this modern road the way of the railway track I had seen lost under the forest floor. After a kilometre or so I picked up a footpath snaking through a patch of tall grass in the direction of the falls. The sun was fierce and the humidity cruel. The pace of my walking slowed as the rate of my breathing surged.
Stanley left this spot in a hurry when he passed here in January 1877, but he found time to describe the fishing methods of the Wagenia around the main cataracts and e
ven illustrated his book with an ink drawing of the scene. I held up the sketch and found nothing had changed. There were the same wooden frames erected near the water’s edge, made from entire tree trunks driven into cracks in the rock. Attached to the frames, suspended four or five metres above the ground, were specially made tapered rattan baskets, with a wide opening at the upstream end, but narrowing to a tight knot in the downstream direction. When the water level rose, fish would be washed past the gaping mouth of the basket and would become trapped in the narrow section, unable to swim back up against the weight of water.
I was there in early September, when the water level was at its lowest. The dry season south of the Equator was nearing its end, so this was off-season for most Wagenia fishermen, but I had a good view of the wooden frames hung with their basket traps. Fishermen were already clambering over them, reattaching baskets and refastening joints in preparation for rising river levels later in the year.
I walked across exposed flanks of the black rock, which, in a few weeks, would be underwater. Eventually I came to the edge of the lowest rapids, where the entire upper Congo River came crashing through a 200-metre-wide cleft in a rock shelf, throwing up a pleasantly cooling spray and churning the brown water into a creamy white lather of eddies and wavelets stretching hundreds of metres downriver. Stanley took great pride in the discovery of the falls that even today bear his name, describing them as more impressive and powerful than any others he had seen during his African wanderings:
The river at the last cataract of the Stanley Falls does not merely fall; it is precipitated downwards. The Ripon Falls at the Victoria Lake outlet, compared to this swift descent and furious on-rush, were languid. The Victoria Nile, as it swept down the steep declivity of its bed towards Unyoro, is very pretty, picturesque, even a sufficiently exciting scene: but the Livingstone [Stanley’s name for the Congo River] with over ten times the volume of the Victoria Nile, though only occupying the same breadth of bed, conveys to the sense the character of irresistible force, and unites great depth with tumultuous rush.
The ‘tumultuous rush’ was a stark contrast to the placid body of water down which my pirogue had travelled. Enjoying the cool of the spray, I watched a few bold fishermen working their pirogues from below the falls into the white water, paddling furiously to make progress against the current and then launching small hand-nets over the side.
‘The fish that live in the biggest current are the strongest,’ said a voice. It belonged to a barefoot fisherman wearing torn red shorts who had joined me on the ledge.
‘Do you know Oggi Saidi?’ I asked.
‘Of course. Everybody here knows Oggi. Come with me.’ He put down his hand-net and led me back across the black rock. We had only walked about a hundred metres when we approached a small man with a tiny head, wearing a smart blue shirt.
‘I am Oggi. How can I help?’ His words startled me. He was speaking fluent English.
Oggi could see I was struggling in the heat, so he invited me to his home, a thatched mud hut in the main fishing village, Binakulu, within a few hundred metres of the cataract. We were just two kilometres from the city centre, but the village was as primitive as the settlements I had passed deep in the jungle. Oggi explained there was no mains water in the village and so the entire community used the river for drinking, washing and sewage. He shrugged and explained that dysentery was common and malaria endemic. In fact his first son, just four years old, was suffering from a bout of malaria.
He gave me a small wooden stool to sit on in the shade of a tree as I explained my journey, following Stanley’s route all the way downriver from Kisangani to the Atlantic Ocean, still more than 2,000 kilometres downstream. When I told him how his name had been given to me by the South African journalist, he dropped his gaze for a second and rocked his upper body forward.
‘Yes. I remember that journey to Bumba. It was a bad journey, a really bad journey.’
Undeterred, I said that I had spent three weeks slogging all the way here from Lake Tanganyika and I was anxious to find a way downriver. When I finished speaking, he hesitated before replying.
‘I know this river as well as anyone. The reason I speak English is that back in the 1980s and early 1990s there were tourists who used to come here, English-speaking tourists. I would take them down the river on boats or sometimes I would take them fishing on pirogues, but the war brought chaos to the river. I have never known it as bad as today. There are no regular boats from Kisangani, and at this time of year, with the water level so low, boat owners do not like to risk their boats. There are sand banks and if you make a mistake you can lose your boat for ever. We can go down to the main port in the city and ask if any boats are moving, but you must understand, it is going to be difficult.’
My euphoria at reaching Kisangani was now fully spent. I might have made it further than any foreign overland traveller in the Congo for decades, but Oggi suggested that my ordeal was far from over.
The next day we went in search of a river boat heading downstream. I had expected we would need to go to the large concrete quayside that I had seen when I first reached Kisangani, the one with the line of cranes. But it turned out this was the property of the Congolese armed forces, who were hostile to anyone trying to tie up alongside, so civilian boats were tied up a kilometre or so downstream along a muddy stretch of river bank. To get there we walked past the remnants of the two-storey hotel where the stars and film crew of The African Queen had stayed in the early 1950s. At the time it had the rather sweet name of ‘L’Hôtel Pourquoi Pas?’. On arrival, Katharine Hepburn had been incensed to find she had been fobbed off with a ground-level room and had immediately pulled rank over the film’s accountant, who had been given a first-floor room with a balcony overlooking the river. She had the bean-counter summarily evicted before installing herself in what she described as a charming room with a pleasant view.
Today ‘L’Hôtel Pourquoi Pas?’ is a broken ruin, home to scores of squatters who sleep on the bare floor next to walls stained with damp, and who light fires where the Oscar-winning actress once unpacked prodigious amounts of luggage, full of the latest tropical outfits designed by the smartest London couturiers.
A little further along the river bank, I saw what I initially took to be a graveyard of wrecked river boats. There were rusting hulks haphazardly tied together by a web of knotted hawsers and cables, bedecked with large pieces of plastic, which had been stretched out to provide shade for gaggles of wretched-looking people living on the decks. It was a floating shanty town.
‘Welcome to the port of Kisangani,’ Oggi said formally.
The stench was incredible. The people under the shades had been living here for months. The river bank was sloppy with raw sewage and I could see a malodorous slick that leached into the river downstream from the boats, too viscous for the current to disperse. Stepping delicately through a minefield of human waste, I made it to a wobbly-looking gangplank connecting the river bank with the first hulk. It creaked under my weight, but with a lunge I reached the rust-brown deck and looked around.
Faces, faces, everywhere. A few turned to look at the white stranger, but most just stared forlornly out over the river. Mothers breastfed babies. Other women stirred pots of cassava on wood fires lit straight on the deck. Men sat in dirty singlets, eyes dull with boredom. It was crowded, chaotic and grim. Only one area of the deck was free of people and I saw why. Some sort of gummy oil had weeped from a split rattan basket onto the deck and the sticky, sweet mess had attracted a thick cloud of angry bees.
I heard Oggi questioning various people and saw them all pointing in the same direction, to the outermost hulk, furthest from the bank. Jumping over hawsers and stepping between the different deck heights of the parallel boats, I followed Oggi. By the time I arrived, he was already in earnest conversation with a man who introduced himself as Simon Zenga and described himself as the Person Responsible for the motorboat Tekele. I queried him. Does that mean you are the captain? No,
he replied. I am the Person Responsible.
It was a term that carried the stamp of Belgian colonial rule. The Belgians ran the Congo on a strict hierarchy, from white bosses down to black underclass. The level of Person Responsible was a middle-ranking tier that was neither as powerful as the boss nor as weak as the underling. The Mobutu regime had made a lot of noise about ridding the Congo of the old trappings of empire. But in reality the old colonial hierarchies had proved to be just as useful for the African dictatorship.
As Oggi and Simon continued their discussion, I slowly made sense of the chaos around the port. The boats were, strictly speaking, not boats at all but barges – vast, flat-bottomed hulls with roofs, but no engine. These were the things that I had taken to be abandoned hulks. They had no cabins, no fittings, no furniture, no lighting, no portholes, no paintwork. They were just floating boxes made of sheet metal, rusting away in the tropical heat. For power they relied completely on tiny tugboats, or ‘pushers’ in the vernacular of Congo boatmen. Dwarfed by the barges, the pushers were much more important as they actually had engines and could both drive and steer the barges.
At the end of the barge I was now standing on, attached by some taut hawsers, was the motorboat Tekele. It was old, rusty and very, very small. Against the river vastness it looked like a toy, and yet the Person Responsible promised me that with enough fuel and a skilful navigator it could push its barge for ‘the 1,734 km’. He was referring to the journey from Kisangani to Kinshasa, where every last kilometre had once been marked on river charts.