by Tim Butcher
‘We are the outermost boat because we are the next one planning to leave,’ Simon said, stirring my interest.
‘When?’ I asked eagerly.
‘In the next few weeks.’
‘How long will it take you to go the whole 1,734 km?’ Excitement was welling inside me.
‘At least four months, but we will have many stops and we might not even go all the way down to Kinshasa …’ He was still speaking, but disappointment had temporarily deafened me.
Back at the hotel, Oggi and I found solace in a bottle of Primus, the local beer. It has been brewed in Kisangani since the colonial era, and across the Congo it enjoys the status of a national institution. During my research most people with any direct experience of the Congo mentioned Primus. During the various wars and periods of turmoil here, just about the only thing that remained open in the city was the brewery, churning out Primus lager in large, brown litre bottles that bore the name not on a paper label, but on a stencil of white letters glazed direct onto the glass. There were legendary stories about bottles of Primus being opened to reveal human nails inside, or insects, or other detritus too gruesome to go into. But the point was: while every other factory in Kisangani collapsed, the Primus brewery plodded on, filling, recycling and refilling the bottles, time after time, year after year, crisis after crisis.
Each bottle I drank seemed to have its own story. The tiny chinks on the lip or missing letters on the stencil told of boozing sessions and bar fights through the city’s turbulent past. Drinking a bottle of Primus in the sweaty heat of Kisangani made me feel more in touch with the country’s recent history than almost anything else I did in the Congo. And another thing – it tasted great.
Smacking his lips lavishly after a gulp direct from a bottle, Oggi reiterated that the low water level meant the larger boats rarely moved up as far as Kisangani for fear of being beached on a sand bank at this time of year. He said he was not surprised that the smaller boats like the Tekele were the only ones that attempted the journey and that four months was a normal journey time.
‘A small boat like the Tekele does not make money from a single cargo. It is too small to carry a large amount from Kinshasa to Kisangani. So it makes its money on a thousand small cargoes, cramming in people and their possessions for just a few kilometres here and a few kilometres there. If you ever see a river boat like the Tekele moving, there will be a hundred pirogues hanging off it at any one time, their paddlers using it to save the effort of paddling a few kilometres. But it means a boat like the Tekele would stop at every town, every village. There will be problems with fuel and navigation. A journey on a boat like the Tekele takes a long, long time.’
I ordered another Primus, discarding the old bottle and with it the hope of travelling with the Tekele.
‘Okay, so what are my options for going downriver?’
Oggi thought for several minutes.
‘We can try to find a way to get you to Bumba. It is the first large town downstream, three hundred and fifty kilometres away from Kisangani. If you went by pirogue it would take at least a week, but maybe we could try to hire a motorised pirogue from the local priests. I know they have one, but they would charge eight hundred to one thousand dollars for the fuel alone. But the problem would remain that when we get to Bumba, we would have to wait there for another boat like the Tekele.’
I could feel my Congo despondency beginning to resurface. And then Oggi made a final suggestion.
‘Or you could ask the UN. Every few months I see one of their barges and pushers arriving here. Maybe you would be lucky with them.’
Like all other UN buildings I had visited in the Congo, there was something unearthly about the headquarters in Kisangani. The tidiness, the cleanliness, the flicker of computer screens all belonged to a world very far removed from planet Congo. I was welcomed by Ann Barnes, a tall, elegant British woman who worked as senior administrator. She was too charming to say anything about my malodorous, grubby appearance and seemed genuinely interested as I explained that I was trying to follow Stanley’s original route and that passage downriver was the key. Like every other foreigner I met in Kisangani, she expressed astonishment that I had arrived here overland rather than via the city’s airport. She could not have been more helpful, promising to make a formal request through the UN channels, but also pointing out something I was familiar with already: that the organisation’s bureaucracy worked very, very slowly.
So began weeks of waiting in Kisangani. Like a supplicant on a daily ritual, I would begin each morning plodding between Kisangani’s port and the UN office, begging for news of a boat heading downstream. My overland ordeal reaching Kisangani had given me a strange feeling of superiority. It was a much stronger version of that felt by the rucksack-carrying overlander, recently arrived at a remote location, over another traveller who arrives at the same spot by air. I felt something similar, only much, much more powerful – a sort of cockiness, almost an aloofness. Without regular river traffic or road connections, Kisangani had been effectively cut off for years. This had made it shrink in on itself, most of its people never venturing far beyond the city confines. Except for a web of dangerous footpaths used by a few tough, foolhardy bicycle-porters, it had no overland connections with the outside world. And the foreigners who come here did so by aircraft.
Just a few months before my arrival, people had died on Kisangani’s streets during rioting sparked by the Bukavu incident. Congolese people were venting their anger at the killings committed there by Rwandan-backed rebels. The Congolese government might be inept at running the country, but it is adept at dodging blame, so it used the government-controlled media to direct the people’s rage against the United Nations, blaming foreign outsiders for failing to protect Bukavu. Popular anger against the UN spread across the country, but nowhere was the anger more intense than in Kisangani, where UN buildings were torched and property looted. The peacekeepers fled and an unknown number of local Congolese died in rioting as the mob’s anger was turned against all things foreign. Aid groups had their offices and warehouses ransacked and what passes for the Congolese authorities did nothing to stop it. Indeed, there was plenty of evidence of the local soldiers and police taking part.
The violence was simply the latest in a long series of spasms that had wrecked Kisangani over the last fifty years. Squabbles between occupying soldiers from Uganda and Rwanda had developed into all-out battles on the streets of Kisangani on several occasions between 1999 and 2002. The troops had come here as part of their respective homeland’s pillaging of the Congo’s resources. Witnesses described the river nearby running red with blood when bodies scraped off the roads were tipped into the water. On another occasion, Rwandan-backed rebels slaughtered dozens of Congolese in the city after a series of protests at Rwandan occupation.
Those killings were just a continuation of what had gone before. In the early 1990s when Mobutu’s rule began to crumble, Kisangani suffered as much as any Congolese city from what locals refer to as the Mass Lootings or Grands Pillages. These were the episodes of anarchy sparked by the growing sense that Mobutu’s corrupt rule was spiralling towards collapse, when the army and police followed the example of the country’s leader and simply helped themselves to whatever could be pillaged. Local people in Kisangani cannot agree on how many Mass Lootings took place there. Some say three, others four. And no-one agrees how many bodies, yet again, were collected from the streets of Kisangani and cast into the river.
And in the decades before – the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s – the city suffered bouts of anarchy, captured by V.S. Naipaul in his book A Bend in the River. He described the bloodletting when ancient tribal anger clashed with the modern regime of ‘The Big Man’, the soubriquet given by Naipaul to the African dictator, who plundered the riverside city deep in the jungle, allowing mercenary forces to run amok, killing with impunity.
But the most notorious violence to grip the city came when it was still known as Stanleyville, in the turbulent yea
rs just after the Belgians reluctantly gave independence to the Congo. Here was established one of the most brutal, even clichéd, snapshots of African violence: the slaughter of missionaries and the rape of nuns. And the person who gave me an account of exactly what happened was a venerable, timeworn Belgian missionary with a throaty chuckle, who had lived through the whole horrible episode.
Father Leon has called the Congo his home since arriving here in 1947 at the age of twenty-six. Born in Brussels, he followed a well-trodden path exporting Christian enlightenment to his country’s African colony. Historians have found plenty of evidence of collusion between Belgium’s established Church and the colonial authorities in the Congo, of the Church being used to justify cruel acts of subjugation, but I was prepared to believe the man I met in the Kisangani headquarters of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was just a well-meaning foot soldier in Christianity’s long battle for the soul of Africa.
I met him in strange circumstances. After five nights at the Palm Beach Hotel in Kisangani my cash had begun to run low and I had grown fed up with the din from hookers, aid workers and assorted hangers-on who gathered nightly in the hotel restaurant. I needed to find a place to stay that was cheaper and more peaceful.
The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus were one of the first Christian communities to reach Stanleyville. They arrived here shortly after the turn of the twentieth century and have witnessed every subsequent episode in the history of the city. Other missions had come and gone, but the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus were still hanging in there in 2004, running a skeleton operation, but obstinately refusing to surrender a century’s work. They ran the last, large mission in the city and they had a few guest rooms at the back of their property where I was offered accommodation. On the first afternoon in my new digs, I heard a chuckle in the courtyard and went out to investigate.
Father Leon was having his snow-white hair cut by Father Wilson, a tall, strapping Brazilian missionary in his late forties. The old man looked tiny as he bent his head forward meekly so that his colleague could get at his neck, and the pair were clearly in high spirits. I could see the shoulders of Father Leon shuddering as he laughed.
‘Yes, of course I remember what happened in those dark days in 1964,’ Father Leon said later as we shared a bottle of Primus on the steps of the mission station. His sharp, spiky haircut made him look younger than his years.
‘By that time I had been in the Congo for almost twenty years. When I first arrived as a missionary, I was met by my brother, who was already working in the Congo as a colonial officer. For my first year or so I lived at the mission station in Ponthierville. It was very peaceful, very pleasant.’
His description made me think of what I had found when I had passed through what was once Ponthierville, the ruined town I knew as Ubundu and from where I had been told to flee for my own safety. I struggled to recognise Father Leon’s description.
‘And then I was moved here to Stanleyville to teach. The Church decided where we would go and when I received my orders, I would go.’
He was describing an almost military hierarchy for the missionaries, who were deployed hither and thither from his headquarters in the city. The missionaries were expected to obey instructions like soldiers, sent off into the forest at a moment’s notice, often for years at a time. It fitted with what I had already seen in the centre of Kisangani of the Church’s main building, a vast, fortress-like brick structure right next to the river’s edge. More of a bunker than a spiritual centre, it had survived all the riots, pillages and street battles that the city had seen.
‘After five years’ service, we are given six months’ leave and I remember it must have been after my third leave that I got back to Stanleyville in 1963. My colleague, a Belgian missionary called Heinrich Verberne, was meant to go to the mission at Opiange, a very remote place many days’ travel from the city. But he was ill and I was sent instead.’
For the first time, the twinkle dimmed in Father Leon’s eye as he got to the point of his story.
‘It cost Father Heinrich his life. I was sent to Opiange and he stayed behind here in the city and was caught up in the rebellion.’
He was beginning to lose his flow, so I tried to prompt him gently back on course.
‘Which of the rebellions are you talking about?’ I asked.
‘The big one, the Mulele Mai rebellion after independence, when the Congo began its big decline.’
Weeks earlier, back in Kasongo, I had seen the graves of Belgians who died in the Mulele Mai rebellion. Here in Kisangani, the bloodletting had been much worse. Father Leon explained.
‘We heard on the radio there were problems, but we did not know how bad. I was with an Irish missionary out at Opiange and we thought we were safe because we were so remote, but then one day in October or November of 1964 some Congolese men with guns came and said they had orders to bring all missionaries to Stanleyville. This must have been at the end of the rebellion because, by the time we got here, the other missionaries like Father Heinrich who had been caught here in the city had been taken by the rebels from the city centre to the left bank of the river, just across the water there.
‘We were held in a room, along with other white people for a few days, but the situation was not that bad. We had water and a bit of food. But then came the day of the twenty-fourth of November 1964. I can remember it like it was yesterday.
‘It was a Tuesday. The Belgian paratroopers arrived, dropped by American planes, and the rebels just disappeared from the city centre here on the right bank of the river. There was some shooting in the city, but within a few hours we were free. But over on the other side of the river, the left bank, the rebels were still in control for another day or so. That was where the massacre occurred. That night they killed all the missionaries they had and, after they raped the nuns, they killed them too.’
I sat in silence, but Father Leon had found a second wind.
‘Come, I will show you something.’
He led me inside the mission house, past the refectory table where the missionaries ate their meals and through a large salon lined with dusty books.
‘It’s in here,’ he said, walking to a side-room that was full of furniture. ‘This used to be a chapel, a long time ago, but we use it now for storage. Help me move this, will you.’ I joined him heaving at a cupboard and, as it moved, I could see the wall had been decorated with hand-painted portraits of men’s faces, each in a tile-like square, which were arranged in the shape of a cross. Some of the faces were young, others old; some with glasses, others with beards; and one was wearing a topi, in the style of Tintin.
‘These were painted to honour all those who died that day, that evening on the twenty-fourth of November 1964.’
Right at the centre of the cross was the portrait of a man with round spectacles and a goatee-beard and moustache. Straining his eighty-three-year-old eyes, Father Leon settled on this image and pointed with his finger.
‘That is Father Heinrich. If he had not been unlucky enough to be too ill that time, perhaps it would be my picture up there.’
My days in Kisangani entered a grim routine made all the grimmer by my not knowing how long I would have to stay there. My priest’s cell at the mission house was small, with a cement floor and a single light bulb hanging from the roof. As the days passed, I tried to make it feel more homely. On the chair I propped the photograph Jane had presented me with before my trip. It was of her and our dogs sitting outside our Johannesburg home in bright sunshine. It was creased across the middle from where I had tucked it into my notebook. No photograph has ever given me more pleasure.
I would be woken at dawn by the sound of Joseph, the housekeeper, noisily scraping the charcoal burner clean before he prepared to light it for another long day of boiling water and preparing food. No matter how early I rose, I never managed to get up before the Brazilian priest, Father Wilson, who seemed to get even taller and more healthy-looking the longer I spe
nt there. His energy levels were stunning. Each morning I would see him clean-shaven and in a fresh T-shirt wolfing down bananas and bread, freshly baked by Joseph, before he headed off into the tropical heat, walking several kilometres to a piece of land where he was preparing the ground for a primary school. And as the people of Kisangani deserted the city’s dangerous streets each evening, I would head back to the mission house for my supper of bananas and cassava bread and find Father Wilson already installed in the mission chapel, wearing his vestments and readying himself for a long vigil of prayer.
Each morning I took breakfast with Father Dino, originally from Italy and now a robust-looking fifty-year-old. You clearly had to be physically strong to represent the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Congo. As the days passed, I began to joke with the priests about the special military-style selection they appeared to need for service in the Congo.
‘Well, it helps if you are fit. We had two young Polish missionaries here back in 2000, but the first malaria bout really got one of them and the first round of fighting got the other. Neither came back,’ Father Dino said. I thought of Father Leon arriving in the Congo in 1947 and of the disease, hunger and deprivation he had endured over the last six decades. ‘Perhaps the young priests aren’t as tough as they used to be’ were Father Dino’s last words on the subject.
The priests managed to acquire fresh beans from the last dregs of the once-thriving coffee industry in the area and they had one of those elegantly simple Italian coffee pots, with two tapered, hexagonal chambers screwed together. It was old and battered, but it worked. I have one at home and when I saw the one in the mission, steaming on Joseph’s burner, it made me ache with homesickness for my morning ritual of fresh coffee as I surfed the Internet. Like a child in a sweet shop, I guzzled way too much on my first morning at the mission and paid for it with a sleepless night neurotically guessing the time between howls from a dog chained up in a nearby yard.