Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

  Whenever I left the sanctuary of the mission I felt a degree of fear. My Congo mantra – towns bad, open spaces good – was reinforced daily as I got caught up in the white noise of corrupt bureaucracy that mars life in any large Congolese town. In order to walk down a city street in the Congo you have to get your paperwork in order. And by paperwork, I don’t mean a passport to prove who you are. You need permission from state-security apparatus to be in a certain place at a certain time. I found it all very tedious and coercive, but I was by now too used to it to get angry. I plodded between the various buildings claimed by the Congolese government machine – the provincial governor’s secretariat, the director of the immigration office, the local military commander’s headquarters – and had various pieces of paper stamped, counter-signed and authenticated. The offices were in run-down, water-damaged buildings with no computers or phones, but they were invariably occupied by an apparatchik quick to frown, shake his head and demand payment.

  I was warned not to take any pictures in town. UN officials had been bundled out of cars and had their cameras stamped on by aggressive Congolese gunmen for having the temerity to take a souvenir photograph. So I plodded the tatty streets of Kisangani, honing my Congo Survival Skills, looking not staring, pausing not dwelling, chatting without questioning.

  It was clear why the government apparatus extends to Kisangani – it is a place where easy money can be skimmed from local miners who dig diamonds out of alluvial deposits along local river beds. During the recent wars Ugandan and Rwandan troops had occupied the city to get their hands on its diamond wealth. And under the terms of the peace treaty that ended the recent war, Rwanda sought to keep hold of its diamond income through the well-armed militiamen it kept in the city.

  The diamond industry in Kisangani was as chaotic as the cobalt mining in Lubumbashi. It relied on artisanal miners scouring through the shingle of river beds for rough stones and then bringing them into town to sell the diamonds to dealers. But even if it was an industry that worked in a piecemeal, hapless, chaotic way, it was clearly profitable.

  The diamond dealerships were easy to spot. They were the only freshly painted buildings in town. The façades were decorated with brightly painted garish images designed to tempt anyone with a diamond to sell. My favourite had a two-metre-high cartoon image depicting a man, dirty and sad, carrying an angular diamond in his hand, followed by the same man, clean and with a sparkling smile, running along with a sack in his hand marked with a dollar sign. I stole glances inside these establishments, but was too scared to enter. They invariably had a phalanx of dangerous-looking Congolese men slouching on chairs in the shade out front, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses. A handful of Lebanese traders braved the gangster’s life of Kisangani diamond trading, buying up roughs before smuggling them out of the airport north to Sudan or east to Uganda, and onward to be resold, cut and sold again, an industry dependent on a web of bribes, tips and pay-offs here in Kisangani.

  There was only one city-centre restaurant, a drab, modest-looking place, which people came to more for its Primus than its food. It was run by Sridar, a deferential Indian in his late twenties who swayed his head like a bobbin when he spoke. He was a relic from a once-huge Indian-subcontinent community that first arrived by boat at port cities such as Mombasa and Dar es Salaam before percolating right across the continent. During the colonial era they filled a lower-middle-class stratum deemed too menial for the whites and too sophisticated for the blacks. They were the shopkeepers, the foremen, the general traders of colonial Africa and, when independence came, they were often persecuted by Africa’s new native leaders, resentful of their once-superior status. The hero of Naipaul’s A Bend in the River is one such trader, who drives from the coastal home where his family have lived long enough to regard themselves as African, all the way to the city on a great river, deep in the rainforest. Sridar made me think of this character and his struggle for identity as darker forces rip the city apart, destroying his sense of connection with Africa.

  ‘Welcome, welcome, you are most welcome,’ Sridar said when I first met him. ‘I have just opened this restaurant and we have big plans. I work for my uncle, who owns a general trading shop. But I told him we could make money from a restaurant as well.’

  ‘Are you not worried about what happened here to your predecessors, shopkeepers and traders over the past few decades?’ I asked.

  ‘I know nothing of them. I have just got here. I am sure if we work hard we will make good business.’

  Sridar did not have to look far for his first lesson in the perverse character of commerce in the Congo. Near his place I visited a few general stores, crammed with Chinese-made mattresses, flip-flops and imported tinned food. Everything was hugely expensive because, without any meaningful flow of river traffic or passable roads, it all had to be flown in. And the transport costs were then inflated by the need to pay off customs officials, immigration officers and the like. The crazy thing was that the shops that actually contained anything, the general stores, were deliberately tatty and unpainted, an inversion of the Western commercial model that uses bright lights and adverts to draw customers in.

  In Kisangani, the last thing a shop owner wants to do is advertise that he has stock. This would only attract the looters and robbers. A general store has a lot to lose if it is raided, whereas a diamond trader, who would never be so foolish as to leave gems in his shop, brightly advertises his business. If his shop is looted, all the robbers would find are a few tatty chairs or pieces of furniture.

  There was one other thriving business, a shop belonging to a mobile-phone company. Like many other cities in Africa, Kisangani had benefited from the communications revolution. No longer do African regimes have to spend vast sums maintaining land lines and telephone exchanges, exposed to the perils of looting or climate damage. A few mobile-phone beacons, powered by solar batteries, cost a fraction of the old, fixed system. And the cash earned by mobile-phone systems is much easier to control. Gone are the days of relying on a failing mail system to send bills to users of landline systems to chase up payment for calls already made. Top-up cards have to be paid for in advance. Mobile-phone networks are among the most cash-rich and fast-growing businesses in today’s Africa. It is no wonder that the sons, nieces and confidants of Africa’s dictators vie for ownership of mobile-phone companies.

  In Kisangani, I learned the double-edged character of instant communication, the way mobile phones can make you feel both in touch and isolated at the same time. I would go into the phone shop in the city centre, closing the door behind me, and pause under the downwash of air-conditioning, before paying for my next top-up card. I could then speak to Jane back home and hear about a world I had been detached from for weeks. During my journey up to that point there had been occasions when I had felt alone, but I had never had time to dwell on them because of much more dominant feelings of anxiety, fear or exhaustion. In Kisangani I had plenty of time to myself, and being able to speak to Jane so easily served to magnify my loneliness. The presence of a phone in my pocket, on which I could speak to her at any time, left me feeling more powerless and alone than if I had no means of communication. To hear about her normal day, her frustrations with the Johannesburg traffic, how our dogs had played up on their walk in the park or any other mundane detail of home was pure agony.

  Jane could tell something was up. She tried desperately to keep my spirits up, enthusing about my achievement in reaching Kisangani along Stanley’s route and encouraging me to wait just a little longer to see if some sort of river boat might appear. But the Congo was such an abnormal place that I found it distressing to hear from her. I was in a world where Jane and our lovely shared life simply did not belong. I missed normality so much that it was painful and, as I spent long periods in my priest’s cell staring at her photograph, for the first time on my journey I started to seriously consider giving up. Unlike the remote places I had been passing through, Kisangani was connected to the rest of Africa through i
ts airport. As the days of waiting passed, it became more and more difficult to bear the knowledge that in just a few hours I could escape this Congolese chaos and rejoin the world of that photograph.

  The nadir to my despondency came on one of my morning walks along the bank of the Congo River. I had been to check on the boats at the port, but the Tekele had not moved and there was still no certain news of when she might sail. Making my way up to the UN headquarters to see if there was any word about one of their barges heading downriver, I noticed the view over the river looked very different. It took a few seconds to work out what was different but slowly it became clear. An enormous boat had moored, a tanker so large it changed the entire shape and topography of the bank as if a new section of developed land had miraculously appeared next to the river bank overnight. Where there had been mud and water, there was now angular metal and broad, open decks, all painted blue in the livery of Cohydro, a Congolese petrol company, and the name Mbenga was printed clearly on the wheelhouse.

  The sight alone made my heart race. This boat was larger and more riverworthy than anything I had seen in ten days. It had arrived unannounced and I had no idea when it might leave, but for the first time in days I felt a surge of optimism.

  Then began the most wretched twenty-four hours. I boarded via a gangplank and a crew member pointed me in the direction of the engine room to find the skipper. I found him a touch officious – he refused to give me his name – but I was willing to overlook this when he said he would be leaving for Kinshasa the following morning. First I asked to be allowed to sail with him, then I pleaded and finally I begged. It was humiliating but, worse still, it did not work.

  ‘I do not have the authority to let you travel on this boat. You must speak to the Person Responsible for Cohydro here in Kisangani,’ the captain said, in a most irritatingly officious voice.

  I ran back up the river bank and went in search of the offices of Cohydro. Cars are a rarity in Kisangani, affordable only by foreign aid groups and the occasional diamond trader, so I jumped on the back of a toleka, one of the bicycle taxis that swarm the streets. They are chunky, Chinese-made bikes, with a padded seat carried on a frame welded above the back wheel. In Swahili, toleka means ‘let’s go’, so shouting ‘toleka, toleka’, I urged my pedaller to find the Cohydro offices.

  News of the arrival of the Mbenga had already reached the Kisangani headquarters of Cohydro. It consisted of an old petrol-station forecourt and a nearby room. By the time I got there, a crowd of several hundred people had gathered at the petrol station carrying old plastic bottles and there were even a few sinister-looking cars in line, their windows too tinted to see who was inside. The boat’s arrival indicated a rare delivery of petrol in Kisangani and people with motorbikes, generators and vehicles were anxious for fuel.

  As I paid my toleka man, there was a fracas in the crowd. It happened in a flash, but I had a clear view of a woman standing in the queue squawking as she looked in amazement at her handbag on her hip, inside which was the hand of a street-boy, no older than ten. Immediately he tried to run. The woman squawked louder still. The crowd surged. A leg appeared and tripped the pickpocket. And then the crowd surged again, swallowing him up, and I could hear blows landing on the boy and a scream that started loud and clear, but then became faint and gurgling. Then the mob parted and there was the boy, with his arms twisted behind his back and the foot of a man, a petrol attendant in Cohydro cap and uniform, stamped firmly on his neck. The boy’s mouth was bleeding and the side of his face was squashed flat on the uneven concrete of the forecourt. It was a scene I had witnessed numerous times during my stint covering Africa. Quick and brutal, African mob justice is a terrifying thing.

  I was too preoccupied by my own emergency to worry about the boy’s plight. The opportunity I had been waiting for was within reach, so I turned my back on the boy and went in search of the Person Responsible for the company. Eventually I found him, Mr Mosinde, and pleaded to be allowed to travel downriver on his company’s boat. He was not interested. He referred me to his boss in Kinshasa, and though I was able to get through on my mobile phone, he referred me, in turn, to his superior, and then he to his, and so on.

  It was heartbreaking. To know there was a decent boat about to leave for Kinshasa was just too tantalising. All afternoon I fretted over phone call after phone call, desperate to find the person with the right authority. But a slow, growing ache in my guts told me I was wasting my time. Still, I persisted, trying to ignore the gut-ache and wasting top-up cards, trying in turn to sound polite, obsequious, deferential. By evening the people I had been calling in Kinshasa had turned off their phones. I had failed.

  It was masochistic, but I made sure I was there on the river bank the following morning when the Mbenga unmoored, swung into the current and set sail downstream. I was left staring sadly at a bare, muddy river bank, feeling lower than ever.

  And so my wait continued. I passed my time in Kisangani trying to track down people who could tell me about its past, people like Clement Mangubu, a local historian and academic. I was trying to find out if Kisangani had any sort of institutional memory. The history of the city is rich and turbulent, but I wanted to see how well it was remembered by local Congolese. Clement worked at Kisangani’s university, but I did not find him there. The buildings had been abandoned so long ago that three dormitory blocks, dating from the early Mobutu era, had mature trees growing from their roof gutters. When I eventually found Clement, he told me he had published a book on the history of Kisangani. Perfect, I thought. Here is the person to make sense of all the chaos.

  ‘There can be few cities in the world with a history more bloody than Kisangani,’ he said portentously, when we first met at the mission house. ‘From the time of the Arab slavers, through the wars between the Belgians and the Arabs, the colonial era and to everything that has happened since independence, the one common theme is blood.’

  He explained the city’s early history well, how the land became known as Kisangani once the Arab slavers arrived here in the years after Stanley’s expedition. The name means ‘on the island’ in Swahili. Clement explained how the city is surrounded on three sides by water: the Congo River to the west, and the Tshopo, a tributary of the main river, to the north and east. In effect, he said, Kisangani was really a synonym for Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers.

  When Stanley came back here in the 1880s, commissioned by Leopold to set up the Congo Free State, he brought with him a Scotsman, Adrian Binnie, to build the first settlement on the land next to the bottom of the Stanley Falls. Binnie must have been extraordinarily tough to accept such a task, the real-life precursor for Conrad’s fictional spectre, Mr Kurtz. Various wars followed: fights between the Wagenia and rival tribes connected with the advancing Europeans, and then skirmishes between the Arab slavers and Belgian colonial officers, two of whom drowned in the Congo River. The fighting got so bad that ten years after first crossing the Congo, Stanley sailed all the way to Zanzibar for a peace conference in 1887 with Tippu-Tip. The pair had met during Stanley’s foot march from Lake Tanganyika to the upper Congo River and Tippu-Tip had since established himself as leader of all Arab slavers in eastern Congo. More than a century later in the summer of 2000, the UN Security Council met in not dissimilar circumstances, issuing a resolution specifically designed to end the bloodshed in Kisangani. It is a rare and dark honour for a single city to be the focus of its own UN Security Council Resolution.

  Clement explained the racist character of colonial Stanleyville, where black Congolese had to apply for written permission even to walk the streets of the city centre, and how the rumblings of a national independence movement first stirred here. Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s post-independence Prime Minister who was later assassinated on the orders of America and Belgium, was based in Stanleyville in the 1950s, working as a post-office official, when he first began organising a national, Congolese political party calling for an end to Belgian rule. Again, there were killings here,
this time by Belgian security forces cracking down on Lumumba’s nascent Congolese National Movement (MNC), an event commemorated by the large Martyrs’ Square in the city centre just next to the ruin of the main post office where Lumumba worked.

  The square has seen plenty of martyring since independence. After his assassination in 1961, Lumumba’s supporters set up their own parallel government here, and there were bloody skirmishes in the square between them and troops loyal to the capital, Kinshasa. Rebel groups came and went, white mercenaries stormed the city centre, and foreign armies invaded. Clement’s account of it was hazy, but I could not criticise him for this. In a nation with little institutional memory, it would be wrong to blame him for not keeping track of this city’s history. The numerous rebellions, uprisings, mercenary raids and invasions blurred into one grim, bloody continuum.

  A few days later I dragged Clement to the city’s main post office in search of any evidence of Lumumba. The country’s postal system had not worked for decades and the same 1950s building where Lumumba had worked was a terrible mess. Windows were smashed, the sorting hall sorted nothing today but dust and cobwebs. Entire corridors and rooms had been surrendered to the ravages of tropical damp. But when I asked an old man hanging around the main entrance about Lumumba, there was a flicker of recognition. I was shown a dirty old office and told this was where he had worked. It was empty apart from a desk with an old Bakelite phone connected to a line that had not functioned in living memory. And when I asked if there were any other artefacts from Lumumba’s time, I was shown the cover of a quarterly postal-union magazine entitled The Postal Echo. The innards had long gone, but on the cover was printed ‘Managing Editor: Patrice Lumumba’.

  From this now-ruined building Lumumba had dreamed of independence for the Congo and the end of eighty years of colonial tutelage that began after Stanley’s expedition passed down the nearby Congo River. And it was outside this building that Lumumba’s dream died, in round after round of bloodletting in Martyrs’ Square.