Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

  Only a handful of foreigners remain in Kisangani today, from a population that once numbered more than 5,000. During my stay I saw plenty of outsiders, but they were almost all aid workers or UN people, working on short-term contracts, whose experience went back just a few months or years. Many were hard-working, deeply committed to helping the local people, but pretty much all of those I spoke to found the scale of the humanitarian problems simply overwhelming. I heard heartbreaking stories about corrupt Congolese officials pocketing aid money intended for local public-health workers, and local soldiers not just looting aid equipment, but brazenly asking for cash to hand it back to its rightful owners. Many in the aid community spent their time counting the days until their contracts were up and they could go back to the real world.

  Yani Giatros’s attitude to Kisangani was very different. He was born in the Congo in 1947, part of a once-huge Greek expat community who had set themselves up as traders, mechanics and farmers during the Belgian colonial period. So large was the Greek community in Kisangani that the city boasted a Hellenic Social Club with restaurant, bar and sports facilities. By the time I got there, the club was barely functioning, but its lunchtime moussaka buffet was one of the few palatable meals available in the entire city.

  ‘Where logic ends, the Congo begins,’ Yani said as he bent his face down to spoon up some moussaka. He peered at me over his spectacles as I made my notes.

  ‘I was born here in the Congo. When my parents took me as a child back to Greece, it was more primitive than here. I used to look forward to coming back to the Congo because it was more advanced than Greece. Can you imagine that?

  ‘This city alone used to have a regular flight by a plane spraying for mosquitoes. Every day trucks would drive around the city sprinkling water on the roads to stop the dust rising. You could pick from six cinemas. Eros was my favourite. The whole city centre was electrified. Right at the end of the colonial period, in the 1950s, they put in a hydroelectric power station on the Tshopo with four generators, which was enough for the whole city.

  ‘But even if you accept the fighting, the wars and the struggle for control, what do you have today? Nobody with any interest in making this place work, apart from a few aid workers.’

  Yani raised his eyes and a club waiter came running with a bottle of Primus. He lit a cigarette and drew heavily on it before leaning forward conspiratorially.

  ‘You see him?’ he asked quietly, flicking his eyes in the direction of a photograph of the country’s president, Joseph Kabila, catapulted into the job in his twenties after his father, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated.

  ‘What skills does he have to run a country like this, or even a place like Kisangani? In all his life he has never been here, and this is the second city of the country he is president of. It is ridiculous. Christ, before his father took over this country, the young Kabila was driving taxis for tourists in Tanzania, and now he is meant to be a national leader!’ His harrumph of scorn was so loud it made the waiter jump.

  ‘Who is there who actually wants this place to work? I don’t see anybody. Let me give you an example. An aid group went to the Tshopo power station in the last couple of years. They found three of the four generators were broken, so they raised the money and shipped replacements to Matadi, the country’s main port down near where the Congo River reaches the Atlantic. And they flew in engineers to Kisangani ready to fit everything.

  ‘So what happened? The customs, the officials, the people down at Matadi blocked the generators from coming in. The foreign engineers got more and more frustrated until they eventually left, God knows where the new generators ended up, and the lights still go out here in Kisangani.’

  He leaned forward again, fixed my gaze and whispered.

  ‘The Congo was built with the chicotte, and the only way to rebuild it will be with the chicotte.’ He was referring to a whip made from dried hippopotamus hide, which the early Belgian colonialists used savagely when dealing with their subjects in the Congo. Even today, almost fifty years after the Belgians left, the chicotte endures as a sinister symbol of their brutality.

  After two weeks of delay in Kisangani, I finally got the news I had been praying for. A Congolese boat, under charter to the United Nations, was heading downriver to Mbandaka, more than 1,000 kilometres downstream. The journey could take a week, maybe longer. I did not care. I was on the move again.

  To secure a place on the boat I needed the assistance of Robert Powell, the UN’s transport boss for Kisangani and a former soldier in the British Army. He helped me through the final stretch of the bureaucratic paperchase needed to travel on the UN boat, before giving me the most unexpected experience of my fortnight in Kisangani. Robert is a plain-speaking Yorkshireman and an advocate of the British Army adage ‘any fool can be uncomfortable’. In the remote city where I had lived in an austere priest’s cell on a diet of fruit and cassava bread, Robert made sure he was true to his word.

  The house he occupied had been turned into a palace by local standards. He had a generator, a fridge full of freshly imported meat, South African satellite television, air-conditioning and no end of other luxuries. I spent my last night in Kisangani enjoying his ribald company and ploughing through a mountain of sausage and ‘bubble and squeak’, prepared, as my host boasted, ‘like my mum taught me back home’.

  After dinner we found a shared interest to talk about: fishing. In South Africa fishermen get excited if they catch a two-kilo Tigerfish. Robert explained how everything was so much bigger on the Congo River where a separate species, the Goliath Tigerfish, reaches upwards of fifty kilos. I was sceptical until he showed me pictures of specimens that had been caught in the nets of local fishermen. They were as big as children, with ugly-looking teeth and sinister eyes. We spent the rest of the evening plotting how to take one of these leviathans on rod and line, idly dreaming about running fishing safaris out of Kisangani for multimillionaire anglers.

  After my night of Yorkshire hospitality there was just one more thing I needed to do in Kisangani. I wanted to say goodbye to Oggi. We met in the bar of the Palm Beach Hotel. When I explained that I had got a place on a boat heading downstream, he smiled half-heartedly. He seemed a bit distracted as if he had something important to say to me, but could not quite come out with it.

  As the Primus flowed, Oggi became more and more nostalgic. He told me stories of how hardy tourists arrived here in the 1980s, coming through the jungle on overland Africa tourist trucks all the way from Europe, and how he took them out for day trips on the river. It reminded me of an elegant film poster I had once seen advertising a French movie about a pan-African journey in the 1950s. The poster showed the continent in outline with a thick red line snaking down from Tangier, Africa’s closest point to Spain, across the desert sands and then through the equatorial jungle before eventually reaching Cape Town at the southern heel of the continent. A few place names were marked on the poster, and I clearly remember that Stanleyville was one of them, just another waypoint on a road that once traversed the entire continent.

  ‘Those trucks stopped coming in the late eighties,’ Oggi said. ‘The forest ate those roads, and the problems with corrupt officials meant our city was slowly written off the map.’

  Oggi’s fluent English was entirely self-taught. He was tough – he had lost count of the malaria episodes he had survived. And he was resourceful – somehow he fed his family and kept them clothed without any meaningful income. But just like Georges, Benoit and many other Congolese I had met, all his energies, skills and talents were spent on the daily struggle to survive. The failure of the Congo is so complete that its silent majority – tens of millions of people with no connections to the gangster government or the corrupt state machinery – are trapped in a fight to stay where they are and not become worse off. Thoughts of development, advancement or improvement are irrelevant when the fabric of your country is slipping backwards around you.

  After enough Primus to make his eyes rheumy, Oggi found the
inner strength he had been looking for. He put his hand on my forearm, leaned forward and made the most wretched of pleas.

  ‘Please, Mr Tim, I have a huge favour to ask. My son, my four-year-old, has no future here. There is nothing for him in Kisangani. I know which way this city is going. Please will you take him with you to South Africa and give him a new life.’

  There was no way I could smuggle a child onto the UN boat with me. I felt wretched having to turn Oggi down. But I felt more wretched that he had to resort to asking me, someone he had known for only a few days, to save his child from the Congo.

  11.

  River Passage

  Goliath Tigerfish from the Congo River as recorded, above, by H.M. Stanley in 1878 and, below, by the author in 2004

  I STOOD ON the deck of the river boat watching the gap widen between me and the crumbling Kisangani quayside. There was a gaggle of Congolese stevedores sitting in the shade of an idle crane, but next to them I could make out a solitary figure lift up his sunhat with studied extravagance, bow and wave me bon voyage. It was Robert. While he helped with my final, rushed preparations, buying bags of rice and boiling up a jerrycan of clean water, I noticed he seemed a little sad, jealous even.

  ‘We’ve never had a civilian person travel downriver before,’ he confided forlornly. ‘I had always thought I would be the first to leave here by boat. But somehow I never found the time.’

  Time is something you need a lot of to travel the Congo River. I was embarking on a 1,000-kilometre journey from Kisangani to Mbandaka and I had been warned it would take at least a week and potentially much longer if we ran out of fuel, hit a sand bank or became snarled on any of the river’s other hazards. And even if I made it to Mbandaka, I would still have another 700 kilometres or so of river descent before reaching Kinshasa.

  I stood watching Robert’s figure get smaller and smaller as the boat made its way over to the deep-water channel on the far side of the river from the UN dock. We had started the journey pointing upriver towards the lowest cataracts of the Stanley Falls. I was straining to spot their broken white water in the distance when our skipper spun the wheel, pointed the bow downstream and ramped up the throttle. For a second I felt a bit unsteady as the boat’s entire superstructure began to vibrate, but gaining my river legs I shifted position so that I could watch the Kisangani waterfront for the last time.

  There were the cranes that had so impressed me when I first reached the city, but which I had later discovered to be useless, broken beyond repair. And there was the cathedral, where Father Leon had led the memorial service in 1964 for his murdered missionary colleagues, whose bodies were brought by barge across this same reach of water to the stone steps that I could see leading down the river bank to the water’s edge in front of the cathedral. And there were the squalid ruins of the ‘L’Hôtel Pourquoi Pas?’ with the balcony where Katharine Hepburn once took the evening air and, just to the left, the even more squalid collection of leaking, disease-ridden, overcrowded hulks of the port.

  The city where I had been trapped for two frustrating weeks slipped steadily by until, without fanfare, it vanished. All that was left was a thin line of trees below an arch of empty sky. No buildings, no people, no smoke, nothing to suggest I was close to one of the great cities of Africa, home to one million-plus souls. Its disappearance was so immediate, so complete that I stood disbelieving for a few minutes, rocking gently with the motion of the deck. Perhaps I had dreamed it all. Perhaps the hollowed-out city had been nothing but a ghostly mirage all along.

  Like the vessels that I had seen in Kisangani’s port, the boat I was travelling on was, strictly speaking, two boats. The front was a massive barge, red with rust and slightly scraped and battered at each end. It was thirty-eight metres long, but had a draught of only thirty centimetres, crucial for the shallow water of the upper Congo River during the dry season, when sand banks loom dangerously close to the surface. The only permanent structure on its entire length was a grey cubicle that looked and smelled like a public lavatory. It protected a gangway down into the barge’s storage compartments.

  To the barge’s stern was attached the second boat, the pusher, named Nganing. It was dwarfed by the hulking barge and had only three modest decks: an oily, smelly engine deck with two large, rattling diesel motors, a cabin deck with just one cabin, and on top a one-room wheelhouse where the helmsman sat. It had no radar equipment, no radio and only the most rudimentary control panel. There was a tiller wheel, an on/off switch and a throttle. The helmsman even had to bring his own high wooden chair to sit on. Next to the hulking barge, the Nganing looked tiny.

  Both the barge and the pusher were genuine Congolese river craft, normally based in Kinshasa and leased by the United Nations as part of a strategy by MONUC to restore confidence in river travel. The Congo River and its many huge tributaries are as potentially useful today as they were when Stanley first charted them. He reported to Leopold the existence of a massive network of navigable waterways, waiting to pump modern commerce and economic development across a swathe of equatorial Africa larger than the entire subcontinent of India. The Congo River system is potentially one of the most valuable natural assets in all of Africa, but in recent years it has been choked to a standstill by war and mismanagement.

  Since the 1990s, boats that once plied thousands and thousands of kilometres of navigable river have idled in the docks of Kinshasa as the Congolese authorities effectively ceded control of the river. During the Belgian colonial era various national institutions were established to open up the river network, but they had all been allowed to collapse. Ferries run by the national transport company, ONATRA, stopped running as the staff went unpaid and the poorly maintained boats broke down. The national navigation company, RVF, stopped marking and dredging a safe, navigable channel on the waterway, making passage hazardous. But the demand for river travel did not diminish. The collapse of the Congo’s road system meant that the river was the only way to travel for millions of Congolese. So when the occasional boat did venture upstream, it would be mobbed by people. Overloaded boats would capsize or become trapped for months on sand banks. If passengers did not drown, they faced other hazards. Insanitary conditions on overcrowded hulks, like the barges I boarded at Kisangani’s port, often proved fatal. Food poisoning and dysentery would break out on the slow, sweaty river passage and it was not uncommon for scores to die from disease on a single journey, their bodies tipped into the river as the boats crawled between towns where public hospitals had long since closed.

  The wars of the late 1990s only made things worse. Various factions hostile to the Kinshasa regime began to attack any boat that ventured upstream, so by 2000 the river was effectively closed, plunging the Congo River basin back to the same state described by Conrad in the nineteenth century, ‘the blankest of blank spaces on the earth’s figured surface’.

  After the 2002 peace treaty, the Congolese authorities declared the river open again, but there were few boat owners brave enough to risk sending their vessels hundreds and hundreds of kilometres upstream on journeys where it was impossible to guarantee fuel or security. The UN stepped in to try to reinvigorate the river. MONUC had flown in enough people and equipment to ensure fuel supplies in places even as remote as Kisangani, so it leased ten sets of pushers and barges and sent them chugging up the waterways of the Congo River basin, flying the UN flag and trying to give the impression that all was normal and safe. Each boat had a local Congolese crew, a small deployment of UN troops for protection and a MONUC naval officer in overall command.

  To restore confidence was the mission. As my journey unfolded I saw the humbling scale of the Congo River and how a fleet of ten boats was much too modest to restore confidence across a river system largely in the same primitive state Stanley found when he paddled downstream for the first time in 1877.

  As with so many projects on UN missions, money was no object. The tiny boat I was on had been leased for $35,000 a month, an obscene sum for such a basic vess
el. The local crew – a skipper and six deckhands, who all had experience of Congo river boats from the days before the war – were meant to be under the command of the senior MONUC officer onboard, a lieutenant commander from the Malaysian navy, Mohammed Yusoff Sazali, who liked to be known as Ali. But it soon became apparent who was really in charge. Ali struggled to communicate with the Congolese crew. He spoke only a few words of French and I watched as the Congolese skipper, Captain Jean Paul Mbuta Monshengo, an untrustworthy-looking man with a lazy right eye, carefully chose which of the words he would understand.

  Our departure from Kisangani had been delayed by one day in mysterious circumstances. Captain Monshengo had declared there was a problem with one of the diesel generators on board, but he would task his best engineer to sort it out as soon as possible. After a delay of exactly twenty-four hours, without the need for any spare parts or, indeed, any apparent effort by the engineer, the problem was rectified and we left, a day behind the MONUC schedule.

  As I got to know Ali, he took me into his confidence and explained what had really happened.

  ‘We were due to sail on a Tuesday from Kisangani. We have been here for several months now, the only UN boat so far upriver, so the crew had plenty of time to get everything in order. But the problem was that Monday was the monthly payday and the Congolese crew had gone into the city to spend. They all have second wives and girlfriends here, parallel homes from their other homes downriver, so they had personal business to attend to. They were too busy to leave as scheduled, but once they had sorted out their mamas here in Kisangani, everything was okay and we could leave.

  ‘I have been here long enough to know what the skipper was up to. And he knows I know what he is up to. But there is nothing I can really do about it. I carry no weapon and all I have is the authority of the UN mission, which does not count for very much when you are hundreds of kilometres away from a friendly face, far up the Congo River.’