Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

  It was while lying awake at night during the river passage that I thought about the world’s changing attitude to the Congo. At the start of the twentieth century, the Congo was the dominant human-rights issue of the day. What Iraq, AIDS and globalisation are for today’s campaigners, the Congo was for Edwardian human-rights groups. They were galvanised by the issue, launching unprecedented campaigns, both in Europe and America, to highlight the cruelty committed in the Congo Free State in the name of Leopold, focusing on the rubber industry and the violence unleashed by colonial agents to harvest it in the Congo. Just as campaigners today use the term Blood Diamonds to discredit gems produced in Africa’s war zones, so their predecessors from a hundred years ago spoke of Red Rubber, publishing dramatic accounts of villagers being murdered or having their hands cut off to terrify their neighbours into harvesting more rubber. Leopold’s representatives tried to suppress the flow of information emerging from the Congo and produced their own propaganda about the benign nature of the colony, but slowly and steadily, as information leaked out of the Congo over the years, smuggled out mainly by missionaries, they lost the public-relations battle.

  Campaigners calling for Congo reform lobbied MPs at Westminster and Congressmen in Washington to debate the issue. Mass meetings were held and leaflets printed denouncing the evils of the Congo Free State. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was first published in 1899 and spoke directly to the message being promoted by the lobbyists. The campaign inspired Mark Twain, the American author famous for his strong anti-imperialist views, to mock the Belgian monarch in a small pamphlet he wrote entitled ‘King Leopold’s Soliloquy’. Roger Casement, a colourful British diplomat who was to end up being executed by Britain for treason, made his name in the Congo when he wrote an official consular report in 1904 on behalf of the British government, accusing the Belgian authorities of committing atrocities that led directly to three million deaths in the Congo. In the days before the Armenian genocide or the Nazi Holocaust, Casement’s estimate was an extraordinary figure.

  So successful was the campaign that in 1908 the Belgian king was forced to relinquish control of his African fiefdom. The Congo Free State passed into the hands of the Belgian state, no longer a plaything of the monarch, but a full colony to be known as the Belgian Congo, where the authorities were supposedly more committed to protecting the rights of local Congolese.

  The international attention paid to the Congo around 1900 was matched decades later at independence. The first UN mission was covered intensely by the world’s media, as was the assassination of Lumumba, the subsequent rebellions in eastern Congo and the mercenary wars, followed by the 1965 ascension of Mobutu.

  But the thing that troubled me was why such scant attention is paid now to the Congo. According to the best estimates, since conflict began in 1998 around four million Congolese lives had been claimed (1,200 a day) and, in spite of the 2002 peace treaty, there has been no significant reduction in this daily loss of life. The international community seems to have developed a terrible Congo-fatigue, where deaths and suffering, even on the enormous scale reported by statisticians, somehow don’t register. The world seems to view the Congo as a lost cause without hope of ever being put right.

  Ali was a man happy with silence. We spent long hours in his cabin or out on deck without feeling the need to talk. But after a few days of silent bonding he took me into his confidence, showing me pictures of home in Malaysia, his wife, son and two daughters. He told me how much he was looking forward to his next leave and his plans to take his family on a beach holiday. It was only by accident that I found out he passed his thirty-ninth birthday while we were together on that boat.

  When he did break his silence, he spoke with conviction.

  ‘I don’t know what it is about these Congolese people, or Africa in general, but look at this wasted opportunity,’ he said one morning out on deck as I drank my tea, slowly coming round after another wretched night. He pointed at the river bank, which at that point was crowded with palm trees, the remnants of an abandoned plantation producing palm oil.

  ‘In Malaysia, people make millions from palm oil. It is one of the most valuable commodities in the world right now. It’s used in the best lipsticks and cosmetics, it is used for all sorts of food preparation and it is even used to make fuel that is more environmentally friendly than petrol. There are businessmen in Malaysia who would give anything to get access to the palm plantations along this river.

  ‘But the Congo people. They don’t want to make money for themselves. They just wait to take money from others.’

  I offered the standard explanation about the Congo’s problems: that the Congolese had suffered under colonialism and, when independence came, the Congo was pulled apart by forces beyond its control, as the Cold War preoccupation of the West allowed Mobutu, under American patronage, to run the country into the ground.

  ‘That is rubbish,’ Ali said. During our trip I never saw him so animated. ‘Malaysia was colonised for centuries too, most recently by the British, a colonial rule that was cruel and racist. We got independence at roughly the same time as the Congo in the early 1960s, and we were even drawn into a Cold War conflict for year after year as communist insurgents fought for control of Malaysia. But somehow Malaysia got through it and the Congo did not. Today, Malaysia is part of the rest of the world. People go on holiday in Malaysia. The world’s business community does business in Malaysia. We even have a Grand Prix every year in Malaysia. The same is not true of the Congo. How can you explain the difference?’

  Ali was almost shouting by the end of this outburst. His months in the Congo, exposed to all of its decay and waste, had clearly got to him. And he had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa?

  The Congo River was trapped in a zombie state, simultaneously dead and alive. We saw almost no other river-boat traffic in a week, but every day we would be intercepted by pirogues paddled by Congolese people from the riverside villages. They were desperate in their efforts to catch up with us. They were not just coming to trade. They were trying to leave behind a feral existence of mud-hut villages and connect with a different, modern world as symbolised by a moving motorboat.

  The paddlers would take the most incredible risks as they tried to catch us. To stand any chance of success they needed at least two paddlers, one at the front of the pirogue and another at the rear. The flanks of the barge were too high and bare for them to get a hold of, so they had to wait patiently in their pirogues until the barge had passed, rocking dangerously over its wake before paddling like fury to come alongside the pusher. Its deck was much lower than the barge, enabling the lead paddler to jump aboard and whip some sort of rope attached to the pirogue to an anchor point on the pusher. It required split-second timing, strength and considerable bravery. Sometimes the lead paddler lost his footing and simply plunged into the river, lost in the water churned white by our propellers; at other times the rope line snapped, sending the pirogue darting backwards into our wake. If the lead paddler was still onboard, he would have to jump back over the side instantly or face an uncomfortably long swim. When more than one pirogue made the attempt at the same time the result could be chaos, with rival canoes clattering into each other, crews whacking each other with their paddles as they fought for a better position, their boats flapping in our wake, in constant danger of being overwhelmed.

  The image of those who had been unsuccessful disappearing behind us comes back to me from time to time. Here were a people living alongside one of the great waterways of Africa, a potent economic asset that should have catapulted this entire region forwards, but who were left struggling on dugout canoes as the modern world steamed by.

  The paddlers who were fortunate enough to make it onto our moving boat showed that their river communities still had life in them. They came to trade. They offered food mostly – cas
sava bread, fish, monkey and white grubs as fat and long as your thumb stored in tubs of damp moss. One enterprising seller made it onboard with a pirogue full of furniture: stools of whittled branches, tables of woven rattan.

  It was tragic to watch the buyers’ market drive the prices down. Our Congolese crew were the only customers and they could simply name a price, no matter how low, confident the seller would be desperate enough to accept. The sellers knew it would be months before the next river boat passed, so they had little choice.

  Once business was concluded, the fish would be handed over, or the furniture tucked away in the hold of the barge, and the sellers would jump back onto their pirogues and face a long paddle back upstream.

  I had an understandably hurried conversation with one of our visitors, Jerome Bilole. He said he was thirty-six and had been born near the now-ruined riverside town of Isangi.

  ‘A boat like this is our only chance to earn any money. My village is like a community from the olden times, when people did not have clothes to wear. Your boat is our only lifeline.’ He then hopped back into his pirogue and cast off. The last I saw of him was when our choppy wake had passed him by and he could balance on his paddle and count the few grubby Congolese notes he had earned.

  In our 1,000-kilometre passage we passed what had once been large towns, places like Bumba. During the war Bumba fell into the hands of pro-Ugandan rebels with a reputation for being bloodthirsty. As we went by, some of its people came to the water’s edge and gave us a macabre display. They threw their heads back and drew their fingers slowly across their throats.

  ‘They tried to put some UN monitors into Bumba once, but it was too dangerous for them. They were pulled out and it does not look like the locals want them back any time soon. They don’t like outsiders very much,’ Ali explained.

  And when we passed the town of Lisala, I looked for signs of its past grandeur. Mobutu was born in this town during the Belgian colonial period, and under his dictatorship it had benefited from his patronage. All signs of this had long gone. Without any mineral resources to fight over, the Congolese authorities had abandoned Lisala completely. All that could be seen on the river bank were some rusting hulks, shrouded in algae-covered fishing nets.

  It was days before we finally saw another river boat. It was a sorry sight. A vast rusting barge, just like the one I had seen attached to the Tekele in Kisangani, was stationary in the middle of the river. I could see the current of the river was breaking around the barge’s sides. It was stuck firmly on a sand bank.

  On its deck hundreds of people sat under tarpaulins and pieces of plastic sheeting watching a tiny pusher, marked with the name Mompoto, as it tried in vain to shift the bigger vessel.

  ‘They might have to wait for the rains to raise the water level,’ Ali said.

  ‘Do you ever stop to help them?’ I asked.

  ‘If they were sinking, we would of course stop to help. But we cannot stop for every boat that sets out overloaded or without the right amount of fuel. These people are only a day’s pirogue from Lisala, so they will not starve. They must be patient.’

  It was on the third day of the river journey that I began to feel sick. It started as nausea shortly after I took my morning malaria pill. During my trip I had learned that the pills had to be taken on a full stomach or they made me feel awful, but this time I felt grim even though I had already eaten. I was groggy from another bad night’s sleep and thought at first that a day of shade and lots of tea would sort me out. I was wrong. My head started to throb, my limbs began to ache and in my heart I began to panic. We were days away from medical help.

  I started to fantasise. I had killed a mosquito in the cabin one day. It was easy to swat precisely because it had fed well and was moving slowly, bloated with blood. It had left a bloom of livid red on the palm of my hand. I began to worry that I had been looking at my own, diseased blood. How long does the malaria pathogen take to develop? How long before the first dangerous symptoms? I knew from my time in Africa that incubation takes at least a week, often longer, but, in my fried mental state, common sense deserted me. I convinced myself this mosquito had made me ill.

  Ali could not have been kinder, breaking open his medicine chest to give me painkillers, salt tablets and vitamin pills. But the feeling of sickness did not abate and I started saying no to meals and struggling to stomach water. By the seventh day of the journey I was a mess. I rarely ventured out of Ali’s cabin, clinging to the shade in my puddle of sweat, willing the boat to reach Mbandaka.

  By the time we eventually got there, a week after leaving Kisangani, it was all I could do to climb off the boat and back onto terra firma. The town sits almost smack on the Equator and has a grimly high attrition rate among its UN personnel, felled by malaria or dysentery or any of a host of other tropical diseases found in the town. Illness has clearly played a major role in Mbandaka’s history. It was leprosy that brought Graham Greene here in the 1950s when he visited a local leprosarium while researching his novel A Burnt-Out Case.

  The fabric of the town appeared to have been ravaged by disease. Like all the other Congolese towns I visited, Mbandaka lay in ruins, with potholed roads connecting tatty buildings. The only half-decent place was the UN headquarters, a two-storey disused factory that had been given a lick of paint and a strong perimeter fence. A few hundred metres from where our boat had tied up I could see a collection of rusting river hulks. Bracing myself against a throbbing headache, I made my way there gingerly to ask about river traffic to Kinshasa. The scene was exactly the same as the port in Kisangani. Crowds of Congolese sat on rusting decks, huddled around cooking pots, next to bundles of bedding, clothes and possessions, waiting in quiet desperation for news of a departure.

  ‘There are no plans for any boats leaving here for Kinshasa. You will have to wait. It could be weeks, maybe longer,’ I was told by a man who described himself as the Person Responsible for Mbandaka port.

  I walked slowly back to Ali’s boat. For the first time on my trip my determination to stick to Stanley’s route downriver wobbled. I was feeling just too ill to face another delay of unknown duration. It had taken me two weeks in Kisangani before I had been lucky enough to find a place on the UN pusher. God knows how long I would have to wait here in Mbandaka for my next break.

  As the sun began to dip, I gathered my strength for another walk. I needed to mull over my options. Like the other Congolese towns I had passed through, Mbandaka was little more than a sad collection of ruins. I felt a sense of déjà vu. The decay was just like what I had seen in Kalemie, Kabambarre, Kasongo, Kibombo, Kindu and elsewhere across the Congo. I tried to convince myself that I had already seen enough in my journey to understand what the Congo is really like. I had achieved more than I had thought possible before I started this trip. I had covered more than 2,000 kilometres on Stanley’s route. Would my sense of achievement overcome the disappointment of skipping the next section?

  I stewed all night, agonising over what to do. There was no hotel in Mbandaka, so the floor of Ali’s cabin was the most comfortable place for me to stay. He was due to head back upstream in the next few days, and the prospect of being sick in Mbandaka without any tolerably clean place to stay tormented me. I could be trapped here, just like I was in Kisangani. I lay on the deck thrashing around in my mosquito net, churning the options in my head. I knew from Ali’s contacts in the UN mission that a weekly helicopter shuttle to Kinshasa left the following day. I did not have much time to decide.

  By morning I had made up my mind. Reluctantly, I would skip the river descent from Mbandaka to Kinshasa.

  A day later, I found myself onboard a UN helicopter flying to Kinshasa. The shame I felt at temporarily abandoning Stanley’s route was more than outweighed by a growing sense of relief that my ordeal was nearing its end. It took three hours to fly a distance that would have taken me weeks by river boat.

  For most of the journey all I could see from the helicopter porthole was jungle. Then, just as we beg
an our final approach to Kinshasa, I caught sight of the Stanley Pool where the Congo River gathers itself in a huge, lake-like expanse, twenty kilometres in width, before its final, tumultuous plunge to the sea. From the air all I could glimpse was an immense body of water, silver in the setting sun like the flank of a Goliath Tigerfish. I was disappointed to have missed this final section of the river, but all I could think about was the town of Boma, a few hundred kilometres off to the west, where my journey would finally end.

  12.

  Road Rage

  THERE CAN BE no capital city in the world more unrepresentative of its country than Kinshasa. It has tarmac roads busy with traffic, shops selling imported goods, a music scene as prolific as any in Africa, even a swanky hotel where the doors are opened by swipe-cards. After all that I had seen on my journey, Kinshasa felt as if it did not even belong in the Congo.

  Despite these first-world trappings, Kinshasa also has the chronic problems standard to many African capitals. Most of its nine-million-strong urban population crowd into squalid squatter camps without adequate drinking water, electricity, health care or basic services. Corruption corrodes every aspect of day-to-day life, forcing its people to rely on international organisations – the UN, aid groups, donors – to prop up the failing state. But by comparison with the country’s medieval hinterland, Kinshasa is centuries ahead.

  I found the disconnect between capital and country bewildering when I arrived by UN helicopter. And it got worse after I was met by Maurice, the local representative of my cobalt-mining contact from Lubumbashi, and whisked away in his jeep. We passed city sights that I recognised from my earlier visit in 2001: the long central artery of the city, ‘The 30th of June Boulevard’, which locals boast of as the ‘longest independence avenue in Africa’; the house where Patrice Lumumba briefly ran his doomed post-independence government before he was assassinated on the orders of Washington and Brussels; the stadium that staged the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ boxing match; and the Belgian diplomatic compound where I met one of Mobutu’s surviving cronies in 2001 and first discussed my plan to retrace Stanley’s journey.