by Tim Butcher
As I approached the Congo River I found myself on the same track that the two Belgian cotton agents had used when they tried to flee that first rebellion in 1964. I thought of their graves back in the overgrown cemetery in Kasongo and shuddered. There is something about the violence of Congo’s post-independence period that is seared into the minds of those whites who call themselves African – second- and third-generation colonials whose ancestors took part in the Scramble for Africa that Stanley’s Congo trip precipitated. They remember dark fragments of what happened in the Congo after independence in 1960 – killing, rape, anarchy. The two cotton traders of Kasongo were just a small part of a much larger number of victims whose deaths still cast a sinister shadow through the older white tribes of Africa.
I tried to imagine the panic of their flight that day. How they felt as the worst nightmare of living deep in the African bush became a reality; the rumours in town of the rebel advance; the terrible understanding that nobody was coming to the rescue; the desperate hope that if they made it from Kasongo to the Congo River they might find a boat to safety; venturing out of the ordered precincts of the town only to be swallowed up by the vengeful rage of Congolese tribesmen settling decades-old scores.
7.
Up a River Without a Paddle
Abandoned paddle-steamer, upper Congo River, August 2004
I WISH I could say my first glimpse of the upper reaches of the Congo River was a moment of dramatic revelation. For days spent clinging to the back of various motorbikes and plodding up hills through Katanga and Maniema, I had tried to picture the scene when I reached the river. In my imagination I hoped for an instant when the rainforest would fall away from a craggy hilltop to reveal, spread out before me, Africa’s mightiest river churning through rapids, cloudy with spray, as it gathered itself for a 2,500-kilometre descent to the Atlantic.
I was disappointed. The moment came during another long day of motorbiking as we picked our way along a section of track not noticeably different from the 600 kilometres that went before. We simply turned a corner and there, unheralded, in front of me, lay one of the natural wonders of the world. The object of so much mystery for generations of outsiders, and the thing that had fired my imagination through years of research, oozed lazily downstream between two thickly forested banks almost a kilometre apart. The midday sun was directly overhead, my least favourite time of day in the Congo when all the colours of the trees are washed out and the heat is at its most suffocating. In the flat light, the river appeared viscous and still. Conrad likened the river to a serpent uncoiling right across Africa. In these upper reaches, the snake was fat and lifeless.
I struggled to recognise Stanley’s lyrical description of his first sight of the river:
A secret rapture filled my soul as I gazed upon the majestic stream. The great mystery that for all these centuries Nature had kept hidden away from the world of science was waiting to be solved. For two hundred and twenty miles I had followed one of the sources to the confluence and now before me lay the superb river itself! My task was to follow it to the Ocean.
I was vainly searching for the rapture in my soul when our track petered out on the river bank. My first encounter with the Congo River and it was already an obstacle. Our track continued over on the other bank and there were no boats in sight.
I watched as Odimba propped the bike on its stand and went off to negotiate with a group of men sitting in the shade of some nearby trees. Odimba was quiet, even shy, in comparison with Benoit, but over the days we spent biking together I found him utterly reliable. To be entrusted with one of Care International’s precious motorbikes was a matter of prestige and Odimba responded with pride. He looked after the bike meticulously, insisted on not sharing the riding with me, and rode with great skill in spite of appalling conditions. Sometimes I would notice that his eyes were rheumy and sore. The concentration needed to avoid obstacles was intense and all day long his straining eyes were bombarded with dust and tiny insects. When I tried to offer him water to wash his eyes, he shrugged me away almost as if it was too much to take help from a white man. He played the role of the stoical sergeant to Benoit’s commissioned officer. I detected that he was a little self-conscious that Benoit spoke much better French than he could, and throughout our time together Odimba appeared comfortable with a dignified silence. He was one of the many Congolese without whom I would not have been able even to attempt my trip so I owed him a great deal, but he did not attempt to exploit this position. For those white doomsters who grumble that corruption is in some way a natural African trait, I would hold up Odimba as evidence that they are talking rubbish.
As he went in search of a way to cross the river, I walked to the water’s edge. The red soil of the jungle turned to a paler, sticky mud, which I could feel gumming up the soles of my boots. I walked slowly along the high-water line for a few hundred metres trying to picture the old port of Kasongo Rive that the Belgians built here. In its day it was a large enough town to support a church, shops, and warehouses for various steamboats and paddleboats that worked this section of the river. I had email exchanges with a Belgian who was born here in the 1940s and who remembers the neat quadrangle of brick buildings that formed the town centre, and the endless coming and going of river traffic.
All of that had long gone. There was not a single riverside building left and all the port facilities had vanished, spirited away over the years by a combination of looters and floodwaters. Areas of hard standing and numerous cranes and moles had all disappeared, leaving nothing but a rusting engine block from a car – too heavy to wash away and too valueless to steal.
Suddenly a man’s voice disturbed the midday torpor. He was one of the men with whom Odimba had negotiated and he was summoning help from way over on the other side of the river. His shouted message was a single Swahili word, repeated and repeated. The river was much wider than I expected, broader than the Thames in central London. We were still 2,500 kilometres from the sea and the river was yet to be joined by any of its major tributaries, but it was already a huge body of water.
Way over in the distance I saw movement. A brown shape slowly flaked off the opposite river bank and began edging silently towards us. It was a pirogue, or dugout canoe. It was slender and elegant, and seeing it gave me a feeling of connection with Stanley. It was no different in design from those he would have seen on 17 October 1876 when he first reached the Congo River at a spot not far from where I was standing.
It took twenty minutes for the boat to make its way across. Pirogues come in a range of sizes, but this one was on the large side, a dreadnought made from the hollowed-out trunk of a large tree. It looked like the husk of a gargantuan seed, streamlined against the river current and without a single join or blemish along the hull. It was at least fifteen metres long and deep enough for its passengers to sit concealed by its sides, with only their faces peeking over the gunwales. It had no engine and was moved by three paddlers, two standing at the bow for power and one at the stern, in charge of steering.
Eventually its bow slid onto our bank with the lightest of kisses. The dreadnought was heavy and the river too inert to make it swing downstream, so it just sat there like a compass needle pointing in the direction I needed to go, straight across the Congo River. A dozen or so passengers disembarked, carrying bundles of fruit wrapped in banana leaves trussed up with cords made from vines. One man had with him a type of home-made bicycle where part of the frame, the front forks, were made of rough branches of wood still in their bark. There was a brief moment of negotiation between Odimba and the oldest paddler, before a tariff was agreed and our motorbike, still laden with luggage, was picked up bodily by four men and dropped into the canoe. The hull was deep enough for one of the paddlers to sit on the bike and freewheel it down to the lowest and most stable point.
We were not the only passengers. A woman carrying a very sickly child squashed in next to me. The baby was wide-eyed with fever and clammy to the touch.
‘Mala
ria,’ she said.
‘Do you have any medicine?’ I asked. She shook her head. Shortly after we pushed off one of the paddlers caught a crab, causing the canoe to lurch, but while everyone else onboard reacted in reflex, the mother and baby did not stir.
Most of the lives still claimed by the turmoil in the Congo are not the direct result of fighting. Only a tiny fraction of the 1,000-plus lives lost each day are ever caused by military action. It became clear to me that the vast majority of deaths are the result not of combat, but of the Congo’s decay – children dying of avoidable diseases because field clinics have been abandoned; cholera epidemics among communities of refugees driven out of their homes into squalid camps by the threat of violence; malnutrition because of the failure of modern agriculture, and so on. I looked at the sickly child and tried to think of another country in the world where a baby born in 2004 was more at risk than one born in the same place half a century earlier.
That moment when I left the east bank of the river was special for me. I had achieved something that many people had thought impossible by crossing overland from Lake Tanganyika all the way to the Congo River, through some of the most dangerous terrain on the planet. With my own eyes I had peered into a hidden African world where human bones too numerous to bury were left lying on the ground and where the life of villagers pulsed between grim subsistence in mud huts, unchanged from those seen by nineteenth-century explorers, and panicked flight into the forest at the approach of marauding militia.
But I found the Congo a relentlessly punishing place to travel. It never let up, never allowed me to fully relax, feel comfortable or at ease. My thrill at having made the overland crossing was more than outweighed by thoughts about where I would next find clean water, food and safe shelter. It had basically taken me two weeks to cover 500 kilometres, but I still had five times that distance to go to the Atlantic, down a river that had not been safe enough to travel along for years. Sitting in that canoe on the Congo River for the first time was a moment for only modest celebration.
The pirogue deposited us on the west bank of the Congo River, but it took another two days of hard biking to reach the port of Kindu. The terrain was flat, but as the rainforest became thicker the humidity and climate grew more uncomfortable. Our track followed the line of a railway that the Belgians built at the start of the twentieth century to connect Kindu, their largest port on the upper Congo River, to Lubumbashi 1,600 kilometres to the south. We kept criss-crossing the old rails as the bike track picked its own erratic course past thickets of giant bamboo, elephant grass and jungle undergrowth. The rails sat on cast-iron sleepers and on some it was possible to make out their year of manufacture, 1913, and the location of their foundry, Antwerp. The railway ran almost parallel with the river, although it was so far away I never caught a glimpse of the water. In the town of Kibombo we passed an old station, where I stopped to find that the stationmaster diligently turned up for work even though only one train had been through in the last six years.
It was a sadly common feature of my journey through the Congo, the desperate willingness of people to cling to the old vestiges of order as an anchor against the anarchy of today. Here was a man who had not seen a train for years, yet he still kept his station house in a state of readiness, passing his time in an armchair on the platform next to the tracks that lay redundant and silent in the baking heat. On occasion he would even don the old stationmaster’s cap, in the blue and red of the old national railway-company livery. We got talking about the old days and he showed me how he would inform the townspeople of Kibombo that a train was coming. He walked onto the platform, reached up and heaved an old bell that still hung over the platform. The clapper swung violently, but the bell let out the ugliest clang. I could see it was almost cleaved in two by a rust-rimmed crack.
Kibombo had once been a large town, large enough to support a substantial Catholic church and seminary that I had seen as we motorbiked in on the southern approach road. The sun was low in the sky, bronzing the seminary’s unplastered brick façade, and after another long, dusty day it was a pleasure to pause a moment to enjoy the tranquillity. Shaggy-headed palm trees nodded deferentially towards the straight lines and angles of the abandoned building. It was long and thin, stretching for more than a hundred metres, and in some places it had two storeys. It looked like the front of a military academy rather than a religious training establishment, but spreading religion was a tough business in the Congo, so maybe the hundreds of novitiates who studied were drilled into shape, not just spiritually, but physically, here in Kibombo, before being unleashed to carry their pastoral message deeper into the African bush.
The church was impressive, but the thing I will not forget from Kibombo is the spectre of the town centre after dark, when it was lit entirely by slow-dancing flames from palm-oil lamps. I had been offered a floor to sleep on in an abandoned building where I had set up my stinking mosquito net before eating another grim meal of cassava. After dark I walked through the relic of a town centre where the lamps cast shadows on the few fragments of wall still standing. Palm oil burns with a low, fat flame and this seemed to make the shadows all the more slow, macabre and sinister. I knew that during one of the 1960s rebellions three Europeans were slaughtered here in Kibombo just hours before a rescue party reached the town. I wrapped myself tight in my mosquito net that night.
Again, we saw no other traffic on the track apart from pedestrians near villages of thatched huts and the occasional trader with a bicycle laden with goods. I stopped to look at one particularly gruesome bicycle payload – five black monkeys destined to be sold at market for eating, their hands and feet bound with vine, their black fingernails oily with some sort of bodily fluid excreted when they had been killed by hunters earlier that day.
We crossed one astonishing bridge near a village called Difuma Deux. The village had seen some recent fighting between government troops from Kindu and rebels attacking from the south. The original bridge had been blown a number of times and what was left was an amazing feat of ingenuity. Various branches, planks and pieces of timber had been lain across the few remaining piles of the bridge, but they were not anchored. As I put my weight on the first plank, the whole disjointed structure sagged dangerously. I felt as if I was playing a life-and-death version of that children’s game where you have to pick up sticks from a pile without moving others. It took me ages to summon the courage to trust the bridge. I need not have worried. When I turned round I saw this higgledy-piggledy construction was strong enough to take the weight as Odimba skilfully wheeled our heavily laden motorbike across.
After so long on the back of a bike watching the forest reel by, I was thrown when suddenly I saw something metallic and man-made next to our track out in the jungle. It was dark with rust and almost submerged in the undergrowth, but there was something about the straight lines and sharp edges that caught my eye. I dug Odimba in the ribs and he stopped.
I had found the remains of an armoured car, a very primitive 1950s military vehicle, but an armoured car nonetheless. The track I was travelling along had been unfit for regular road traffic for decades and it took me some minutes to work out what this once-modern and sophisticated war machine was doing out here, quietly rotting in the forest. It was a relic of one of the Congo’s more chaotic periods – the age of the mercenaries.
In the early 1960s, during the chaos after the end of Belgian colonial rule, the Congo was the world’s epicentre for mercenary activity. Soldiers of fortune came here to fight, at different times, for the government, against the government, against the United Nations, alongside the United Nations. Some of the mercenaries liked fighting so much they fought among themselves. There were those, like Che Guevara, who dressed up their involvement in ideological terms, arguing that it was part of an effort to spread socialist revolution, but many others (mostly, but not exclusively, white) had more venal motives – a passion for violence and loyalty that was transferable to whoever paid most.
As the M
ulele Mai rebellion worsened in 1964, huge numbers of mercenaries arrived in the Congo, many of them under the command of Mike Hoare, a former major in the British Army dubbed ‘Mad Mike’. He sought to justify mercenary activity in Africa as a necessary bulwark against the spread of communism. For some time this earned him a good press in the West and nowhere better than in my paper, the Telegraph, due to his close relationship with my 1960s predecessor in Africa, John Bulloch. Today, Hoare prefers not to talk about what went on. I tried to contact him at his last-known address in Switzerland but failed, and John has not heard from him in years.
In those early days of the post-independence period, the Congo government had enough money from mining to promise the mercenaries extravagant pay packages, but they often ended up paying themselves. It became routine on operations when entering a Congolese town for the mercenary forces to hurry to the local bank, blow open the safe with dynamite and take whatever was inside. This was not small-scale stuff, or the work of just a few psychos and hotheads. Without a functioning army of its own, the government of the Congo came to rely on men like Hoare and a huge mercenary militia that grew to hundreds of men, spread across three battalions with their own cap badges, unit names and structure. For several years the Congo’s combat troops were all foreign mercenaries.
Their activities peaked in 1964 when they were unleashed on the east of the country with carte blanche to deal with the rebels. The vehicle I had found was the relic of a skirmish during the combat assault on Kindu by Hoare’s mercenary column. In a 1967 book, Congo Mercenary, he described what happened:
Our leading armoured car was face to face with three enemy armoured cars, evil-looking mock-up affairs, and the gunners were slugging it out toe to toe …