Blood River

by Tim Butcher

  He explained some of the other scams pulled by the Congolese crews on the UN boats. He said some skippers deliberately pretend there is an engine problem and reduce the speed of the boat. But this is done simply to lower the rate of fuel consumption, leaving a surplus at the end of the trip that the skipper then siphons off to sell. And the Congolese crew routinely use the UN boats to smuggle things up and down the river, goods from Kinshasa to be sold in Kisangani. Many suspect diamonds from Kisangani are smuggled back downriver to avoid having to pay bribes at the airport.

  Ali was too philosophical to be angered by all this. His mission was to fly the UN flag up and down the Congo River. For months at a time his boat, which he preferred to call ‘UN Pusher Number Ten’ rather than the Nganing, would be deployed upriver, steaming to ports like Kisangani and then waiting there for weeks in between patrols. A day’s delay here or there was not worth fighting over.

  I have seen numerous UN missions around the world, in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and all over the Middle East. Each was castigated by the international media and commentators for being inefficient, bureaucratic and ineffective, but such criticism always misses the point. Yes, the missions are sloppy and poorly focused, but that is precisely because the international community’s attitude to complicated problems like the collapsing Yugoslavia, or rampaging west African rebels, is sloppy and poorly focused. When the United Nations Security Council addresses these international problems, the question it ends up answering is not ‘What is the right thing to do?’ but ‘What is the least we can do?’ UN missions around the world evolve at the pace of the lowest common denominator between the nations of the world, and that common denominator is pretty low when nations with interests as divergent as China and America both hold prominent positions in the UN Security Council.

  Today’s UN mission in the Congo developed along exactly these lines. When the most recent war started in 1998, aid groups and the international media reported the massive loss of life, demanding a response. The UN was understandably wary about sending troops back to the Congo. In 1960 UN peacekeeping cut its teeth in the Congo, trying to stop the chaotic aftermath of Belgium granting its colony independence. It was to be a grim experience for the international body, which had only been founded fifteen years earlier at the close of the Second World War. The UN’s first Congo peacekeeping mission from 1960 to 1964 was a disaster, as peacekeepers ended up fighting pitched battles with white mercenaries and Congolese rebels backed by Belgium. The UN lost more peacekeepers in combat there than on any other peacekeeping mission, before or since. That early mission cost the life of the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld, killed in a plane crash as he shuttled between rival Congolese factions in 1961.

  So MONUC, the new Congo mission of the late 1990s, evolved slowly and cautiously. Its peacekeepers were deployed without adequate weapons or a clear chain of command, frankly powerless to stop the killing. But this simply reflected the lack of international willingness to genuinely do what was needed to end the fighting. MONUC was created so that the outside world could say something was being done about the Congo. The opprobrium of commentators would be better focused on world leaders, who use UN missions as scapegoats for their own lack of determination to deal with major international crises.

  Ali told me a story that perfectly encapsulated the inefficiency and helplessness of MONUC. He was deployed on ‘Pusher Number Ten’ in Kisangani at the time of the Bukavu incident in June 2004 when mobs began to attack UN targets across Congo. He was onboard the boat, tied up alongside the dock, when smoke started to rise above Kisangani from burning UN cars and he heard on the local radio that UN personnel were being evacuated.

  ‘The safest place for me and the boat was back out on the river. The local crew were scared too because they did not even come from Kisangani, so we unmoored and went back out onto the river.’ He was grinning as he told the story, although it did not sound very amusing to me.

  ‘We were busy for a few hours getting under way and moving a safe distance downstream, but the worst thing was when I got the satellite telex working and sent a message to our naval base in Kinshasa. I sat there waiting for a response for a few minutes, and then a few hours, and then a few days. Do you know what had happened? The entire naval command centre at UN headquarters had left because of the rioting and nobody had bothered to think about me and my command up at the other end of the river.’ He was chortling quite loudly now.

  ‘It’s crazy. The ten pushers are the only major assets of the naval command and no-one from the operations room thought about them for a second!’

  ‘So what did you do? How did you survive?’ I had to wait a few minutes for Ali to regain his composure.

  ‘Well, I keep enough water and food on the boat to last for weeks, so we went a safe distance downriver and tied up on a tree and I went fishing. I like fishing. It’s my favourite hobby.

  ‘After a few weeks I noticed a message arrived on the telex. It said something like “Where are you, Ali, we were worried.” Obviously things had calmed down in Kinshasa and the operations room was back up and running, and someone had thought to ask what happened to Pusher Ten. It’s crazy to think I could just have left Kisangani, evacuated with the other peacekeepers, and anything could have happened to this boat. But the really crazy thing is that nobody would have cared.’

  My time on ‘Pusher Number Ten’ passed at its own strange pace. My diary tells me we sailed for seven days, but it felt as if I travelled years back in time. After leaving Kisangani, we did not stop at any other town until Mbandaka, 1,000 kilometres downstream, and in between I felt as though I saw an Africa unchanged from that which Stanley saw.

  Without any major towns all I saw was the endless forest, an unbroken screen of green that was reeled slowly past me. It would grow fat when we neared the water’s edge and thin when our course took us far into the midstream, but for 1,000 kilometres it never quite broke. At first light the rising sun would colour in the forest with a rich spectrum of greens from emerald to lime, pea to peridot, before they steadily faded as the sun tracked upwards. By midday, the overhead sun would wash out all but the most vivid tints, before they were slowly restored as the sun dipped towards the western horizon.

  And there was the river. Conrad’s uncoiling serpent grew fatter and fatter each day that we descended. There are places where the river swells to a width exceeding five kilometres. We were constantly slaloming through eyots and islands, some of which were enormous, running to twenty kilometres or more in length. Every day we passed villages that had the same design Stanley described. There would be a clutch of thatched huts built on raised stilts to avoid the seasonal high water and, through the smoke from cooking fires, I would see people moving around wearing rags, while down on the river’s edge a clutch of pirogues hung in the current.

  For the first few days our progress was slow and cautious, as the Congolese skipper sat up in the wheelhouse barking at the helmsman to cut the revs, nudging the boat forward, while one of his crew stood right at the bow of the barge, more than forty metres away from the skipper, using an old branch to probe for a safe course through the sand banks. There was no sonar or depth sounder, just a branch broken off a riverside tree to save us from being marooned. The bowman had no radio or intercom, so our progress depended on wild gesticulations and the occasional scream. And after some days, as the chocolate-coloured waters deepened and the safe channel widened, the engine settled into the high-end rattle of full power and the bowman put down his stick and sat on a home-made wooden chair that hummed with the vibration coursing through the boat’s superstructure.

  I entered a zone of mental torpor. Normally I am the sort of person who needs to be doing something constantly. I am not a napper. But on that river passage, there was nothing I could do to influence our progress. We would reach our destination when we reached our destination and not a moment sooner, so I took off my wrist watch and let my days flow with the rhythm of the river.

  At
night the boat would stop. Night navigation was too dangerous, the navigable channel too tricky to follow in the dark. So just before sunset the skipper would look for a suitable section of river bank, steep enough to ensure we would not become beached. He would then gently kiss the bow of the barge up against it. By the time the bowman had jumped onto the bank and wrapped the large rusting anchor cable around a tree, the rest of the boat would have swung around in the current and now be hanging downstream. When the first Belgian-era steamboats started regular journeys on the Congo River, they used to pull over on the river bank just like this. Woodcutters would then be sent off into the forest to cut fuel overnight for the following day’s steaming, while the white crew would struggle for sleep in the still heat under bombardment from mosquitoes.

  It was exactly the same for me. When the boat tied up on the river bank each evening, the now motionless air would clot with heat and moisture. Insects would swarm to any flicker of torchlight so I clung to darkness, teaching myself how to feel my way around the boat, to the stern-plate to have a pee, to the store of jerrycans for a drink of clean water. Ali let me sleep on the carpeted floor of his cabin and I would huddle there in the dark, cocooned in my gossamer tent of mosquito netting, nervously fidgeting so that my skin never came into contact with its sides. Congo River mosquitoes are notorious. Conrad himself took six months to recover from the fever he caught during his single passage up and down the Congo River, and I knew the little bleeders were more than capable of biting through netting if I was foolish enough to let it come into contact with bare skin.

  Ali was brought up in rural, tropical Malaysia and was clearly tougher than me in dealing with disease-carrying insects. His passion for fishing meant he would slip out of the cabin at night, wrapped in a hooded cagoule from which only his face protruded, and take up position on the side of the pusher, crouched over his fishing rod, constantly puffing on cigarettes to keep the insects from his face. In our time together he did not catch a single fish, but this did not deter him. Around midnight, as I thrashed in shallow sleep, he would tiptoe back into the room, shed his coat and, invariably, twang the web of strings I had set up to support my mosquito net.

  Nights were grim and I would lie awake waiting for the first throaty cough of the diesel engines that marked dawn. The skipper liked to get away at first light and by the time the eastern sky was beginning to lighten, he would be back up in the wheelhouse ready for a day’s passage. Once I had extricated myself from my straitjacket of sweat-sodden bedclothes and netting, the whole cabin would be vibrating as the engines powered the boat upstream to take the tension off the anchor line so that it could be retrieved by the bowman. Then the boat would pirouette and, once again, we would begin reeling in kilometre after kilometre of the green screen.

  This was one of my favourite times of day. I had brought plenty of clean water for the trip and I would spend the first few hours of each day up on the top deck drinking mug after mug of black tea, enjoying the sensation of motion and the muggy waft of air moving across my face. My normal mindset would have found our progress infuriatingly slow. The boat rarely reached its top speed and even then it only managed 18 kph. But I had entered a Zen state and every metre we moved was a metre closer to the end of my ordeal.

  I loved watching our wake. The mocha whirls of white water whipped up by the propeller would rush out from under the stern-plate, dancing and churning before growing steadily calmer and calmer. Slowly the creamy lather would lose its fizz and darken, merging into just another featureless reach of flat, brown water. But the thing I loved most about the wake was that it meant we were moving. A wake meant we were slightly closer to our destination. I loved watching our wake.

  Out of boredom I found another way to monitor our progress. Up in the wheelhouse the skipper had a solitary navigational aid, a thirty-year-old map book. Each page was mouldy to the touch after years of exposure to the humid river air and the edges were as tattered as week-old leaves in a rabbit hutch. Grubby pencil messages, written and overwritten, had been scrawled on each page, as well as a dotted line that marked the navigable channel. I could see it had been rubbed out and redrawn numerous times. The entire route from Kisangani to Kinshasa, the descent of 1,734 kilometres, was covered by this old map book, so every time one of its sixty-four pages turned, I knew I was thirty kilometres or so nearer my destination.

  By ten o’clock the morning heat was too much for me to stay out on deck. After crossing the Equator a short distance upstream from Kisangani, the Congo River prescribes a slow but momentous westward arc, eventually dipping back across the Equator for a second time at Mbandaka before its final run to Kinshasa, and thence the coast. The climate gets crueler and crueler with the descent. As altitude is lost, with it goes any hope of a cooling breeze. I found by late morning, even on a hazy day, the steel panels on the decks would be throbbing with heat. They were studded with rice-grain-sized bulges for grip, and through the soles of my sandals I could feel each one radiating warmth.

  I would surrender to the heat by late morning, seeking shelter in the darkness of Ali’s blacked-out cabin. Tired from the uncomfortable night’s sleep, I would nap in between attempts to read some of the trashy novels Ali kept in his cabin.

  I entered the same odd mental zone that I reach on overnight flights, the state of consciousness when I am awake enough to watch a film, but not awake enough to actually take anything in. Plane movies have a special quality. Within a few hours of watching them I never seem to be capable of remembering the smallest detail about the film – the name, the plotline, the actors. I felt exactly the same during my boat journey on the Congo. I would turn the pages of the book and my eyes would work through the paragraphs, but to this day I have no recall of what I read.

  To pass the time I would drag out my daily ablutions, taking perverse pleasure in the slow process of boiling water for a meticulous, slow shave, before taking one of the world’s most dangerous showers. The water for the shower came straight from the river. Against the creamy ceramic of an old shower cubicle, the water ran brown like tea. It reminded me of Scottish hill water tainted with peat, only it was much warmer and the chemicals that leached brown into the Congo River were more terrifying than those found in Highland soil. Somewhere to our north ran the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but a name that is associated with a horrific medical condition. It was near this river that a virus was first discovered that caused its victims to die in a spectacularly horrible way, bleeding to death from every orifice. Several of the world’s other spectacularly horrible haemorrhagic fevers were first discovered in the Congo. I kept my mouth tight shut whenever I showered.

  Ali was a gracious host. He had kitted himself out with a Congo survival kit from the duty-free shop at Dubai airport while flying from Malaysia to Africa. He had brought himself a microwave, a kettle and a rice boiler. The diesel generators on the Nganing provided ample power, so he would provide me with meals of noodles and litres of water, boiled clean.

  By late afternoon when the outside temperature had begun to dip, I would venture outside once more. Most days I would go all the way to the bow of the barge, picking my way over the straining hawsers and cables that connected the barge with the pusher, to join the Congolese bowman. His name was Pascal Manday Mbueta and he was entered on the crew list with the lowest possible grade of deckhand. Pascal lived inside the barge. He had no cabin and there was no furniture. He simply slept on the rusting metal, squashed up against a bulkhead. I peered through the hatch and down a ladder into his living space one day and winced at the smell. With the motion of the boat I could see a broken beer bottle floating down there in a malodorous swill of bilge water and God knows what else.

  Pascal had the rheumy eyes of a confirmed drunk. He had brought a large stash of Primus beer from Kisangani but, if I got to him when he was sober, he was good company. Mostly we would sit in silence, listening to the hiss of the water working its way down the side of the barge. Occasionally he w
ould blurt out something about how the river used to be.

  ‘See there,’ he would say, pointing at the river bank. ‘There used to be a marker showing the safe channel. The authorities kept the channel clear and kept the markers in the right place, but all of that has gone. Now, you have to work by memory alone – 1,734 kilometres from memory alone. It’s crazy.’

  Our constant companion out on the river was water hyacinth. For each of the thousand kilometres of my river descent, floating alongside me in clumps that could be as small as a single tendril or as large as a tennis-court-sized raft, I was accompanied by the plant.

  The story of the water hyacinth in the Congo is a wonderful allegory for the white man in this country. The plant’s intended role was innocent enough. It was brought here as a garden ornament decades ago. According to one story, a Belgian colonialist who had seen it in its native South American environment imported the first seedlings to prettify a waterway near his remote colonial outpost. Another account blames an American Baptist missionary who was attracted by its delicate pastel flowers.

  There was nothing innocent about the alien’s behaviour once it took root in the Congo. It grew and grew and grew, spreading a deadly mat across much of the Congo River basin, suffocating the life out of ponds, lakes and slow-moving rivers and upsetting entire eco-systems. It is now categorised as a dangerous alien weed that should be eradicated before it clots even the main arteries of the river system. And I saw with my own eyes the extent of its grip on the Congo River. Downstream from Kisangani I barely saw a single stretch of river free from floating knots of water hyacinth.

  As the sun neared the horizon, picking out the lilac blooms of the water hyacinth on their mattresses of matted tuber and leaf, the day’s cycle would repeat itself. The skipper would look for a suitably steep river bank, Pascal would grab hold of the anchor line and I would return to the cabin and brace myself for another night of battle with mosquitoes.