Blood River

by Tim Butcher

  But it was not the fact that I was seeing familiar sights that confused me. It was the way that, in my mind, I could not connect these places with the Congo I had travelled through, a country where I had seen human bones lying too thick on the ground to be given a decent burial; where a stranger like me was implored to adopt a child to save him from a life of disease, hunger and misery; and where some people were so desperate they actually pined for the old and brutal order of Belgian colonial life.

  My bewilderment was complete when Maurice dropped me at the Kinshasa headquarters of the mining company, a brand-new, luxury villa built on a prime piece of city-centre real estate fronting directly onto the Congo River. Armed guards nodded towards Maurice at the entrance to the exclusive, private estate and when they slammed the cast-iron gate behind us, there was an instant when I felt they had shut out the chaos of an entire continent. The estate would have looked at home in any major European city. There were well-tended gardens, cul-de-sacs curving between neatly laid-out kerbstones and family cars parked on driveways. The house Maurice led me to had features lifted straight from a Milanese loft apartment: polished wooden floors, stainless-steel designer kitchen units and a huge television screen wired into the most comprehensive satellite-television network money could buy. It was when I stepped into the shower and warm, clean water started to pulse from an array of nozzles in the glass cubicle for an all-over-body-massage that my compass went completely haywire. It was just too far removed from everything I had experienced.

  I had entered the world of the Congo super-elite. It was a world of enormous wealth and power, made possible because of close connections to the regime of President Joseph Kabila. Without these links it would have been impossible to get modern kitchen units or any of the other expensive fittings into the country. As I experimented with the multi-setting, remote-controlled air-conditioning, I could see there was enough money sloshing around the Congo to make anything possible, given the right connections.

  My contact’s links with the Kabila regime could not have been stronger. When Joseph’s father, Laurent, was assassinated in January 2001, the mining group helped ensure he was succeeded by his son, and not by a rival Congolese power broker. Within hours of the shooting, Laurent’s body was secretly flown out of Kinshasa on the mining firm’s private company jet. He was already dead, but to buy time a false story was put about that he had survived the attack and was receiving hospital treatment. This raised fears that rivals might stage another attempt to finish him off, so the mining firm even arranged for a second, dummy plane, supposedly carrying Laurent, to be seen landing at the airport in Harare, capital of Zimbabwe.

  The ploy bought Joseph enough time to be made ready for succession. He was only in his twenties at the time and was completely unknown in Kinshasa, where his father’s dictatorship had ruled for just four years since ousting Mobutu in 1997. The Kabila clan came from central Katanga, over on the other side of the country, where people speak Swahili and look more to the east, to the anglophone Indian Ocean nations of Kenya and Tanzania, than to francophone Kinshasa on the western side of the Congo. Joseph did not even speak Lingala, the language of the Congolese capital.

  In those volatile days after the assassination, what Joseph needed most was time to allow his safe installation in Kinshasa. Coups are a common feature of the Congolese political landscape. I was in Kinshasa at that time and can remember the rumours of takeovers, counter-coups, mysterious forces marching on the presidential palace and secret military deployments.

  Stability returned only after Joseph was seen in public for the first time, an occasion I witnessed. It was out at Kinshasa’s main airport and he was meeting his father’s coffin as it was flown back into the Congo. I remember how overwhelmed the young pretender looked. His ill-fitting dark suit swamped him and his eyes darted around as a line of tribal elders wearing leopardskin caps paid their respects to the world’s then youngest head of state. Bodyguards and militiamen milled around with their weapons cocked. They included a large number of troops from Zimbabwe – the Kabila clan’s closest international ally – and they were taking no chances. The road into his new capital was deemed too dangerous, so the new president was spirited to and from the airport by helicopter.

  For its role in Joseph Kabila’s succession, the mining company had been rewarded handsomely. It enjoyed large cobalt concessions for its mining operations in Katanga and export licences through the Katangan capital, Lubumbashi. But Lubumbashi lies 1,700 kilometres south-east of Kinshasa and, as Joseph started to spend more time in the capital, it became essential for the firm to maintain a presence there to iron out operational problems. The mining company rented this villa as a sort of forward operating base, so that its executives could fly in from time to time to deal with any glitches with the regime.

  None of the cobalt miners were there when I stayed in the house, although I was not alone. After Maurice had dropped me off, I found a short, rather sinister-looking white man lying full-length on a plush leather sofa in the sitting room, cursing into a mobile phone, while his eyes followed muted coverage of the 2004 Ryder Cup golf competition on the satellite television. He had dark, slightly threatening eyes and, although he was in his forties, he was nuggety, without any flabby give in his weather-worn skin. Seeing televised sport for the first time in a month reminded me that the Athens Olympics had been about to start when I began my Congolese journey, so when he eventually ended his call I asked the man what had happened at the Games.

  ‘They finished weeks ago,’ he snapped impatiently. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  I told him.

  ‘You’ve come all the way from Lake Tanganyika. No way. That’s not possible,’ he said, swinging his legs onto the ground, clicking off the television and suddenly sounding much more approachable.

  It took me a while to convince him I was not lying. I explained my route, overland through Katanga, and then along the upper Congo River to Kisangani and finally downstream by river boat to Mbandaka. He listened closely. When I finished, he exhaled in admiration, leaned forward to shake my hand, introduced himself as Johnny and began talking knowledgeably about Africa, and the Congo in particular.

  His life story belonged in a Wilbur Smith novel. Born in Rhodesia, he was too young to enlist during the Rhodesian war of independence in the 1970s, when the white minority struggled against the black independence movement that would eventually transform the former British colony into Zimbabwe. This had not stopped him from being shot, however. He hoisted his shirt and showed me several scarred splash marks on his abdomen, explaining how he had been ambushed on a dirt road near his family’s farm while motorbiking home from school. ‘Ambushes were normal out in the rural areas back then, and I was hit four times. But we all carried guns, even us school children, so I shot back. Killed one of the “terrs”,’ he said, chuckling and using the abbreviated form of the word ‘terrorist’ favoured by white Rhodesians to describe their wartime enemy.

  After Zimbabwean independence in 1980, he joined the South African armed forces and served in Angola, when South African troops became involved in the former Portuguese colony’s tortuous and complex civil war. After some years he left the army, but returned to Angola, earning a living in the rich but chaotic diamond mines on the country’s north-eastern frontier with the Congo. He described working closely with Jonas Savimbi, the bearded bush warrior who led the UNITA rebel force through thirty years of guerrilla fighting in Angola. It was diamond sales that kept UNITA going for so long, as well as financial and military support from the West. Like Mobutu in the Congo, Savimbi enjoyed generous backing from America and the West as his rebel force challenged the socialist MPLA government for control of Angola. Johnny had colourful stories of Savimbi entrusting him with bags of rough diamonds to be smuggled out of Angola, through the Congo, for sale at the diamond market in Antwerp. He chuckled when he described how a diamond mine he was working at was suddenly surrounded by MPLA soldiers, and he was forced to run for his
life through the bush, surviving days out in the open before he reached safety.

  There was something about Johnny’s steely expression that convinced me he was not making any of this up. I let him continue.

  In the late 1990s he started to spend more time in the Congo, working in the cobalt mines near Lubumbashi. Johnny was close to Zimbabwean businessmen with links to the first Kabila president, Laurent, and for a year or so they enjoyed bumper profits as the cobalt price boomed. And then his business contact fell out with Kabila, and Johnny ended up detained for several months by Kabila’s troops. He was now back in the Congo plotting an ambitious diamond project down on the Congo–Angola frontier, using his close relationship with another Zimbabwean businessman well connected to the Kabila clan. As he enthused about his new diamond-mining operation, I heard echoes of Stanley and generations of other white adventurers who had come to the Congo over the previous 130 years and been enthralled by its economic promise.

  ‘You would not believe the potential down near the border with Angola, on the Tshikapa River. It is amazing. It is just a matter of getting the equipment in place to be able to mine the diamonds,’ he gushed.

  The name Tshikapa rang a bell. When I had rented the satellite phone for my trip from a South African dealer back in Johannesburg and told him I was going to the Congo, he said something about Tshikapa. He described it as the densest source of satellite-phone communications on the planet, outside post-war Iraq. ‘And all of those satellite phones are being used by people looking for diamonds.’

  ‘People who say there is no money in Africa are talking complete bollocks,’ Johnny said. ‘I have seen with my own eyes that there has always been plenty of money, whether it’s for diamonds, cobalt, safari hunting, whatever. And with China needing resources to keep up their current economic boom, there is more money around today for African raw materials than ever before. But the point is the money goes to only a few people, not to the country in general. If you think you can solve Africa’s problems with money, then you are a bloody fool. You solve Africa’s problems by creating a system of justice that actually works and by making the leaders accountable for their actions. If that happens, I guess things would get a lot more competitive for my business, but it would be good for Africa.’

  When I flew into Kinshasa I was worried about my health. I was feeling weak and nauseous after the river-boat journey, but I was still 400 kilometres short of Boma, the place where Stanley completed his trip. It was only after two days of sleeping in a bed with laundered sheets, drinking clean water, eating healthy food and dosing myself with antibiotics in the comfort of the luxury house that I started to feel strong enough to contemplate attempting this final leg.

  When Stanley’s flotilla paddled across the huge expanse of the Stanley Pool in March 1877 they were in high spirits. Two of Stanley’s three white companions had died of disease earlier in the expedition, but the last one, Francis Pocock, felt a surge of confidence when he saw tall, white cliffs rising up on the right bank of the river, because they reminded him of the cliffs at Dover near where he was brought up in Kent. ‘I feel we are nearing home,’ he enthused.

  The confidence was premature. A short distance further west and the Stanley Pool narrowed dramatically, choked through a narrow rocky cleft, only a few hundred metres across. Stanley could have had no idea what other perils lurked beyond these first cataracts but he described how, in the space of just a few metres, the entire character of the Congo River was transformed:

  It is no longer the stately stream whose mystic beauty, noble grandeur, and gentle uninterrupted flow … ever fascinated us, despite the savagery of its peopled shores, but a furious river rushing down a steep bed obstructed by reefs of lava, projected barriers or rock, lines of immense boulders, winding in crooked course through deep chasms, and dropping down over terraces in a long series of falls, cataracts and rapids.

  Stanley decided on the same tactic he used 1,900 kilometres upriver when the expedition first encountered the Stanley Falls. He would approach as close to each cataract as was safe by boat, and then hack a track through the bush on one of the river banks so that the boats and expedition equipment could be dragged round to the next safe section of water. This had worked as a way to get round the Stanley Falls and he had no reason to doubt it would work on this lower section of river.

  What he did not know was that the falls on the lower Congo River were a quantum level more hazardous than anything he had so far encountered. For the next 250 kilometres the river forms an almost unbroken chain of cataracts and rapids as it is funnelled through a tight fissure in the Crystal Mountains, a range separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Congo River basin. Hydrographers later charted thirty-two major sets of cataracts as the river snakes its way through the break in the mountainous plateau, but from Stanley’s viewpoint, sitting low down on the water on his collapsible Thames river boat, the Lady Alice, he had no idea what he was embarking on when he gave the command for his boats to enter the gorge.

  Stanley’s description of this section grew ever more pathetic. As the cataracts became more dangerous, the river banks became increasingly rocky and more difficult to traverse. His expedition suffered from acute hunger, with local tribes reluctant to sell food. These tribes had been trading in European goods for hundreds of years – goods that had been shipped to the mouth of the Congo River, on the other side of the Crystal Mountains, ever since the Portuguese sailors first discovered the river in the fifteenth century. Stanley describes how the beads and wire that he had used to trade for food earlier in the expedition were no longer enough to impress the tribes on the lower Congo River, where tastes had grown more sophisticated:

  Gunpowder was abundant with them, and every male capable of carrying a gun possessed one, often more. Delft ware and British crockery were also observed in their hands, such as plates, mugs, shallow dishes, wash-basins, galvanised iron spoons, Birmingham cutlery, and other articles of European manufacture.

  The condition of his expedition plummeted. Disease became rampant, made worse by the gnaw of constant hunger and malnutrition. So many canoes were washed away by the river that the expedition had to camp for several weeks so that two suitable trees could be found, felled and turned into replacements. Ever faithful to the newspaper financiers of his expedition, Stanley named rivers feeding into this lower reach of the Congo River after his newspaper-editor sponsors, but his efforts to continue mapping and charting the river could not conceal the growing danger that the entire expedition might perish in those last few kilometres before the Atlantic Ocean. After three months of slogging through the gorge, Stanley lost his last white companion. With feet too damaged by ulcers to be able to walk around a particular set of falls, Pocock stayed onboard his canoe a moment too long. It was caught by the current, swept down some rapids and he was drowned.

  The survivors struggled along the river for another two months, but with the cataracts getting no easier Stanley took one last gamble. The expedition would leave the river, abandon the boats and attempt to reach the trading station at Boma on foot. The river had been his handrail, guiding him for 2,500 kilometres across Africa, and by leaving it he risked getting lost and dying of starvation before the next food supplies could be found. He describes in emotional terms his parting from the Lady Alice:

  At sunset we lifted the brave boat after her adventurous journey across Africa, and carried her to the summit of some rocks … to be abandoned to her fate. On 31st July 1877, after a journey of nearly 7,000 miles up and down broad Africa, she was consigned to her resting-place above the Isangila Cataract, to bleach and to rot to dust!

  In theory the journey from Kinshasa to Boma should have been the simplest part of my entire trip. The only functioning highway in the entire country traverses the Crystal Mountains in a south-westward arc for 350 kilometres from Kinshasa to the port of Matadi, built just below the lowest set of cataracts. The road then crosses the river on the Marshal Mobutu suspension bridge before continuing another
100 kilometres or so to Boma.

  I naively thought I could do it in a single day round-trip. That was until I discussed the journey with Maurice.

  ‘It’s highly irregular for an outsider to want to travel there, you know,’ he said. ‘You will need written permission from both the national security service and the department of immigration.’

  I remembered my rule for Congo: towns bad, open spaces good. Here in Kinshasa, the biggest city of all, I faced the worst pettifogging of my entire journey. Maurice heard my sigh of exasperation, but continued with the bad news.

  ‘And how do you propose to travel there? There are no buses. You cannot take a taxi. There are no hire-cars. The old railway does not work. You have to remember that Kinshasa looks like a city, but it is largely an illusion. Things that you take for granted in other cities – like buses, taxis, hire-cars – just don’t belong in Kinshasa.’

  ‘Well, I thought I would be able to hitch a lift …’ My voice trailed off. Even to myself, I sounded like a naive fool.

  Maurice took pity on me. He explained he was part of a Katangan clique that had followed Laurent Kabila to Kinshasa when he took power in 1997. He said he had good connections with the various departments of immigration and national security, most of which were run by Katangans. If I gave him my passport, I was assured it would take just a day or two for the necessary paperwork to be prepared. And if I was willing to pay for a local driver, I could take the jeep that belonged to the mining company. His only condition was that one of his colleagues, Hippolite, must accompany me.