by David Yeadon
“I think you would enjoy a drink?”
I thanked him, maybe too profusely.
“May I sit with you?” he asked, and smiled.
“Please. I could do with some company.”
Paul was a French citizen who had lived in Zaire most of his adult life (“since I discovered African women”). After the normal introductory chitchat I asked him to tell me a little about this strange and mysterious country. Vaguely, from shards of schoolboy history, I remembered tales of atrocities and unbelievable cruelties inflicted on the Congo nation by Belgium’s King Leopold II. But Paul gave these tales flesh and blood. Too much blood.
“It was possibly the worst example of colonial rape ever inflicted on an indigenous people,” he said. “Even today I have friends in Belgium who will not talk—they refuse to discuss this period of their history. It is still hard for them to imagine such things as were done. I think they would prefer to forget. You see, Leopold was—ah, wait a minute—I am going too fast. Let’s begin with the Portuguese. One Portuguese man. A navigator, Diogo Cao, who discovered the Congo River in 1482. He thought it was just another bay and then found a river of such a size that it pushed out fresh water thirty, forty miles into the Atlantic. He could not understand a river of that enormity. We now know it is the fifth largest river in the world—almost five thousand kilometers long. Do you remember the others?”
I hadn’t expected the question and dredged my mind for the answers: “Er—the Amazon. Yes, certainly the Amazon. The Nile…the Mississippi, and…”
“The Yangtze, my friend. Never forget the Yangtze.”
“Right.”
“So—Signor Cao met the people—the Bakongo tribe—and sailed upriver as far as the Caldron of Hell—a very difficult part of those rapids that fill the last four hundred kilometers of the river below Kinshasa—the old Leopoldville. The things he offered them—gifts, education, the world’s most powerful religion, and personal friendship with King John of Portugal—seemed to please the Bakongo King, Nzinga, and what happened in the early fifteen hundreds was possibly one of the best relationships between an African and a European nation. We French—the British, the Spanish—we all had our dreams of riches and power, but Portugal for a while—well, they seemed happy just to convert, educate, and help the development of the Congo without destroying it.”
“That didn’t last too long, though. Not from what I understand.”
“Well—you are so right. Portugal became greedy—they saw how rich all the other colonial powers were becoming—and they joined the slave trade. And other things too. Then the Arabs moved in from the Middle East. Other countries got involved. Many of the native kingdoms were destroyed. Pirates, profiteers, planters—everyone tried to grab a bit of the Congo. Your Dr. Livingstone came too—he talked about ‘taming, educating, and Christianizing these savages of darkest Africa.’ And the tribes themselves. They also began to destroy one another.” He sighed. To him, Zaire’s history was still something very alive and tangible.
“So how did King Leopold get into all this?”
“Leopold? Ah—well. That was another Englishman, your Mr. Stanley, who came here looking for Livingstone, you remember, and then he seeked—searched for—someone—someone very rich—to invest in developing this place—this ‘Amazonia of Africa.’ In the 1880s Europe was carving up Africa—deciding who would have which bits. King Leopold had made a lot of money with his shares in the Suez Canal and was angry that Belgium didn’t seem to be getting much in the way of colonies in Africa. Somehow—I don’t know how—Stanley persuaded the European governments to let Leopold start a private company to collect ivory and rubber—and anything else that made a profit. So the king now had his own private colony—the whole Congo, eighty times the size of little Belgium—all his, to do with what he wanted.”
“And what did he do?”
“He made a lot more money. That’s what he did. He killed or starved eight million Africans; he cut off the hands of workers who gathered the rubber if they did not collect enough. His soldiers made fortunes too. The more hands they brought to him—they smoked the hands to preserve them and put them in big straw baskets—they more they got paid. I think that is what inspired the writer Conrad—another one of your Englishmen—to write that famous story ‘Heart of Darkness.’”
“Yes—I know the story well.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about. It was unbelievable what happened. Unbelievable! A whole country of this size, at the mercy of this tyrant—this idiot—in Belgium.”
“Didn’t Britain put a stop to it all?”
“And France. France too protested. Oh—and Mark Twain too. He wrote a vicious satire about Leopold. In 1908 the country was taken over by the Belgian government. Leopold was discredited. It became the Belgian Congo and for a while things got better. New cities were built. Many mines were dug for copper, diamonds—later uranium. Many got rich. The Belgians—even some of the natives.”
“Did the tribes have any political power?”
“None. And that, of course, was the problem. The Belgians kept promising them power but did nothing.”
“So—what happened?”
“Patrice Lumumba. That’s what happened. He created riots and demanded freedom. That was in 1958. And”—Paul laughed loudly—“he got it. In a year or so the Belgians were gone. They took everything. Just walked—or maybe they ran—away.”
“And left a hell of a mess behind.”
“And left a mess. Yes. And a hell. That’s exactly what they did. Maybe they thought that if things got really bad they’d be invited back. Who knows? But they certainly left a mess. A few days after independence in 1960 the place went crazy. The whites who had stayed were murdered or driven out, the country started dividing itself up, back into the old tribal regions. Roads, machinery, towns—all were destroyed. The Belgians sent troops back in—there were more massacres. Then the United Nations took over for a while and tried to bring the tribes together—then the tribes started using mercenaries and within a year you had a bloody—very bloody—civil war. Lumumba was murdered—some say by people paid by American CIA. Mobutu tried to establish himself as leader but was forced to resign. Dag Hammarskjöld tried to stop the fighting between the UN troops and the mercenaries, but he was killed—very mysteriously—in a plane crash. It was terrible. The country was destroying itself. Then the Simba terrorists came along—believing they were immune to bullets. Doing terrible things. So more mercenaries came—‘Mad Mike’ Hoare and others as mad as he was. They were as cruel as the Simbas—killing everyone, anything. The massacre of the whites—the ‘mateka’ of Stanleyville [Kisangani] was one of the worst things the Simbas did. I can’t even tell you how horrible it was—it would make you ill. Eventually the mercenaries destroyed most of them—but it was a bad, bad time.”
Paul paused to take a long pull on his Primus beer and gave me a second one. Our shade had shifted, so we moved farther down the deck back into the still-sweltering shadows. Across the broad Zaire River large islandlike mats of water hyacinths slipped by, speckled with blue flowers. The water was possibly a good two miles wide now; I could see the straggly jungle, misted by heat haze, easing slowly—very slowly—by. Behind that riparian riot of vegetation lay what? The map showed nothing except pucegreen swaths of blank paper with no roads, no villages, no mountains. Just endless jungle covering almost three million square miles, laced by spidery tributaries. Empty, unused, unexplored. The old Africa—the Africa of V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River:
Africa is big. The bush muffles the sound of murder, and the muddy river washes the blood away.
And other Naipaul lines that touch the mystery of this silent place:
The bush is full of spirits; in the bush hover all the protecting presences of man’s ancestors…the river and the forest are like presences, and much more powerful than you…. You feel unprotected, an intruder…. You feel the land taking you back to something that is familiar, something you had known a
t some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there.
Conrad captured a similar spirit in “Heart of Darkness”:
Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world…an empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest…. You thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence.
The vast Congo basin has drawn writers like moths to its tantalizing flames: Graham Greene creeping through the alleys of Leopoldville seeking, savoring the atmosphere and tension and stupefying sense of humid doom for his A Burnt-out Case, Gide and his Journey to the Congo, and Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Helen Winternitz’s more recent East Along the Equator, and Peter Matthiessen’s African Silences. So many more too. Explorers, world wanderers, diarists, sociologists, UN missions, church missionaries, get-rich-quick Trumpies, seekers of the sensual and the strange—all coming here looking for insights, understanding, wealth, cheap sex, adventure. Who knows, maybe even early death. The death wish that seems to urge Greene-like characters to slither into this wilderness and disappear. While others—like me, I suppose—come merely to wander, and to wonder.
Paul nudged my arm. “Hello, David. Where are you?”
I didn’t know where I was. Limbo-landed again. Off in the infinities of this incredible place. With a mind at first reaching out, trying to touch the edges, discovering the edgelessness of things and being content for the moment at least to pause—and to dream.
“Sorry, Paul. I was just thinking.” Thinking what, though? I tried to explain. “It always amazes me. Particularly in Africa. The horrible histories—the cruelties, the inhuman violations, the genocides, the greed…and yet it all looks so peaceful, so untouched. The jungle grows back again—that patient jungle—so patient—covering the scars, breaking the buildings into dust, grinding and squeezing it all down into its roots…as if none of the terrors and tortures had ever happened; as if there was no break between what was, what is, and what will be.”
Paul smiled, sipped his beer, and wiped the corners of his mouth delicately with long, sinewy fingers.
“You talk like a writer.”
It was my turn to smile. “But what I can write is so pathetic against…all this. The power of it. The horror of it. It’s…too big!”
“Now you sound like a white African.”
“Like you?”
“Yes—like me. You are saying—feeling—what I have felt for…what? All of my time here, I think. And it has been a long time. Thirty years.”
“And you’re still here.”
“Oh, yes, of course. You can never really leave, you know. Even if you leave.”
“Yes. I can sense that. I’m beginning, but only beginning, to understand why.”
“Oh—I think by the time you leave, you will understand maybe a little better. In Africa—and in Zaire particularly, David, always remember it—that French saying: ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’ The same thing. Different disguises but always the same thing.”
We drank our beers in silence, watching the river ease by like thick syrup, flattened by the appalling heat, undisturbed by breezes, reluctantly rippled only by the boat.
“And Mobutu. How are things now under President Mobutu?”
Paul’s expression changed. The smile withdrew and his mouth became a thin gash. He looked over his shoulder as if nervous about eavesdroppers and his voice became a sad whisper.
“Oh, David. I could tell you so…so many things. He has been president now for over twenty-five years. Twenty-five years of crazy schemes and useless industrial projects and useless dams and airports and useless wars. He has told people what to wear, what to think, what to believe. Zaire has now, I think, one of the largest debts in the world, it is one of the poorest and one of the hungriest places on earth in spite of all its wonderful earth, minerals, gold…thirty-five million people with an average income, if you can call it that, of less than one hundred and fifty dollars a year! Yet Mobutu is one of the richest men alive today. Do you know what his full name is—Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga—it means ‘the great warrior who conquers everything.’ Maybe it’s true—he has conquered everything—for himself. And all thanks to our support of him—French money, Belgian money, British money, U.S. money—and, of course, your CIA. He has hidden it all away—billions of dollars—and his people get”—outstretched arms again “this! Yet we all keep this man alive, we let him do whatever he wants to do. We are still the power behind his throne.”
“Twentieth-century colonialism?”
Paul lowered his voice even further.
“David. This is dangerous. Please be careful what you say and what you do here. Things may look so very beautiful and peaceful as we go up this river, but Zaire…it is a very strange country. You—all of us—have to be careful what we say and who we say it to. This man keeps power in the old-fashioned way—terror, fear, informants—sometimes very friendly people who get very rich by saying bad things about you to the police. And money. Lots and lots of money…our money!”
“It’s incredible.”
“It’s Africa,” said Paul quietly.
“So why do you stay?”
“Ah. That question again. That old question. Why do I stay? Sometimes I just don’t know….” He took a long pull from his beer. “A writer once wrote—I forget who it was, but it doesn’t matter—he wrote, ‘I could always move on—though where, I didn’t know. And then I found I couldn’t move. I had to stay.’”
“Sounds a bit like Naipaul.”
“Possibly. I don’t remember.”
“So. You have to stay?”
He gave one of those wonderfully French shrugs, with outstretched arms and raised eyebrows.
“I have to stay…that’s all. I have to stay, David.”
The sun was setting now and music roared up from the barges. Paul seemed talked out and went off to his cabin for a nap. I stayed on deck for a while, enjoying the evening breezes. But the music got louder and louder. Too loud to ignore. What was going on down there in those barges? Time to explore.
And what an exploration!
This was not a boat, it was a community. A floating minicity complete with bars, discos, banks, snack stands, merchants in little cramped compartments, gamblers, vendors of smoked monkeys that looked like wizened charcoal-shrouded fetuses, and smoked bats, smoked crocodile, and smoked fish (I think it was fish), butchers (watching a goat struggle in its bloody death throes is not conducive to a hearty appetite), bakers—who knows maybe even candlestick makers, old whores, young whores, fat, thin, angelic, vampish, and just plain ugly whores. And smells—marijuana, roasting goat, roasting monkey, laundry, toilets that don’t work, sweat, incense, cheap perfumes, beans—vast caldrons of beans—tea, boiling maize, boiling fish stew (the most popular dish, served with hot pepper sauce), fresh-cut pineapples, stale beer. And sounds—the music, of course, scores of different cheap cassettes playing on equally cheap boomboxes—screams, the cries of children, shrieks of chickens about to be lopped, topped, tailed, trussed, and turned over blazing fires, the flapping of wet washing in river breezes strung out in gay lines of color resembling the slum streets of Naples….
The alleys (sometimes with names!) between the metal-box cabins were like Oriental bazaars, lit by flaring, spitting oil lamps. You could buy just about anything here: illicit herbs, antibiotics, condoms, baskets, blankets, fabrics, fruit, fish, all those smoked oddities, cheap glittery jewelry, cheap glittery women, secondhand dresses and pants, platters of fat squirming grubs (ready for deep frying into a popular snack), live baby crocodiles, an amazing assortment of ballpoint pens adorned with familiar Fortune 500 logos, pirated cassettes in cracked plastic boxes, notions, potions, and lotions of all descriptions, plastic shoes and sandals from Hong Kong, cigarettes (sold individually), cheap watches—and beer. Crate upon crate of Primus and Congo beer. Half the boat’s cargo seemed to b
e beer.
“Hey, bonjour, white—buy me a beer.” The call came from a bunch of men who seemed bored with their gambling on the upper deck of one of the barges and were looking for distraction.
I smiled, waved, and shrugged.
“Okay, man—we buy you beer!”
I joined them.
“So where you going, citoyen?” The use of the French vernacular created a rumble of laughter.
“I’m not a citoyen—I’m from the USA.”
Raised eyebrows, a few ooh-la-las, and more laughter. Someone pushed a warm beer into my hand. Someone else patted my back. (Where was my wallet? Oh, right, in my ankle strap, under the sock. If they tried a pickpocket technique they’d find nothing. Why am I always so suspicious at first? Because you’ve been ripped off in so many places that it’s second nature, comes the reply.)
“So—you like our country?” The questioner was an older man with a thick mat of curly gray hair and a long scar from hairline to chin on the left side of his face. He had finely drawn features—not unlike the notorious explorer of eastern Zaire, Richard Burton.
“So far, I like it,” I said, and slurped my beer with the others.
“And what about our beloved president?” the older man asked with a lopsided grin. He looked a little drunk. He was leading me on. Trying to get me to commit verbal indiscretions. I remembered Paul’s warning.
“I don’t know. We haven’t been introduced yet.” Not much of a response, but it made them all laugh and another bottle of beer arrived in my spare hand.
“And you would like to meet him—yes?”
Time to shift the conversation away from Mobutu. I’d read far too much about his “personality cult” and his dreaded henchmen to offer an unbiased reply. Certainly he’d brought a measure of centralized control and calm to this chaotic land—but at what cost to his poor citoyens and citoyennes, and at what cost to us, the ill-informed, gullible, boondoggled, and bamboozled taxpayers back home?