by Dom Joly
Nevertheless, Moneyman said he would ring us if he was successful or if any money came in. We returned to the guesthouse to wait but already it looked like we wouldn’t make Epema that night, let alone Boha. There had been no sign of Hermes and his friend from the WCS. They had been supposed to pick us up at nine but there was no answer from their mobile. Time was clearly a very relative concept in the Congo . . .
As we sat waiting outside our rooms at Le Rosier, I realized that I was secretly quite pleased with the delay. It meant one day less in the swamps, one day less of hardship. This is quite a common sensation for me. Whenever I was driving around looking to do a hidden camera stunt I was always relieved when something went wrong with the set-up and we had to delay things. Once I was actually in the thick of it I loved it, but the pre-tension was unbearable.
Finally JP’s phone rang at around one p.m. It was Moneyman and he had managed to scrape together 350,000 francs. Someone had come in and paid some money over to someone in Brazzaville. It was not enough but JP hoped he could pay WCS by wire transfer and use the cash for porters and negotiations with the village chief. However, the problem was that we still couldn’t get hold of the WCS driver to take us to Epema. It was incredible enough that there was mobile phone reception in Impfondo, but this was all part of the process of ‘municipalization’ that the government had implemented in the last six years in an attempt to ensure that all towns in Congo have at least one tarmac road and better public buildings. At the time of my visit the road from here to Epema had been built only four years previously, with Brazilian money, and was the only tarmacked road in the entire province.
JP went off to get the money from Moneyman before Moneyman lost his money. I started reading King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild. Finally at around five p.m., the WCS people arrived at our guesthouse. They seemed entirely unconcerned with being almost a day late. Hermes had brought his boss, a Rwandan and a man called Sylvestre who had been to Lake Tele four times. He told us it would be a two-night camp from Boha, with us arriving at the lake on the third morning. Today was Friday and we had to be back in Impfondo by Thursday morning to get the plane to Brazzaville. This left us with very little time to play with.
We went through the finances of the trip. Sylvestre wanted 5,000 Congolese francs per porter per day. He was going to come with us and his fee was 10,000 Congolese francs a day. He estimated we needed to pay around 100,000 Congolese francs each to the chief and that we would need 80,000 for food and supplies.
We went to the market for the supplies. We needed two bottles of water per person per day, tinned tuna, hamburger buns, pasta, rice, tomato sauce and some Babybel cheese. On our way back from the market we spotted that a large boat had docked in town and we went down to have a look. On deck was a white man: a rotund Frenchman who seemed rather surprised to see us.
The boat turned out to be a bi-national cooperation between the Central African Republic and the Congo. He had been working on it for seven years and knew the rivers very well. They would trawl up and down the river from Bangui to Brazzaville putting in buoys and arrows to show boats where to navigate. The Frenchman told us that it was a never-ending task, as the power of the river shifted the sand constantly.
I asked him if he had ever seen the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. He looked puzzled. He didn’t know what it was. A Congolese crew member sitting on an oil drum and having his head shaved with a rusty-looking razor looked up.
‘Mokèlé-mbèmbé? Le dinosaur?’
I nodded and ask him if he’d seen it.
‘I haven’t, but I know plenty of people who have.’
He got very animated and I feared for his scalp. He told us about a place on the river charts where everyone said there was a Mokèlé-mbèmbé. He said that all Congolese avoided this bend because of the beast. Another deckhand spoke up. He claimed that planes didn’t fly over the Lake Tele area because the beast had a magnetic power that dragged them into some sort of aerial whirlpool before crashing them. While I was happy that they knew about my quarry, I hate stories like theirs. These were so ludicrous they made the reality of a Mokèlé-mbèmbé seem unlikely.
The Frenchman laughed and promised us that he’d keep an eye out. It was another four days downstream to Brazzaville from Impfondo.
Bangui to Brazzaville on a boat down the Congo – now that was an adventure. But sadly it would have to be for another time. We said goodbye to the Frenchman and scrambled back up the bank past a mother washing four little naked kids on top of an upturned dugout canoe.
Once back at the guesthouse we were finally ready to go. The Rwandan was driving a big white Toyota Land Cruiser, the vehicle of choice for charities and relief agencies worldwide. We squeezed into the back and set off out of Impfondo along the road that the Brazilians built. Now, I know little of the Brazilians’ road-building capability, but let’s just say that I hoped this wasn’t the jewel in their crown. The road was essentially a series of joined-up potholes with the forest attempting to reclaim the route from all sides. We had to go at a snail’s pace to avoid breaking the Land Cruiser’s suspension.
Sylvestre was sitting opposite me in the back and I asked him if he believed in the Mokèlé-mbèmbé. He said that he hadn’t seen one but he knew of many people who had. This seemed to be a stock answer round here and I hoped that I might get some first-hand experiences from someone in Boha.
It took about two hours to get to Epema and most of that time was spent listening to the government conservateur of the park having a screaming argument with the others about the Bible.
His French was very heavily accented and I couldn’t follow everything but the main thrust seemed to be about vegetarianism and how Daniel, because he was a vegetarian, was not eaten in the den of lions as he didn’t smell of meat. At one juncture they asked me what I thought and I admitted that I had no idea but I had heard that the Mokèlé-mbèmbé was vegetarian. They all nodded and said that, yes, it was a herbivore.
‘I hope so,’ I said, mock-nervously, and everyone roared with laughter. Outside the vehicle was total darkness. Occasionally I could spot the glimmer of a fire outside a hut through the thick trees. Every so often the headlights would catch the surprised face of someone walking in the pitch-black along the road. Where were they going? Come to think of it, where were we going?
We rolled into the WCS compound in Epema, where JP and I were given a very basic room with two beds. The sounds of the forest were all round us.
‘I’m afraid that I snore,’ I warned JP.
‘No worry – I make gas,’ he replied.
Sylvestre promised that he would wake us at five in the morning and that we’d immediately set off in a boat for Boha. We woke up at seven. Nobody had woken us up and we stumbled out and tried to get things going. Predictably everyone was still asleep and it took another good couple of hours before we were ready to get on the boat. I glanced at my iPhone and was astonished to find that I had reception.
I once did a show for Radio 4 about how extraordinary the mobile-phone boom has been for Africa. It’s allowed fishermen and traders to check where they can get the best price for their goods as well as keeping migrant families in touch with each other. In the days before mobiles this was a major problem and would have made our already tricky trip almost impossible to coordinate. Now, though, men in day-glo orange vests patrolled the streets of every town we’d been in trying to sell people ‘credit’. All the government had needed to do was erect some mobile-phone masts and the money started to roll in. Every African ‘rich’ kid wanted to get in on this boom business.
I sent Stacey a final text:
I’m getting on the boat and heading off into the unknown – laters xxx
Finally, Sylvestre, JP, the boat driver and I (plus all our supplies) set off down the misty river of Likouala aux Herbes in search of dinosaurs.
The river was bordered on both sides by a swampy savannah and you could see the high-water marks from the rainy season. Kingfishers swooped and dived al
l around us. On the banks perched large herons and the occasional vulture. Beneath us were crocodiles, hippos and possibly a Mokèlé-mbèmbé or two. I felt very vulnerable in our tiny boat.
Every so often we would pass fishermen standing tall on their long, thin dugout canoes, the rim just inches above the water level. As seems to be the international boat convention, everyone waved at each other frantically. Admittedly this was a friendly thing to do but why does this just happen in boats? Why don’t we all wave at each other every time we see someone in another car? I made a mental note to start doing this when I got back home.
The sun rose higher in the sky as we ploughed on down the river at a steady but unexciting pace. The river was still and trees were reflected in the water as though in fantastical mirrors. After a time my eyes started playing tricks on me and tree stumps became men and logs metamorphosed into giant crocodiles. The herons all sat ramrod-straight on dead branches, seemingly contemplating life as they knew it. They appeared Zen-like in comparison to the hyperactive kingfishers, swooping up and down looking for the slightest hint of a fish. I felt incredibly peaceful: to travel is better than to arrive – and I was slightly dreading the arrival. It was the calm before the storm.
Our boatman waved at a man sitting on a log by the riverside. The man beckoned us over and we turned sharply towards the shore and beached the boat. The man lived in a tiny hut with his wife and two little kids. He would catch fish and then smoke them on a wooden trestle table that hung over a slow-burning fire. Every month he would make the trip to Epema in his pirogue to sell the smoked blackened fish. We bought 2,000 Congolese francs’ worth, which JP chucked into the front of the boat where their blackened, dead eyes stared balefully at me as we proceeded on down the river.
An hour or so later we rounded another corner and came across two men in their pirogues. One, who bore an extraordinary resemblance to Snoop Dogg, was holding an antique rifle and had a large dead python wrapped round it. The other, whom I shall call Bulldog, was a more physically intimidating-looking man and held a long, nasty-looking spear.
‘We are in luck,’ said Sylvestre quietly. ‘These are the very men we need to talk to . . .’
It turned out that Snoop Dogg, who looked very young for the role, was the village chief, whereas Bulldog was a tribal elder (although not that elderly).
Snoop Dogg seemed to be in a good mood on account of his python kill, whereas Bulldog was friendly enough but a little distant. Aware of the constraints of time, we offered to tow them back to the village. They agreed and each sat in their dugouts holding on to the sides of our boat as we became a kind of DIY catamaran.
After ten minutes we turned right off the main river and down a side tributary. To our left we began to see the village half-hidden in the trees. Our arrival sparked much interest and most of the village rushed down to the river to watch us disembark. We climbed a steep mudbank and entered the village right by the chief’s hut. He went inside and produced a couple of low, home-made chairs that he beckoned us to sit in. The chief, it quickly became apparent, was also the government’s man in the village. He told us that he was responsible for any white man in his area and he wanted to be sure we had no ulterior motive for visiting the lake. He seemed quite smart, rather charismatic and young – maybe thirty? We told him why we were there and that we were on a very tight timeframe and needed to leave as soon as possible on that day to have a chance of reaching the lake and returning on time. He nodded and said it was possible to organize porters and do the trip, but that he needed his ‘chief’s fee’ for this to happen. We discussed the fee and it was within our budget so we handed the money over and we shook hands. This had really been too easy. It looked like the travel gods were on our side. The chief stood up and said that he’d start thinking about who would go with us. While he did this, he said, we should go and greet the village elders and get their blessing for the trip. This was all going swimmingly and we set off through some quite thick forest to where the elders were assembling.
On the way I asked Sylvestre about Boha and how it was that the people here looked after Lake Tele since they were so far away from it. He said that the tribe used to live around the lake but they, like everyone else, were forced to move to the riverside so that the colonial authorities could keep an eye on them. So the tribe had moved to Boha but they were still custodians of Lake Tele and anybody going to the lake had to go through them.
Sylvestre pushed his way through a thick bush and we found ourselves in another little village. It was all part of Boha but this area had definitely been built with a view to keeping a distance from the rest. This was where the elders lived and we could see a couple of their wives pounding manioc, their staple food, in the doorways of their huts. We rounded a corner and walked into a central area that was clearly used for meetings as there were two long low benches on each side. It was indicated to us that we should sit on one of these benches, and this we did. I looked around us. Directly opposite us were the elders. There were about five of them, including Bulldog, and they were all holding the rather nasty-looking spears we’d seen earlier. A couple also had machetes hanging by their waists. In the middle of them was a man who seemed to be a lot older than the elders. He looked fairly ravaged by life. His eyes were bloodshot and slightly crazed-looking. He wore a tattered old combat jacket that was open to the waist. He stared at us with a look that didn’t immediately scream ‘Welcome to the jungle.’
To our left sat about fifty men from the village all settling down as though about to watch a good match . . . Which they probably were.
JP, though normally pretty cool about things, was visibly quite unsettled by the amount of weapons on show.
‘Will this take long?’ I whispered to him. We needed to get cracking as soon as possible if we wanted to get any distance towards the lake before we had to camp.
‘I have no idea what is going on,’ replied JP.
A young, very tall man stood up. He was holding a wicker brush and another long spear. Sylvestre explained that he was the porte-parole. He would stand in between the elders and us and relay any messages. We were not to speak to the elders directly. Everything had to be directed through Porte-Parole. I couldn’t believe this system at first but actually it wasn’t that dissimilar to MPs directing their remarks to the Speaker in the House of Commons. Supposedly it helped to avoid full-on arguments.
Proceedings started with Sylvestre, speaking through Porte-Parole, greeting the elders and telling them that we had come a long way to go and see the lake and wanted their blessing for the trip.
Porte-Parole relayed this to the elders, who all nodded and grunted in what looked like a fairly amenable manner.
Then the crazed-looking man in the combat jacket, whom I shall call Crazy (because, frankly, he was), started to speak. I say speak; it was more a series of shouts and gesticulations. Porte-Parole listened and, after a little pause, informed us that Crazy was happy that we’d come to see them and that they would give us their blessing if we paid them the sum of 250,000 Congolese francs. This was totally out of the question. Firstly, we had just paid Snoop Dogg for the privilege of making the trip to the lake and we were not about to pay twice. More importantly, we just didn’t have anything near that sort of money.
Sylvestre stood up and thanked the elders for their kind offer but hinted that this was a little more than we had been expecting to pay. Both JP and I hissed at him that it was a lot more than we had expected to pay, since we had already paid. Porte-Parole took this all on board and passed it on to the elders.
The elders went . . . apeshit. Crazy started waving a machete at us in a distinctly unfriendly manner and Bulldog was shouting at the other elders and pointing at us.
I asked Sylvestre what was going on. Why were we negotiating to pay more money that we didn’t have when we’d already paid the chief? Sylvestre explained that Snoop Dogg was chief but he was the government’s man, whereas traditional tribal authority rested with Crazy and the Elders (good
band name). They had no interest in what we’d negotiated with Snoop. As far as they were concerned he was an irrelevance. They were the top dogs and we needed to pay them for access. I asked Sylvestre why he had not mentioned this before and he shrugged in that infuriating African way. I could see JP subtly looking at how much money we had left and making a quick calculation of what we could afford. I already knew that it was not much and the clock was still ticking.
JP took the floor and did his flowery-French thing. He dropped the fact that he was a prince back home and said he knew how these things worked and didn’t want to offend. He then went on to explain that we’d had a lot of unexpected problems on the trip and this had left us short of both time and money. He started off on quite a long allegory about a hunter going out into the forest and chopping down trees that were too big and took too long to chop down, and he didn’t have enough provisions so he went home without the trees because it was dangerous in the forest at night. I was just about following this and hoped that Porte-Parole could convey it in full. Porte-Parole did his best but, when the gist became clear that we were not going to pay anything near the amount they wanted, Bulldog exploded. He ignored Porte-Parole and started screaming at JP and me while waving his spear about.
‘If you don’t like the price then go back to where you came from. We have no need for you here. Anyway, the gros bébé will never make it to the lake – he will die on the journey . . .’
It took me a moment to work out that the gros bébé in question was me. It took me a little longer to confirm that he was not threatening to kill me but was sure that the forest would . . .
I looked at JP and he looked at me with a sense of foreboding. We agreed to leave the clearing and discuss what we should do next. Curiously Snoop Dogg had now turned up and insisted on joining our discussions. I was already annoyed with him for taking a payment that gave us nothing, but joining our secret negotiations was a bit much. JP and I talked, and worked out that 50,000 Congolese francs was the best we could do and they would have to take it or leave it. Snoop Dogg nodded at this offer and said they would listen to it. I asked him whether he had at least organized the porters so that, should this sort itself out, we could leave immediately. He looked at me vacantly and I guessed the answer.