by Simon Reeve
I spotted a lone figure walking slowly towards us. He was carrying a bundle of thin pieces of firewood across his stooping shoulders. Brian grabbed the camera to get a shot of him approaching. He was barefoot, tiny, ancient, and wearing just a ragged pair of old knee-length shorts. I sidled up to him as he drew level.
‘How far have you come?’ I said to him as Emery translated.
‘About four kilometres.’
‘That’s a long way.’
‘Yes,’ he replied through Emery. ‘And I still have a way to go yet.’
Emery and I helped him with his load so he could rest for a couple of minutes.
He said his name was Ngozi. He was so skinny his ribs were visible. His arms looked wizened and wasted.
‘Thank you,’ he said, as he shook my hand. ‘Merci beaucoup.’
‘It’s heavy,’ I told him. ‘It was heavy for me and all I did was lift it down from your shoulders.’
‘It is heavy,’ he said, stretching his old limbs, ‘but that’s the price I pay in order to survive.’
We sat on a rock and he laid the machete he used to cut the wood across his knees. Bright-eyed and smiling, he seemed completely unperturbed by our presence or the camera. It was as if he had been expecting us. Like it was fate our paths had crossed.
‘Do you mind if I ask you a cheeky question?’ I said to him.
‘Not at all.’
‘How old are you, Ngozi?’
He smiled. ‘Sixty-eight. I look older because I work so hard. I’m not strong any more. Carrying so much wood makes me weak.’
‘What do you do with the wood?’
‘I pick it from the forest and then I take it to the market and I sell it. Sometimes it can take a whole day, working from dawn to dusk. Everything I get for my survival comes from the forest.’
I asked him how much money he would get for the wood he had been carrying. He thought for just a moment. Then told me he would earn perhaps 400 francs per day. Emery did the calculations, checked with Ngozi, then turned to me. It was roughly 42 pence. Per day. I was horrified, but I tried to make sure it didn’t show.
‘It’s not enough to buy the food I need,’ said Ngozi thoughtfully. ‘But it’s all I can get for the wood. This is what I have to do in order to support myself.’
I shook his hand again and thanked him for talking to us. It was just a brief moment. But it lives with me. How could it not? There is hardly a day that goes past when I do not think of Ngozi or the other humbling souls I met on that trip. This was the journey, more than any before or since, that helped convince me of both the personal value of an adventure, which at its best should challenge, enlighten and fulfil, and the merit of taking a camera to a remote part of the world.
Capturing a sense of how our fellow humans, our brothers and sisters, struggle to survive in parts of the world enduring conflict and poverty can be a potent reminder of reality for those watching in less blighted corners. I still believe it has value. Even years after this series aired I would be stopped by a viewer who would sidle close or put their hand on my arm to convey the sharing of an experience and tell me they also remembered Ngozi. A young woman once sought me out to say she watched this journey on the television, changed her university course to study remote medicine and was about to become the only doctor in a faraway refugee camp. She was telling me the ripple of the programmes had an effect. Making a television series is surely not enough, but at least it is something.
Emery wanted us to see a village called Ngamba-Kinshasa, where a school teacher was waiting to talk to us. To get there we had to journey up the Congo River. We stopped at a busy jetty, watched in amazement as a man walked past with a small crocodile on his head, then hired a long dugout canoe fixed with an outboard motor.
We set off with a breeze coming off the muddy water and locals bathing close to the banks. They were waving and chanting as we passed them, so I waved back.
‘They’re taunting you, Simon,’ said Emery, laughing.
‘What are they saying, then?’
‘It’s a song. White man – your breath stinks.’
We pulled alongside a huge barge. In a country with only 300 miles of paved roads, the river was the lifeline and main thoroughfare, and barges carried basic trade and people wanting to move from place to place. This barge was completely rammed with travellers. It looked like an entire village was living aboard, under tarpaulins strung up on poles.
‘Have you done that, Emery?’ I asked him, smiling away rather naively as if nothing could be more pleasant than a barge trip on the Congo.
‘Travelled on the barges? Of course, many times.’
I gazed across the water to where the people on one massive barge were all but spilling over the sides and asked him how long he would have to wait until a barge was ready to leave.
‘Minimum is a month,’ Emery said.
‘A month?’ I was incredulous. My smile vanished.
‘Maximum is three months.’
I couldn’t believe it.
‘Conditions are terrible,’ he told me. ‘You can have four or five hundred people and only two toilets for all of them.’
I was silent for a while after that. The DRC often left me numb. You can read about a place as much as you like, but only by going and seeing can you truly appreciate both the beauty and the tragedy. The DRC had both in epic quantities.
It was explorer Henry Morton Stanley, he of ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’ fame, who really helped begin the subjugation of the people of the Congo basin. Under the colonial rule of King Leopold II of Belgium 5–10 million people died in what is now the DRC. Some historians argue it is the hidden holocaust.
Independence from Belgium was no salvation. The country set sail on its own with just a couple of dozen graduates in the entire country and not a single person with a university degree in law, medicine or engineering. The Belgians had prevented almost anyone from getting an education.
Just as you can’t run a country if all the educated people leave, so the DRC then floundered. A dictator called Mobutu Sese Seko took over, ran a kleptocracy for thirty-two years and deliberately didn’t build any roads so nobody could attack him in the capital. He milked the country for personal wealth and created a culture that enrichment through the state was standard. Corruption remains endemic.
Today there is enough fertile land in the DRC to feed the entire continent and enough hydroelectric potential to power most of it as well. But the DRC is astonishingly poor.
Finally, we arrived by canoe into the village of Ngamba-Kinshasa, a simple settlement of wood-and-thatch houses built on stilts, and pulled our boat up onto the bank, next to fishermen who were mending small nets using random pieces of string.
Jose, a young teacher from the community, took us to see the basic school. He said he hadn’t been paid by the state in months but was still trying to give some kind of education to the next generation.
‘There’s no money, but I do the best I can,’ he said. He led me through a church which doubled as a school. The floor was open planking with no desks, just rough pews for kids to sit on.
‘There are no books,’ he admitted sadly, ‘no tables where they can write, they just rest the paper on their thighs.’
‘How many children are there?’ I asked him.
‘Sixty. They’re split into different forms, first and second because of the different ages. I place one form on this side, another on this side and so on. We have nothing, and we need everything, blackboard, books, chalk.’
We visited Jose’s home where he and his wife were not only trying to raise three children of their own, but three more children of family members who had died of disease, including malaria. Jose’s youngest son Johnson, who was just a year old, had also contracted the disease. I felt my heart wrench. There were no German doctors who could rush round to see them.
This was the harsh reality of poverty, corruption, and life in the DRC. An astonishing 60 per cent of children were dying before their fi
fth birthday. Even those who survived into their teens faced enormous challenges from afflictions such as malaria. Life expectancy for a man was just forty-two years.
We flew further along the Congo river with the help of Dan from the Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF). With his crisp white shirt, moustache and pre-flight clipboard checks, Dan seemed slightly out of place in the jungle. I asked him whether he felt he had a calling to be in the DRC. He laughed and said if he didn’t there would be no reason to be there. ‘I’m not getting paid enough to do this,’ he added.
I have always been taken by a line used by Archbishop Desmond Tutu about the arrival of Christianity on the continent: ‘When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.’
Even in recent decades other missionaries in other parts of the continent have done wicked and appalling things in Africa, reportedly only agreeing to help people in one area if they would be tattooed with a cross on their forehead, ensuring their annihilation when persecutors returned to town. But MAF pilots seemed completely selfless, shuttling missionaries but also lepers, cancer patients, the injured and anyone needing urgent help around the DRC and other areas of the world lacking infrastructure and roads. You can book a flight via their website. Dan didn’t lecture or hector us about faith. But he did slip a couple of leaflets into my bag.
Dan was one of the few people prepared to fly into the east of the DRC despite the ongoing conflict.
‘What’s the situation like there at the moment?’ I asked as I sat in the co-pilot’s seat with grasslands and waterways unfolding beneath me.
‘Flare-ups,’ he said. ‘One after the other, there’s continual fighting. The Ugandans keep coming across the border. There’s the Hutu and the Tutsis who are always fighting it out. The cattle people fight with the farmers. It’s anarchy.’
DRC was a collapsed state. The United Nations was the life support.
Dan flew us to a UN base just north of the equator and we landed on tarmac surrounded by a multitude of helicopters used to ferry thousands of troops around the east. The UN was running the largest peacekeeping operation in the world in DRC to prevent the country slipping back into a devastating regional war. They were trying to disarm well-armed militia groups and also train the nascent Congolese army, which still had a terrible reputation.
As we drove to our lodgings we passed a troop of Congolese soldiers exercising in the middle of town. Dressed all in black they looked more than a little menacing. People moved swiftly out of their way. Emery summed up the local feeling.
‘It’s all right in the middle of town here,’ he said. ‘Lots of people around and the UN soldiers are everywhere.’ His voice was low as if he was worried someone might overhear. ‘In the middle of the bush, though – if we met them there – I wouldn’t be anything like as happy.’
‘Why?’
At first, he seemed a little reluctant to answer. ‘It’s common knowledge. The army, or some of them at least, rob the population.’
Much of the fighting had been about gold and diamonds. The DRC was and is fantastically rich in mineral deposits. I wanted to visit a gold mine, but all the roads were blocked or too dangerous even with an armed escort. But the United Nations agreed to take us on a UN helicopter flight to a mine. A detachment of Pakistani soldiers came along for our protection.
As we came in to land I could see more soldiers in pale-blue UN helmets guarding the strip to make sure we didn’t come under attack from militia groups with rocket-propelled grenades. We lurched through the bush in the back of Land Rovers to reach a lucrative mine which had changed hands on five separate occasions during the war.
It was an astonishing sight. In a vast pit of mud and water, perhaps a mile long by half a mile wide, hundreds and hundreds of men, women and children toiled, up to their waists and often deeper. The work was often impossibly hard. Passing heavy pans of sludge and mud from hand to hand they would then tip it out and purify it over a water bed padded with carpet that would hold small flecks of gold.
There was very little machinery. Almost everything was done by hand. The mine was under the control of a powerful local militia which charged miners a daily fee to work there. If anyone found any gold the militia would then take a hefty commission. It all looked, sounded and smelt absolutely horrific.
I asked one of the miners whether he thought gold had been a blessing or a curse for the DRC.
His answer chastened me. He said that people were poor, but at least with the mine they could earn a little money. Without the gold, he said, life would be unbearable.
I took a photograph in that mine of a youngster standing on the rim, in front of a vast hole in which tiny bodies look like insects. I have the photo on the wall in my office. I see it every day, and it reminds me not just of the humbling endurance of the Congolese, or their apparently eternal suffering, but also how sheer bloody lucky I am to not be working for twelve hours a day, seven days a week, up to my waist or my neck in sucking mud and filth.
The Pakistani UN force invited us to their base for dinner that night. It was a matter of honour for them that we ate well.
There was no alcohol on offer, of course, but we talked late into the night and they spoke with horror and wonder about the state of the DRC. Men from the deserts of Balochistan, they said they were astonished to discover when they arrived that people in the region were starving.
‘This is a place where you drop a seed in the ground and by the next year there is a tree,’ said one captain. Gradually the Pakistanis realised they were dealing with an entire society that had been traumatised by endless and apocalyptic conflict. People had lost touch with fundamental skills and leadership was completely absent. Refugees began gathering around their base begging for help and advice, so men from the deserts of Pakistan began offering crash courses in smallholding. By the time I visited there were vegetable stalls lining the roads near their base, and malnutrition rates, in their area at least, had fallen dramatically.
Each time I have visited a UN military contingent they have gone out of their way to both protect and feed us. Elsewhere in the DRC a contingent of Moroccan UN soldiers were especially proud of their food, and had spices, dried apricots, fruit and meat flown in weekly. ‘Our own special aid flight,’ one of their senior officers said with a smile. The best UN food I have eaten was, perhaps a little predictably, a meal with an Italian force. They had flown in not just fresh garlic and vegetables, but pasta, cheese, wine and their own chef.
But a posting with the UN in the DRC was no cushy job. When I visited in the mid-2000s there were 17,000 UN troops working not just as peacekeepers, but peace enforcers, authorised to fight warring factions. Dozens of UN soldiers had been killed and they were taking no chances when out on patrol.
The next day we headed out with the Pakistanis on a patrol that is often described as ‘force projection’, a show of power designed to intimidate enemies and reassure friends. Driving around flanked by UN armoured cars with mounted machine guns was nerve-wracking. Attacks with RPGs were still worryingly common.
We were taken to a district where an astonishing 50,000 had died in fighting between different ethnic groups battling over land that one side wanted to use for crops and the other to graze their cattle. Whole communities had been wiped out. The UN dropped us off in the village of Nizi, where locals from the Hema tribe told me they had been attacked by the neighbouring Lendus. The village chief took Emery and me to see a mass grave where victims had been buried.
‘How many are there?’ I asked as I looked out over a forest of wooden crosses.
‘One hundred and fourteen. All killed in one attack.’ His eyes narrowed at the memory. ‘They were mostly women and children.’
‘How did it happen?’ I asked him.
He took a moment before he responded. ‘Early morning, just as the sun was coming up they attacked the village with machetes.�
� He pointed into the distance, towards the Lendu village from where the attackers had appeared. ‘They massacred women and children, hacked them down wherever they came upon them.’
An older man appeared, clearly traumatised. He struggled to contain his emotions as he described the attack. He escaped with his life, but his arms and hands bore the scars of machetes and his right ear and head had been split with a heavy blow.
‘They tried to hack me to death,’ he told me. ‘I don’t know how I survived.’
‘How many members of your family did you lose?’
‘All of them. They killed my wife and all my children. There is no one left, the Lendus took everyone from me.’
Emery and I were both deeply moved by the suffering we heard in the village. We had a quiet hug after meeting that poor man, before we headed back into the town of Bunia in search of a reflective beer. On the dirt road outside our guesthouse was a bar with a sign at the door showing a crossed-out sub-machine gun and the legend ‘Pas d’armes / No weapons’. It was perfect. We sat outside and Emery, as decent a human being as you will find on this planet, told me he was optimistic about the future. He showed me his voter registration card for upcoming elections and said he would guard it with his life.
Emery had faith in the democratic process. In the years that followed the President of the DRC, Joseph Kabila, secured repeat terms in office in 2006 and 2011, then refused to leave when his term expired in December 2016. Further fighting has erupted in the north-east, with more suffering and tens of thousands forced to flee. Meanwhile in Mbandaka there have been Ebola outbreaks even within the town. It seems the people of the DRC must continue to endure the endless consequences of climate, colonial rule, conflict and sapping corruption.
