2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth

by Giles Foden

  Then the landscape changed dramatically. The train rocked its way up into some sandstone bluffs. Reaching the top it assumed an alarming angle and plunged down into the Lukuga Valley. Below them for nearly 200 miles—sometimes foaming angrily over rocks, sometimes sluggish and clogged with water-plants and creepers—flowed a river that was at the very heart of the mystery of Lake Tanganyika. As much as the Nile—with which it was mistakenly connected by Livingstone—Lake Tanganyika was the Holy Grail of the great European explorers of Africa. Despite its vast size, it proved strangely difficult to find. But added to this, nobody quite understood how it was connected to the great river-systems surrounding it.

  It was a question that Spicer, as a trained hydrographer, had considered and discussed with Mauritzen. Their discussions were footnotes to a grand tradition. While Livingstone believed that the Lualaba River and the much smaller Lukuga were at the head-waters of the Nile, Stanley was convinced they both fed into the Congo, whose source (he reasoned) must be Lake Tanganyika. But exploring the lake in his wooden sailboat, the Lady Alice, in 1876, Stanley found the situation to be rather more complicated. Instead of flowing out of Lake Tanganyika, as he had expected, the Lukuga River was actually flowing in, through a marshy intermediate zone. Stanley calculated that the level of the lake was rising and, with characteristic egotism, he reckoned that after thousands of years it was now at its limit. Just a little more rain, he said, and it would pour out over the swamp. As John Geddie puts it in The Lake Regions of Central Africa, it was extremely magnanimous of Lake Tanganyika to delay ‘the ceremony of turning on the water’ until Stanley had arrived to witness it:

  This is a fascinating theory, but perhaps a more obvious one is to be preferred. Tanganyika is too old not to have discovered this chink in its side long ago. In its time it has had several levels, and in point of fact it alters its flood-mark at least once every year with the rainy and the dry seasons. The Lukuga gap probably represents the fracture of an earthquake, or a hole which the imprisoned waters had broken out and escaped by in some former age, and which has been its safety-valve in its later history. When the Tanganyika has water to spare, it empties it westward; when it has not, it keeps all its supply to itself, and generally preserves a very fine balance between inflow and evaporation.

  It was towards this occasional contributor to the Congo and unique hydrological phenomenon that the Naval Africa Expedition made its precarious way on 26 October 1915. Perhaps among the members of the expedition only Spicer understood the Lukuga River’s significance. He may well have read the account of its discovery written by his naval predecessor Lieutenant Cameron, who explored Lake Tanganyika in 1874, while in search of Livingstone.↓

  ≡ Across Africa (London, 1877). Meeting Livingstone’s servants bearing the dead body of their master, Cameron explored Lake Tanganyika before proceeding westwards to the Atlantic, becoming the first European to cross equatorial Africa. He was later an author of adventure stories for boys.

  After descending into a wooded area above the river, the train came to a halt. This was Kilu, said the Belgian engine-driver, where they would swap locomotives. For the remaining 40 or so miles of their journey, Mimi and Toutou would cross gorges on rickety wooden bridges that would not support the yo-ton locomotive, so a smaller one would be hooked up. In the event, the driver also ordered Toutou to be uncoupled. Both boats would be too heavy for the trestle bridges, he explained, and he would only take Mimi for the time being. So Toutou was shunted off into a siding along with the big locomotive.

  Over the high rocks, to which the track clung with all the tenacity of a mountain goat, the tiny train chugged its way, continually dipping in and out of gulches. Where the gulches became gorges there were wooden bridges constructed from long poles driven into the rocks and fastened with guy ropes either side. At any moment the train might have plunged down one of these deep ravines and the driver stopped before each bridge to inspect its fixtures carefully and see if it was safe. Sometimes the gorges were more like tunnels. On one of the bridges the vertical clearance was so slight they had to remove the boats from the carriages and slide them along the tracks on their cradles. This was done, says Spicer, ‘by lowering them onto sleepers laid across the rails, which were well greased’. The engine then pulled the boats slowly through. Even so, Spicer adds, ‘we had only 7 inches clearance at the top’. There were no less than 33 bridges, so even though the distance they had to travel was relatively short, their journey took most of the day. Not far from Lukuga—the Belgian encampment on Lake Tanganyika—the line petered out. The train simply came to an abrupt halt on a piece of bare track. All of the rail and sleepers had been used up. There was a sort of station in the bush, consisting of little more than a few huts, a water-tank and a pile of firewood. From behind this modest establishment, a quaint and ragged personage greeted them, looking like some figure from the commedia dell’arte. It was Sub-Lieutenant Tyrer, otherwise known as Piccadilly Johnny, he of the monocle and the addiction to Worcester sauce. In the intervening months, however, his bottle of yellow hair-dye had run out and his hair was now as white as snow, with a beard to match. The other members of the expedition stared at this tatty individual in astonishment. Seemingly oblivious to their scrutiny, Tyrer informed them they would have to walk the remaining two miles to the lakeshore.

  It was almost evening by this stage and too late to see Lake Tanganyika, so Mimi was hidden in a siding, in case the Germans came looking for her, and the expedition set up camp.

  Dr Hanschell awoke the following morning to find that Spicer had already set off for the lake. The locomotive was being prepared to return up the line to fetch Toutou, accompanied by some of the men; the others had gone with Spicer to Lukuga. Dr Hanschell and Eastwood, finding themselves with nothing to do, decided to walk to the lake. Despite their very different religious beliefs, they were now firm friends. So it was with a sense of companionship as well as mounting excitement that they climbed the hills surrounding the vast expanse of water they had travelled so far to conquer; its presence was heralded by a change in the light over the brow of a range of hills some miles off. As they climbed, the weather broke with a warning thunderclap and a sudden flash of lightning. Finally the rains had arrived, it seemed, pattering down on the cane and dry grass in round fat drops.

  The moisture was borne in by the monsoon winds from the Indian Ocean—the same journey Burton and Speke had made, when they first saw Lake Tanganyika, after a long and arduous march from Zanzibar. The weather became milder at the final moment, but Eastwood and the doctor had nothing like the sunny conditions under which their predecessors had seen the lake: its characteristic aspect of dazzling water reflecting every tint of land and sky. As they climbed the final hill, the change in the light they had perceived in the distance became the thing itself: a vast grey panel of water. It was as if an enormous slate had been sunk in a trough far below the level of the undulating tableland over which they had climbed.

  Atheist and Methodist stood in awestruck silence on a red sandstone cliff in Belgian territory. The opposite side of the lake was under the control of the Germans. All that could be discerned of it was the hook-like summit of Mount Kungwe, home to the resident spirit of one of the tribes on the German side, a vengeful deity who demanded great sacrifices of his followers.

  The Holo-holo thrived on both sides of Lake Tanganyika and were then the dominant tribe in the area. They had informed Lee about German activities on the lake, but they had also spied on the Belgians for the Germans, for which a great many had been hanged. Some of this information consisted of news about the expedition’s progress up the Lualaba River, on the banks of which lived several Holo-holo clans. Fortunately, the Germans had been too preoccupied with the apparent threat of the Baron Dhanis to pay attention to the muttering forest drums.

  Once Eastwood and Dr Hanschell had descended from their bluff, they crossed another line of hills, hiking up and down through basins of land until they reached the Belgian headquart
ers at Lukuga. This lay next to a swampy river about a mile wide, its banks choked with a profuse growth of arum lilies and papyrus.

  On one bank of the river, amid tall grass stalks, could be seen the iron hulk of another steamer, this time with shell-holes in its side.↓

  ≡ The Alexandre del Commune, which had been disabled by the Germans earlier in the War.

  On the water were various small vessels manned by the Belgian Navy. Nearby, on a little plateau, was the Belgian camp and another they had built for their British visitors: a series of mud-walled, thatch-roofed huts around a level piece of ground. Eastwood and the doctor found Spicer sitting in a chair in the largest hut, legs crossed and hands busy with needle and thread. He was making himself up to Vice-Admiral and sewing on a flag to prove it.

  TWELVE

  Mimi and Toutou’s great journey was over. Now they had to prepare for battle. Spicer had his Vice-Admiral’s flag—white with a red circle in the corner—run up a pole in the centre of the camp. He ordered the men to smarten themselves up and parade, reminding them that they still had the most important part of their mission ahead of them—the sinking of the Hedwig von Wissmann—and they could not afford to let standards slip, as they had on their long journey here. He added that Mimi and Toutou would be kept hidden in the bushes back at the railway siding until a suitable safe harbour could be constructed for them. ‘This will be your next job,’ he said in conclusion, his eye wandering to Eastwood’s chimpanzee, which had hooked an arm round the ankle of one of the men in the front rank.

  Finding and making a safe harbour proved to be Spicer’s first flashpoint with the Belgian senior army officer, Commandant Stinghlamber. This stiff-shirted individual had given Spicer what Byron Farwell describes as ‘a correct but unenthusiastic welcome’. There was an immediate tension over who was higher in rank. Strictly speaking, Spicer was a grade higher than Stinghlamber, as a Belgian army commandant is equivalent to a British army major, whereas a British navy commander is equivalent to a colonel. But the Belgians can be forgiven their confusion: quite apart from the folie de grandeur of the Vice-Admiral’s flag that now flew outside Spicer’s hut, the Englishman’s epaulettes had been wrongly sewn by Spicer’s African valet, Tom. As Shankland explains: ‘They were perhaps confused by the fact that Tom, unaware of the important difference between a pip and a crown, on transferring them to Spicer’s clean shirt had made him a Lieutenant on one shoulder and a double Major on the other.’

  Stinghlamber had begun building a harbour in the mouth of the Lukuga next to the camp, but Spicer thought there was a better place a little further south. The Lukuga mouth, he maintained, was an unreliable place to float boats. As Stanley had discovered, the river could become blocked, stopping and starting as the rains prevailed. This hydrographer’s argument cut no ice with Stinghlamber. Spicer retaliated by saying that unless the Belgian concurred, he would take Mimi and Toutou to the British port of Kituta in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), 200 miles to the south. In the end, Stinghlamber capitulated, not wanting to lose the ‘two little cruisers automobile’ as he called them.

  Despite this difference of opinion, within a week of their arrival Commandant Stinghlamber hosted a dinner for Spicer and Dr Hanschell at the Belgian mess hut. Joining Stinghlamber as host was Commandant Goor, an extremely tall, thin man in charge of the Belgian fleet on the lake, such as it was.

  Flying ants flitted about the hurricane lamps hanging from the rafters as Spicer and the doctor were introduced to the other guests. Apart from officers of the Belgian army and navy, they included Monsieur Jadot, the Area Engineer (a Rabelaisian figure, according to the doctor), and a missionary from the Catholic Order of the White Fathers, who was also good company. Female African servants in print dresses waited at table.

  Spicer and Jadot probably had much to talk about. Like Spicer, the Belgian engineer had spent much of his earlier career in China. There he built a 75 o-mile railway, including a bridge spanning the Yellow River that was at the time the longest bridge in the world. On behalf of the Katanga mining company, Jadot had directed the construction of the railways upon which Spicer’s men had travelled. He was later commemorated in the town of Jadotville, an important mining centre 75 miles north of Elizabethville.↓

  ≡ Uranium from the mines of Jadotville was used in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The town’s last claim to fame was when 150 Irish UN troops were besieged there during the Congolese civil war of 1961, holding their position against 3,000 Katangan soldiers until they ran out of ammunition, food and water.

  All the Belgians, even the frosty Stinghlamber, were suitably impressed by Spicer’s lively account of Mimi and Toutou’s journey, which he launched into the moment they began eating. But as Shankland points out, ‘Spicer distressed the Doctor by speaking as if he had overcome all the difficulties by his own ingenuity—he mentioned neither Lee, nor even Wainwright who had got the boats to Lukuga for him.’

  Goor explained to Spicer the current naval situation on the lake. The Belgian flagship was a rectangular petrol-driven barge called the Dix-Tonne, which was armed with two cannon. Goor’s other main vessel was a glisseur or motor boat called Netta. She was a light, flimsy creature, he admitted, able to carry only a single machine-gun. He also had at his disposal a Boston whaler with an outboard motor, which he called la vedette (‘patrol boat’). There were also the vessels he wanted to bring into commission: the Baron Dhanis, which they had seen rusting at Kabalo, and closer to hand the hulk of the Del Commune, which had been bombarded by the Hedwig. (The Del Commune was named after Alexandre Del Commune, an official of the Societe Anonyme Beige pour le Commerce du Haut Congo, with whom Joseph Conrad had planned to make a second expedition upriver 25 years earlier, after his famous Heart of Darkness journey. It never took place, after Conrad fell out with Del Commune’s brother.)

  The meal progressed. Goor wanted to continue his naval briefing with information about the German boats that Mimi and Toutou would face, but Spicer seemed more interested in trotting out his own stories than in gathering intelligence. It was some time since he’d had a captive audience and he rose to the occasion. He provided himself with an entree by asking Monsieur Jadot if there was much game to be found round these parts.

  ‘Plenty before the war,’ replied the engineer distractedly (for he was mainly interested in the African girls serving them), ‘but we’ve been short of meat and now there’s little left to shoot.’

  ‘What a pity,’ sighed Spicer. ‘The hunting of big game is a passion with me. It’s given me some of the most exciting moments of my life. I once had a remarkable day’s shooting in the Galapagos Islands…’

  Dr Hanschell recognised the signs, remembering them years later as he recounted the episode to Shankland. Spicer’s dove-grey eyes were beginning to mist over as he slipped into one of his preposterous reveries.

  ‘The wild cattle were really wild—not used to being hunted—you had to kill, not wound. The first to fall, I remember, was a huge black bull with wicked-looking horns. I dropped him at 40 yards, but before I could go up and examine him, two more were thundering down on us. I bagged them with a left and a right.’

  An embarrassed silence fell round the table and the doctor smiled to himself, remembering the ox whose horn Spicer had winged—at a distance of just a few feet—back in Mwenda Mkosi. How long ago that seemed now…Looking up, he saw Spicer raise his liqueur glass to the light.

  ‘Just the colour of my wife’s hair,’ said Spicer, studying the deep-red liquid intensely. ‘She’ll be a rich woman one day,’ he added. ‘Every time I return from one of my adventures in China or Borneo, I bring her a pearl—she has quite a famous string now.’

  He then launched into a long account of his near-fatal experience sinking a German cruiser off the Kent coast. As it ended—‘One’s actions in such cases are purely instinctive’—Dr Hanschell reflected on Spicer’s psychological condition, for he knew that the only action Spicer had seen in European waters was watching H
MS Niger go down from a hotel window. He later told Shankland:

  There was no doubt that while he was telling it Spicer believed the story, and that all his past humiliations and failures were blotted out of his mind. For a brief moment, surrounded by a group of admiring listeners in the heart of Africa, he really was the hero he would have liked to be, and that perhaps only a malicious fate had so far prevented him from being.

  Fate would test Spicer again soon enough. Not the Graeco-Roman variety with scissors and thread, nor—despite a missionary’s presence at dinner that night—the Providence of a Christian God. In the eyes of the local tribes, Mkungwe, the nzimu or spirit of the mountain opposite, under which the Germans kept a stock of wood to refuel the Götzen, was a much more powerful arbiter of man’s destiny.

  Mount Kungwe, Mkungwe’s seat, was a vast granite tower rising to a height of 8,620 feet. At its summit goats and chickens—and, if the stories were to be believed, human beings—were sacrificed by the local people to determine future outcomes. If you sailed or camped near Mkungwe, it was customary to cry: ‘You big devil! You big king! You kill all men; let us go by.’ If you did not, as had been proved on many occasions, you would die. Or, at the very least, your luck would run out.

  THIRTEEN

  The sun rose over Lukuga the morning after Stinghlam-ber’s dinner party. It shone across Lake Tanganyika to Mount Kungwe beyond—the holy mountain whose priests were solitary, rogue-male baboons, whose acolytes were bounding bands of screeching hyrax. The expedition would have heard the eerie cries of these dassies or rock rabbits, one of the most extraordinary sounds of the animal kingdom. As the naturalist Richard Estes memorably puts it, ‘the call starts with a series of spaced cracking sounds, likened to the rusted hinge of a huge gate slowly opening, followed by a series of expiring screams suggesting a soul in torment’.