Blood River

by Tim Butcher

  ‘But have you been there recently, along the road between here and Kindu?’

  ‘No-one has been all the way along that road recently. It is a long way, more than seven hundred kilometres. But in our province, Katanga, closer to here, I have walked along some of the roads in recent years. The mai-mai are not all out of control, you know. I have been with many of them and they will listen to me. But once you leave Katanga and enter into the next province of Maniema, then that will be different. I do not know that place at all.’

  When Stanley passed through here, the name Maniema itself was enough to cause many of his bearers to run away. It had terrible associations with cannibalism and sorcery. I was more sanguine about it. Maniema was a problem for another day some time in the future. For the moment, I had a much bigger problem to deal with. If Georges was going to come with us, I needed to find another motorbike.

  It was Benoit who immediately spotted the problem.

  ‘We have only two bikes. You will ride with Odimba on one bike and I will ride on the other with all our luggage. There is no space for Georges, and how would he get back here to Kalemie? I have been in this town for a few days now and I have not seen any other suitable bikes we could use.’

  I asked Michel and he was more optimistic. He took us into the centre of town and stopped near a small office run by the World Food Programme, the UN agency responsible for feeding refugees, left us in the jeep and walked over to the security guard. After two minutes’ conversation he came back.

  ‘My friend here knows a man with a motorbike, who might be prepared to rent it for Georges as long as he only goes a short distance out of town. He will try to find the man, but it will take half an hour or so.’

  Michel had to leave, so Benoit, Georges and I all jumped out of the jeep and killed time in the centre of Kalemie until the guard came back. The heat was getting to me and I needed to drink something. Some bottles of sugary orangeade were the only thing available, so I bought three from a hawker and we all stood in the shade of a coconut tree drinking them. On the other side of the road was the relic of a building that looked like a restaurant or café. There was a fenced-in garden and an old sign that said ‘Cercle des Cheminots’ or ‘Railwaymen’s Club’. I remembered seeing photographs of this place from the 1940s and 1950s when it was full of Belgian railway employees, seated at small wooden tables draped with chequered table cloths and laden with plates of food and bottles of wine. For years the railway company – La Compagnie des Chemins de Fer des Grands Lacs, or CFL – had been the biggest employer in the town, and this was where the employees drank, ate and socialised.

  I walked inside to find a wreck. A wooden bar ran along one wall and a tall Congolese lady stood behind it.

  ‘Do you have anything I could drink?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have anything I could eat?’

  ‘No.’

  Before I left, I spotted a pile of crockery on a table. The top one caught my eye. It was marked with the livery of CFL, a swirling red-and-white pennant, a relic of an age when customers and staff would have eaten off company crockery.

  Back on the main street, we returned to our rendezvous to find a grubby-looking man talking to Michel’s security guard. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled of alcohol.

  ‘If you want a motorbike, I am your man.’ He could barely stand he was so drunk.

  My response was a bit tetchy and impatient.

  ‘If I am going to allow my guide to ride with you on your bike, I need to see it.’

  ‘I have thought of that. Follow me.’

  The man, Fiston Kasongo, then led us down a track away from Kalemie’s high street to the abandoned railway, where he had hidden a bike in some long grass.

  ‘There is my bike. It is a great bike.’

  I could see Benoit was not convinced. Benoit had a pair of Yamaha off-road bikes. They were only 100cc, much smaller than the 900cc bike I used to ride in London, but Benoit assured me they were the best bikes for Congolese tracks; light enough to lift over obstacles and strong enough to cope with the huge distances and awful trails. The bike Fiston was offering had a brand name – TVS Max – that I did not recognise, and was much less sturdy.

  Benoit tapped me on the shoulder and took me off to a safe distance so that he could raise his concerns.

  ‘I have never seen that make of bike before. It does not look good enough to me.’

  I was beginning to feel sceptical, but Georges then joined in.

  ‘The bike looks okay for me. I am only going to come with you for a day or so, not the whole journey. In the past I have walked this same distance, so if we have any problems I can always walk.’

  If Georges was game, that was enough for me. Benoit nodded slowly and I returned to the swaying Fiston. A price was then settled upon. I asked Fiston how much he wanted per day. He hesitated for a moment and said $125. Benoit’s eyes flickered disapprovingly, so I offered $50. Fiston did not hesitate for a second, agreeing enthusiastically to the price. He shook my hand, promised to meet me at the IRC house and, before leaving on his bike, asked for a down payment to allow him to buy some fuel. I gave him $20 and he disappeared, weaving along a footpath through the high grass in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke that spoke of an engine in distress.

  I spent the next three days preparing for the journey. First, I had to get permission from both the local district commissioner and military commander. Even in a large town like Kalemie where the state fails to provide any teachers, doctors or policemen, it still insists on pieces of paper to authorise the toings and froings of foreigners. I was wary about making too many introductions as I feared the authorities would whip up greater problems, but Michel assured me that the commissioner, Pierre Kamulete, would not cause trouble. Michel volunteered to make the introductions, so on my second morning in Kalemie he drove me and my team – Benoit the biker, and Georges the pygmy – up past the main church and along to the ruins of the old colonial governor’s house, which now served as the commissioner’s office.

  We sat on an old school bench in the hall outside the commissioner’s office, along with a few other supplicants waiting for an audience with the commissioner. When our turn came we all trooped into a large room, at the end of which stood a big desk with M. Kamulete sitting behind it. The desk was bare apart from a piece of paper torn from a school textbook, covered in handwriting. At the other end of the room sat two military men, one a large man in khaki fatigues and the other smaller, also wearing uniform, but with naval insignia on his epaulettes.

  ‘Look at this, Michel, what do you make of this?’ The commissioner knew Michel well and wanted his opinion on the handwritten page. He handed it to Michel, who read it slowly. It was a public attack on the commissioner, an anonymous Swahili denunciation of the inefficiency and corruption of his administration. Written in capital letters using a blue biro, it had been discovered that morning pinned to a coconut tree in the town centre. It accused the commissioner and his staff of deliberately cutting the power line connecting the town with the Bendera hydroelectric power station for sinister, political reasons. The pair of them discussed it earnestly for a few minutes and I quietly shook my head. While the rest of the world drowned in information provided by broadband Internet connections and live satellite television, the political debate here in Kalemie revolved around a rude message, written on a child’s notepad and nailed to a tree.

  Once the issue had been dealt with to the satisfaction of the commissioner, Michel thought it was time to introduce me. He emphasised my interest in the explorer Stanley and my historical connection through the Telegraph, before I was allowed to thank the commissioner for his time and ask if he would grant me the necessary authority to head on my way though Katanga.

  The trouble I was expecting did not materialise. The commissioner listened to my plans and made a few remarks about how difficult it was to travel safely through the Congo. He gave the impression of finding my plan trifling, not suspicious, humou
ring me like someone on a fool’s errand, confident I would be back in Kalemie in a few days after failing to get through Katanga. At no stage did he ask for money. He simply checked my passport, looked at the identity documents of Georges and Benoit, and barked an instruction at his secretary to prepare the necessary stamps. It was then that he pointed to the larger of the two military men in the room, telling me I would also need the permission of the local commander, Lieutenant Colonel Albert Abiti Mamulay. The colonel squirmed in his seat as the commissioner pointed at him and said we must come up to his headquarters for the relevant stamp.

  We followed the colonel outside to his waiting staff car. It was an old Peugeot, which looked too fragile to take any more crashes or bumps. I was wrong. As we watched, the colonel’s driver jammed the car into reverse and rammed it firmly into a rocky bank, before over-revving and charging off up the hill towards the barracks, bumping over exposed tree roots and rivulets scoured into the roadway by rain.

  I remembered the description by the American journalist Blaine Littell of the same military barracks in the 1960s. He had reached Albertville just after the town had been recaptured by government troops, and when he got to the barracks he was given his own display of torture tactics. A hapless rebel, accused by the government troops of involvement in Albertville’s uprising, was paraded and humiliated for Mr Littell at gunpoint.

  There were no rebels to torture when I arrived at the same building forty years after Mr Littell. I saw the colonel disappear into a tatty old house and we tried to follow. A squat man, a pygmy the same size as Georges but without his charm, barred our way and told us firmly to wait outside. I handed over the piece of paper already stamped by the commissioner and stood under a mango tree with another group of men. Some of their clothing was khaki, so I assumed they were soldiers. The oldest then did something peculiar. From the lower branches of the tree he plucked a silver bugle. It was buckled and pitted, but he solemnly set about polishing with his sleeve.

  I walked across and asked him who he was.

  ‘I am the bugler. It is my job to sound the bugle at dawn, midday and sunset.’

  ‘Have you always been in the army?’

  ‘No, I was only just brought into the army this year. I was a musician in the railway band before the Belgians left and I am the only person left in Kalemie with any musical knowledge.’

  With the necessary stamps on my travel pass, all that was left was to arrange the fuel, food and water for our trip. But before that I wanted to test the bikes, so I suggested a run to Mtowa, the lakeside village at the spot where Stanley first reached the Congo.

  Georges said he knew Mtowa well and would guide me, so off we headed for my first taste of Congolese motorbiking. Benoit rode his bike with Georges riding pillion, and I rode Benoit’s second bike. The route took us out over the bridge across the Lukuga River, a cast-iron structure built by the Belgians with a single carriageway. It was swarming with pedestrians and cyclists as Benoit led the way, tooting on the bike’s horn to clear a path, before we headed north from the town past the UN base. When Michel had picked me up from the airport the road had felt sandy, and on the bike it was downright dangerous. The sand made the tyres slew extravagantly from side to side and one particularly deep trough pitched me heavily down on my side. Breaking an ankle now would not be a good idea, I thought, as I dusted myself down and set off more cautiously.

  The road took us round the back of the UN base and for the first time I could see the scale of the old cotton factory that the Belgians had built here. As well as the large warehouses for processing the cotton, there were dozens of houses for the employees, covering a huge campus. The cotton was not grown here on the lakeside as the climate was not quite right. To grow, the cotton plants needed the greater heat and humidity of the Congo River valley, and under the Belgians the raw material was then transported hundreds of kilometres by rail and road to this factory, where it was spun into fibre and then woven into cloth. By its size alone, I could tell the plant must have been an impressive sight when operational, but all lay in ruins as we buzzed by on the bikes.

  The going was slow. We were following what had once been a road, but we were forever slowing to pick our route over streams that had carved their way across the carriageway, or patches of mud that had dried in wavy ridges. For several kilometres the terrain was low and flat before the track started to climb a series of hills. Just as the road began to rise, we passed through several villages, where the sound of the bikes was enough to draw crowds of children. In one village I saw Georges tapping Benoit on the shoulder, asking him to stop. He hopped off the bike and began to talk with a group of villagers. There was something slightly odd about the scene, but it took me a few moments to work out what I found curious – Georges no longer appeared short.

  ‘This is a village of pygmies,’ he explained. ‘I come here from time to time to hear about what is happening to these people. Throughout the history of the Congo the pygmies have suffered, and it continues today. That is one of the largest parts of our job, to fight for the rights of these people.’

  A lopsided sign was tied to a tree. It was a piece of bark that had been flattened and a name had been written using ash in crude, uneven letters on its pale underside. It reminded me of illustrations from A.A. Milne books and it read ‘La Voix des Minorités’, the name of the group run by Georges. The village was composed of tiny grass huts arranged around an area of dirt beaten flat by shoeless feet. As Georges spoke to the village elder, a group of children wearing rags played a rather hazardous game, which involved the player trying to pick up as many sticks as possible that had been scattered on the ground while dodging a coconut thrown at her by rival players.

  Back on the bikes, the road climbed and the bush got thinner until finally I got the view of the lake I had been hoping for. I stopped my bike and climbed up a bank. The lake stretched away to the east as far as I could see, but just below me was the village of Mtowa and a headland, the first piece of Congolese land Stanley touched when he arrived here by boat across the lake in September 1876.

  ‘I know everything about Stanley.’ The words of the village chief, Idi Kavunja, grabbed my attention. It had taken me a week to get here from Johannesburg, but I was finally on the trail of the explorer. Hearing his name, pronounced in the French style of ‘Stan-lay’, threw me. I was talking to a chief whose forebears could have met the explorer, but the magic of the moment was lost when it became clear he was talking rubbish.

  ‘He is buried here. If you pay me money, I will show you the grave.’ I looked into a pair of eyes that had an oily, unfocused sheen. The chief was now craning forward, the sinews on his scrawny neck as tight as guitar-strings, and his breath was pungently high. ‘You are a white man, you have a phone. I am a chief, I need a phone. You must give me your phone.’

  There was nothing threatening about the chief. He was a slight man, wearing the remnants of a pin-striped suit that was several sizes too big for him. Inside a wide and grubby shirt collar, his neck rattled around like a turtle’s, giving him the impression of a child dressed up in his parents’ clothes. But there was nothing child-like about his next outburst.

  ‘You white men only ever come here to profit from the Congo. Stanley was the first. Then came the Belgians. How do I know you have not come here to profit?’

  Georges looked embarrassed and I made a polite but firm apology and returned to our bikes. We rode down to the water’s edge, following a track through the reed beds that was used by fishermen. When it got too muddy for the bikes, I parked and walked down to a break in the reeds where the fishermen had pulled up their dugouts. A boy was standing ankle-deep in the jet-black mud, hunting for worms. I shouted a question, asking if he knew the name of this place.

  He nodded and shouted back. ‘Mtowa.’

  I wanted to see if any of Mtowa’s history still lingered about the place, asking, ‘Do you know the old name? It used to be called Arab’s Crossing. This was where the slavers used to arriv
e from the other side of the lake.’

  The boy thought for a moment, shook his head blankly and continued worming. Suddenly he shouted something in Swahili, something that made Georges become visibly more tense.

  ‘He said there are land mines all around here, left by Ugandan troops when they occupied this area during the war.’ Georges was now peering into the reedy undergrowth.

  ‘Look there,’ he shouted, pointing at a red warning sign. In large black letters it said: ‘Beware! Mines!’

  Very slowly, we followed our footprints back to the bikes for the return trip to Kalemie.

  As a trial run, the trip to Mtowa was a success. The bikes stood up well to the shocking conditions of the track and we had managed about ten kilometres an hour. I had not hurt myself, and both Benoit and Georges had been helpful companions. But the words of the chief stayed with me, as my first hint of the residual bitterness felt by Congolese for centuries of suffering at the hands of outsiders.

  The old man might have been drunk, but he was right. Outsiders have robbed and exploited the people of the Congo ever since the days of the first European and Arab slavers. The territory that Stanley staked in the name of Leopold witnessed what many regard as the first genocide of the modern era, when millions of Congolese were effectively worked to death trying to meet the colonialists’ almost insatiable demand for resources, most notably rubber. And since independence, foreign powers have toyed with the Congo, stripping its mineral assets and exploiting its strategic position, never mindful of the suffering inflicted on its people. And that really was the point. At every stage of its bloody history, outsiders have tended to treat Congolese as somehow sub-human, not worthy of the consideration they would expect for themselves. For progress to be made, outsiders must treat Congolese as equals and they could do worse than follow the example of an amazing white woman I discovered after we got back to Kalemie.

  It took some time to track down the town’s last white, Belgian resident. Michel had lived there for two years, but he had only ever heard mention of the mysterious woman, who kept herself to herself, living in an old villa on the hill behind the main church.