by Tim Butcher
As I prepared to say goodbye to Louise, outside the thatched hut where she lived in the Kindu training centre, I thought how her attitude of warmth and respect for Africans differed from that shown by so many outsiders over the decades in the Congo. Just as O’Brien had suggested, this dominant, negative attitude had left the Congo stunted.
I lay under my mosquito net that night in the bishop’s house being kept awake by a terrible sound. Like all other Congolese towns I visited, Kindu fell silent at night as if people were too scared to move around after dark. But outside my room I could hear the deranged ramblings of the bishop’s father, an elderly man suffering from acute dementia. At night he would stumble round the yard, crashing into things, wailing incoherently. It added to my distress as I thrashed around on my sweat-sodden mattress, feeling trapped by history. When Stanley reached the Congo River in October 1876, he too had struggled to find a way to descend the river. Of the 355 expedition members who set out with him from Zanzibar in November 1874, only 147 were left by the time he got here. The rest had either deserted or died. Frederick Barker and Edward Pocock had both been killed by disease, leaving Francis Pocock as Stanley’s last white companion.
In terms of nineteenth-century exploration, his party had already achieved great things, using his collapsible boat, the Lady Alice, for the first full circumnavigation of Lake Victoria and mapping other major features of the Great Lakes region. But the overall success or failure of Stanley’s mission depended on him finding a way down the Congo River.
With good reason, the Arab slavers were unwilling to help. They were reluctant to let any outsider into territory they claimed for themselves, fearing – quite rightly as it turned out – that they might lose control of the land. They dressed up their explanations with warnings about hostile tribes and dangerous cataracts on the river, but it seems obvious they were reluctant to risk losing their exclusive control of the upper Congo River. Stanley was the third white man to reach the river after Livingstone and Cameron, but they had both failed to persuade the local Arabs to let them proceed downstream. Livingstone had turned back towards Lake Tanganyika, while Cameron had abandoned the river and struck out overland towards the west coast of Africa.
By the light of my head torch that night, I reread Stanley’s account of the colourful warnings issued by the Arabs to dissuade him from heading downstream:
There are monstrous large boa-constrictors, suspended by their tails to the branches waiting for the passer-by or a stray antelope. The ants in the forest are not to be despised. You cannot travel without your body being covered with them, when they sting you like wasps. The leopards are so numerous that you cannot go very far without seeing one. Almost every native wears a leopard-skin cap. The gorillas are in the woods, and woe befall the man or woman met alone by them; for they run up to you and seize your hands, and bite the fingers off one by one, and as fast as they bite one off, they spit it out.
I felt a strange empathy when I read how Stanley had seen this as a crisis point for his journey. Amid warnings from the Arabs and demands from his Zanzibari porters that they turn round and go home, Stanley describes in his book how he and Francis Pocock turned to the toss of a coin to decide whether or not they should head downriver. Heads would be for the river, and tails for retreat. Six times a rupee coin was tossed and six times it came down tails. In Stanley’s book this moment of great drama is captured in a black-and-white etching that shows a pipe-smoking Pocock preparing to flick the coin with his thumb while Stanley, in full tunic and knickerbockers, stands poised for the result.
Somewhat strangely, the pair decided to completely ignore this six-toss omen, badgering, cajoling, threatening and bribing the Arabs until they eventually agreed – for a price – to provide protection for Stanley’s party for sixty days’ march downstream.
The expedition initially set off on foot, slogging through the forest on the east bank of the river. There is no explanation as to why Stanley wasted effort going overland when he was right next to a perfectly navigable stretch of river. It is most likely that he could not find enough local canoes for his expedition – with his Arab protectors, the expedition had swollen to around 700 souls. Having experienced the climate myself and seen the thickness of the rainforest, I realised that Stanley’s description of the rigours of the overland trek rang horribly true:
We have had a fearful time of it today in these woods and those who visited this region before declare with superior pride that what we have experienced as yet is only a poor beginning to the weeks upon weeks which we shall have to endure. Such crawling, scrambling, tearing through the woods! … It was so dark sometimes in the woods that I could not see the words, recording notes of the track, which I pencilled in my note-book … We arrived in camp, quite worn out with the struggle through the intermeshed bush, and almost suffocated with the heavy atmosphere … Our Expedition is no longer the compact column which was my pride. It is utterly demoralised. Every man scrambles as he best may through the woods; the path, being over a clayey soil, is so slippery that every muscle is employed to assist our progress. The toes grasp the path, the head bears the load, the hand clears the obstructing bush, the elbow puts aside the sapling.
It was in this section of forest that Stanley came across village after village decorated with skulls, often arranged in two rows sunk into the soil running the entire length of the village. The inhabitants told him, through translators, that they belonged to apes trapped in the forest and eaten, although Stanley smuggled two samples home to Britain, where a medical expert studied them and concluded they were definitely human. The same image was used by Conrad twenty years later in Heart of Darkness when his narrator arrives after a long and terrible river journey in central Africa in search of a white colonial agent, Mr Kurtz, to find his bush house decorated with human skulls.
Eventually Stanley abandoned the land route, sent his Arab guides back towards Kasongo and committed his expedition to the river. Behind the Lady Alice came a flotilla of twenty-two pirogues – one he named the Telegraph after our employer – that he had stolen at gunpoint from riverside villages. He saw them as spoils of war after a series of skirmishes with the Wagenia, the tribe living along the river. The only contact the Wagenia had ever had with outsiders had been raids by Arab slaving parties, and it is no surprise that they treated Stanley’s arrival with hostility, attacking with bows and arrows and suffering heavy casualties from the modern weaponry fired by Stanley’s Zanzibaris. By late December 1876 Stanley’s entire expedition was floating down the Congo River, anxiously peering out over the barrels of their Snider rifles, percussion-lock muskets and double-barrelled shotguns at a forest that concealed dangers both real and imagined.
When I eventually left Kindu, I did so in circumstances very similar to Stanley. I was on a boat crewed by non-Congolese outsiders, heading nervously downriver and looking out from behind a phalanx of rifles and machine-guns.
I had hitched a ride on a UN river patrol boat, a swanky, sleek-looking thing with powerful engines and comfy padded white seats more suited to the French Riviera than combat riverine operations. It was the property of a tiny detachment from the navy of Uruguay. They were MONUC’s sole military presence on the 800 navigable kilometres of the upper Congo River. I was lucky to have been given a place on their downriver patrol and I owed my good fortune to Lieutenant Commander Jorge Wilson, an impressively bulky Uruguayan naval officer who commanded the Kindu unit.
I don’t know whether it was because, as a descendant of nineteenth-century British immigrants to the Americas – Scottish miners who mined salt in Uruguay – he felt an affinity with Stanley, another British nineteenth-century immigrant to the Americas, but Cdr Wilson was very knowledgeable about Stanley’s journey and happy to play a small part in helping me recreate it. My target was Ubundu, a town 350 kilometres downstream from Kindu at the head of a series of rapids that make the river impassable. The cataracts make river travel downstream from Ubundu impossible, so I would have to travel
overland to the next major town, Kisangani. That would be dangerous enough, but for now my main concern was getting to Ubundu.
‘There’s no way we can get you all the way to Ubundu. We don’t have the fuel to make it even halfway. But on our next downstream patrol we can at least give you a head start.’ He was shouting above the sound of the Village People’s ‘In the Navy’ being played at full volume during a Saturday night booze-up at his unit’s base next to Kindu’s old railway station.
Sailors from his unit were wearing the Uruguayan national soccer strip and comedy sombreros, jiving drunkenly, pausing every so often to gulp down more beer and steak – all imported on UN flights. While the rest of Kindu was in darkness, the Uruguayan naval-unit compound fizzed with bright lights and loud music. As I left to walk through the silent streets to the bishop’s blacked-out house, I saw a large halo effect around the compound perimeter lights. Walking closer, I saw thousands of tiny flying insects attracted from the nearby river by the light, shimmying backwards and forwards in a thick cloud. And on the ground beneath the light, millions more lay dead in drifts.
Cdr Wilson’s offer was the best I could hope for. My plan was simply to go as far downriver with the Uruguayans as possible and then try to find some villagers to paddle me the rest of the way to Ubundu by pirogue. I would face another raft of problems when I reached Ubundu, as the war had cut links with Kisangani, the next major port 100 kilometres downstream. Marie-France and the bishop both thought my pirogue plan risky, but I was desperate to get moving again.
The next time I saw Cdr Wilson was the morning we were due to leave. As he climbed down from the river bank to the boats, the gangway sagged and so did my spirits. There was something in his expression that was not quite right and, after dumping his webbing on the pontoon, he led me out of earshot of his crew.
‘We have big problems today. I have just heard the rebel commander here in Kindu is angry about the way some of his men have not been given well-paid promotions, and he is threatening to pull out of the peace process and to take all his fighters with him. Unfortunately for you, he comes from the area you want to travel through and that is where his men are assembling. Are you sure you want to carry on?’
It was one of those moments in the Congo when fear threatened to overwhelm me. Throughout my journey fear had been a constant, nagging away like a ringing in the ears. After hearing from Cdr Wilson, it welled up and threatened to deafen me.
I looked out over the Congo River. The sun had risen, but was yet to lift the layers of sweaty mist blanketing the water. In the half-light the river looked like a motionless slick frozen by torpor – the same torpor threatening my entire journey. The Uruguayan crew was busy preparing the two patrol boats for departure as I mulled over what to do. A broom scratched noisily on the foredeck, while three machine-guns were mounted in their firing positions on each boat, making a deep metallic clunk as they were bolted home. I noticed that by some wonderful quirk of historical circularity, their guns were Belgian-made. Brussels might have been forced to cede its Congo colony in 1960, but its guns were still master here in 2004.
A Congolese woman paddled calmly by in a small dugout. She looked up disinterestedly at the activity before disappearing out of view behind an old tugboat, abandoned, rotten and motionless, next to our pontoon on the river bank. Motorboats come and go on the Congo River, I thought, but the pirogue remains.
‘Come on,’ I said to myself. ‘You can always make a decision when the moment comes to be dropped off. If it doesn’t look safe, you just come back to Kindu with the Uruguayans.’
I shouted for help from one of the sailors already on board the patrol boat and passed him my luggage, including a grubby yellow plastic jerrycan. I was not going to make the same mistake from my dehydrated motorbiking days. The can contained enough drinking water for four days, carefully boiled and filtered by the bishop’s wife.
Our flotilla of two pushed off as the sun finally folded back the morning mist. I felt the traveller’s surge of satisfaction as the propellers whipped up a wake. I was on my way again after five frustrating, uncomfortable days in Kindu.
The river might be more than 1,000 metres wide on this upper stretch, but it is not deep. We were at the end of the region’s dry season and I noticed fishermen wading thigh-deep hundreds of metres out from either bank. The Uruguayan navy helmsmen had also noticed, and the engines barely ticked over as they nosed their way through sand banks in search of a navigable channel.
It gave me time to look at the rusting wrecks of the old boats that used to ply this reach, but which now lined the left bank for well over a kilometre. Some were huge, others more modest, but all were in ruins. One ship had been completely overrun by a reed bank and its old smokestack could just be seen poking from the vegetation with ivy, not smoke, spewing out of the top. Another hulk was lying on its side clear out of the water, the panels eaten away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass. But my favourite was an old stern-paddler, a rust-red X-ray image of the Mississippi steamboats of my imagination. The panels were all gone, but the superstructure remained in skeletal form. At the stern was the octagonal tubular frame on which the wooden blades of the paddle once stood.
‘It was the biggest boat on this section of the river.’ I looked over my shoulder to see the Congolese pilot employed by the Uruguayans following my gaze. ‘The Belgians brought it here in the 1940s and called it the Chevalier, or something like that, but after independence it was renamed the Ulindi. I started work here on the river in 1977, but that boat has not moved since long before I arrived.’
The voice of Kungwa Mwamba was flat and free of emotion. There was no sadness, no sense of anger at the waste, no hint of shame. He was fifty-two years old and came from Kabambarre, the town that I passed through en route from Lake Tanganyika to the river. Stanley had spent time there, so I asked him about the explorer Stanley, but he shook his head. He knew nothing about that period. He did, however, know a lot about boats.
‘They bought it all the way here from Belgium, piece by piece, by ship and train, and assembled it here on the upper Congo. And they did not stop there. It was one of a pair, with a sister ship, the Prince Charles, I think, but that was sunk downriver from here in the 1964 rebellion. If the river is low, you might even be able to see the remains.’
A single, enormous transport company was created by the Belgians during the colonial period, covering its vast interests in the Congo River basin. The Great Lakes Railway Company laid thousands of kilometres of track, but it was much more than just a railway. Its emblem was a swirling white-and-red ship’s pennant, which somehow conveyed the importance of boats to the company along the Congo’s long river system and on the lakes that form the territory’s eastern frontier.
‘After I left school I joined the company. By then it had changed its name to the Congolese Railway Company, but it did the same job and after I was trained they moved me onto the boats on the upper river. But the money to maintain the engines was all stolen, there was no fuel and the system just fell apart.’
There was something terribly matter-of-fact about Kungwa’s delivery. He said he had not been paid a penny in wages since 1998, but was still supposedly on the books of the company. No wonder he was moonlighting as a pilot for the UN.
‘I have seen the river die here. Without the boats, life closes in for everyone, they just go back to their villages and have no contact with the outside world.’
He was right. Just a few river bends downstream from Kindu and life did indeed close in abruptly. Every so often a chink would open in the jungle to reveal a few thatched huts and some shadowy figures, but they were as cut off and remote as they had been when Stanley passed this spot in late 1876.
The sun was now cruelly strong and I retired under the shade behind the cockpit leaving Kungwa uncovered up on the foredeck of the patrol boat. As a trained river pilot, he was meant to know the lie of the deep water and spent the whole day concentrating intently on the river
in front of him, pointing left and right to the Uruguayan at the helm just behind him.
Looking over the shoulder of the helmsman, I watched as he slowly turned the pages of an old river chart. Printed in 1975, its marked channel had long since been shifted by underwater currents and for the purposes of river navigation it was pretty useless. But I was impressed to see the number of towns, plantations and settlements it identified. According to the map we were passing through a busy river thoroughfare full of navigation buoys and buildings once maintained by the Great Lakes Railway Company.
I did see one navigation bollard. It was made of rocks set in concrete, but half of it had been washed away by flood water. It was bestrewn with rotting flotsam and capped with a bright-white dollop of dry guano. Kungwa told me the bollards used to carry working navigation lights. Not for decades, I thought, as a black, long-necked diving bird prepared to leave its latest mark.
As the heat grew, I began to dwell on Cdr Wilson’s warning. He advised me it would be suicidal to venture alone into such a remote part of the Congo at a time of increased tension. But I kept thinking of how awful it would be to abandon Stanley’s route so early in my journey.
