Blood River

Advertisements from The Guide to South and East Africa (for the Use of
Tourists, Sportsmen, Invalids and Settlers), 1915

The airline that was to fly me to the Democratic Republic of
Congo in August 2004 was as rickety as the country's latest peace
deal. Hewa Bora had been cobbled together from the remnants of
various bankrupt versions of the national carrier - Congo Airlines
and Zaire Airlines - and although the flight I was waiting for was
a scheduled one from Johannesburg to Lubumbashi, the Congo's
second city and capital of the south-eastern province of Katanga,
there was something about the behaviour of the ground crew and
my fellow passengers that suggested it was anything but routine.

A middle-aged Congolese man, hoping to make it to
Lubumbashi, spotted my concern as I winced at the check-in
muddle. He tried to reassure me. 'I have family here in South
Africa, but whenever I travel with Hewa Bora I never know for
sure if the plane will take off, or even if there is a plane. It really
is a Maybe Airline - Maybe You Get There, Maybe You Don't.'

I waited patiently, watching the ebb and flow of the passengers'
mood. One minute they seemed happy, as a female member of
staff in Hewa Bora uniform - an elegant blue cotton wrap spotted
with yellow teardrops - checked the name of the person at the
front of the queue against the manifest. But then the same member
of staff would get up from her chair and disappear from view,
prompting groans of frustration from the crowd. The flight was
not full, but my fellow passengers all seemed to be carrying
unfeasibly large amounts of luggage, mostly electrical goods like
televisions and CD players, wrapped in the woven-plastic,
tricolour bags of red, white and blue that you see all over the
developing world.

Against this bulky display, my own luggage seemed rather
meagre. I had a green rucksack packed with clothing, bedding and a mosquito net, and two shoulder bags for my notebooks, camera,
laptop computer and satellite telephone. I wanted to keep it as
light as possible so that it could be carried on foot if need be, so
the only book I brought with me was Stanley's account of his
journey, Through the Dark Continent. I had read it several times,
but if my journey was successful I wanted to be able to make a
direct comparison between what he found in the late nineteenth
century and what I found in the early twenty-first.

My first problem was how to reach the spot where Stanley
arrived in the Congo in September 1876. He had been following
the established route of Arab slavers across what is now the east
African country of Tanzania, before crossing Lake Tanganyika by
boat and arriving in the Congo at the village of Mtowa on the
lake's western shore. Under the Arabs, Mtowa developed into a
large centre for the trans-shipment of slaves and ivory. Its name is
not to be found on modern maps of the Congo, but I had been able
to establish that it lies about thirty kilometres north of Kalemie, a
once-prosperous port set up by the Belgians on the lake. Fifty
years ago it was possible to reach Kalemie by rail, road and ferry,
but today its only regular connection with the outside world is a
weekly shuttle flight arranged by the United Nations peacekeeping mission, MONUC, to serve Kalemie's small garrison of
peacekeepers. The shuttle flight leaves from Lubumbashi, capital
of the Congo's Katanga province, and a UN administrator had
promised that if I made it to Lubumbashi, I could take my place
on a waiting list for the trip to Kalemie.

The chaos at the check-in desk in Johannesburg took hours to
sort out, but I was in the wonderful position of being under no
time pressure. Whenever my journalism has taken me overseas,
time has always been of crucial importance, a situation made
worse by twitchy foreign editors, deadlines and competitive
colleagues. But this time I faced no such constraints. For my
attempt to cross the Congo I was entirely on my own. It was
pleasantly liberating and as time passed at the airport I was happy to people-watch, trying to guess the nationality of the one other
white person on the flight, or why an Asian lady was travelling
solo to the Congo.

Johannesburg International Airport is one of the great hubs of
modern African travel, a first-world airport offering flights to
some of the rougher third-world destinations. As I headed to the
gate for the Lubumbashi flight, I looked at the well-stocked
boutiques and felt the downwash from the powerful airconditioning, and wondered when I would next experience the
same.

The Hewa Bora cabin crew had laid out copies of a Kinshasa
newspaper, L'Avenir, on the seats in business class and I snaffled
one as I shoulder-barged my way to my economy seat. It was more
of a samizdat newsletter than a newspaper, comprising four pages
amateurishly printed on a single folded sheet of very cheap,
coarse paper. The ink came off on my fingers and there were no
decipherable photographs. But I could decipher the paper's tone,
a tone that was rabidly anti-Rwandan. There were various articles
claiming that the paper had seen documentary evidence proving
Rwanda was about to attack the Congo and there were vicious
denunciations of various pro-Rwandan Congolese rebels, such as
my old contact, Adolphe Onusumba. Under the terms of the 2002
peace deal that was meant to have ended the Congo's war, all the
major rebel groups, including the pro-Rwandan ones, had taken
their place in a transitional, power-sharing government in
Kinshasa. The arrangement was fragile and, as I could see from
the deeply xenophobic tone of L'Avenir, the fault line separating
Rwandans from Congolese remained explosive.

Since the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has been regarded by many
outsiders as a tiny, frail country bullied by its larger neighbours.
This is a grossly inaccurate generalisation. With a government
now dominated by Tutsis, Rwanda punches way above its weight
in regional affairs. There are clear parallels with Israel, another
small country of people driven by the memory of mass murder committed against them to dominate its neighbours militarily,
and the neighbour that Rwanda bosses most is the Democratic
Republic of Congo. On a map, tiny Rwanda is overshadowed by
the vastness of the DRC, but for the past ten years it has been
Rwanda that has loomed over the DRC. In 1996 Rwanda's Tutsidominated forces invaded the country and orchestrated the
ousting of Mobutu the following year, and in 1998 the same forces
turned on Laurent Kabila, the man they had installed as Mobutu's
replacement, starting the conflict that has so far cost four million
lives.

For many Congolese, the Tutsis who now rule Rwanda play the
role of bogeymen. Tutsis are taller and thinner than their ethnic
neighbours, with finer features, and I heard many Congolese
cursing them for 'not looking like us'. There were plenty of less
polite insults. The Tutsi/non-Tutsi divide is one of central
Africa's great social divisions and it was to have enormous impact
on my attempt to cross the Congo.

Eight weeks before I flew to Lubumbashi, an ethnic Tutsi
Congolese warlord broke the terms of the 2002 peace treaty when
he mobilised a force and launched an attack on the Congolese
town of Bukavu that sits on the border between DRC and Rwanda.
His motives were unclear, but the result fitted into the depressing
pattern of central African turmoil. After thirty-six hours of
savagery, scores of people lay dead, thousands had fled their
homes and the entire eastern sector of the country was pushed to
a state close to war. The Congolese authorities were quick to
blame the Tutsi-led regime across the border in Rwanda, accusing
them of arming and protecting the rebels. The accusations were
soon followed by retaliatory attacks from Congolese troops on
groups linked to Rwanda's Tutsis. I knew that the relationship
between the DRC and Rwanda was tense, but the racist bile I
read in L'Avenir revealed the depth of enmity between the two
sides. All I could do as the plane made the three-hour crossing
from South Africa over Zimbabwe and Zambia en route to Lubumbashi was pray that some sort of calm would he reestablished before I reached eastern Congo.

If you look at a map of the Congo, you see that the country appears
to have grown a vestigial tail around its bottom right-hand corner,
known as the Katanga Panhandle. On the surface there seems no
clear reason for this outcrop of Congolese territory surrounded on
three sides by its southern neighbour, Zambia. It is below the soil
that you find the reason why the early Belgian colonialists in the
late nineteenth century staked the territory so obstinately, in
defiance of British pioneers probing northwards from what was
then Rhodesia. The panhandle includes some of the richest
deposits of copper, cobalt and uranium on the planet, a geological
quirk that the early Belgian colonialists identified more smartly
than their British counterparts.

While Congo's other provinces have large diamond and gold
deposits, it was mainly on Katanga's mineral wealth that the
Belgian colony grew rich in the mid-twentieth century. The
uranium for the atom bombs dropped by America on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki came from a mine in Katanga, and it was Katanga's
vast copper deposits that really powered the colony's growth
when the reconstruction of Europe and Japan after the Second
World War drove a surge in demand for copper. Most of the
mineral profits from Katanga were taken by the Belgians, repatriated to Brussels and divided among shareholders from various
private corporations, or Societes, created by the colonial authorities. But some of the profits were reinvested in Katanga, to build
a number of mines, processing plants and factories, serviced by
new towns built out of the virgin bush and connected by a web of
roads and railways. By the mid-twentieth century Katanga was the
most developed province in all of the Congo.

The blessing of Katanga's mineral wealth became its curse
when Belgium granted independence to the Congo on 30 June
1960. While maintaining the illusion of handing over a single country to the black Congolese, the authorities in Brussels secretly
backed the secession of Katanga from the Congo, financing,
arming and protecting the pro-Belgian Katangan leader, Moise
Tshombe, in return for a promise that the Belgian mining interests
in Katanga would be protected. It was one of the most blatant acts
of foreign manipulation in Africa's chaotic independence period,
and it culminated in one of the cruellest acts of twentieth-century
political assassination, when Patrice Lumumba, the first
Congolese national figure to win an election, was handed over by
Belgian stooges to be murdered by Tshombe's regime.

Lumumba's mistake was to hint at pro-Soviet sympathies. The
mere possibility of the Congo, with its huge deposits of copper,
uranium and diamonds, falling into the Soviet sphere of
influence during the Cold War was too much for the Western
powers. Several African nations were already moving into the
Communist camp but the Congo was, in the eyes of the West,
simply too important to lose so Brussels, with the connivance of
Washington, engineered Lumumba's arrest, torture and transfer
to the capital of Katanga, then known by its Belgian name of
Elisabethville, today's Lubumbashi.