Blood River (13 page)

I will never know what Mukumbo looks like because we arrived
there after sunset and left before dawn. As I got off the bike and
regained my land legs, Benoit said he must show the correct
courtesy to the village headman by asking permission to stay. He
disappeared into a thicket, following a small child wearing rags
who offered to lead the way. With no moon, it took some minutes
for my eyes to get used to the dark, but when they did I found that
Odimba and I were now surrounded by a crowd of silent children.
They led us past a hut and there on the ground I could see the
faintest glow of a wood fire. It was arranged in exactly the same
way I had seen used by the Bushmen of southern Africa, with four
or five long branches radiating out from a small, hot core. Only the
tips of the branch actually burned and once the tips had fallen into
the fire and turned into embers, the fire appeared to have gone out.
But a prod of one of the branches, sliding the tinder-dry unburned
tip over the embers, had the effect of turning the knob on a gas
stove. Almost instantly flames began to dance and the fire was
ready for cooking. After a few words from Odimba, someone slid
one of the spokes over the embers and within minutes a pot of
water was beginning to simmer.

As the flames grew, light caught the eyes of the children, who
were all staring at me with the same cheerless expression of the
boy at the skull village. Like most bush children in the Congo,
they have learned that outsiders rarely bring anything but trouble.

By the time Benoit returned with the chief, an old man by the
name of Luamba Mukumbo, a large pan of sweet tea had been
prepared by Odimba. I poured some into my mug and sipped
slowly. After a day of gulping tepid water from plastic bottles, it
tasted like ambrosia. I could almost feel the sugar leaching into
my drained system. The interaction between Benoit and the chief
was intriguing. The old man wore rags and had no signs of
authority or wealth, but the young outsider was polite and
deferential. I heard a few references to muzungu, Swahili for
'white man', and a small boy was sent running off into the (lark
with some whispered instructions from the chief.

'The chief welcomes us and is sorry, but there is no food to
offer,' Benoit was now acting as translator. 'He said the mai-mai
passed through here a few days ago and they took all the food
before they left in the direction of an old gold mine, the Lunga
mine, down the track. He said his village is still nervous and all
his people have been gathered in for the night, but he said there
is a but you can sleep in. I will go and check everything is okay.'

I returned to the puddle of firelight and began a piecemeal
conversation with the chief. He said he thought he was sixty years
old, but he could not be sure. I asked him what he remembered
about his country's history.

'When I was a child I went to school in Kalemie. It was a great
honour for one from our village to go to the big town and I was
chosen because I was the son of the chief. My family walked with
me through the forest to the place not far from here where the bus
passed. I will never forget that first bus journey.' He fell silent for
a moment, staring into the fire.

'I was still at school when independence came in 1960, and in
Kalemie I remember almost all the white families fled across the lake because they were scared. I came home and since then I think
I have been to Kalemie maybe two times.

'Our village here, the one you are sitting in, used to have cars
come through it every few days. Just a few kilometres away is one
of those guest houses the Belgians built. They called them gites
and they were always open for travellers coming through by car.
But all of that went with the fighting.

Now when we hear the fighting coming our way, my people
and I just flee into the bush. We have learned it is the safest place
for us. We know how to survive there. And when we come back,
our village is almost always destroyed and we have to build it
again.

'Over the years, things have got worse and worse. We have lost
the things we once had. Apart from what we can carry into the
bush, we have nothing. I think the last time I saw a vehicle near
here was 1985, but I cannot be sure. All these children you see
around you now are staring because I have told them about cars
and motorbikes that I saw as a child, but they have never seen one
before you arrived.'

He carried on talking, but I was still computing what he had
just said. The normal laws of development are inverted here in
the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary
and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity
than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the
planet where the same can be true.

Benoit returned to lead me to the but that the chief had had
prepared for me. It had walls of dried mud on wattle, a roof of
heavy thatch and a door panel made of reeds woven across a
wooden frame. Without a hinge, it worked by being heaved across
the doorway, which I soon found had been cut for people quite a
bit shorter than me. There was nothing modern in the room
whatsoever. On the beaten-earth floor stood a bed - a frame of
branches, still in their bark, lashed together with some sort of
vine. The springs of the bed were made of lengths of split bamboo anchored at only one point halfway along the bed, so that when I
put my hand down on them they bent horribly and appeared
close to collapse. But the design was ingenious because, when my
weight was spread across the entire structure, the bamboo screen
supported it easily, giving and moving with the contour of my
shoulders and hips. It was a Fred Flintstone orthopaedic bed and
I found it amazingly comfortable.

I slipped outside to see Odimba and Benoit heaving the bikes
through the small doorway into their but next door. `We don't
want to leave anything outside to say we are here,' Benoit explained.
`The sort of people who move around after dark are the sort we
don't want to meet.'

As I walked to the village latrine I stumbled over something soft
on the ground. I turned on my torch and there, below me, lying on
the earth wrapped in a tattered piece of cotton, was a baby. As the
beam of the torch moved I spotted another child, and another, and
then another. The soil was still warm from the day's sun and the
mothers had left their children outside to enjoy the last traces of
heat.

Back on my reedy bed, I struggled to hang up my mosquito net.
Predictably enough, the picture on the bag of the elegant square
shape, airily and comfortably arranged over a sleeping figure, was
beyond me. After much vain wafting of the delicate cloth and
careful spreading around the four corners of the bed, I ended up
tightly bundled in it like a shroud. To be honest, I had stopped
caring. I was done in and after one last sweep of the room with
the head torch, when I spotted a russet antelope skin with white
spots, creased up in the corner covered in congealed blood, I fell
asleep to the buzz of mosquitoes in my ear and the scrunch of
much bigger insects apparently ransacking my rucksack.

My watch said 3 a.m. when I heard Benoit's voice. `Let's go, our
journey is a long one today.'

I escaped from my mosquito-net-cum-sleeping-bag-cum shroud and shivered. Even though the heat soars during the day
in this region, a temperature inversion at night means that the
small hours get amazingly cold. Most of the outsiders who have
written about travelling here remark on the unexpected chill. Che
Guevara described how he needed extra blankets while plotting
his attacks in the hills of eastern Congo, and Stanley often
referred to the additional clothing he donned at night even
though he spent the day bathed in sweat.

I wrapped myself in my fleece, packed my gear and heaved
everything outside. Again, Benoit used his eel-taming trick to
load the bikes, and again he and Odimba dressed themselves like
combat trawlermen. The noise of the bike engines starting
sounded loud enough to wake the gods. I noticed that the babies
who had been left outside to sleep had been gathered in. Nothing
stirred as we left Mukumbo and rejoined the track.

In the pitch dark there was little for me to look at and so, after
a few minutes of bumping and grinding behind Odimba, my mind
started to work. We were about 100 kilometres from Kabambarre
and needed to travel another 200 kilometres beyond to reach
Kasongo. I had planned to be able to refill my water bottles with
boiled, clean water overnight, but we had got there too late and
left too early. I was sure I could get clean water in Kasongo, so that
meant I had to eke out the remaining three bottles of water for 300
kilometres. Okay, I thought, that meant one bottle per 100 kilometres, and I can always ration further myself if things are getting
tighter later on.

Those 100 kilometres to Kabambarre felt painfully long. I was
by then aching with hunger. The only food I had with me were
energy sweets, given to me as a bit of a joke by an old running
partner in Johannesburg. `In case of emergencies,' he said when
handing them over. He will never know how important they
turned out to be. To keep my luggage down I had gambled that the
villages we passed through would provide food, but I had not
taken the pillaging habits of the mai-mai into consideration. The sweets were the only things I had to eat. I devoured them greedily,
but they were still not enough.

Maybe it was my empty stomach that got to me. Or maybe it
was because the first few hours were in complete darkness and I
had nothing to focus my mind on. Either way, I felt increasingly
irritated and ratty. The river stops felt more irksome. I burned my
hand badly on the exhaust as we dragged the bikes over one of the
stream beds. Then we started to reach some hilly sections too
steep for the heavily laden bikes to cope with, so I kept having to
jump off the bike and heave myself and various pieces of luggage
to the top of the slope. And then an overhanging branch caught
me on the forehead, drawing blood and leaving a painful sore. As
I got weaker, Benoit and Odimba carried on as if this was quite
normal. They had drunk and eaten just as little as I, but they
coped much better.

We had been going for two hours before the sun finally rose.
Where the track opened out into less overgrown sections, I
watched the long shadow of the bike, Odimba and me dancing
across the red earth. The heat began to grow, so I shed my fleece,
but not the feeling of torpor.

I knew what the problem was - dehydration. The bottles I had
drunk the day before were simply not enough, and I had not had
a drop of water overnight, leaving me with a whopping headache
and a pain behind my eyes. In this failing mental half-light,
Kabambarre had become the focus of all my faculties. I clung on
to the bike, looking over Odimba's shoulder counting down on
the odometer the 100 kilometres until we reached the old mining
town. As I stared, the track seemed to get ever more difficult, the
rotation of the meter numbers slowing as if in glue.

The sudden appearance of Kabambarre took me by surprise. I
got no sense that I was approaching a place of human habitation
until we actually reached it. It was the same with all the other
settlements in the eastern Congo: the bush was just as thick, the
track just as frail, yet all of a sudden you turn a corner and there is a place where large numbers of people live. In Kabambarre the
population is measured in thousands, but still there was nothing
to indicate we were approaching a town until, at the top of a
particularly steep valley up which I had plodded behind the two
bikes, Benoit pointed to something next to a tree. It was an old
road sign, indicating the way we had just come and describing it
as the National Highway. I could not even manage a wry smile.
The sign was rotten and lopsided, much like the entire town.

Kabambarre was a major crossroads of nineteenth-century
exploration. David Livingstone stayed here for months in early
1871, recovering from a fever caught on the upper Congo River.
He was the first white man to discover its headwaters, although
the achievement was slightly diminished because he got his
rivers muddled up. He thought he was looking at a tributary of the
upper Nile and did not make the connection with the Congo River
that the Portuguese had discovered 400 years earlier, flowing into
the Atlantic 1,000 or so kilometres to the west. Livingstone failed
to persuade the locals to let him descend the river, so he began
trekking eastwards, towards Lake Tanganyika, before collapsing
from illness here in Kabambarre.

The Scotsman had been left frail and weak after twenty years of
tramping across southern and central Africa, but it was not just
the fever that troubled him in Kabambarre. His soul was wounded
by what he had seen of the Arab slaving methods. He watched
them descend mercilessly on Congolese villages, shooting anyone
who put up resistance, pillaging anything that could be carried
and pinning able-bodied Africans together with vast wooden
collars for the slow, often fatal, route march all the way to the
Indian Ocean and the slave markets of Zanzibar. It was around
Kabambarre that Livingstone's loathing of slavery hardened into
his life's work and led to this plea against slavery inscribed on his
tomb in London's Westminster Abbey:

All I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven's rich blessing
come down on every one, American, English or Turk, who
will help to heal this open sore of the world.

When Cameron passed through here in 1874 he met village
elders who spoke warmly of the Scottish explorer. I doubt if they
said the same of Cameron. In his writings he shows little of the
humanity that was Livingstone's hallmark. The two appeared to
belong to totally different exploring worlds. While Livingstone
travelled armed only with his Bible, Cameron insisted on more
elaborate luxuries: