Blood River (14 page)

And it was also needful for me to keep in rear of the caravan
in order to prevent my men from straggling. With all my care
they often eluded me and lay hidden in the jungle till I had
passed in order to indulge in skulking. The men carrying my
tent and bath were especially prone to this habit although
their loads were light, and I frequently waited long after
camp was reached for these necessary appliances to come to
the front.

When Cameron reached Kabambarre, he was, like Livingstone
and me, feeling terrible. He was exhausted by the sudden gain in
altitude and the endless series of ridges and dips that had to be
negotiated. And when he arrived, the villagers of Maniema did not
let him down, providing him with an image that fits snugly into the
Victorian era's patronising view of Africa. He was serenaded by
village minstrels on the delights of eating human flesh:

I was entertained with a song setting forth the delights of
cannibalism, in which the flesh of the men was said to be
good but that of women was had and only eaten in time of
scarcity; nevertheless, it was not to be despised when man
meat was unobtainable.

When Stanley passed through Kabambarre, he too met locals
who spoke highly of the `old white man', Livingstone. This was
the tribute to Livingstone from the village chief recorded by
Stanley:

He was good to me, and he saved me from Arabs many a time.
The Arabs are hard men, and often he would step between
them and me when they were hard on me. He was a good
man, and my children were fond of him.

The Kabambarre I discovered was an eerie place. For 300
kilometres since Kalemie I had seen nothing but grass-roofed
mud huts, but here, at last, were some traces of a more modern
world - buildings of cement and brick. But even more so than in
Kalemie, they were in ruins. All of the sharp edges associated
with modern towns had been eaten away by corrosion or
smudged by layers of vegetation. The entire roofline of a terrace
of buildings was askew, with tiles dislodged by thigh-thick ivy
and gaping holes caused by collapsed beams. In front of the
terrace I could just make out the trace of an old road junction,
around a triangle on which had once stood a memorial to Belgian
colonialists. The bronze plaque had been ripped off the concrete
plinth and the roads had been reduced to footpaths meandering
through thick undergrowth.

At least in Kalemie there was the UN presence and the occasional vehicle to keep the main roads open. Here in Kabambarre
there were pedestrians and a few bicycles that had made it here
only after being pushed through the bush for hundreds of
kilometres.

My 1951 travel guide to the Congo records Kabambarre as one
of the oldest Belgian settlements from the 'heroic period',
meaning it was one of the places secured by Belgian gunmen in
their war for supremacy against Arab slavers in the 1890s. They
built a fortified storehouse and, while my travel book has a photo graph of the old stockade, I saw no trace of it. Benoit was not
interested in looking. He was much more focused on retrieving a
plastic jerrycan of petrol that he had had the foresight to leave
here on his trip to Kalemie and on getting back on the road. He
drove straight into the overgrown garden of an old house and
parked under a large mango tree. Odimba followed, but when I
got off the bike I struggled to find my land legs. I lurched up
against the tree's trunk, panted loudly and began to lose all
peripheral vision.

Benoit could see something was wrong. Behind me I heard
scurrying as he barked orders at someone.

'Bring a chair, bring a chair.'

Slowly I turned round and, instead of just Benoit and Odimba,
there was now a forty-strong crowd of villagers who must have
come running after hearing the sound of our bike engines. I was
too weak to have heard them approach. From within the group a
wooden chair - home-made with a woven grass seat - appeared
not a moment too soon. I collapsed into it. Benoit did not stop. I
watched him retrieve the jerrycan, fill both fuel tanks, rearrange
the luggage and check over an engine problem spotted by
Odimba. It was all a blur and I don't remember very much about
Kabambarre, apart from stuffing myself on bananas that appeared
out of the crowd, and the moment when the villagers insisted we
take it photograph. The result is one of my most haunting images
from the Congo, showing me crumpled and empty-eyed from
dehydration, surrounded by a mass of earnest, unsmiling faces.
Strip away my watch and the threadbare Chelsea soccer top worn
by the man sitting on the arm of my chair, and the image could
be straight out of the nineteenth century - the white man, offered
the best seat in the house, surrounded by curious but watchful
natives.

Time and again during my journey with Benoit and Odimba, I
was struck by just how much tougher and more resilient than me
they were. Travelling so close together, I had watched how rarely they drank and ate, but somehow they had a strength and stamina
that were lacking in me. It gave me an enormous respect for them.
I was lucky to have them on my side.

There was little time to talk or take notes. Benoit knew we still
had 200 kilometres to go to Kasongo and we had spent almost half
the day reaching Kabambarre. He was fretting to leave, but I did
take down the name of one English speaker, a man who described
himself as an English teacher, Kabinga Sabiti, and a few notes.

`Thank you for coming. Since the war came we have not seen
many outsiders. The UN came here once, but only by helicopter
and they touched down and left in just a few minutes. Please help
us find peace.'

His plea was almost lost in the sound of Benoit gunning his
engine. There was nothing I could do to help Kabinga. I felt
ashamed.

We mounted up and sped through town. I could see
Kabambarre had been a big settlement, built on top of a plateau
with views over tree-covered countryside. A line of single-storey
buildings faced onto what must have been a common back in the
Belgian era, but the open ground was now badly overgrown.
There were no market traders or hawkers. The only people I saw
were standing around the ruins of the buildings staring at us. In
the tropics concrete can actually rot. It goes black and begins to
flake. I have seen it in a number of places, but here in Kabambarre
on the facade of one of the blackest, darkest, most manky-looking
ruins I could just make out the outline of some words painted in
metre-high letters: Post Office.

The next 200-kilometre-long stretch was grim. It began well
enough with a relatively fast track out of Kabambarre along a
well-forested ridge. This was the main access road into the town
and I spotted a group of soldiers guarding the entrance to the
town. They were gathered around a cooking fire in the ruins of a
building, but Benoit repeated his old trick of speeding up, and though the soldiers jumped up, grabbed their weapons and
shouted after us, we had already slipped by.

The track then became strikingly beautiful. It was following
what had clearly once been a carriageway wide enough for cars,
lined on both sides by high banks. Huge trees grew on these raised
earthworks and their canopies spread and met, creating a shady,
green tunnel effect. Some of the trees were giant palms with huge,
elegant fronds, plaited by the breeze into a natural roof of thatch.

Our next landmark was the Luama River. All the nineteenthcentury explorers referred to wading and paddling across the
Luama, one of the Congo's larger tributaries, although Benoit
assured me that an old Belgian road bridge was still standing and
we had no need to look for canoes. Again, the bridge did not
announce itself in any way. After several hours of bouncing down
an earthy track, through villages identical to those we had seen in
Katanga with not a single trace of modernity, we emerged from a
thicket onto a huge, iron girder bridge, spanning the brown waters
of the Luama.

Benoit shouted to take care as he picked his way past holes in
the planking on the bridge, but I wanted to stop and walk around.
The girders were brown with rust but, to my layman's eye, they
seemed sound and functional. The bridge stood ten metres above
the water, so was clear of the threat of being washed away by
floodwaters. But what struck me was the folly it represented. A
solid bridge capable of carrying heavy trucks and traffic had been
designed, built, brought here and eventually assembled on the
assumption that heavy trucks and traffic would be able to reach
it. Since the Belgians left the Congo, that assumption had
collapsed, so there the bridge stands, a memorial deep in the
jungle to the folly of planners who never dreamed that the Congo
would spiral backwards as much as it has.

The rest of that day was pure purgatory. My backside had
stopped being numb and had moved into a painful phase, each
buttock screaming to be relieved of the pressure of being squashed against the plastic of Odimba's motorbike seat. I learned
to lean on one side and then the other to alleviate the pressure,
but it was agony.

Much worse was my thirst. With only two bottles of drinking
water left, I rationed myself to a gulp every fifteen minutes, so,
instead of watching the landscape, I started to examine my watch,
urging the hands to sweep round to the quarter-hour so that I
could take the next gulp. I thought of one of the nastier episodes
of the early Belgian colonial period that took place around here.
The Belgians may like to refer to the early years of their Congolese
colony as the 'heroic period', but there was not much heroism in
the way they treated Gustav Maria Rabinek, an Austrian
adventurer who set himself up as an African explorer and trader
in these eastern forests of the new colony towards the end of the
1890s.

The early years of the Congo's colonisation were all about
control. Leopold's agents fought the Arabs of eastern Congo for
control in the mid-1890s. After they defeated the Arabs, they
turned their attention to monopolising all trade emanating from
the territory, setting up agencies and companies claiming exclusive rights on all merchandise. Rabinek bought all the necessary
licences needed to trade in eastern Congo, but the Belgian
authorities took against him. He was arrested early in 1901 on
trumped-up charges alleging smuggling and was sentenced by a
military tribunal in Kalemie to a year in jail. When Rabinek
demanded the right to appeal, he was told his appeal would
indeed be heard, but that the only court senior enough to deal
with the case was in Boma, the trading post at the mouth of the
Congo River, then the capital of Leopold's colony. The problem
for Rabinek was that Boma lies 3,000 kilometres west of Kalemie
and he was told that he would have to walk all the way.

It must have been around June 1901 when Rabinek passed
through the area where I now found myself. The Scottish skipper
of a steamer on Lake Tanganyika had described the parlous state of the prisoner when he set out from Kalemie. By the time he got
here he was close to death. He made it to the Congo River, but
died on board a steamer heading downstream on 1 September
1901. The Belgians had walked him to death.

Images of Rahinek staggering through the jungle, starving,
riddled with disease as he slogged his way to the Congo River,
filled my muddled mind as the journey went on. My trip from
Kalemie had started out exciting and become exhausting, but now
it was a mess. If we ran into trouble, I no longer had the wits to
deal with anything. By the time darkness came I was slumped
half-asleep against Odimba's back. Every so often, I would lean
over and stare at the odometer trying to count down the
kilometres until Kasongo. There were times when, as I stared at
the little numbers on the meter, my mind played tricks, convincing myself they were going backwards.

Night fell. We had been on the go since before dawn, but our
journey was not over. The darkness was complete apart from the
headlights of our two hikes. Every so often I saw huts on either
side of the track and knew we were passing through villages, but
the only light I saw was the occasional glow of a cooking fire.

I had lost all sense of time when I suddenly spotted a much
brighter light up ahead. We were still moving, and it kept disappearing and reappearing between trees and bushes. Finally, I
convinced myself it was something other than a cooking flame. It
was an electric light, the first for 535 kilometres. We had reached
Kasongo and the modest house maintained by Benoit's aidworker colleagues from Care International. I remember little
about the arrival, apart from the vast jug of filtered water that I
gulped down and the smell of the previous night's but on my
mosquito net, in which I wrapped myself before collapsing.

European explorer crossing eastern Congo, circa 1913