Blood River (18 page)

I tried to imagine the panic of their flight that day. How they felt
as the worst nightmare of living deep in the African bush became
a reality; the rumours in town of the rebel advance; the terrible
understanding that nobody was coming to the rescue; the
desperate hope that if they made it from Kasongo to the Congo
River they might find a boat to safety; venturing out of the ordered
precincts of the town only to be swallowed up by the vengeful
rage of Congolese tribesmen settling decades-old scores.

Abandoned paddle-steamer, upper Congo River, August 2004

I wish I could say my first glimpse of the upper reaches of the
Congo River was a moment of dramatic revelation. For days spent
clinging to the back of various motorbikes and plodding up hills
through Katanga and Maniema, I had tried to picture the scene
when I reached the river. In my imagination I hoped for an instant
when the rainforest would fall away from a craggy hilltop to
reveal, spread out before me, Africa's mightiest river churning
through rapids, cloudy with spray, as it gathered itself for a 2,500-
kilometre descent to the Atlantic.

I was disappointed. The moment came during another long day
of motorbiking as we picked our way along a section of track not
noticeably different from the 600 kilometres that went before. We
simply turned a corner and there, unheralded, in front of me, lay
one of the natural wonders of the world. The object of so much
mystery for generations of outsiders, and the thing that had fired
my imagination through years of research, oozed lazily downstream between two thickly forested banks almost a kilometre
apart. The midday sun was directly overhead, my least favourite
time of day in the Congo when all the colours of the trees are
washed out and the heat is at its most suffocating. In the flat light,
the river appeared viscous and still. Conrad likened the river to a
serpent uncoiling right across Africa. In these upper reaches, the
snake was fat and lifeless.

I struggled to recognise Stanley's lyrical description of his first
sight of the river:

A secret rapture filled my soul as I gazed upon the majestic
stream. The great mystery that for all these centuries Nature
had kept hidden away from the world of science was waiting to be solved. For two hundred and twenty miles I had
followed one of the sources to the confluence and now before
me lay the superb river itself! My task was to follow it to the
Ocean.

I was vainly searching for the rapture in my soul when our
track petered out on the river bank. My first encounter with the
Congo River and it was already an obstacle. Our track continued
over on the other bank and there were no boats in sight.

I watched as Odimba propped the bike on its stand and went
off to negotiate with a group of men sitting in the shade of some
nearby trees. Odimba was quiet, even shy, in comparison with
Benoit, but over the days we spent biking together I found him
utterly reliable. To be entrusted with one of Care International's
precious motorbikes was a matter of prestige and Odimba
responded with pride. He looked after the bike meticulously,
insisted on not sharing the riding with me, and rode with great
skill in spite of appalling conditions. Sometimes I would notice
that his eyes were rheumy and sore. The concentration needed to
avoid obstacles was intense and all day long his straining eyes
were bombarded with dust and tiny insects. When I tried to offer
him water to wash his eyes, he shrugged me away almost as if it
was too much to take help from a white man. He played the role
of the stoical sergeant to Benoit's commissioned officer. I
detected that he was a little self-conscious that Benoit spoke
much better French than he could, and throughout our time
together Odimba appeared comfortable with a dignified silence.
He was one of the many Congolese without whom I would not
have been able even to attempt my trip so I owed him a great deal,
but he did not attempt to exploit this position. For those white
doomsters who grumble that corruption is in some way a natural
African trait, I would hold up Odimba as evidence that they are
talking rubbish.

As he went in search of a way to cross the river, I walked to the water's edge. The red soil of the jungle turned to a paler, sticky
mud, which I could feel gumming up the soles of my boots. I
walked slowly along the high-water line for a few hundred metres
trying to picture the old port of Kasongo Rive that the Belgians
built here. In its day it was a large enough town to support a
church, shops, and warehouses for various steamboats and
paddleboats that worked this section of the river. I had email
exchanges with a Belgian who was born here in the 1940s and who
remembers the neat quadrangle of brick buildings that formed the
town centre, and the endless coming and going of river traffic.

All of that had long gone. There was not a single riverside
building left and all the port facilities had vanished, spirited
away over the years by a combination of looters and floodwaters.
Areas of hard standing and numerous cranes and moles had all
disappeared, leaving nothing but a rusting engine block from a car
- too heavy to wash away and too valueless to steal.

Suddenly a man's voice disturbed the midday torpor. He was
one of the men with whom Odimba had negotiated and he was
summoning help from way over on the other side of the river. His
shouted message was a single Swahili word, repeated and
repeated. The river was much wider than I expected, broader than
the Thames in central London. We were still 2,500 kilometres
from the sea and the river was yet to be joined by any of its major
tributaries, but it was already a huge body of water.

Way over in the distance I saw movement. A brown shape
slowly flaked off the opposite river bank and began edging
silently towards us. It was a pirogue, or dugout canoe. It was
slender and elegant, and seeing it gave me a feeling of connection
with Stanley. It was no different in design from those he would
have seen on 17 October 1876 when he first reached the Congo
River at a spot not far from where I was standing.

It took twenty minutes for the boat to make its way across.
Pirogues come in a range of sizes, but this one was on the large
side, a dreadnought made from the hollowed-out trunk of a large tree. It looked like the husk of a gargantuan seed, streamlined
against the river current and without a single join or blemish
along the hull. It was at least fifteen metres long and deep enough
for its passengers to sit concealed by its sides, with only their
faces peeking over the gunwales. It had no engine and was moved
by three paddlers, two standing at the bow for power and one at
the stern, in charge of steering.

Eventually its bow slid onto our bank with the lightest of
kisses. The dreadnought was heavy and the river too inert to make
it swing downstream, so it just sat there like a compass needle
pointing in the direction I needed to go, straight across the Congo
River. A dozen or so passengers disembarked, carrying bundles of
fruit wrapped in banana leaves trussed up with cords made from
vines. One man had with him a type of home-made bicycle where
part of the frame, the front forks, were made of rough branches of
wood still in their bark. There was a brief moment of negotiation
between Odimba and the oldest paddler, before a tariff was agreed
and our motorbike, still laden with luggage, was picked up bodily
by four men and dropped into the canoe. The hull was deep
enough for one of the paddlers to sit on the bike and freewheel it
down to the lowest and most stable point.

We were not the only passengers. A woman carrying a very
sickly child squashed in next to me. The baby was wide-eyed
with fever and clammy to the touch.

`Malaria,' she said.

'Do you have any medicine?' I asked. She shook her head.
Shortly after we pushed off one of the paddlers caught a crab,
causing the canoe to lurch, but while everyone else onboard
reacted in reflex, the mother and baby did not stir.

Most of the lives still claimed by the turmoil in the Congo are
not the direct result of fighting. Only a tiny fraction of the 1,000-
plus lives lost each day are ever caused by military action. It
became clear to me that the vast majority of deaths are the result
not of combat, but of the Congo's decay - children dying of avoidable diseases because field clinics have been abandoned;
cholera epidemics among communities of refugees driven out of
their homes into squalid camps by the threat of violence; malnutrition because of the failure of modern agriculture, and so on.
I looked at the sickly child and tried to think of another country
in the world where a baby born in 2004 was more at risk than one
born in the same place half a century earlier.

That moment when I left the east bank of the river was special
for me. I had achieved something that many people had thought
impossible by crossing overland from Lake Tanganyika all the
way to the Congo River, through some of the most dangerous
terrain on the planet. With my own eyes I had peered into a
hidden African world where human bones too numerous to bury
were left lying on the ground and where the life of villagers
pulsed between grim subsistence in mud huts, unchanged from
those seen by nineteenth-century explorers, and panicked flight
into the forest at the approach of marauding militia.

But I found the Congo a relentlessly punishing place to travel.
It never let up, never allowed me to fully relax, feel comfortable
or at ease. My thrill at having made the overland crossing was
more than outweighed by thoughts about where I would next find
clean water, food and safe shelter. It had basically taken me two
weeks to cover 500 kilometres, but I still had five times that
distance to go to the Atlantic, down a river that had not been safe
enough to travel along for years. Sitting in that canoe on the
Congo River for the first time was a moment for only modest
celebration.

The pirogue deposited us on the west bank of the Congo River,
but it took another two days of hard biking to reach the port of
Kindu. The terrain was flat, but as the rainforest became thicker
the humidity and climate grew more uncomfortable. Our track
followed the line of a railway that the Belgians built at the start of
the twentieth century to connect Kindu, their largest port on the upper Congo River, to Lubumbashi 1,600 kilometres to the south.
We kept criss-crossing the old rails as the bike track picked its
own erratic course past thickets of giant bamboo, elephant grass
and jungle undergrowth. The rails sat on cast-iron sleepers and on
some it was possible to make out their year of manufacture, 1913,
and the location of their foundry, Antwerp. The railway ran
almost parallel with the river, although it was so far away I never
caught a glimpse of the water. In the town of Kibombo we passed
an old station, where I stopped to find that the stationmaster
diligently turned up for work even though only one train had
been through in the last six years.

It was a sadly common feature of my journey through the
Congo, the desperate willingness of people to cling to the old
vestiges of order as an anchor against the anarchy of today. Here
was a man who had not seen a train for years, yet he still kept his
station house in a state of readiness, passing his time in an
armchair on the platform next to the tracks that lay redundant and
silent in the baking heat. On occasion he would even don the old
stationmaster's cap, in the blue and red of the old national
railway-company livery. We got talking about the old days and he
showed me how he would inform the townspeople of Kibombo
that a train was coming. He walked onto the platform, reached up
and heaved an old bell that still hung over the platform. The
clapper swung violently, but the bell let out the ugliest clang. I
could see it was almost cleaved in two by a rust-rimmed crack.

Kibombo had once been a large town, large enough to support
a substantial Catholic church and seminary that I had seen as we
motorbiked in on the southern approach road. The sun was low
in the sky, bronzing the seminary's unplastered brick facade, and
after another long, dusty day it was a pleasure to pause a moment
to enjoy the tranquillity. Shaggy-headed palm trees nodded
deferentially towards the straight lines and angles of the abandoned building. It was long and thin, stretching for more than a
hundred metres, and in some places it had two storeys. It looked like the front of a military academy rather than a religious training
establishment, but spreading religion was a tough business in the
Congo, so maybe the hundreds of novitiates who studied were
drilled into shape, not just spiritually, but physically, here in
Kibombo, before being unleashed to carry their pastoral message
deeper into the African bush.