Blood River (19 page)

The church was impressive, but the thing I will not forget from
Kibombo is the spectre of the town centre after dark, when it was
lit entirely by slow-dancing flames from palm-oil lamps. I had
been offered a floor to sleep on in an abandoned building where I
had set up my stinking mosquito net before eating another grim
meal of cassava. After dark I walked through the relic of a town
centre where the lamps cast shadows on the few fragments of wall
still standing. Palm oil burns with a low, fat flame and this
seemed to make the shadows all the more slow, macabre and
sinister. I knew that during one of the 1960s rebellions three
Europeans were slaughtered here in Kibombo just hours before a
rescue party reached the town. I wrapped myself tight in my
mosquito net that night.

Again, we saw no other traffic on the track apart from pedestrians near villages of thatched huts and the occasional trader
with a bicycle laden with goods. I stopped to look at one
particularly gruesome bicycle payload - five black monkeys
destined to be sold at market for eating, their hands and feet
bound with vine, their black fingernails oily with some sort of
bodily fluid excreted when they had been killed by hunters
earlier that day.

We crossed one astonishing bridge near a village called Difuma
Deux. The village had seen some recent fighting between government troops from Kindu and rebels attacking from the south. The
original bridge had been blown a number of times and what was
left was an amazing feat of ingenuity. Various branches, planks
and pieces of timber had been lain across the few remaining piles
of the bridge, but they were not anchored. As I put my weight on the first plank, the whole disjointed structure sagged dangerously. I felt as if I was playing it life-and-death version of that
children's game where you have to pick up sticks from a pile
without moving others. It took me ages to summon the courage to
trust the bridge. I need not have worried. When I turned round I
saw this higgledy-piggledy construction was strong enough to
take the weight as Odimba skilfully wheeled our heavily laden
motorbike across.

After so long on the back of a bike watching the forest reel by, I
was thrown when suddenly I saw something metallic and manmade next to our track out in the jungle. It was dark with rust and
almost submerged in the undergrowth, but there was something
about the straight lines and sharp edges that caught my eye. I dug
Odimba in the ribs and he stopped.

I had found the remains of an armoured car, a very primitive
1950s military vehicle, but an armoured car nonetheless. The
track I was travelling along had been unfit for regular road traffic
for decades and it took me some minutes to work out what this
once-modern and sophisticated war machine was doing out here,
quietly rotting in the forest. It was a relic of one of the Congo's
more chaotic periods - the age of the mercenaries.

In the early 1960s, during the chaos after the end of Belgian
colonial rule, the Congo was the world's epicentre for mercenary
activity. Soldiers of fortune came here to fight, at different times,
for the government, against the government, against the United
Nations, alongside the United Nations. Some of the mercenaries
liked fighting so much they fought among themselves. There were
those, like Che Guevara, who dressed up their involvement in
ideological terms, arguing that it was part of an effort to spread
socialist revolution, but many others (mostly, but not exclusively,
white) had more venal motives - a passion for violence and
loyalty that was transferable to whoever paid most.

As the Mulele Mai rebellion worsened in 1964, huge numbers of mercenaries arrived in the Congo, many of them under the
command of Mike Hoare, a former major in the British Army
dubbed `Mad Mike'. He sought to justify mercenary activity in
Africa as a necessary bulwark against the spread of communism.
For some time this earned him a good press in the West and
nowhere better than in my paper, the Telegraph, due to his close
relationship with my 1960s predecessor in Africa, John Bulloch.
Today, Hoare prefers not to talk about what went on. I tried to
contact him at his last-known address in Switzerland but failed,
and John has not heard from him in years.

In those early days of the post-independence period, the Congo
government had enough money from mining to promise the
mercenaries extravagant pay packages, but they often ended up
paying themselves. It became routine on operations when
entering a Congolese town for the mercenary forces to hurry to the
local bank, blow open the safe with dynamite and take whatever
was inside. This was not small-scale stuff, or the work of just a
few psychos and hotheads. Without a functioning army of its
own, the government of the Congo came to rely on men like Hoare
and a huge mercenary militia that grew to hundreds of men,
spread across three battalions with their own cap badges, unit
names and structure. For several years the Congo's combat troops
were all foreign mercenaries.

Their activities peaked in 1964 when they were unleashed on
the east of the country with carte blanche to deal with the rebels.
The vehicle I had found was the relic of a skirmish during the
combat assault on Kindu by Hoare's mercenary column. In a 1967
book, Congo Mercenary, he described what happened:

Our leading armoured car was face to face with three enemy
armoured cars, evil-looking mock-up affairs, and the gunners
were slugging it out toe to toe ...

'Bazooka, sir?' enquired a soft voice behind me in the dark.
It was Captain Gordon ...

'OK,' I said reluctantly `give it a bash. Watch yourself.'

Wham! A brilliant flash of yellow light lit up the tunnel of
the track as an almighty bang reverberated down the length
of the column and the front of the leading enemy armoured
car flew into a thousand pieces ...

The crews of the other two cars, panic-stricken, tried to
bale out, but all were caught in merciless machine-gun
fire...

The bodies of the dead were strewn on the track ahead of
us, but nobody got out to remove them and the column
continued after its fright, each vehicle bumping over the
bodies in turn until they were reduced to a squashy pulp.

I was standing at the exact spot described by Hoare. In the
1960s this was a major thoroughfare down which a mercenary
column comprising jeeps, trucks, armoured cars and command
vehicles could easily pass and where their enemies could plan
and execute an ambush. Today it is pristine forest crossed by a
single-file track with only a war-damaged armoured car to hint at
its bloody past. As I walked back to the motorbike to continue on
to Kindu, I wondered if I was stepping where those bodies had
been crushed to a pulp.

I knew Kindu had a large UN base and I was looking forward to
feeling truly safe for the first time in two weeks. I had great hopes
for the place. Maybe I could even have a wash and a decent meal.
I should have known better. A good rule of thumb for my Congo
journey was that the more I anticipated arriving somewhere, the
more disappointed I was. By that formula, Kindu did not let me
down.

`You came from where?' Marie-France Heliere, who ran the UN
operation in Kindu, was astonished when I turned up in her
office. She had never heard of any foreigner reaching her town
overland and was amazed when I explained the route I had used. In her experience, outsiders only ever flew to Kindu, using the
UN-controlled airport, and she seemed initially a little sceptical
about my claim to have arrived by motorbike.

Only my filthy state seemed to convince her I was telling the
truth.

`Well, at least you look like a real traveller,' she said slowly, her
gaze creeping from my dirty boots up to my dust-frosted hair. I
suddenly felt very uncomfortable, as if I was spoiling the airconditioned perfection of Marie-France's office. It was spotless,
although she complained she was still retrieving shards of glass
from her riot-damaged computer keyboard. Like all other UN
bases around the Congo, the one in Kindu had been attacked by
mobs angered by the failure of peacekeepers to protect civilians
two months earlier. Near the door in her office I noticed a small
overnight snatch-bag with her UN livery-blue body armour and
helmet. She followed my gaze and explained, 'We have to be able
to leave quickly if we need to.'

Her door opened and she welcomed two Italian aid workers. I
felt slightly embarrassed when she introduced me as an
`adventurer'. I squirmed, but the two Italians were not that
interested. One of them was thin and haggard, and the other freshfaced and eager. The healthy-looking one was taking over from
the ill-looking one, who had just finished a year of service in
Kindu.

`What was it like?' I asked the older hand.

`The Congo is like nowhere else. After a year here, I cannot wait
to leave.'

I thought of the thirteen Italian airmen who died here in Kindu
in November 1961. They were flying routine shuttle flights for the
original UN mission in the Congo, the predecessor by forty years
of the mission that Marie-France worked for. They arrived in two
planes at Kindu's small airport to deliver equipment to the local
detachment of Malaysian troops, but for some reason they left the
secure confines of the airstrip and headed into town, where they fell into the hands of an angry mob of government soldiers. They
were dragged through the streets to the town centre just a short
distance from where we were sitting and beaten to death. They
were then butchered and eaten. Body parts were seen for sale
days later at local markets. I don't even know if the exhausted,
disease-ravaged aid worker I met was even aware of the story.

I was trapped there for days, struggling to find a way to travel
downriver. In 2004 the river was viewed more as a hindrance
than as a transport asset, a completely different reality from the
town's heyday in the first half of the twentieth century when
Kindu was a principal component of a carefully constructed
Belgian transport network. Kindu was a major junction on the
route between Kisangani (the colonial river town of Stanleyville)
and Lubumbashi (colonial Elisabethville). River boats would
arrive here from Kisangani in the north, to connect with trains
that would head south to Lubumbashi.

I have a book by a Belgian hunter, Andre Pilette, about a safari
he went on, just before the First World War, across this part of
Africa. Most of the book is standard Great White Hunter stuff -
descriptions of how he shot his way through hundreds and
hundreds of game animals, dodging death from various wounded
beasts - and it contains a fantastic photograph of him looking
completely shameless in a suit, shoes and topi, being carried
through the Congo on a hammock strung along a pole between
two African bearers. But by the time M. Pilette reached Kindu in
August 1913, he basically viewed his adventure as over,
describing a modern town fully connected to the outside world.
His journey home to Belgium began here with a routine ferry
downstream:

All day long you could hear the whistles from railway
locomotives or the sirens of riverboats; the sound of cargo
being loaded and unloaded. On a Sunday or any weekday, you could see endless industry in the town and you could
think yourself transported to one of Belgium's most
important industrial centres.

By the time I reached Kindu ninety years later, it was a squalid
imitation of a Belgian industrial centre. There were some
buildings that once belonged to railway officials and built, just as
M. Pilette described, on the crest of the hill behind the station,
now decrepit and tatty. And I saw my first motor traffic since
Kalemie, 700 kilometres to the south and east. The vehicles were
almost all UN-owned or jeeps belonging to aid agencies, and at
the junction outside the repainted rice warehouse where the UN
had its headquarters, a Congolese traffic policeman diligently
stood in the middle of the road all day long, whistling and
signalling with gloved hands, peering out from beneath a brightyellow helmet. I found the heat in Kindu grim, but every time I
passed that junction I never saw the policeman without those
delicate white gloves.

They were deeply incongruous in this otherwise filthy town.
Roads that had once been smooth with tarmac are now potholed
and uneven. There are a few shops in the town centre, but they
sell nothing but the samizdat tat of low-end trading - cheap,
Chinese goods that are brought here on the back of bicycles or on
the occasional unregistered flight to Kindu's small airport. The
town had grown up on the west bank of the Congo River, but over
on the east bank and about 100 kilometres into the bush there
were large deposits of cassiterite, the ore from which tin is made.
If Lubumbashi is a cobalt town, Kindu is a tin town, although the
relatively low profit margins on mining cassiterite make the
whole operation more low-key than the more sexy diamond, gold
and cobalt mines elsewhere in the Congo. Along the main drag in
town, you can see a few buildings where cassiterite traders do
business, buying sacks of ore from artisanal miners who drag it
here by bicycle through the bush.

But without mains water or power, Kindu is a dismal place.
Among the UN and aid community Kindu has one of the highest
attrition rates for disease out of all towns in the Congo. The Italian
aid worker who had looked so eager and healthy in MarieFrance's office at the UN base fell sick almost immediately and,
when I next saw him just a few days later, he was pale with a
plaster on his arm where a drip had been attached. Without mains
water, people use the Congo River as a giant sluice, to rid themselves of all types of waste. During recent fighting, war dead had
been tipped into the river, continuing a tradition from the
mercenary days of the 1960s when the mercenary commander,
Mike Hoare, described the river waters turning red with blood
when a boatload of rebels was hit by machine-gun fire.