Blood River (20 page)

Most frustrating for me was the utter collapse of the ferry
system. There was not a single working Congolese motorboat left
on the entire upper reach of the Congo River. I walked down to
the old port to find the carcasses of various boats from the midtwentieth century lying rusting on the river bank. I encountered
the same suspicious, money-grabbing hostility that I had experienced many times over in the Congo, as my curiosity was met
with demands from self-styled `policemen' for money and threats
that I must pay or get into trouble for violating a `security zone'.

I was beginning to feel lonely and depressed, but I still could
not avoid being impressed by the scale of the decay in Kindu.
Some of the abandoned boats were enormous, with chimney
stacks that reached up through four rotten decks. I struggled to
imagine the planning, effort and expense involved in bringing the
ships' components all the way here for assembly in the early
twentieth century. But all of that effort lay in ruins, flotsam from
a forgotten age.

`You must not give up hope. God will provide.' The optimism of
Masimango Katanda perked me up a little bit. He was the local
Anglican bishop and my host during my time in Kindu. I had arrived unannounced at his house and yet he immediately offered
to put me up. I was curious about what a Church of England
representative was doing in the predominantly Catholic Congo.

'It was the British missionaries in Uganda who are to blame.
They crossed the border into the Congo and brought with them
their message into the east of the country. We do not have the
biggest congregation, but I am still responsible for 20,000 church
members in Maniema province alone.'

After a grace delivered in French, which the bishop tailored
specially for me by asking that travellers receive God's protection,
we ate a meal of cassava bread garnished with cassava leaves,
before moving outside to talk in the evening cool of his courtyard.
The town of Kindu had no power, although I could see a distant
glow from the UN base, lit up by its own generators.

'We have had so many rebellions and wars it is difficult to
remember them all, but I remember exactly where I was when the
latest one started in 1998. I was at the summer Lambeth
Conference in London when I heard of the fighting here, so I flew
to Uganda thinking I could come overland like those early
missionaries.'

I fidgeted on my plastic chair, trying not to break the bishop's
flow. After the fierce heat of the day the temperature had dipped
nicely outside, but I was anxious not to be bitten by mosquitoes
swarming in the gloom. I kept moving to make sure my ankles and
wrists were not exposed. The bishop's house was perhaps the
finest in town, but it was still basic, without running water or
power. As a treat I had bought a plastic bottle of petrol to run his
small generator and I could hear the delighted screams of his
children gathered around a television inside, watching a lowbudget Nigerian-made film about adult women falling in love
with a magical eight-year-old boy.

'We stayed in Uganda a month or so before it became clear the
fighting was too bad to make it back that way, so we had to come
up with another plan. We flew all the way to Zambia and headed north until we crossed into the Congo and reached Lubumbashi.
There we took the last train that ran from Lubumbashi to Kindu
before the war. It was September 1998 and a journey that used to
take thirty-six hours or so lasted nine days. It was grim. No food,
no water, no bathroom. But at least we got home to Kindu.'

During the war the two banks of the river were held by rival
militia.

'The town was completely cut off for years. No trains. No
bicycle traders. Nothing. You could not even go down to the river
because of the shooting sometimes. Our church had land for an
educational centre over there on the east bank, but it was in noman's-land. It was very dangerous, but now things are better.'

'Do you think it would be safe for me to travel downriver by
canoe?'

'It will be very risky. If it was safe there would be regular river
traffic, but, even today, there is nothing.'

One afternoon I crossed the river and went in search of the last
English missionary still working in eastern Congo. Louise Wright
was sixty-one when I met her, living in a mud hut, speaking
Swahili fluently and claiming to miss nothing from home except
for a daily cryptic crossword. A former English teacher at a girls'
high school in Norfolk, she had turned her back on a comfortable
Western life and spent the last fifteen years in the eastern Congo
working as a teacher for the Church Mission Society.

Clearly loved by her congregation, she had committed herself
to one of the least comfortable and most dangerous places on the
planet. Even though she was much too modest to accept the
comparison, to my eye she was living the life captured so powerfully in The Poison wood Bible, an award-winning novel by an
American author, Barbara Kingsolver, which tells the story of an
evangelical Baptist and his family working as missionaries in the
Congo around the time Belgium granted independence in 1960.

'I was working in my school as head of the English department in the late 1980s when I saw an advert from the Church Mission
Society which read: "Is God calling you to stay where you are?" I
don't know quite why it had such a powerful effect on me, but it
made me think that perhaps I could be doing something more
constructive to help the work of God.'

We were speaking inside the educational centre described by
the bishop, set up by the Anglican Church on the east bank of the
Congo River near Kindu. Outside I had seen a grim feature of local
life as militiamen beat up bicyclists and stole their bicycles -
there were no cars or trucks to speak of on this side of the river.
But inside the compound, things were more peaceful. There were
no modern buildings, just traditional mud huts and a large
clearing in the bush where women were tending a crop of cassava.
I could hear the murmur of voices from an open-sided thatched
hall where trainee priests were being taught about the Bible.
Louise gave me a tour.

`We have to be self-sufficient,' she explained as we passed a
group of Congolese women clearing the forest so that more
cassava could be planted, and another threesome who were
milling cassava roots in a large wooden tub. Inside the tub there
was a blur of motion as the three women skilfully wielded a thick
timber pole each, pounding them like synchronised pistons so
that the brittle cassava crumbled into flour. Another woman was
sorting the ripe fruit of a palm tree so it could be crushed for oil.
I had seen palm oil used in candles, but this woman had another
use for it - washing her infant son, who beamed at me naked, but
glowing with a fresh sheen of oil. Louise spotted my interest.
`Pretty impressive stuff, palm oil,' she said. `You can cook with it,
eat it, wash with it or light your house with it.'

Returning to a thatched boma in the centre of the compound,
she said something that later I could not stop thinking about.

`The thing about the east of the Congo is that even during the
Belgian colonial period, it really was not that developed. Today
things are very basic, but the important thing to remember is that things have always been like this here - a very tough, rural selfsufficient lifestyle.'

This did not fit snugly with my image of the Congo as a oncefunctioning country that has slipped backwards. I responded,
`But surely the war and the chaos have made a difference. At least
there was some sort of society before, an exploitative and cruel
society, but one that was peaceful. Now people are dying in an
anarchic free-for-all from things that would not have killed them
before - starvation and avoidable disease.'

Louise thought for a second before answering.

'The war has had one major effect in that there are only two real
ways left for Congolese people to get on. Before, there was at least
a system of schools to go to paid for by the state, a transport
system so that people could reach other parts of the country, a
health system so that if you were ill you could stand a chance of
recovery. But today all of that has gone, so that you only have two
real options - you join a church, the only organisation that
provides an education, a way for someone to develop, or you join
one of the militias and profit from the war.'

I found her analysis depressing. The collapse of the state in this
large swathe of Africa meant that its people either relied on the
charity of outsiders or took to violence. I must have looked bit
dejected because Louise tried to lighten my mood.

'From my point of view as church worker, it's great,' she said.
'When I go on leave back to the UK and I go into a church on
Sunday, I am the youngest person there by a long way. But here
in the Congo, I am always the oldest.'

As our discussion continued, she made one other important
point about how the Belgian colonial way of doing things in the
Congo lasted long after independence in 1960.

'The Belgians ran their colony almost on military lines. Black
Congolese were only allowed to travel if they had passes from the
Belgian authorities, and nothing could be done without the
blessing of what was effectively the local Belgian commander. By the time I got here in the 1980s, the colonial era had long gone,
but I found that under Mobutu everything was run along exactly
the same lines. Nothing had really changed.

'I remember going to see the head of a big mine in the east of the
country to ask if one of the congregation could be treated at the
mine's clinic. Well, when I turned up at the director's office, it
was as if the Belgians were still running things. The director, a
white man, an old colonial type, was treated like royalty. I
remember sitting outside his office for hours waiting for him to
grant me an audience. It was as if the Mobutu regime had taken
over and decided to use exactly the same methods of control and
military discipline that the Belgians had used.'

Her story reminded me of something written by Conor Cruise
O'Brien, the Irish author and politician, about his time serving
with the UN in the Congo back in the early 1960s. He served as
point man in Katanga for the UN Secretary General, when the
province tried to secede, and in his subsequent book To Katanga
and Back he writes scathingly about the attitude of Belgian
colonialists to the Congolese:

If the attitude of the Belgian administration and the industrialists and missionaries had been genuinely paternal .. .
there would have been much to be said for it. A good parent,
after all, wants his children to grow up. He does not want to
stunt their intellectual growth; he encourages them to take on
responsibilities progressively; he steps aside, and stays aside,
as soon as he reasonably can. There is little evidence that
Belgians in the Congo generally were paternalist in this good
sense. The priest who, in the presence of a Congolese
colleague, emphasised not only the gravity but also the
ineradicable nature of Congolese defects, was `paternalist' in
the manner of a father who enjoys sneering at a son's
awkwardness, and keeps impressing on him that he is
congenitally and incurably defective. I found this form to be, on the whole, the prevalent type of paternalism in
Katanga.

As I prepared to say goodbye to Louise, outside the thatched hut
where she lived in the Kindu training centre, I thought how her
attitude of warmth and respect for Africans differed from that
shown by so many outsiders over the decades in the Congo. Just
as O'Brien had suggested, this dominant, negative attitude had left
the Congo stunted.

I lay under my mosquito net that night in the bishop's house
being kept awake by a terrible sound. Like all other Congolese
towns I visited, Kindu fell silent at night as if people were too
scared to move around after dark. But outside my room I could
hear the deranged ramblings of the bishop's father, an elderly
man suffering from acute dementia. At night he would stumble
round the yard, crashing into things, wailing inco-herently. It
added to my distress as I thrashed around on my sweat-sodden
mattress, feeling trapped by history. When Stanley reached
the Congo River in October 1876, he too had struggled to find
a way to descend the river. Of the 355 expedition members
who set out with him from Zanzibar in November 1874, only 147
were left by the time he got here. The rest had either deserted or
died. Frederick Barker and Edward Pocock had both been killed
by disease, leaving Francis Pocock as Stanley's last white
companion.

In terms of nineteenth-century exploration, his party had already
achieved great things, using his collapsible boat, the Lady Alice,
for the first full circumnavigation of Lake Victoria and mapping
other major features of the Great Lakes region. But the overall
success or failure of Stanley's mission depended on him finding
a way down the Congo River.

With good reason, the Arab slavers were unwilling to help.
They were reluctant to let any outsider into territory they claimed for themselves, fearing - quite rightly as it turned out - that they
might lose control of the land. They dressed up their explanations
with warnings about hostile tribes and dangerous cataracts on the
river, but it seems obvious they were reluctant to risk losing their
exclusive control of the upper Congo River. Stanley was the third
white man to reach the river after Livingstone and Cameron, but
they had both failed to persuade the local Arabs to let them
proceed downstream. Livingstone had turned back towards Lake
Tanganyika, while Cameron had abandoned the river and struck
out overland towards the west coast of Africa.

By the light of my head torch that night, I reread Stanley's
account of the colourful warnings issued by the Arabs to dissuade
him from heading downstream: