Blood River (21 page)

There are monstrous large boa-constrictors, suspended by
their tails to the branches waiting for the passer-by or a stray
antelope. The ants in the forest are not to be despised. You
cannot travel without your body being covered with them,
when they sting you like wasps. The leopards are so
numerous that you cannot go very far without seeing one.
Almost every native wears a leopard-skin cap. The gorillas
are in the woods, and woe befall the man or woman met
alone by them; for they run up to you and seize your hands,
and bite the fingers off one by one, and as fast as they bite one
off, they spit it out.

I felt a strange empathy when I read how Stanley had seen this
as a crisis point for his journey. Amid warnings from the Arabs
and demands from his Zanzibari porters that they turn round and
go home, Stanley describes in his book how he and Francis
Pocock turned to the toss of a coin to decide whether or not they
should head downriver. Heads would be for the river, and tails for
retreat. Six times a rupee coin was tossed and six times it came
down tails. In Stanley's book this moment of great drama is captured in a black-and-white etching that shows a pipe-smoking
Pocock preparing to flick the coin with his thumb while Stanley,
in full tunic and knickerbockers, stands poised for the result.

Somewhat strangely, the pair decided to completely ignore this
six-toss omen, badgering, cajoling, threatening and bribing the
Arabs until they eventually agreed - for a price - to provide protection for Stanley's party for sixty days' march downstream.

The expedition initially set off on foot, slogging through the
forest on the east bank of the river. There is no explanation as to
why Stanley wasted effort going overland when he was right next
to a perfectly navigable stretch of river. It is most likely that he
could not find enough local canoes for his expedition - with his
Arab protectors, the expedition had swollen to around 700 souls.
Having experienced the climate myself and seen the thickness of
the rainforest, I realised that Stanley's description of the rigours
of the overland trek rang horribly true:

We have had a fearful time of it today in these woods and
those who visited this region before declare with superior
pride that what we have experienced as yet is only a poor
beginning to the weeks upon weeks which we shall have to
endure. Such crawling, scrambling, tearing through the
woods! ... It was so dark sometimes in the woods that I could
not see the words, recording notes of the track, which I
pencilled in my note-book . . . We arrived in camp, quite
worn out with the struggle through the intermeshed bush,
and almost suffocated with the heavy atmosphere ... Our
Expedition is no longer the compact column which was my
pride. It is utterly demoralised. Every man scrambles as he
best may through the woods; the path, being over a clayey
soil, is so slippery that every muscle is employed to assist our
progress. The toes grasp the path, the head bears the load, the
hand clears the obstructing bush, the elbow puts aside the
sapling.

It was in this section of forest that Stanley came across village
after village decorated with skulls, often arranged in two rows
sunk into the soil running the entire length of the village. The
inhabitants told him, through translators, that they belonged to
apes trapped in the forest and eaten, although Stanley smuggled
two samples home to Britain, where a medical expert studied
them and concluded they were definitely human. The same
image was used by Conrad twenty years later in Heart of Darkness
when his narrator arrives after a long and terrible river journey in
central Africa in search of a white colonial agent, Mr Kurtz, to
find his bush house decorated with human skulls.

Eventually Stanley abandoned the land route, sent his Arab
guides back towards Kasongo and committed his expedition to
the river. Behind the Lady Alice came a flotilla of twenty-two
pirogues - one he named the Telegraph after our employer - that
he had stolen at gunpoint from riverside villages. He saw them as
spoils of war after a series of skirmishes with the Wagenia, the
tribe living along the river. The only contact the Wagenia had ever
had with outsiders had been raids by Arab slaving parties, and it
is no surprise that they treated Stanley's arrival with hostility,
attacking with bows and arrows and suffering heavy casualties
from the modern weaponry fired by Stanley's Zanzibaris. By late
December 1876 Stanley's entire expedition was floating down the
Congo River, anxiously peering out over the barrels of their
Snider rifles, percussion-lock muskets and double-barrelled shotguns at a forest that concealed dangers both real and imagined.

When I eventually left Kindu, I did so in circumstances very
similar to Stanley. I was on a boat crewed by non-Congolese
outsiders, heading nervously downriver and looking out from
behind a phalanx of rifles and machine-guns.

I had hitched a ride on a UN river patrol boat, a swanky, sleeklooking thing with powerful engines and comfy padded white
seats more suited to the French Riviera than combat riverine operations. It was the property of a tiny detachment from the navy
of Uruguay. They were MONUC's sole military presence on the
800 navigable kilometres of the upper Congo River. I was lucky to
have been given a place on their downriver patrol and I owed my
good fortune to Lieutenant Commander Jorge Wilson, an
impressively bulky Uruguayan naval officer who commanded the
Kindu unit.

I don't know whether it was because, as a descendant of
nineteenth-century British immigrants to the Americas - Scottish
miners who mined salt in Uruguay - he felt an affinity with
Stanley, another British nineteenth-century immigrant to the
Americas, but Cdr Wilson was very knowledgeable about
Stanley's journey and happy to play a small part in helping me recreate it. My target was Ubundu, a town 350 kilometres downstream from Kindu at the head of a series of rapids that make the
river impassable. The cataracts make river travel downstream
from Ubundu impossible, so I would have to travel overland to
the next major town, Kisangani. That would be dangerous
enough, but for now my main concern was getting to Ubundu.

`There's no way we can get you all the way to Ubundu. We
don't have the fuel to make it even halfway. But on our next
downstream patrol we can at least give you a head start.' He was
shouting above the sound of the Village People's `In the Navy'
being played at full volume during a Saturday night booze-up at
his unit's base next to Kindu's old railway station.

Sailors from his unit were wearing the Uruguayan national
soccer strip and comedy sombreros, jiving drunkenly, pausing
every so often to gulp down more beer and steak - all imported on
UN flights. While the rest of Kindu was in darkness, the
Uruguayan naval-unit compound fizzed with bright lights and
loud music. As I left to walk through the silent streets to the
bishop's blacked-out house, I saw a large halo effect around the
compound perimeter lights. Walking closer, I saw thousands of
tiny flying insects attracted from the nearby river by the light, shimmying backwards and forwards in a thick cloud. And on the
ground beneath the light, millions more lay dead in drifts.

Cdr Wilson's offer was the best I could hope for. My plan was
simply to go as far downriver with the Uruguayans as possible
and then try to find some villagers to paddle me the rest of the
way to Ubundu by pirogue. I would face another raft of problems
when I reached Ubundu, as the war had cut links with Kisangani,
the next major port 100 kilometres downstream. Marie-France
and the bishop both thought my pirogue plan risky, but I was
desperate to get moving again.

The next time I saw Cdr Wilson was the morning we were due
to leave. As he climbed down from the river bank to the boats, the
gangway sagged and so did my spirits. There was something in
his expression that was not quite right and, after dumping his
webbing on the pontoon, he led me out of earshot of his crew.

'We have big problems today. I have just heard the rebel
commander here in Kindu is angry about the way some of his men
have not been given well-paid promotions, and he is threatening
to pull out of the peace process and to take all his fighters with
him. Unfortunately for you, he comes from the area you want to
travel through and that is where his men are assembling. Are you
sure you want to carry on?'

It was one of those moments in the Congo when fear threatened
to overwhelm me. Throughout my journey fear had been a
constant, nagging away like a ringing in the ears. After hearing
from Cdr Wilson, it welled up and threatened to deafen me.

I looked out over the Congo River. The sun had risen, but was
yet to lift the layers of sweaty mist blanketing the water. In the
half-light the river looked like a motionless slick frozen by torpor
- the same torpor threatening my entire journey. The Uruguayan
crew was busy preparing the two patrol boats for departure as I
mulled over what to do. A broom scratched noisily on the
foredeck, while three machine-guns were mounted in their firing
positions on each boat, making a deep metallic clunk as they were bolted home. I noticed that by some wonderful quirk of historical
circularity, their guns were Belgian-made. Brussels might have
been forced to cede its Congo colony in 1960, but its guns were
still master here in 2004.

A Congolese woman paddled calmly by in a small dugout. She
looked up disinterestedly at the activity before disappearing out
of view behind an old tugboat, abandoned, rotten and motionless,
next to our pontoon on the river bank. Motorboats come and go on
the Congo River, I thought, but the pirogue remains.

'Come on,' I said to myself. 'You can always make a decision
when the moment comes to be dropped off. If it doesn't look safe,
you just come back to Kindu with the Uruguayans.'

I shouted for help from one of the sailors already on board the
patrol boat and passed him my luggage, including a grubby
yellow plastic jerrycan. I was not going to make the same mistake
from my dehydrated motorbiking days. The can contained
enough drinking water for four days, carefully boiled and filtered
by the bishop's wife.

Our flotilla of two pushed off as the sun finally folded back the
morning mist. I felt the traveller's surge of satisfaction as the
propellers whipped up a wake. I was on my way again after five
frustrating, uncomfortable days in Kindu.

The river might be more than 1,000 metres wide on this upper
stretch, but it is not deep. We were at the end of the region's dry
season and I noticed fishermen wading thigh-deep hundreds of
metres out from either bank. The Uruguayan navy helmsmen had
also noticed, and the engines barely ticked over as they nosed
their way through sand banks in search of a navigable channel.

It gave me time to look at the rusting wrecks of the old boats
that used to ply this reach, but which now lined the left bank for
well over a kilometre. Some were huge, others more modest, but
all were in ruins. One ship had been completely overrun by a reed
bank and its old smokestack could just be seen poking from the vegetation with ivy, not smoke, spewing out of the top. Another
hulk was lying on its side clear out of the water, the panels eaten
away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass. But
my favourite was an old stern-paddler, a rust-red X-ray image of
the Mississippi steamboats of my imagination. The panels were
all gone, but the superstructure remained in skeletal form. At the
stern was the octagonal tubular frame on which the wooden
blades of the paddle once stood.

`It was the biggest boat on this section of the river.' I looked over
my shoulder to see the Congolese pilot employed by the
Uruguayans following my gaze. 'The Belgians brought it here in
the 1940s and called it the Chevalier, or something like that, but
after independence it was renamed the Ulindi. I started work here
on the river in 1977, but that boat has not moved since long before
I arrived.'

The voice of Kungwa Mwamba was flat and free of emotion.
There was no sadness, no sense of anger at the waste, no hint of
shame. He was fifty-two years old and came from Kabambarre, the
town that I passed through en route from Lake Tanganyika to the
river. Stanley had spent time there, so I asked him about the
explorer Stanley, but he shook his head. He knew nothing about
that period. He did, however, know a lot about boats.

`They bought it all the way here from Belgium, piece by piece,
by ship and train, and assembled it here on the upper Congo. And
they did not stop there. It was one of a pair, with a sister ship, the
Prince Charles, I think, but that was sunk downriver from here in
the 1964 rebellion. If the river is low, you might even be able to
see the remains.'

A single, enormous transport company was created by the
Belgians during the colonial period, covering its vast interests in
the Congo River basin. The Great Lakes Railway Company laid
thousands of kilometres of track, but it was much more than just
a railway. Its emblem was a swirling white-and-red ship's
pennant, which somehow conveyed the importance of boats to the company along the Congo's long river system and on the lakes
that form the territory's eastern frontier.

'After I left school I joined the company. By then it had changed
its name to the Congolese Railway Company, but it did the same
job and after I was trained they moved me onto the boats on the
upper river. But the money to maintain the engines was all stolen,
there was no fuel and the system just fell apart.'

There was something terribly matter-of-fact about Kungwa's
delivery. He said he had not been paid a penny in wages since
1998, but was still supposedly on the books of the company. No
wonder he was moonlighting as a pilot for the UN.

'I have seen the river die here. Without the boats, life closes in
for everyone, they just go back to their villages and have no
contact with the outside world.'