Blood River (23 page)

I ran my wet fingers across the coarse hull of the pirogue,
tracing gouges left by the boatmaker's adze. They felt like a roughhewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed
and cursed by this great natural phenomenon. It is a waterway
that offers much, but which has run with blood from the moment
Stanley paddled past here aboard the Lady Alice at the head of a
flotilla of stolen pirogues. At every stage of the Congo's history,
the river had sluiced away its dead - natives shot on their war
canoes by Stanley's people in the 1870s; agents of Leopold
drowned during clashes with Arab slavers in the 1890s; Belgian
officers killed by disease as they toiled to build a modern colony
high up an African river in the 1930s; Congolese rebels mown down by white mercenaries in the 1960s; civilians slaughtered in
2000 by African armies sent to the Congo by its greedy
neighbours.

The modern world had used this river for its toehold in central
Africa. Towns had been built along its banks. Motorboats had
been assembled here. But while the towns were now abandoned
and the boats left to rust, the one constant was the pirogue. It gave
the river its pulse, moving people and goods across a swathe of
central Africa that was all but abandoned by the outside world.

I sat in the darkness, thinking of my journey so far and how
remote this area had become. A yachtsman on the southern seas
or a climber in the Himalayas had more chance of rescue than I
did. The Uruguayans were long gone and would not be back to
this stretch of water until their fuel supplies were replenished in
another month or so; anyway, I had no way of communicating
with them. High on the Congo there were no helicopters to
summon, no rescue teams to call on. I felt very alone.

But instead of being overwhelmed by helplessness, I found it
liberating. My journey through the Congo had its own unique
category. It did not quite do it justice to call it adventure travel,
and it certainly was not pleasure travel. My Congo journey
deserved its own category: ordeal travel. At every turn I faced
challenges, difficulties and threats when in the Congo. The challenge was to assess and choose the option best suited to making
progress. But there were moments when there were no alternatives, or shortcuts or clever ideas. At these times, ordeal travel
became really no ordeal at all.

That evening on my pirogue was one such moment. I felt I had
no alternative other than to commit myself utterly to the river.
There was nothing left other than, quite literally, to go with the
flow. I felt horribly alone, but more than at any moment on my
trip I also felt relaxed and content.

My sense of well-being grew as a full moon rose brightly in the
east, its beam perfectly reflected in the broad, still waters of the river. I pushed the stool out of my way and stretched out on the
gritty bottom of the boat and, to the gentle sound of scraping as
the paddles rattled down the side of the pirogue, I fell into a deep
sleep.

A clap of thunder woke me. I opened my eyes and at first I could
see nothing. The moon was long gone, but a flicker of lightning
gave a nasty snapshot of busy, angry-looking clouds overhead.
Pulling myself upright, I could no longer hear the scraping sound
of the paddles on the hull. They were drowned out by the
pounding of freshly whipped waves that made the hull of the
pirogue shudder and vibrate.

There was an urgency in the strokes of the four paddlers that I
had not noticed when we set off from Lowa.

'We must find shelter, or the rain will fill the pirogue and we
will capsize,' shouted Malike, struggling to make himself heard
above the noise of the wind and waves. I thought of the crocodile
I had seen the day before. Capsizing would not be good.

As the paddlers made for the shore, we raced a curtain of rain
that I could hear, but not see, approaching from behind. We lost
the race by only a short distance, but it was still enough to see me
soaked through, struggling to keep my camera bag clear of the
water welling in the bottom of the boat. I had felt sorry for the
paddlers when I saw how little they brought with them, but now
I was the one with the problem of having to deal with wet
equipment.

The paddlers had spotted a break in the riverside forest and
some tied-up pirogues being clattered by the waves, so I knew we
were near a village. Slithering up a muddy bank, we found
ourselves at a thatched hut shuddering in the wind. There was
nobody to ask permission from, so we just bundled in through the
small door and collapsed on the floor. By the time I had retrieved
my soggy head torch and cast a light around the room, my four
companions were asleep, their limbs all folded together for warmth like the blades on a Swiss Army knife. I turned off the torch
and settled myself on the ground, watching as every so often the
mud-hut walls glowed to the flicker of lightning outside.

A very watery dawn broke over the village of Mutshaliko. We
were on the west bank of the upper Congo River and by the time
I emerged from the thatched hut, where we had gained sanctuary,
the sun was clear of the horizon, but struggling to break through
the remnants of the storm clouds. I sat down outside on a large log
and tried to spread out some of my wet gear so that it would dry.

Three of the paddlers slept on, but Malike was already awake.

'I must go speak with the village chief, to pay our respects,' he
said before disappearing down a track leading away from the river
bank.

There was nobody around. From the top of the river bank I had
a perfect view out over the full breadth of the river. With the sun
so low in the sky, the greens of the forest on my side were picked
out perfectly. There was the bright emerald green from banana
leaves, all ribbed and symmetrical with a bright waxy sheen; a
lighter peridot green from reeds swaying in the muddy water's
edge; and a green so dark it was almost black on menacinglooking palm fronds, the same shape and sharpness as a broadsword. Eating biscuits given to me for the journey by the bishop's
family back in Kindu, I watched a pied kingfisher, its black body
flecked with white, as it darted along the river's edge before it
picked a suitable overhanging branch from which to spy. For
minutes it sat motionless, before plunging into the storm-churned
water and emerging with a silver morsel in its beak.

The bird flew away when Malike returned. He was not alone.
Behind him trouped a group of children and an elderly, greyhaired man wearing a baseball cap. I turned round and stood up
to shake the man's hand.

`My name is Liye Oloba,' he said. `I am the administrative
secretary for the village.'

He joined me at my jumble sale of drying clothes and I asked
him about the village and how it had fared during the war.

`When I was young, the ferryboats used to come by here almost
every day, up and down, but they never stopped in our village.
Our place is too small. So even though I have not seen a boat for
years, I don't think there is any great difference. The only
difference is that gunmen come from time to time and take
everything. They came through here a few times in the last few
years, but we don't know where they come from or who they are
fighting for. They just take our chickens and our goats and our
cassava and then leave.'

His baseball cap bore a message in English: `Not Perfect But
Damn Close'. It came from the busy trade in donated clothes that
has grown up between the developed world and Africa. Clothes
given in the West to charity shops are sold for peppercorn sums
to traders more interested in quantity than quality. The traders
bale them up and ship them here in bulk for sale in street markets.
No matter that they are so tatty or unfashionable in Western eyes
as to have no value, here in Africa people are willing to pay good
money for them, and the bizarre clothing I saw all over the Congo
suggested it was big business. My favourite was a T-shirt that had
obviously been given to contestants in a 1994 pistol-shooting
competition in Dallas, Texas, only to end up, more than a decade
later, as the main component of a Congolese villager's wardrobe.
I wondered by what meandering path Liye's baseball cap ended
up on the banks of the Congo River.

I asked him about the houses.

`The river floods every year, so we must be able to rebuild our
houses,' explained Liye. `The waters sometimes carry everything
away, so we must start again using what we find in the forest.
Those modern houses built during the colonial period do not last.
They are not suitable for our conditions.'

He explained that flooding was regarded as an occupational
hazard for the subsistence farmers of his village. The village had to be built close to the river because it was here that the best soils
were found, washed down by seasonal floods. But those same
floods meant the houses were threatened with destruction. It was
a classic development trap - to survive, these villagers lived
somewhere that any attempt to build bigger, better homes was
wasted because of the flood threat.

Liye had been friendly enough, but suddenly he changed.
Leaning forward he started to whisper, 'I have a lot of work to do
as the administrative secretary here and I need money to pay for
our work.' His face was almost touching mine, and this first
request was made sotto voce. He almost seemed embarrassed to
be asking. But when I hesitated he started to threaten me,
demanding to see written permission from the local militia
commander for my presence in the village. In the face of these
threats I caved in, slipping a ten-dollar note into his hand, but I
was not happy until Malike and the crew returned to the pirogue
and whisked me back out into the safe anonymity of the river.

The daylight hours passed very slowly on my pirogue. The
paddlers chatted and sung in Swahili. The sun was as strong as I
have ever known. We were just a short distance from the Equator
and the storm had washed the sky clean of any screening clouds.
While the crew were impervious to the sun's force, it had me
cringing in a puddle of shade under my wide-brimmed hat,
pathetically splashing my face and arms with river water the
same colour and warmth as tea, praying for the evening shadows
to reach us.

The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as
they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their
long-handled wooden paddles. About three metres long, they
were shape of spades from a deck of cards, only stretched out to
mansize, with shafts that were thin and shiny, polished by years
of being slid through calloused hands. The leaf-shaped blade
spread broad and fat before tapering gracefully to a point. It was no surprise when later on the journey I saw them being used both
as trays for food and as weapons for fighting.

The foursome worked in harmony, with just the faintest of
deliberate lags between the actions of the two up front and the
two behind. Standing upright they would lean forward to plunge
the blade into the water, before heaving it backwards with a dip
of the shoulders and a shimmy of the hips. The deft, feathering
flick at the end of the stroke to clear the blade from the water
would have impressed the most skilful Oxbridge oarsman and
each time they did it I felt a faint surge in the pirogue as it inched
forward.

My pirogue was about ten metres long and was nothing but a
tree trunk, halved and hollowed out, completely bare, without
shelving, seats or compartments. Someone had scratched the
name `Sandoka' at the stern, but when I asked the four paddlers
what it meant, they shrugged their shoulders and said it was not
normal for pirogues to have a name. Many different types of tree
are used to make pirogues, but some have wood that is so heavy
the pirogues sink if they are overturned. I did not want to put the
Sandoka to the test, so every time I clambered aboard I squatted
as low as possible and mentally rehearsed how I would grab my
small camera bag if the boat tipped.

I did not have many other possessions to worry about. Apart
from the camera bag, all I had was my rucksack and the yellow,
plastic jerrycan of boiled water. Someone had stolen the can's
stopper, so I had made a botched repair with a piece of plastic and
an elastic band. I could not afford to fall ill out here. The paddlers
watched me in polite silence as I drank from the jerrycan only
after wiping the spout with one of my sterile baby-wipes.

At twenty-seven, Malike was the oldest of the four paddlers
and clearly the leader of the group. He had enough French to
communicate with me as the three others looked on unknowingly, and it was through him that requests for cigarettes and food
were channelled.

I had so much time to myself that I actually measured their
stroke rate. Every thirty seconds they averaged twelve to fourteen
strokes. They kept this up for hours at a time, but when the rate
began to fall Malike would suddenly declaim, `We must stop, we
must eat.'

And with that they would head to the next village for a fuel
stop.

To drink they would squat down while we were out in
midstream, lower their faces over the edge of the pirogue until
their lips were suspended maybe ten centimetres above the river
and literally throw the water into their mouths with their hands.
They peed over the edge of the boat and were as sure-footed as if
they were standing on terra firma. I was more ungainly, so when
I tried, the effort of standing up and keeping my balance made me
way too tense. Only after hours of discomfort could I build up the
pressure required to overcome my nerves, and then only if I
kneeled on my rucksack. Standing on the wobbly pirogue was
much too nerve-racking ever to enable me to pee.

As the stern paddler, Malike could control the pirogue's
steering and at one point he veered us towards the river bank
where I could see nothing but dense jungle. He must have spotted
something because, as we approached the shore, the trees opened
up and there was the village of Babundu.