Blood River (25 page)

'This is the harbour of Ubundu,' Malike whispered. All I could
make out was a jumble of broken concrete from an old slipway.
'And that ... is a soldier,' he added in a voice trailing into silence.

I looked up. A dark figure was moving towards us and the gunmetal grey of his rifle had a pale moonlit sheen.

He was small, only a boy to be honest, and I did something
completely unplanned. I jumped onto the broken jetty and began
to bark orders.

`Who are you? Where is your commanding officer?' My voice
was firm. It was meant to camouflage my terror and could have
backfired horribly. No white man had arrived here for years, let
alone by pirogue in the middle of the night, and the soldier had
every reason to treat me with suspicion.

I could not believe what happened then. The gunman shuffled
respectfully to attention and saluted me.

I knew my bravado to be a fragile thing with an unreliably short
half-life. I also knew it would not be long before the Congolese
gunman worked this out. Stomping off purposefully through the
undergrowth, I was desperate to maintain the illusion of control.
Thankfully the darkness hid the fear in my eyes. Days earlier I
had tried to relay a message through the closest major town,
Kisangani, 140 kilometres to the north, to the last remaining
Catholic priest in Ubundu, that I might pass this way. My best
hope for sanctuary was to make it to the priest's house and pray
my message had got through.

It was already the middle of the night. Beneath clouds weakly
backlit by the waning moon, our small column set off for what
passes as Ubundu town centre. Uninvited, Malike, the leader of
the paddlers, grabbed my rucksack, balanced it on his head and
led the way up a thickly overgrown track between two banks of
dense vegetation. I could make out large trees lurking overhead.
At times the shadows merged ~o thickly I thought we had entered
a tunnel. Malike said he knew the way to the priest's house and I
was banking on him being right. I followed next, trying to convey
an air of control. Falling flat on my face would not have helped,
so I took extra care as I picked my way through the web of roots
and tendrils underfoot. And behind me came the gunman. I could
not see him, but the sound of his footfall was clear and
threatening.

As we left the other three paddlers at the riverside, so we left
the roar of the cataracts. I was still being deafened, but this time
it was my adrenalin-spiked heartbeat that was pounding in my
ears. Sweat poured down my back in the clammy night heat as
fireflies began to flicker in the gloomier puddles of shadow.

Under one particularly thick knot of foliage I could just make
out a carved stone madonna. It fitted with the only detailed
description I had been able to find of the town, one written by
Katharine Hepburn in a diary entry describing an afternoon idled
away here while waiting for the train north during the filming of
The African Queen.

I wandered out the main avenue toward the monks' church
... On the way there was a nunnery. Quite high walls lined
the avenue. Plaster - mud-coloured - sometimes painted
white. Great vines growing over them. Just opposite the
nunnery was the nuns' cemetery ... I went in through the
gate and stood thinking by the sweet gravestones. Lives of
total service ... I am not in any sense a Catholic, but one
couldn't help being moved by the dedication of these men
and women.

In the gloom I could not make out any nunnery or cemetery, but
the madonna suggested I must be near.

Malike ploughed on uphill and after a few more minutes we
came to an area where the undergrowth had been cut back and in
the darkness I could make out the loom of buildings. All was
silent.

'Hello, hello, is there anyone there?' I tried to conceal the
tremble in my voice as I broke the silence with a shout.

Nothing.

And then a shambling human shape emerged.

'I am the housekeeper. The priest is asleep, but he told me
someone might come one of these nights. I will show you where
you can sleep.'

My sigh of relief was so deep that, for a second, I felt dizzy.
Malike put down the rucksack and I spent a few minutes in the
dark rummaging through its innards to recover my head torch.
Under its glare, I carefully unrolled four $50 notes and handed them to him. This was four times more than the price we had
agreed, but all my usual nervousness about not appearing too
foolishly generous was lost in the thrill of having made it to
Ubundu. Malike was silent. He turned the notes in his hands. I
flashed the head torch a second time so that he could check each
note and confirm I was not fleecing him. My largesse clearly
troubled him. Maybe he was disappointed that he had not driven
a harder bargain. If I could afford to quadruple our original price,
then surely I could have been persuaded to pay even more. Maybe
he suspected the notes were counterfeit. A single fifty-dollar note
represented a fortune in his riverine village, now several days'
paddle back upstream on the upper Congo. Four was wealth
untold. He turned on his heel without shaking my hand and, with
my plaintive thanks in his ears, disappeared back down the track
to the river. I was closely watching the gunman from the corner of
my eye. To my great relief, he decided to go back to his sentry
position on the river's edge, fell in behind Malike and was soon
lost to my sight.

The housekeeper told me to follow him to an outbuilding. As
the door opened with a creak I could hear the scuttle of cockroach
legs scrabbling on the cement floor. It was a curiously lovely
sound. It meant I had made it to the safety of a place connected to
the modern world: a place of cement floors, dirty, cracked,
vermin-infested cement floors, but cement nonetheless. I fell
asleep with a grin on my face, wrestling with my mosquito net,
planning how I would cope with the next ordeal.

The room where I slept was in the precincts of a church, but it was
the sound of a drum, not bells, that woke me. In The Poison wood
Bible, one of the child narrators describes the 'loggedy' drums of
the Congo that she heard while growing up at her Baptist father's
mission station. It was a perfect description for the large, wooden
instrument I heard that morning. It was located just inside the
door of the church of Saint Joseph's looking like an oversized piggy-bank. It was made from a two-metre length of tree trunk,
stripped of bark with just a single slit in the top. Through that
aperture, carvers had scraped out the innards of the trunk to leave
a hollow wooden tube. When drummed on the outside, a sound
as thick as treacle oozed from the slit.

A cloudy dawn had broken and I could now see where I had
arrived in the middle of the night. The church itself was a large
building, dating from the 1950s. Older brick buildings comprising a school and prayer centre stood in front of it, but the
whole place was overgrown and badly looked after. When known
as Ponthierville, this town had been another important hub in the
Belgian colonial project, connecting the upper Congo River with
a railway skirting the 100 unnavigable kilometres of the Stanley
Falls.

`Nothing is working right now.' The priest, Adalbert Mwehu
Nzuzi, sounded deeply troubled. He had welcomed me in front of
his church, but from the moment I saw his cold expression, I
knew I was dealing with a worried man. `This place is not safe for
you. I really think you should leave as soon as possible.'

After surviving three weeks' travel through the Congo, I was
beginning to feel a bit cocky, so I assured him I was all right. He
looked me in the eye, slowly raised his eyebrows and repeated his
warning.

`This is a terrible place where terrible things happen. You
really must leave before they find you.'

`Who are "they"?' I asked.

Before he answered he looked around over his shoulder to
check no-one was in sight and whispered a reply. `The rebels, the
mai-mai, the ones who are under the command of . . .' At this
point he dropped his voice so that it was barely audible. `Kufi.'

I had not heard the name Kufi before. It was a name that left
Father Adalbert petrified.

`I lock myself in at night. We hear the most terrible things.
Sometimes it is the sound of gunfire, but sometimes we hear nothing but the screams. That is when they are using "white
weapons".'

I had never heard the expression 'white weapons', so I asked
him to explain.

'The old weapons, the ones that do not make a sound: knives,
machetes, spears. Once they kill, they throw the bodies in the
river and they are washed away.

`There is just no law here. That is what we need more than
anything. A sense of the law and the sense that there is someone
to enforce it. Without that there is chaos. These mai-mai kill for
no reason at all. One day you are okay, the next day you are dead.
There is no sense to it. If they are angry with you or don't like your
clothes, they kill and they know they will never face justice.'

It was a brief but eloquent lament for the Congo. What the
country needs above aid shipments or charitable donations is a
sense of law and order.

Entering the priest's house, I saw on a table a portrait of one of the
main culprits for Congo's legal anarchy. It showed the dictator
Mobutu Sese Seko. When the Congo won independence from
Belgium on 30 June 1960, the African continent viewed it as a
moment of great optimism and hope, a time when eighty years of
colonial control and exploitation would end and a new era of
black emancipation would begin. More than any other single
person, Mobutu made sure this dream was never fulfilled.

Mobutu's dictatorial reign between 1965 and 1997 created the
violent free-for-all of today's Congo. It was Mobutu who robbed
the country of its wealth, plundering national reserves on a scale
economists have still not been able to gauge accurately. When he
came to power, the Congo had a thriving mineral industry, reliant
on copper from the south-eastern province of Katanga and
diamonds from the central province of Kasai. When he was
driven from office in May 1997 to die in exile a few months later,
the country was broke and the output of the mines a fraction of what it had been fifty years earlier. Estimates of what he stole vary
from millions of dollars to billions, but the truth is nobody will
ever be able to arrive at an accurate figure. Dictionaries cite
Mobutu's rule as the perfect example of a kleptocracy, a state
where rampant greed and corruption erode normal economic
activity.

Like many other African dictators, Mobutu won power by
presenting himself as the only leader strong enough to unite the
country. For five years after independence, the Congo had been in
a state of near-permanent rebellion, with the attempted secession
by Katanga, the Mulele Mai uprising in the east and various coup
attempts in Kinshasa. In one of the clumsier features of Belgian
rule, Brussels had groomed no Congolese politicians to take
control of the vast country at independence - Belgian colonial
law barred Congolese from reaching senior positions in the army,
civil service, judiciary or other organs of state, and by the time the
colonialists left, the country had barely a handful of graduates.
Control of the Congo fell into the hands not of a cadre of trained,
experienced, educated leaders, but of young turks who suddenly
found themselves vying for positions of enormous influence.

Mobutu had not yet turned thirty when independence came to
the Congo but, as violence gripped the country for five years, he
used his senior position in the army to artfully convince America
and the West that he was the only Congolese leader capable of
controlling the fractious giant at the heart of Africa. It worked.
The coup that brought him to power in 1965 was tacitly approved
by Washington, if only because it promised an end to the turmoil.
Mobutu obliged by establishing stability in the most brutal way
possible, publicly executing rivals and detaining possible
plotters. Pierre Mulele, the rebel leader responsible for the Mulele
Mai uprising, was lured back from exile with a promise of an
amnesty, only to be disposed of by Mobutu's troops. He died
under torture, after his genitals and limbs had been cut off. What
remained of his body was then tossed into the Congo River.