Blood River (29 page)

Oggi could see I was struggling in the heat, so he invited me to
his home, a thatched mud hut in the main fishing village,
Binakulu, within a few hundred metres of the cataract. We were
just two kilometres from the city centre, but the village was as
primitive as the settlements I had passed deep in the jungle. Oggi
explained there was no mains water in the village and so the
entire community used the river for drinking, washing and
sewage. He shrugged and explained that dysentery was common
and malaria endemic. In fact his first son, just four years old, was
suffering from a bout of malaria.

He gave me a small wooden stool to sit on in the shade of a tree
as I explained my journey, following Stanley's route all the way
downriver from Kisangani to the Atlantic Ocean, still more than
2,000 kilometres downstream. When I told him how his name had
been given to me by the South African journalist, he dropped his
gaze for a second and rocked his upper body forward.

`Yes. I remember that journey to Bumba. It was a bad journey, a
really bad journey.'

Undeterred, I said that I had spent three weeks slogging all the
way here from Lake Tanganyika and I was anxious to find a way
downriver. When I finished speaking, he hesitated before
replying.

`I know this river as well as anyone. The reason I speak English
is that back in the 1980s and early 1990s there were tourists who
used to come here, English-speaking tourists. I would take them
down the river on boats or sometimes I would take them fishing
on pirogues, but the war brought chaos to the river. I have never
known it as bad as today. There are no regular boats from
Kisangani, and at this time of year, with the water level so low,
boat owners do not like to risk their boats. There are sand banks
and if you make a mistake you can lose your boat for ever. We can
go down to the main port in the city and ask if any boats are
moving, but you must understand, it is going to be difficult.'

My euphoria at reaching Kisangani was now fully spent. I
might have made it further than any foreign overland traveller in
the Congo for decades, but Oggi suggested that my ordeal was far
from over.

The next day we went in search of a river boat heading downstream. I had expected we would need to go to the large concrete
quayside that I had seen when I first reached Kisangani, the one
with the line of cranes. But it turned out this was the property of
the Congolese armed forces, who were hostile to anyone trying to
tie up alongside, so civilian boats were tied up a kilometre or so downstream along a muddy stretch of river bank. To get there we
walked past the remnants of the two-storey hotel where the stars
and film crew of The African Queen had stayed in the early
1950s. At the time it had the rather sweet name of `L'Hotel
Pourquoi Pas?'. On arrival, Katharine Hepburn had been incensed
to find she had been fobbed off with a ground-level room and had
immediately pulled rank over the film's accountant, who had
been given a first-floor room with a balcony overlooking the river.
She had the bean-counter summarily evicted before installing
herself in what she described as a charming room with a pleasant
view.

Today 'L'Hotel Pourquoi Pas?' is a broken ruin, home to scores
of squatters who sleep on the bare floor next to walls stained with
damp, and who light fires where the Oscar-winning actress once
unpacked prodigious amounts of luggage, full of the latest
tropical outfits designed by the smartest London couturiers.

A little further along the river bank, I saw what I initially took
to be a graveyard of wrecked river boats. There were rusting hulks
haphazardly tied together by a web of knotted hawsers and
cables, bedecked with large pieces of plastic, which had been
stretched out to provide shade for gaggles of wretched-looking
people living on the decks. It was a floating shanty town.

'Welcome to the port of Kisangani,' Oggi said formally.

The stench was incredible. The people under the shades had
been living here for months. The river bank was sloppy with raw
sewage and I could see a malodorous slick that leached into the
river downstream from the boats, too viscous for the current to
disperse. Stepping delicately through a minefield of human
waste, I made it to a wobbly-looking gangplank connecting the
river bank with the first hulk. It creaked under my weight, but
with a lunge I reached the rust-brown deck and looked around.

Faces, faces, everywhere. A few turned to look at the white
stranger, but most just stared forlornly out over the river. Mothers
breastfed babies. Other women stirred pots of cassava on wood fires lit straight on the deck. Men sat in dirty singlets, eyes dull
with boredom. It was crowded, chaotic and grim. Only one area
of the deck was free of people and I saw why. Some sort of gummy
oil had weeped from a split rattan basket onto the deck and the
sticky, sweet mess had attracted a thick cloud of angry bees.

I heard Oggi questioning various people and saw them all
pointing in the same direction, to the outermost hulk, furthest
from the bank. Jumping over hawsers and stepping between the
different deck heights of the parallel boats, I followed Oggi. By the
time I arrived, he was already in earnest conversation with a man
who introduced himself as Simon Zenga and described himself as
the Person Responsible for the motorboat Tekele. I queried him.
Does that mean you are the captain? No, he replied. I am the
Person Responsible.

It was a term that carried the stamp of Belgian colonial rule.
The Belgians ran the Congo on a strict hierarchy, from white
bosses down to black underclass. The level of Person Responsible
was a middle-ranking tier that was neither as powerful as the boss
nor as weak as the underling. The Mobutu regime had made a lot
of noise about ridding the Congo of the old trappings of empire.
But in reality the old colonial hierarchies had proved to be just as
useful for the African dictatorship.

As Oggi and Simon continued their discussion, I slowly made
sense of the chaos around the port. The boats were, strictly
speaking, not boats at all but barges - vast, flat-bottomed hulls
with roofs, but no engine. These were the things that I had taken
to be abandoned hulks. They had no cabins, no fittings, no
furniture, no lighting, no portholes, no paintwork. They were just
floating boxes made of sheet metal, rusting away in the tropical
heat. For power they relied completely on tiny tugboats, or
`pushers' in the vernacular of Congo boatmen. Dwarfed by the
barges, the pushers were much more important as they actually
had engines and could both drive and steer the barges.

At the end of the barge I was now standing on, attached by some taut hawsers, was the motorboat Tekele. It was old, rusty and
very, very small. Against the river vastness it looked like a toy,
and yet the Person Responsible promised me that with enough
fuel and a skilful navigator it could push its barge for 'the
1,734 km'. He was referring to the journey from Kisangani to
Kinshasa, where every last kilometre had once been marked on
river charts.

'We are the outermost boat because we are the next one
planning to leave,' Simon said, stirring my interest.

'When?' I asked eagerly.

'In the next few weeks.'

'How long will it take you to go the whole 1,734 km?'
Excitement was welling inside me.

`At least four months, but we will have many stops and we
might not even go all the way down to Kinshasa. . .'He was still
speaking, but disappointment had temporarily deafened me.

Back at the hotel, Oggi and I found solace in a bottle of Primus,
the local beer. It has been brewed in Kisangani since the colonial
era, and across the Congo it enjoys the status of a national
institution. During my research most people with any direct
experience of the Congo mentioned Primus. During the various
wars and periods of turmoil here, just about the only thing that
remained open in the city was the brewery, churning out Primus
lager in large, brown litre bottles that bore the name not on a
paper label, but on a stencil of white letters glazed direct onto the
glass. There were legendary stories about bottles of Primus being
opened to reveal human nails inside, or insects, or other detritus
too gruesome to go into. But the point was: while every other
factory in Kisangani collapsed, the Primus brewery plodded on,
filling, recycling and refilling the bottles, time after time, year
after year, crisis after crisis.

Each bottle I drank seemed to have its own story. The tiny
chinks on the lip or missing letters on the stencil told of boozing sessions and bar fights through the city's turbulent past. Drinking
a bottle of Primus in the sweaty heat of Kisangani made me feel
more in touch with the country's recent history than almost
anything else I did in the Congo. And another thing - it tasted
great.

Smacking his lips lavishly after a gulp direct from a bottle, Oggi
reiterated that the low water level meant the larger boats rarely
moved up as far as Kisangani for fear of being beached on a sand
bank at this time of year. He said he was not surprised that the
smaller boats like the Tekele were the only ones that attempted
the journey and that four months was a normal journey time.

'A small boat like the Tekele does not make money from a
single cargo. It is too small to carry a large amount from Kinshasa
to Kisangani. So it makes its money on a thousand small cargoes,
cramming in people and their possessions for just a few
kilometres here and a few kilometres there. If you ever see a river
boat like the Tekele moving, there will be a hundred pirogues
hanging off it at any one time, their paddlers using it to save the
effort of paddling a few kilometres. But it means a boat like
the Tekele would stop at every town, every village. There will be
problems with fuel and navigation. A journey on a boat like the
Tekele takes a long, long time.'

I ordered another Primus, discarding the old bottle and with it
the hope of travelling with the Tekele.

'Okay, so what are my options for going downriver?'

Oggi thought for several minutes.

'We can try to find a way to get you to Bumba. It is the first large
town downstream, three hundred and fifty kilometres away from
Kisangani. If you went by pirogue it would take at least a week,
but maybe we could try to hire a motorised pirogue from the local
priests. I know they have one, but they would charge eight
hundred to one thousand dollars for the fuel alone. But the
problem would remain that when we get to Bumba, we would
have to wait there for another boat like the Tekele.'

I could feel my Congo despondency beginning to resurface.
And then Oggi made a final suggestion.

`Or you could ask the UN. Every few months I see one of their
barges and pushers arriving here. Maybe you would be lucky with
them.'

Like all other UN buildings I had visited in the Congo, there
was something unearthly about the headquarters in Kisangani.
The tidiness, the cleanliness, the flicker of computer screens all
belonged to a world very far removed from planet Congo. I was
welcomed by Ann Barnes, a tall, elegant British woman who
worked as senior administrator. She was too charming to say
anything about my malodorous, grubby appearance and seemed
genuinely interested as I explained that I was trying to follow
Stanley's original route and that passage downriver was the key.
Like every other foreigner I met in Kisangani, she expressed
astonishment that I had arrived here overland rather than via the
city's airport. She could not have been more helpful, promising to
make a formal request through the UN channels, but also pointing
out something I was familiar with already: that the organisation's
bureaucracy worked very, very slowly.

So began weeks of waiting in Kisangani. Like a supplicant on a
daily ritual, I would begin each morning plodding between
Kisangani's port and the UN office, begging for news of a boat
heading downstream. My overland ordeal reaching Kisangani
had given me a strange feeling of superiority. It was a much
stronger version of that felt by the rucksack-carrying overlander,
recently arrived at a remote location, over another traveller who
arrives at the same spot by air. I felt something similar, only
much, much more powerful - a sort of cockiness, almost an
aloofness. Without regular river traffic or road connections,
Kisangani had been effectively cut off for years. This had made it
shrink in on itself, most of its people never venturing far beyond
the city confines. Except for a web of dangerous footpaths used by a few tough, foolhardy bicycle-porters, it had no overland
connections with the outside world. And the foreigners who
come here did so by aircraft.

Just a few months before my arrival, people had died on
Kisangani's streets during rioting sparked by the Bukavu incident. Congolese people were venting their anger at the killings
committed there by Rwandan-backed rebels. The Congolese
government might be inept at running the country, but it is
adept at dodging blame, so it used the government-controlled
media to direct the people's rage against the United Nations,
blaming foreign outsiders for failing to protect Bukavu. Popular
anger against the UN spread across the country, but nowhere
was the anger more intense than in Kisangani, where UN
buildings were torched and property looted. The peacekeepers
fled and an unknown number of local Congolese died in rioting
as the mob's anger was turned against all things foreign. Aid
groups had their offices and warehouses ransacked and what
passes for the Congolese authorities did nothing to stop it.
Indeed, there was plenty of evidence of the local soldiers and
police taking part.

The violence was simply the latest in a long series of spasms
that had wrecked Kisangani over the last fifty years. Squabbles
between occupying soldiers from Uganda and Rwanda had
developed into all-out battles on the streets of Kisangani on
several occasions between 1999 and 2002. The troops had come
here as part of their respective homeland's pillaging of the
Congo's resources. Witnesses described the river nearby running
red with blood when bodies scraped off the roads were tipped
into the water. On another occasion, Rwandan-backed rebels
slaughtered dozens of Congolese in the city after a series of
protests at Rwandan occupation.