Blood River (3 page)

At the Belgian Club I drank Simba beer and ate chips doused
with mayonnaise, in the Belgian style, with one of the few
Europeans bold enough to risk involvement in Lubumbashi's
cobalt boom. Belgium's links remain closer with Katanga than
with any other province of their old colony and a photograph of
the Belgian royal family looked down on us from the wall as I
listened to his mind-boggling stories about local business
anarchy. On numerous occasions trucks had been loaded in
Lubumbashi with sacks of cobalt ore worth $50,000, but when they arrived in South Africa the sacks were found to contain
nothing but worthless soil.

'Between here and South Africa you don't just have thousands
of kilometres of tarmac road,' he said. `You have three international borders, from the Congo into Zambia, from Zambia into
Zimbabwe and from Zimbabwe into South Africa. At each one,
you have officials demanding handouts. Each one of them can be
bribed by a rival cobalt shipper to cause you delays and other
problems. And the drivers can be bought off by rivals, so when
they stop to sleep at night, God knows what happens to the bags
of ore on the back. Some of the buyers who come here to
Lubumbashi decide it's cheaper just to set themselves up on the
main road south through Zambia, say, and wait there with a gang
of gunmen armed with AK-47s to help themselves to whatever
comes down the road. The truck drivers are so badly paid that
they are not going to risk their lives to protect the load. If you
offered them a hundred-dollar bill, most drivers would pull over
and let you pinch some or all of what's on the back.'

There was nothing funny about some of his other stories. The
cobalt mining was, for the large part, unlicensed and chaotic, as
artisanal miners - men with shovels - dug deeper and deeper pits
to get at the grey, cobalt-rich rock. The stories of miners being
killed by landfalls were so routine the authorities did not bother
responding to them. And an attempt to restart one of the old
processing plants near Lubumbashi had raised other health
hazards. The processing uses local ores known to be rich in
uranium. Without any meaningful local environmental standards,
there were concerns that radioactive isotopes of uranium were
being released by the process into the atmosphere as smoke
particles.

What made it so galling to me, the outsider, was that of the large
sums paid by the various mining companies, brokers and traders,
only a tiny fraction ever reached the local economy. The vast bulk
was lost in bribes demanded by corrupt officials at all levels. Lubumbashi's cobalt bonanza brought home to me how money
alone will not solve Africa's problems. Until the Congo's
economy is underpinned by the rule of law and transparency, it
will remain stagnant, chaotic and unproductive.

Those days in Lubumbashi spent waiting for the UN shuttle flight
northwards to Kalemie felt rather surreal. I rarely ventured from
the sanctuary of the compound, which lay behind a high
perimeter wall in a relatively smart area of Lubumbashi, near the
governor's residence. The view I got from there was entirely
skewed. For those, like Clive, with good enough connections, it
was possible to live comfortably in the Congo's second city. It was
hugely expensive, as everything - from cartons of milk to the
satellite television dish - had to be imported, mostly by plane
from South Africa. When I got there a large box of umbrellas had
just arrived in anticipation of the next rainy season. But it was
clear the potential profits from cobalt were so enormous that as
long as the mine kept producing and the trucks managed to get
past the corrupt customs officials into Zambia, then the whole
operation was cost-effective.

The problem with Lubumbashi's cobalt boom was that it was
too inefficient to be of genuine economic benefit to the million or
so Katangans living in the city. A mining expert I met explained
one of the main inefficiencies.

`The cobalt-rich rock is simply bagged and driven out of the
country,' he explained. 'That way ensures the smallest amount of
benefit to the local economy - just the few dollars a day paid to
each miner. If the local authorities were interested in helping the
local economy, then they would have a processing plant here in
Lubumbashi that converts the cobalt-rich rock into concentrated
cobalt salts. It is not a complex procedure, but it multiplies the
value of the cobalt product by fifty times, maybe a hundred times.
It is much more efficient to transport the concentrate than the
untreated rock and the profit margin is much greater. Under the system we have now, some plant in South Africa or China makes
the profit on the treatment of the rock, a profit that is lost to the
Congo.

`But the reality is this. The authorities in the Congo are not
interested in how cobalt mining benefits the local economy. They
are only interested in what they can take in bribes. And it is easier
to count sacks of rock at the border and work out how many
dollars you can cream off per bag. Until that fundamental attitude
changes, then the cobalt boom driven by China will not benefit
more than a few members of the Congo elite.'

There was one entirely personal and self-indulgent thing I needed
to do while I was in Lubumbashi. I wanted to go to the town's
railway station and see where my mother had caught the train
that took her across the Congo in 1958.

Simon, a factotum from the mine office, agreed to take me there
on a Sunday morning when, I gambled, there would be fewer
police and gendarmerie in the town centre demanding to see my
papers. As we drove into town, I was struck by Lubumbashi's
resemblance to other southern African cities. In my mind the
Congo belonged to the continent's sweaty, tropical centre, but
Lubumbashi's topography and climate were much closer to those
of Johannesburg or Harare. The air was dry and the land was
covered not by dense rainforest, but open scrub. It was more highveld plateau than steamy equatorial river basin. The streets were
even lined with the same fast-growing jacaranda trees that I
recognised from the garden at my Johannesburg home, although
Lubumbashi's position closer to the Equator meant they were
already putting on their bright-purple display of springtime
blossom two months earlier than those in chillier South Africa.

We passed the Cathedral of St Paul and St Peter, a large redbrick structure in the centre of Lubumbashi, built in 1919, and I
could see it was full of worshippers. Some of the older, wider
boulevards were paved with hexagonal cobbles made from some sort of dark, possibly volcanic, rock. The work that went into
laying these roads must have been enormous, but they were in
much better condition than the potholed modern roads.

Apart from being tatty, Lubumbashi's town centre is largely
unchanged since the Belgian colonial period. There is a 1950s
post office fronting a main square from which various roads
radiate between some fine Art Deco buildings. There are a few
modest general stores selling imported goods, although fresh
bread is available from a Greek-owned patisserie. We walked the
last few hundred metres to the railway station. I had heard that a
two-year work programme by foreign aid groups had recently
enabled the station to reopen for the first time since the war,
connecting Lubumbashi with Kindu, a port on the upper Congo,
and I wanted to see if this was really true.

Simon and I approached a man in dark glasses standing guard
at the gate that led onto the platform.

'Please can you tell me about the train to Kindu.'

`Who are you? What is your business here at the station? This
is a military installation, who gave you permission to come here?'

The man was not just drunk, he was aggressively drunk. I
recoiled and let Simon deal with him. Simon edged forward, took
the guard's hand in his hand and started speaking in Swahili, his
voice dropping almost to a whisper. I made to look away as Simon
slipped the guard a folded-up bank note. The gate opened.

I walked out onto an open platform. Unlike British railways
where the platform stands much higher than the track level, this
station was of a more continental European design, the tracks only
a few centimetres below the platform. I looked around and saw a
blackboard with a message chalked across it referring to the train
to Kindu. It said that it leaves every first of the month. Simon
assured me this was nonsense as no train had left in the first two
weeks of August. But the thing that was oddest about Lubumbashi
station was the complete lack of trains. There was no rolling stock,
no carriages, nothing. The whole place was silent and empty.

The longer I spent in Lubumbashi, the more nervous and sick I
felt. The powerful anti-malaria tablets I was taking caused the
nausea, but the nervousness came from the growing sense that my
whole trip now depended on the next few days. I knew my
attempt to cross the Congo would have to begin in Kalemie, but I
also knew it might end there. During my months of research at
home in Johannesburg, I had trawled the small number of aid
workers and missionaries based in the town, but none of them
had ever heard of an outsider travelling overland from Kalemie
deeper into the Congo.

My most positive lead had come from Michel Bonnardeaux, a
civilian UN employee from Canada who had been based in
Kalemie, on and off, for more than two years. When he arrived,
the war was raging in the eastern Congo and Kalemie was
filled with refugees, but since the 2002 peace treaty Michel had
seen a small but steady improvement in the security situation.
While most of my e-correspondents had dismissed my plan to
follow Stanley's route as being either impossible or insane,
Michel was one of the few who did not reject it out of hand. It
might have been his contagious enthusiasm for local Congolese
history or just his upbeat positive nature, but like a drowning man
to a piece of flotsam, I latched firmly onto Michel and his advice.

According to Michel, the 500-kilometre route overland from
Kalemie to the upper Congo passed through the land belonging to
the Banga-Banga tribe. From the many Banga-Banga refugees
living in Kalemie, he knew the security situation in the area had
improved enough to allow a trickle of people to arrive in town by
foot. Many came pushing old bicycles laden with produce, which
was then traded at the port for salt, soap and other commodities.
The distances were immense and the tracks tiny, but if you could
get a bicycle along them, Michel reckoned, you could also get a
small motorbike along them.

The security situation remained the great unknown. The peace treaty had technically ended the war, but gangs of armed militia
still roamed the forest and savannah west of Kalemie. Many of the
bicycle bearers arrived in town with stories of atrocities in the
anarchic region between Lake Tanganyika and the upper Congo.
Cannibalism was common, and rape was a ghastly routine for
villagers populating this vast swathe of territory.

The one thing I had going for me was the scale of the place.
After Kalemie, the next UN base was 700 kilometres away on the
upper Congo River, at the town of Kindu. The distances were so
enormous that if I could move quickly by motorbike, and not
advertise my plans in advance to anyone minded to arrange an
ambush, I gambled that I could get through safely. But whether I
would manage to find a lift on a motorbike, let alone someone
prepared to act as guide and interpreter, were great unknowns.
Language would definitely be a problem, as my French would
only be of use in the Congo's larger settlements, where I could be
sure to find village elders with the remnants of a school
education. In the rural areas I would need someone who spoke
Swahili to ask for help and directions from villagers we met.
There were no reliable maps of the area I wanted to cross, so I
would have to rely on local directions.

Peacekeepers from MONUC would not be able to help because
they had a policy of only going to places that could be reached by
jeep - in the case of Kalemie, this meant that they operated within
a few kilometres of the town centre. The MONUC bases at
Kalemie and Kindu were linked only by air, so I turned my
attention to the few aid groups operating in the eastern Congo to
beg for help. The problem was not one of expense - I could afford
the few thousand dollars cost of a bike and wages for a guide. The
problem was more simple - finding anyone who was prepared to
travel overland through such hazardous terrain. One by one the
aid groups turned me down. They had, after all, their own
important work to do, and helping out an adventurous hack did
not fit readily into their schedules.

In the months leading tip to my trip I had finally made contact
with a group that offered me a glimmer of hope. Care
International had been developing its network of contacts around
Kindu and I heard that its country director, Brian Larson, had
personally organised a convoy of motorbikes that ventured 200
kilometres south of Kindu, to see how viable it was to move
supplies down jungle tracks to people who had received no
humanitarian aid for years. For me, this was precisely what I was
looking for: someone who was prepared to take a calculated risk
to open up areas viewed for a generation as impassable.