Blood River (31 page)

The diamond dealerships were easy to spot. They were the only freshly painted buildings in town. The facades were decorated
with brightly painted garish images designed to tempt anyone
with a diamond to sell. My favourite had a two-metre-high
cartoon image depicting a man, dirty and sad, carrying an angular
diamond in his hand, followed by the same man, clean and with
a sparkling smile, running along with a sack in his hand marked
with a dollar sign. I stole glances inside these establishments, but
was too scared to enter. They invariably had a phalanx of
dangerous-looking Congolese men slouching on chairs in the
shade out front, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses. A handful
of Lebanese traders braved the gangster's life of Kisangani
diamond trading, buying up roughs before smuggling them out of
the airport north to Sudan or east to Uganda, and onward to be
resold, cut and sold again, an industry dependent on a web of
bribes, tips and pay-offs here in Kisangani.

There was only one city-centre restaurant, a drab, modestlooking place, which people came to more for its Primus than its
food. It was run by Sridar, a deferential Indian in his late twenties
who swayed his head like a bobbin when he spoke. He was a relic
from a once-huge Indian-subcontinent community that first
arrived by boat at port cities such as Mombasa and Dar es Salaam
before percolating right across the continent. During the colonial
era they filled a lower-middle-class stratum deemed too menial for
the whites and too sophisticated for the blacks. They were the
shopkeepers, the foremen, the general traders of colonial Africa
and, when independence came, they were often persecuted by
Africa's new native leaders, resentful of their once-superior status.
The hero of Naipaul's A Bend in the River is one such trader, who
drives from the coastal home where his family have lived long
enough to regard themselves as African, all the way to the city on
a great river, deep in the rainforest. Sridar made me think of this
character and his struggle for identity as darker forces rip the city
apart, destroying his sense of connection with Africa.

'Welcome, welcome, you are most welcome,' Sridar said when I first met him. `I have just opened this restaurant and we have big
plans. I work for my uncle, who owns a general trading shop. But
I told him we could make money from a restaurant as well.'

`Are you not worried about what happened here to your
predecessors, shopkeepers and traders over the past few
decades?' I asked.

`I know nothing of them. I have just got here. I am sure if we
work hard we will make good business.'

Sridar did not have to look far for his first lesson in the perverse
character of commerce in the Congo. Near his place I visited a few
general stores, crammed with Chinese-made mattresses, flip-flops
and imported tinned food. Everything was hugely expensive
because, without any meaningful flow of river traffic or passable
roads, it all had to be flown in. And the transport costs were then
inflated by the need to pay off customs officials, immigration
officers and the like. The crazy thing was that the shops that
actually contained anything, the general stores, were deliberately
tatty and unpainted, an inversion of the Western commercial
model that uses bright lights and adverts to draw customers in.

In Kisangani, the last thing a shop owner wants to do is
advertise that he has stock. This would only attract the looters
and robbers. A general store has a lot to lose if it is raided,
whereas a diamond trader, who would never be so foolish as to
leave gems in his shop, brightly advertises his business. If his
shop is looted, all the robbers would find are a few tatty chairs or
pieces of furniture.

There was one other thriving business, a shop belonging to a
mobile-phone company. Like many other cities in Africa,
Kisangani had benefited from the communications revolution. No
longer do African regimes have to spend vast sums maintaining
land lines and telephone exchanges, exposed to the perils of
looting or climate damage. A few mobile-phone beacons,
powered by solar batteries, cost a fraction of the old, fixed system.
And the cash earned by mobile-phone systems is much easier to control. Gone are the days of relying on a failing mail system to
send bills to users of landline systems to chase up payment for
calls already made. Top-up cards have to be paid for in advance.
Mobile-phone networks are among the most cash-rich and fastgrowing businesses in today's Africa. It is no wonder that the
sons, nieces and confidants of Africa's dictators vie for ownership
of mobile-phone companies.

In Kisangani, I learned the double-edged character of instant
communication, the way mobile phones can make you feel both
in touch and isolated at the same time. I would go into the phone
shop in the city centre, closing the door behind me, and pause
under the downwash of air-conditioning, before paying for my
next top-up card. I could then speak to Jane back home and hear
about a world I had been detached from for weeks. During my
journey up to that point there had been occasions when I had felt
alone, but I had never had time to dwell on them because of much
more dominant feelings of anxiety, fear or exhaustion. In
Kisangani I had plenty of time to myself, and being able to speak
to Jane so easily served to magnify my loneliness. The presence of
a phone in my pocket, on which I could speak to her at any time,
left me feeling more powerless and alone than if I had no means
of communication. To hear about her normal day, her frustrations
with the Johannesburg traffic, how our dogs had played up on
their walk in the park or any other mundane detail of home was
pure agony.

Jane could tell something was up. She tried desperately to keep
my spirits up, enthusing about my achievement in reaching
Kisangani along Stanley's route and encouraging me to wait just
a little longer to see if some sort of river boat might appear. But
the Congo was such an abnormal place that I found it distressing
to hear from her. I was in a world where Jane and our lovely
shared life simply did not belong. I missed normality so much
that it was painful and, as I spent long periods in my priest's cell
staring at her photograph, for the first time on my journey I started to seriously consider giving up. Unlike the remote places I had
been passing through, Kisangani was connected to the rest of
Africa through its airport. As the days of waiting passed, it
became more and more difficult to bear the knowledge that in just
a few hours I could escape this Congolese chaos and rejoin the
world of that photograph.

The nadir to my despondency came on one of my morning walks
along the bank of the Congo River. I had been to check on the
boats at the port, but the Tekele had not moved and there was still
no certain news of when she might sail. Making my way up to the
UN headquarters to see if there was any word about one of their
barges heading downriver, I noticed the view over the river
looked very different. It took a few seconds to work out what was
different but slowly it became clear. An enormous boat had
moored, a tanker so large it changed the entire shape and
topography of the bank as if a new section of developed land had
miraculously appeared next to the river bank overnight. Where
there had been mud and water, there was now angular metal and
broad, open decks, all painted blue in the livery of Cohydro, a
Congolese petrol company, and the name Mbenga was printed
clearly on the wheelhouse.

The sight alone made my heart race. This boat was larger and
more riverworthy than anything I had seen in ten days. It had
arrived unannounced and I had no idea when it might leave, but
for the first time in days I felt a surge of optimism.

Then began the most wretched twenty-four hours. I boarded via
a gangplank and a crew member pointed me in the direction of
the engine room to find the skipper. I found him a touch officious
- he refused to give me his name - but I was willing to overlook
this when he said he would be leaving for Kinshasa the following
morning. First I asked to be allowed to sail with him, then I
pleaded and finally I begged. It was humiliating but, worse still,
it did not work.

`I do not have the authority to let you travel on this boat. You
must speak to the Person Responsible for Cohydro here in
Kisangani,' the captain said, in a most irritatingly officious voice.

I ran back up the river bank and went in search of the offices of
Cohydro. Cars are a rarity in Kisangani, affordable only by foreign
aid groups and the occasional diamond trader, so I jumped on the
back of a toleka, one of the bicycle taxis that swarm the streets.
They are chunky, Chinese-made bikes, with a padded seat carried
on a frame welded above the back wheel. In Swahili, toleka
means `let's go', so shouting 'toleka, toleka', I urged my pedaller
to find the Cohydro offices.

News of the arrival of the Mbenga had already reached the
Kisangani headquarters of Cohydro. It consisted of an old petrolstation forecourt and a nearby room. By the time I got there, a
crowd of several hundred people had gathered at the petrol
station carrying old plastic bottles and there were even a few
sinister-looking cars in line, their windows too tinted to see who
was inside. The boat's arrival indicated a rare delivery of petrol in
Kisangani and people with motorbikes, generators and vehicles
were anxious for fuel.

As I paid my toleka man, there was a fracas in the crowd. It
happened in a flash, but I had a clear view of a woman standing
in the queue squawking as she looked in amazement at her
handbag on her hip, inside which was the hand of a street-boy,
no older than ten. Immediately he tried to run. The woman
squawked louder still. The crowd surged. A leg appeared and
tripped the pickpocket. And then the crowd surged again,
swallowing him up, and I could hear blows landing on the boy
and a scream that started loud and clear, but then became faint
and gurgling. Then the mob parted and there was the boy, with
his arms twisted behind his back and the foot of a man, a petrol
attendant in Cohydro cap and uniform, stamped firmly on his
neck. The boy's mouth was bleeding and the side of his face was
squashed flat on the uneven concrete of the forecourt. It was a scene I had witnessed numerous times during my stint covering
Africa. Quick and brutal, African mob justice is a terrifying
thing.

I was too preoccupied by my own emergency to worry about
the boy's plight. The opportunity I had been waiting for was
within reach, so I turned my back on the boy and went in search
of the Person Responsible for the company. Eventually I found
him, Mr Mosinde, and pleaded to be allowed to travel downriver
on his company's boat. He was not interested. He referred me to
his boss in Kinshasa, and though I was able to get through on my
mobile phone, he referred me, in turn, to his superior, and then
he to his, and so on.

It was heartbreaking. To know there was a decent boat about to
leave for Kinshasa was just too tantalising. All afternoon I fretted
over phone call after phone call, desperate to find the person with
the right authority. But a slow, growing ache in my guts told me I
was wasting my time. Still, I persisted, trying to ignore the gutache and wasting top-up cards, trying in turn to sound polite,
obsequious, deferential. By evening the people I had been calling
in Kinshasa had turned off their phones. I had failed.

It was masochistic, but I made sure I was there on the river bank
the following morning when the Mbenga unmoored, swung into
the current and set sail downstream. I was left staring sadly at a
bare, muddy river bank, feeling lower than ever.

And so my wait continued. I passed my time in Kisangani trying
to track down people who could tell me about its past, people like
Clement Mangubu, a local historian and academic. I was trying to
find out if Kisangani had any sort of institutional memory. The
history of the city is rich and turbulent, but I wanted to see how
well it was remembered by local Congolese. Clement worked at
Kisangani's university, but I did not find him there. The buildings
had been abandoned so long ago that three dormitory blocks,
dating from the early Mobutu era, had mature trees growing from their roof gutters. When I eventually found Clement, he told me
he had published a book on the history of Kisangani. Perfect, I
thought. Here is the person to make sense of all the chaos.

`There can be few cities in the world with a history more
bloody than Kisangani,' he said portentously, when we first met
at the mission house. `From the time of the Arab slavers, through
the wars between the Belgians and the Arabs, the colonial era and
to everything that has happened since independence, the one
common theme is blood.'

He explained the city's early history well, how the land became
known as Kisangani once the Arab slavers arrived here in the
years after Stanley's expedition. The name means 'on the island'
in Swahili. Clement explained how the city is surrounded on
three sides by water: the Congo River to the west, and the Tshopo,
a tributary of the main river, to the north and east. In effect, he
said, Kisangani was really a synonym for Mesopotamia, the land
between two rivers.

When Stanley came back here in the 1880s, commissioned by
Leopold to set up the Congo Free State, he brought with him a
Scotsman, Adrian Binnie, to build the first settlement on the land
next to the bottom of the Stanley Falls. Binnie must have been
extraordinarily tough to accept such a task, the real-life precursor
for Conrad's fictional spectre, Mr Kurtz. Various wars followed:
fights between the Wagenia and rival tribes connected with the
advancing Europeans, and then skirmishes between the Arab
slavers and Belgian colonial officers, two of whom drowned in
the Congo River. The fighting got so bad that ten years after first
crossing the Congo, Stanley sailed all the way to Zanzibar for a
peace conference in 1887 with Tippu-Tip. The pair had met
during Stanley's foot march from Lake Tanganyika to the upper
Congo River and Tippu-Tip had since established himself as
leader of all Arab slavers in eastern Congo. More than a century
later in the summer of 2000, the UN Security Council met in not
dissimilar circumstances, issuing a resolution specifically designed to end the bloodshed in Kisangani. It is a rare and dark
honour for a single city to be the focus of its own UN Security
Council Resolution.