Blood River (33 page)

Goliath Tigerfish from the Congo River as recorded, above, by H.M.
Stanley in 1878 and, below, by the author in 2004

I stood on the deck of the river boat watching the gap widen
between me and the crumbling Kisangani quayside. There was a
gaggle of Congolese stevedores sitting in the shade of an idle
crane, but next to them I could make out a solitary figure lift up
his sunhat with studied extravagance, bow and wave me bon
voyage. It was Robert. While he helped with my final, rushed
preparations, buying bags of rice and boiling up a jerrycan of
clean water, I noticed he seemed a little sad, jealous even.

`We've never had a civilian person travel downriver before,' he
confided forlornly. 'I had always thought I would be the first to
leave here by boat. But somehow I never found the time.'

Time is something you need a lot of to travel the Congo River. I
was embarking on a 1,000-kilometre journey from Kisangani to
Mbandaka and I had been warned it would take at least a week
and potentially much longer if we ran out of fuel, hit a sand bank
or became snarled on any of the river's other hazards. And even
if I made it to Mbandaka, I would still have another 700 kilometres or so of river descent before reaching Kinshasa.

I stood watching Robert's figure get smaller and smaller as the
boat made its way over to the deep-water channel on the far side
of the river from the UN dock. We had started the journey
pointing upriver towards the lowest cataracts of the Stanley Falls.
I was straining to spot their broken white water in the distance
when our skipper spun the wheel, pointed the bow downstream
and ramped up the throttle. For a second I felt a bit unsteady as
the boat's entire superstructure began to vibrate, but gaining my
river legs I shifted position so that I could watch the Kisangani
waterfront for the last time.

There were the cranes that had so impressed me when I first reached the city, but which I had later discovered to be useless,
broken beyond repair. And there was the cathedral, where Father
Leon had led the memorial service in 1964 for his murdered
missionary colleagues, whose bodies were brought by barge
across this same reach of water to the stone steps that I could see
leading down the river bank to the water's edge in front of the
cathedral. And there were the squalid ruins of the 'L'Hotel
Pourquoi Pas?' with the balcony where Katharine Hepburn once
took the evening air and, just to the left, the even more squalid
collection of leaking, disease-ridden, overcrowded hulks of the
port.

The city where I had been trapped for two frustrating weeks
slipped steadily by until, without fanfare, it vanished. All that
was left was a thin line of trees below an arch of empty sky. No
buildings, no people, no smoke, nothing to suggest I was close to
one of the great cities of Africa, home to one million-plus souls.
Its disappearance was so immediate, so complete that I stood
disbelieving for a few minutes, rocking gently with the motion of
the deck. Perhaps I had dreamed it all. Perhaps the hollowed-out
city had been nothing but a ghostly mirage all along.

Like the vessels that I had seen in Kisangani's port, the boat I was
travelling on was, strictly speaking, two boats. The front was a
massive barge, red with rust and slightly scraped and battered at
each end. It was thirty-eight metres long, but had a draught of
only thirty centimetres, crucial for the shallow water of the upper
Congo River during the dry season, when sand banks loom
dangerously close to the surface. The only permanent structure
on its entire length was a grey cubicle that looked and smelled
like a public lavatory. It protected a gangway down into the
barge's storage compartments.

To the barge's stern was attached the second boat, the pusher,
named Nganing. It was dwarfed by the hulking barge and had
only three modest decks: an oily, smelly engine deck with two large, rattling diesel motors, a cabin deck with just one cabin, and
on top a one-room wheelhouse where the helmsman sat. It had no
radar equipment, no radio and only the most rudimentary control
panel. There was a tiller wheel, an on/off switch and a throttle.
The helmsman even had to bring his own high wooden chair to
sit on. Next to the hulking barge, the Nganing looked tiny.

Both the barge and the pusher were genuine Congolese river
craft, normally based in Kinshasa and leased by the United
Nations as part of a strategy by MONUC to restore confidence in
river travel. The Congo River and its many huge tributaries are as
potentially useful today as they were when Stanley first charted
them. He reported to Leopold the existence of a massive network
of navigable waterways, waiting to pump modern commerce and
economic development across a swathe of equatorial Africa larger
than the entire subcontinent of India. The Congo River system is
potentially one of the most valuable natural assets in all of Africa,
but in recent years it has been choked to a standstill by war and
mismanagement.

Since the 1990s, boats that once plied thousands and
thousands of kilometres of navigable river have idled in the docks
of Kinshasa as the Congolese authorities effectively ceded control
of the river. During the Belgian colonial era various national
institutions were established to open up the river network, but
they had all been allowed to collapse. Ferries run by the national
transport company, ONATRA, stopped running as the staff went
unpaid and the poorly maintained boats broke down. The
national navigation company, RVF, stopped marking and
dredging a safe, navigable channel on the waterway, making
passage hazardous. But the demand for river travel did not
diminish. The collapse of the Congo's road system meant that the
river was the only way to travel for millions of Congolese. So
when the occasional boat did venture upstream, it would be
mobbed by people. Overloaded boats would capsize or become
trapped for months on sand banks. If passengers did not drown, they faced other hazards. Insanitary conditions on overcrowded
hulks, like the barges I boarded at Kisangani's port, often proved
fatal. Food poisoning and dysentery would break out on the slow,
sweaty river passage and it was not uncommon for scores to die
from disease on a single journey, their bodies tipped into the river
as the boats crawled between towns where public hospitals had
long since closed.

The wars of the late 1990s only made things worse. Various
factions hostile to the Kinshasa regime began to attack any boat
that ventured upstream, so by 2000 the river was effectively
closed, plunging the Congo River basin back to the same state
described by Conrad in the nineteenth century, `the blankest of
blank spaces on the earth's figured surface'.

After the 2002 peace treaty, the Congolese authorities declared
the river open again, but there were few boat owners brave
enough to risk sending their vessels hundreds and hundreds of
kilometres upstream on journeys where it was impossible to
guarantee fuel or security. The UN stepped in to try to
reinvigorate the river. MONUC had flown in enough people and
equipment to ensure fuel supplies in places even as remote as
Kisangani, so it leased ten sets of pushers and barges and sent
them chugging up the waterways of the Congo River basin, flying
the UN flag and trying to give the impression that all was normal
and safe. Each boat had a local Congolese crew, a small
deployment of UN troops for protection and a MONUC naval
officer in overall command.

To restore confidence was the mission. As my journey
unfolded I saw the humbling scale of the Congo River and how a
fleet of ten boats was much too modest to restore confidence
across a river system largely in the same primitive state Stanley
found when he paddled downstream for the first time in 1877.

As with so many projects on UN missions, money was no
object. The tiny boat I was on had been leased for $35,000 a
month, an obscene sum for such a basic vessel. The local crew - a skipper and six deckhands, who all had experience of Congo
river boats from the days before the war - were meant to be under
the command of the senior MONUC officer onboard, a lieutenant
commander from the Malaysian navy, Mohammed Yusoff Sazali,
who liked to be known as Ali. But it soon became apparent who
was really in charge. Ali struggled to communicate with the
Congolese crew. He spoke only a few words of French and I
watched as the Congolese skipper, Captain Jean Paul Mbuta
Monshengo, an untrustworthy-looking man with a lazy right eye,
carefully chose which of the words he would understand.

Our departure from Kisangani had been delayed by one day in
mysterious circumstances. Captain Monshengo had declared
there was a problem with one of the diesel generators on board,
but he would task his best engineer to sort it out as soon as
possible. After a delay of exactly twenty-four hours, without the
need for any spare parts or, indeed, any apparent effort by the
engineer, the problem was rectified and we left, a day behind the
MONUC schedule.

As I got to know Ali, he took me into his confidence and
explained what had really happened.

`We were due to sail on a Tuesday from Kisangani. We have
been here for several months now, the only UN boat so far
upriver, so the crew had plenty of time to get everything in order.
But the problem was that Monday was the monthly payday and
the Congolese crew had gone into the city to spend. They all have
second wives and girlfriends here, parallel homes from their
other homes downriver, so they had personal business to attend
to. They were too busy to leave as scheduled, but once they had
sorted out their mamas here in Kisangani, everything was okay
and we could leave.

'I have been here long enough to know what the skipper was up
to. And he knows I know what he is up to. But there is nothing I
can really do about it. I carry no weapon and all I have is the
authority of the UN mission, which does not count for very much when you are hundreds of kilometres away from a friendly face,
far up the Congo River.'

He explained some of the other scams pulled by the Congolese
crews on the UN boats. He said some skippers deliberately
pretend there is an engine problem and reduce the speed of the
boat. But this is done simply to lower the rate of fuel consumption, leaving a surplus at the end of the trip that the skipper then
siphons off to sell. And the Congolese crew routinely use the UN
boats to smuggle things up and down the river, goods from
Kinshasa to be sold in Kisangani. Many suspect diamonds from
Kisangani are smuggled back downriver to avoid having to pay
bribes at the airport.

Ali was too philosophical to be angered by all this. His mission
was to fly the UN flag up and down the Congo River. For months
at a time his boat, which he preferred to call 'UN Pusher Number
Ten' rather than the Nganing, would be deployed upriver, steaming to ports like Kisangani and then waiting there for weeks in
between patrols. A day's delay here or there was not worth
fighting over.

I have seen numerous UN missions around the world, in Bosnia,
Sierra Leone, Liberia and all over the Middle East. Each was
castigated by the international media and commentators for being
inefficient, bureaucratic and ineffective, but such criticism
always misses the point. Yes, the missions are sloppy and poorly
focused, but that is precisely because the international community's attitude to complicated problems like the collapsing
Yugoslavia, or rampaging west African rebels, is sloppy and
poorly focused. When the United Nations Security Council
addresses these international problems, the question it ends up
answering is not `What is the right thing to do?' but `What is the
least we can do?' UN missions around the world evolve at the
pace of the lowest common denominator between the nations of
the world, and that common denominator is pretty low when nations with interests as divergent as China and America both
hold prominent positions in the UN Security Council.

Today's UN mission in the Congo developed along exactly
these lines. When the most recent war started in 1998, aid groups
and the international media reported the massive loss of life,
demanding a response. The UN was understandably wary about
sending troops back to the Congo. In 1960 UN peacekeeping cut
its teeth in the Congo, trying to stop the chaotic aftermath of
Belgium granting its colony independence. It was to be a grim
experience for the international body, which had only been
founded fifteen years earlier at the close of the Second World
War. The UN's first Congo peacekeeping mission from 1960 to
1964 was a disaster, as peacekeepers ended up fighting pitched
battles with white mercenaries and Congolese rebels backed by
Belgium. The UN lost more peacekeepers in combat there than on
any other peacekeeping mission, before or since. That early
mission cost the life of the UN Secretary General, Dag
Hammarskjold, killed in a plane crash as he shuttled between
rival Congolese factions in 1961.