Blood River (34 page)

So MONUC, the new Congo mission of the late 1990s, evolved
slowly and cautiously. Its peacekeepers were deployed without
adequate weapons or a clear chain of command, frankly powerless to stop the killing. But this simply reflected the lack of
international willingness to genuinely do what was needed to end
the fighting. MONUC was created so that the outside world could
say something was being done about the Congo. The opprobrium
of commentators would be better focused on world leaders, who
use UN missions as scapegoats for their own lack of determination to deal with major international crises.

Ali told me a story that perfectly encapsulated the inefficiency
and helplessness of MONUC. He was deployed on `Pusher
Number Ten' in Kisangani at the time of the Bukavu incident in
June 2004 when mobs began to attack UN targets across Congo. He
was onboard the boat, tied up alongside the dock, when smoke started to rise above Kisangani from burning UN cars and he
heard on the local radio that UN personnel were being evacuated.

'The safest place for me and the boat was back out on the river.
The local crew were scared too because they did not even come
from Kisangani, so we unmoored and went back out onto the
river.' He was grinning as he told the story, although it did not
sound very amusing to me.

`We were busy for a few hours getting under way and moving a
safe distance downstream, but the worst thing was when I got the
satellite telex working and sent a message to our naval base in
Kinshasa. I sat there waiting for a response for a few minutes, and
then a few hours, and then a few days. Do you know what had
happened? The entire naval command centre at UN headquarters
had left because of the rioting and nobody had bothered to think
about me and my command up at the other end of the river.' He
was chortling quite loudly now.

'It's crazy. The ten pushers are the only major assets of the
naval command and no-one from the operations room thought
about them for a second!'

'So what did you do? How did you survive?' I had to wait a few
minutes for Ali to regain his composure.

'Well, I keep enough water and food on the boat to last for
weeks, so we went a safe distance downriver and tied up on a tree
and I went fishing. I like fishing. It's my favourite hobby.

`After a few weeks I noticed a message arrived on the telex. It
said something like "Where are you, Ali, we were worried."
Obviously things had calmed down in Kinshasa and the
operations room was back up and running, and someone had
thought to ask what happened to Pusher Ten. It's crazy to think I
could just have left Kisangani, evacuated with the other peacekeepers, and anything could have happened to this boat. But the
really crazy thing is that nobody would have cared.'

My time on `Pusher Number Ten' passed at its own strange pace. My diary tells me we sailed for seven days, but it felt as if I
travelled years back in time. After leaving Kisangani, we did not
stop at any other town until Mbandaka, 1,000 kilometres downstream, and in between I felt as though I saw an Africa unchanged
from that which Stanley saw.

Without any major towns all I saw was the endless forest, an
unbroken screen of green that was reeled slowly past me. It would
grow fat when we neared the water's edge and thin when our
course took us far into the midstream, but for 1,000 kilometres it
never quite broke. At first light the rising sun would colour in the
forest with a rich spectrum of greens from emerald to lime, pea to
peridot, before they steadily faded as the sun tracked upwards. By
midday, the overhead sun would wash out all but the most vivid
tints, before they were slowly restored as the sun dipped towards
the western horizon.

And there was the river. Conrad's uncoiling serpent grew fatter
and fatter each day that we descended. There are places where the
river swells to a width exceeding five kilometres. We were
constantly slaloming through eyots and islands, some of which
were enormous, running to twenty kilometres or more in length.
Every day we passed villages that had the same design Stanley
described. There would be a clutch of thatched huts built on
raised stilts to avoid the seasonal high water and, through the
smoke from cooking fires, I would see people moving around
wearing rags, while down on the river's edge a clutch of pirogues
hung in the current.

For the first few days our progress was slow and cautious, as
the Congolese skipper sat up in the wheelhouse barking at the
helmsman to cut the revs, nudging the boat forward, while one of
his crew stood right at the bow of the barge, more than forty
metres away from the skipper, using an old branch to probe for a
safe course through the sand banks. There was no sonar or depth
sounder, just a branch broken off a riverside tree to save us from
being marooned. The bowman had no radio or intercom, so our progress depended on wild gesticulations and the occasional
scream. And after some days, as the chocolate-coloured waters
deepened and the safe channel widened, the engine settled into
the high-end rattle of full power and the bowman put down his
stick and sat on a home-made wooden chair that hummed with
the vibration coursing through the boat's superstructure.

I entered a zone of mental torpor. Normally I am the sort of
person who needs to be doing something constantly. I am not a
napper. But on that river passage, there was nothing I could do to
influence our progress. We would reach our destination when we
reached our destination and not a moment sooner, so I took off my
wrist watch and let my days flow with the rhythm of the river.

At night the boat would stop. Night navigation was too
dangerous, the navigable channel too tricky to follow in the dark.
So just before sunset the skipper would look for a suitable section
of river bank, steep enough to ensure we would not become
beached. He would then gently kiss the bow of the barge up
against it. By the time the bowman had jumped onto the bank and
wrapped the large rusting anchor cable around a tree, the rest of
the boat would have swung around in the current and now be
hanging downstream. When the first Belgian-era steamboats
started regular journeys on the Congo River, they used to pull
over on the river bank just like this. Woodcutters would then be
sent off into the forest to cut fuel overnight for the following day's
steaming, while the white crew would struggle for sleep in the
still heat under bombardment from mosquitoes.

It was exactly the same for me. When the boat tied up on the
river bank each evening, the now motionless air would clot with
heat and moisture. Insects would swarm to any flicker of torchlight so I clung to darkness, teaching myself how to feel my way
around the boat, to the stern-plate to have a pee, to the store of
jerrycans for a drink of clean water. Ali let me sleep on the
carpeted floor of his cabin and I would huddle there in the dark,
cocooned in my gossamer tent of mosquito netting, nervously fidgeting so that my skin never came into contact with its sides.
Congo River mosquitoes are notorious. Conrad himself took six
months to recover from the fever he caught during his single
passage up and down the Congo River, and I knew the little
bleeders were more than capable of biting through netting if I was
foolish enough to let it come into contact with bare skin.

Ali was brought up in rural, tropical Malaysia and was clearly
tougher than me in dealing with disease-carrying insects. His
passion for fishing meant he would slip out of the cabin at night,
wrapped in a hooded cagoule from which only his face protruded, and take up position on the side of the pusher, crouched
over his fishing rod, constantly puffing on cigarettes to keep the
insects from his face. In our time together he did not catch a single
fish, but this did not deter him. Around midnight, as I thrashed in
shallow sleep, he would tiptoe back into the room, shed his coat
and, invariably, twang the web of strings I had set up to support
my mosquito net.

Nights were grim and I would lie awake waiting for the first
throaty cough of the diesel engines that marked dawn. The
skipper liked to get away at first light and by the time the eastern
sky was beginning to lighten, he would be back up in the
wheelhouse ready for a day's passage. Once I had extricated
myself from my straitjacket of sweat-sodden bedclothes and
netting, the whole cabin would be vibrating as the engines
powered the boat upstream to take the tension off the anchor line
so that it could be retrieved by the bowman. Then the boat would
pirouette and, once again, we would begin reeling in kilometre
after kilometre of the green screen.

This was one of my favourite times of day. I had brought plenty
of clean water for the trip and I would spend the first few hours
of each day up on the top deck drinking mug after mug of black
tea, enjoying the sensation of motion and the muggy waft of air
moving across my face. My normal mindset would have found
our progress infuriatingly slow. The boat rarely reached its top speed and even then it only managed 18 kph. But I had entered a
Zen state and every metre we moved was a metre closer to the end
of my ordeal.

I loved watching our wake. The mocha whirls of white water
whipped up by the propeller would rush out from under the
stern-plate, dancing and churning before growing steadily calmer
and calmer. Slowly the creamy lather would lose its fizz and
darken, merging into just another featureless reach of flat, brown
water. But the thing I loved most about the wake was that it meant
we were moving. A wake meant we were slightly closer to our
destination. I loved watching our wake.

Out of boredom I found another way to monitor our progress.
Up in the wheelhouse the skipper had a solitary navigational aid,
a thirty-year-old map book. Each page was mouldy to the touch
after years of exposure to the humid river air and the edges were
as tattered as week-old leaves in a rabbit hutch. Grubby pencil
messages, written and overwritten, had been scrawled on each
page, as well as a dotted line that marked the navigable channel.
I could see it had been rubbed out and redrawn numerous times.
The entire route from Kisangani to Kinshasa, the descent of 1,734
kilometres, was covered by this old map book, so every time one
of its sixty-four pages turned, I knew I was thirty kilometres or so
nearer my destination.

By ten o'clock the morning heat was too much for me to stay out
on deck. After crossing the Equator a short distance upstream
from Kisangani, the Congo River prescribes a slow but
momentous westward arc, eventually dipping back across the
Equator for a second time at Mbandaka before its final run to
Kinshasa, and thence the coast. The climate gets crueler and
crueler with the descent. As altitude is lost, with it goes any hope
of a cooling breeze. I found by late morning, even on a hazy day,
the steel panels on the decks would be throbbing with heat. They
were studded with rice-grain-sized bulges for grip, and through
the soles of my sandals I could feel each one radiating warmth.

I would surrender to the heat by late morning, seeking shelter
in the darkness of Ali's blacked-out cabin. Tired from the
uncomfortable night's sleep, I would nap in between attempts to
read some of the trashy novels Ali kept in his cabin.

I entered the same odd mental zone that I reach on overnight
flights, the state of consciousness when I am awake enough to
watch a film, but not awake enough to actually take anything in.
Plane movies have a special quality. Within a few hours of
watching them I never seem to be capable of remembering the
smallest detail about the film - the name, the plotline, the actors.
I felt exactly the same during my boat journey on the Congo. I
would turn the pages of the book and my eyes would work
through the paragraphs, but to this day I have no recall of what I
read.

To pass the time I would drag out my daily ablutions, taking
perverse pleasure in the slow process of boiling water for a
meticulous, slow shave, before taking one of the world's most
dangerous showers. The water for the shower came straight from
the river. Against the creamy ceramic of an old shower cubicle,
the water ran brown like tea. It reminded me of Scottish hill water
tainted with peat, only it was much warmer and the chemicals
that leached brown into the Congo River were more terrifying
than those found in Highland soil. Somewhere to our north ran
the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but
a name that is associated with a horrific medical condition. It was
near this river that a virus was first discovered that caused its
victims to die in a spectacularly horrible way, bleeding to death
from every orifice. Several of the world's other spectacularly
horrible haemorrhagic fevers were first discovered in the Congo.
I kept my mouth tight shut whenever I showered.

Ali was a gracious host. He had kitted himself out with a Congo
survival kit from the duty-free shop at Dubai airport while flying
from Malaysia to Africa. He had brought himself a microwave, a
kettle and a rice boiler. The diesel generators on the Nganing provided ample power, so he would provide me with meals of
noodles and litres of water, boiled clean.

By late afternoon when the outside temperature had begun to
dip, I would venture outside once more. Most days I would go all
the way to the bow of the barge, picking my way over the straining
hawsers and cables that connected the barge with the pusher, to
join the Congolese bowman. His name was Pascal Manday
Mbueta and he was entered on the crew list with the lowest
possible grade of deckhand. Pascal lived inside the barge. He had
no cabin and there was no furniture. He simply slept on the
rusting metal, squashed up against a bulkhead. I peered through
the hatch and down a ladder into his living space one day and
winced at the smell. With the motion of the boat I could see a
broken beer bottle floating down there in a malodorous swill of
bilge water and God knows what else.