Blood River (35 page)

Pascal had the rheumy eyes of a confirmed drunk. He had
brought a large stash of Primus beer from Kisangani but, if I got to
him when he was sober, he was good company. Mostly we would
sit in silence, listening to the hiss of the water working its way
down the side of the barge. Occasionally he would blurt out
something about how the river used to be.

`See there,' he would say, pointing at the river bank. `There
used to be a marker showing the safe channel. The authorities
kept the channel clear and kept the markers in the right place, but
all of that has gone. Now, you have to work by memory alone -
1,734 kilometres from memory alone. It's crazy.'

Our constant companion out on the river was water hyacinth.
For each of the thousand kilometres of my river descent, floating
alongside me in clumps that could be as small as a single tendril
or as large as a tennis-court-sized raft, I was accompanied by the
plant.

The story of the water hyacinth in the Congo is a wonderful
allegory for the white man in this country. The plant's intended
role was innocent enough. It was brought here as a garden orna ment decades ago. According to one story, a Belgian colonialist
who had seen it in its native South American environment
imported the first seedlings to prettify a waterway near his remote
colonial outpost. Another account blames an American Baptist
missionary who was attracted by its delicate pastel flowers.

There was nothing innocent about the alien's behaviour once it
took root in the Congo. It grew and grew and grew, spreading a
deadly mat across much of the Congo River basin, suffocating the
life out of ponds, lakes and slow-moving rivers and upsetting
entire eco-systems. It is now categorised as a dangerous alien
weed that should be eradicated before it clots even the main
arteries of the river system. And I saw with my own eyes the
extent of its grip on the Congo River. Downstream from Kisangani
I barely saw a single stretch of river free from floating knots of
water hyacinth.

As the sun neared the horizon, picking out the lilac blooms of
the water hyacinth on their mattresses of matted tuber and leaf,
the day's cycle would repeat itself. The skipper would look for a
suitably steep river bank, Pascal would grab hold of the anchor
line and I would return to the cabin and brace myself for another
night of battle with mosquitoes.

It was while lying awake at night during the river passage that I
thought about the world's changing attitude to the Congo. At the
start of the twentieth century, the Congo was the dominant
human-rights issue of the day. What Iraq, AIDS and globalisation
are for today's campaigners, the Congo was for Edwardian
human-rights groups. They were galvanised by the issue,
launching unprecedented campaigns, both in Europe and
America, to highlight the cruelty committed in the Congo Free
State in the name of Leopold, focusing on the rubber industry and
the violence unleashed by colonial agents to harvest it in the
Congo. Just as campaigners today use the term Blood Diamonds
to discredit gems produced in Africa's war zones, so their predecessors from a hundred years ago spoke of Red Rubber, publishing dramatic accounts of villagers being murdered or having
their hands cut off to terrify their neighbours into harvesting more
rubber. Leopold's representatives tried to suppress the flow of information emerging from the Congo and produced their own propaganda about the benign nature of the colony, but slowly and steadily,
as information leaked out of the Congo over the years, smuggled
out mainly by missionaries, they lost the public-relations battle.

Among the earliest campaigners was George Washington Williams, a pioneering African American who travelled by boat as far
as the Stanley Falls in 1890 and did something nobody had ever
thought to do before; he recorded the testimony of the Congolese
themselves. His writings contained eye-witness accounts of the first
genocide of the modern era, inspiring him to coin a term that is now
used widely, `crimes against humanity'. So groundbreaking was his
work that it was enthusiastically embraced by campaigners lobbying MPs at Westminster and Congressmen in Washington. Mass
meetings were held and leaflets printed denouncing the evils of the
Congo Free State. Conrad's Heart of Darkness was first published
in 1899 and spoke directly to the message being promoted by the
lobbyists. The campaign inspired Mark Twain, the American author famous for his strong anti-imperialist views, to mock the Belgian monarch in a small pamphlet he wrote entitled `King Leopold's
Soliloquy'. Roger Casement, a colourful British diplomat who was
to end up being executed by Britain for treason, made his name in
the Congo when he wrote an official consular report in 1904 on
behalf of the British government, accusing the Belgian authorities
of committing atrocities that led directly to three million deaths in
the Congo. In the days before the Armenian genocide or the Nazi
Holocaust, Casement's estimate was an extraordinary figure.

So successful was the campaign that in 1908 the Belgian king
was forced to relinquish control of his African fiefdom. The Congo
Free State passed into the hands of the Belgian state, no longer a
plaything of the monarch, but a full colony to be known as the Belgian Congo, where the authorities were supposedly more committed to protecting the rights of local Congolese.

The international attention paid to the Congo around 1900 was
matched decades later at independence. The first UN mission was
covered intensely by the world's media, as was the assassination
of Lumumba, the subsequent rebellions in eastern Congo and the
mercenary wars, followed by the 1965 ascension of Mobutu.

But the thing that troubled me was why such scant attention is
paid now to the Congo. According to the best estimates, since conflict
began in 1998 around four million Congolese lives had been claimed
(1,200 a day) and, in spite of the 2002 peace treaty, there has been
no significant reduction in this daily loss of life. The international
community seems to have developed a terrible Congo-fatigue, where
deaths and suffering, even on the enormous scale reported by statisticians, somehow don't register. The world seems to view the
Congo as a lost cause without hope of ever being put right.

Ali was a man happy with silence. We spent long hours in his cabin
or out on deck without feeling the need to talk. But after a few days
of silent bonding he took me into his confidence, showing me
pictures of home in Malaysia, his wife, son and two daughters.
He told me how much he was looking forward to his next leave
and his plans to take his family on a beach holiday. It was only by
accident that I found out he passed his thirty-ninth birthday while
we were together on that boat.

When he did break his silence, he spoke with conviction.

'I don't know what it is about these Congolese people, or Africa
in general, but look at this wasted opportunity,' he said one morning out on deck as I drank my tea, slowly coming round after another wretched night. He pointed at the river bank, which at that
point was crowded with palm trees, the remnants of an abandoned
plantation producing palm oil.

`In Malaysia, people make millions from palm oil. It is one of the
most valuable commodities in the world right now. It's used in the best lipsticks and cosmetics, it is used for all sorts of food preparation and it is even used to'make fuel that is more environmentally
friendly than petrol. There are businessmen in Malaysia who would
give anything to get access to the palm plantations along this river.

`But the Congo people. They don't want to make money for themselves. They just wait to take money from others.'

I offered the standard explanation about the Congo's problems:
that the Congolese had suffered under colonialism and, when independence came, the Congo was pulled apart by forces beyond its
control, as the Cold War preoccupation of the West allowed Mobutu,
under American patronage, to run the country into the ground.

`That is rubbish,' Ali said. During our trip I never saw him so
animated. `Malaysia was colonised for centuries too, most recently
by the British, a colonial rule that was cruel and racist. We got independence at roughly the same time as the Congo in the early
1960s, and we were even drawn into a Cold War conflict for year
after year as communist insurgents fought for control of Malaysia.
But somehow Malaysia got through it and the Congo did not. Today,
Malaysia is part of the rest of the world. People go on holiday in
Malaysia. The world's business community does business in Malaysia. We even have a Grand Prix every year in Malaysia. The same is
not true of the Congo. How can you explain the difference?'

Ali was almost shouting by the end of this outburst. His months
in the Congo, exposed to all of its decay and waste, had clearly
got to him. And he had distilled the quintessential problem of
Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers
have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are
Africans so bad at running Africa?

The Congo River was trapped in a zombie state, simultaneously
dead and alive. We saw almost no other river-boat traffic in a
week, but every day we would be intercepted by pirogues
paddled by Congolese people from the riverside villages. They
were desperate in their efforts to catch up with us. They were not just coming to trade. They were trying to leave behind a feral
existence of mud-hut villages and connect with a different,
modern world as symbolised by a moving motorboat.

The paddlers would take the most incredible risks as they tried
to catch us. To stand any chance of success they needed at least
two paddlers, one at the front of the pirogue and another at the
rear. The flanks of the barge were too high and bare for them to get
a hold of, so they had to wait patiently in their pirogues until the
barge had passed, rocking dangerously over its wake before
paddling like fury to come alongside the pusher. Its deck was
much lower than the barge, enabling the lead paddler to jump
aboard and whip some sort of rope attached to the pirogue to an
anchor point on the pusher. It required split-second timing,
strength and considerable bravery. Sometimes the lead paddler
lost his footing and simply plunged into the river, lost in the
water churned white by our propellers; at other times the rope
line snapped, sending the pirogue darting backwards into our
wake. If the lead paddler was still onboard, he would have to
jump back over the side instantly or face an uncomfortably long
swim. When more than one pirogue made the attempt at the same
time the result could be chaos, with rival canoes clattering into
each other, crews whacking each other with their paddles as they
fought for a better position, their boats flapping in our wake, in
constant danger of being overwhelmed.

The image of those who had been unsuccessful disappearing
behind us comes back to me from time to time. Here were a
people living alongside one of the great waterways of Africa, a
potent economic asset that should have catapulted this entire
region forwards, but who were left struggling on dugout canoes as
the modern world steamed by.

The paddlers who were fortunate enough to make it onto our
moving boat showed that their river communities still had life in
them. They came to trade. They offered food mostly - cassava
bread, fish, monkey and white grubs as fat and long as your thumb stored in tubs of damp moss. One enterprising seller made
it onboard with a pirogue full of furniture: stools of whittled
branches, tables of woven rattan.

It was tragic to watch the buyers' market drive the prices down.
Our Congolese crew were the only customers and they could
simply name a price, no matter how low, confident the seller
would be desperate enough to accept. The sellers knew it would
be months before the next river boat passed, so they had little
choice.

Once business was concluded, the fish would be handed over,
or the furniture tucked away in the hold of the barge, and the
sellers would jump back onto their pirogues and face a long
paddle back upstream.

I had an understandably hurried conversation with one of our
visitors, Jerome Bilole. He said he was thirty-six and had been
born near the now-ruined riverside town of Isangi.

'A boat like this is our only chance to earn any money. My
village is like a community from the olden times, when people
did not have clothes to wear. Your boat is our only lifeline.' He
then hopped back into his pirogue and cast off. The last I saw of
him was when our choppy wake had passed him by and he could
balance on his paddle and count the few grubby Congolese notes
he had earned.

In our 1,000-kilometre passage we passed what had once been
large towns, places like Bumba. During the war Bumba fell into
the hands of pro-Ugandan rebels with a reputation for being
bloodthirsty. As we went by, some of its people came to the
water's edge and gave us a macabre display. They threw their
heads back and drew their fingers slowly across their throats.

'They tried to put some UN monitors into Bumba once, but it
was too dangerous for them. They were pulled out and it does not
look like the locals want them back any time soon. They don't like
outsiders very much,' Ali explained.

And when we passed the town of Lisala, I looked for signs of its
past grandeur. Mobutu was born in this town during the Belgian
colonial period, and under his dictatorship it had benefited from
his patronage. All signs of this had long gone. Without any
mineral resources to fight over, the Congolese authorities had
abandoned Lisala completely. All that could be seen on the river
bank were some rusting hulks, shrouded in algae-covered fishing
nets.

It was days before we finally saw another river boat. It was a
sorry sight. A vast rusting barge, just like the one I had seen
attached to the Tekele in Kisangani, was stationary in the middle
of the river. I could see the current of the river was breaking
around the barge's sides. It was stuck firmly on a sand bank.