Blood River (38 page)

From the moment I saw Hippolite, I did not trust him. He was a
big, lumbering oaf with a gormless expression. When I gave him
my passport, I pointed out the yellow-fever certificate tucked
between its pages and asked him to take particular care of it.
Vaccination regulations are a common source of friction when
travelling in Africa. If you don't have the right certificates you can
find yourself being charged large sums by officials and proof of
yellow-fever vaccination was often asked for. By the time Hippolite
came back with my passport, the certificate was missing.

I stared at him angrily and asked what had happened. His gaze
dropped to the ground and he mumbled something about not
knowing what I was talking about, followed by a swift warning that I would need a yellow-fever certificate when I eventually left
the country and a promise that, for a fee, he could arrange a
replacement. I said we would sort it out later, but that exchange
confirmed my first instinct about Hippolite's integrity.

We left early in the morning for the drive to Boma. There were
three of us in the jeep: Roget, a locally hired driver, Hippolite in
the front passenger seat and me, trying not to look conspicuous in
the back. We would be passing through numerous checkpoints
and I wanted to attract minimal attention from bribe-hungry
officials. It took a long time to get past the city-centre traffic - we
drove past a smart private school just as hundreds of children,
offspring of politicians and aid workers, were being dropped off
in limousines and 4x4s. I saw a traffic cop wearing the same
uniform of yellow helmet and white gloves that I had seen weeks
earlier in Kindu on the other side of the country. And, just as in
Kindu, everyone ignored his gloved mime actions and whistles. It
took us an hour to inch past the school.

Once we had left the city behind, our speed picked up and I felt
the sensation of being in a car moving at full speed, something I
had not done since arriving in the Congo six weeks earlier. The
timing of my trip was lucky. Repairs on the trunk road between
Kinshasa and Matadi had just been completed. The first half of it
had been rebuilt with Chinese government assistance and the
second half with European money. This is the main highway of
the entire country, joining the capital city with the country's
solitary deep-water port for ocean-going ships, Matadi, the main
entry point for imports, and yet the government had to rely on
foreign money to keep the road passable.

Now that traffic was moving again between Kinshasa and
Matadi, another problem had developed - highway robbery.
Armed gangs routinely robbed and killed people on the road.
Most attacks happened after dark, but there had been a few during
daylight hours. The situation was so bad that roadblocks were
erected before sunset, stopping all overnight travel.

The only other vehicles on the road were trucks, which we saw
every so often hauling containers to and from the port at Matadi.
Along with their regular loads, almost all of them had a miserable
human cargo. Maurice was right when he told me there were no
taxis or buses on this route, so the container lorries were being
used for public transport. The driving compartments would be
crammed with people begging a ride, but they were the lucky
ones. The unlucky ones were forced to risk their lives, clinging to
the bare roof of the containers or perching precariously between
the back of the cabin and the container. They had to stand there
for hour after hour, with little to hold on to for safety. On some of
the larger, articulated trucks the end of the container would shift
towards them as they went round corners, threatening to squash
them. Many of the lorries carried little signs banning passengers.
Nobody paid any notice. I even saw policemen and soldiers
taking their chances among the other passengers.

We came across a grizzly scene. A truck was jack-knifed across
the road with a trail of blood, gore and body parts smeared across
the tarmac in a line leading to its back axle. The truck had been
forced to brake suddenly, some of the passengers had fallen off
and the rear wheels had gone straight over them.

It made me think of Conrad's description of this same road. The
Matadi-Kinshasa road had been a symbol of death and cruelty
since Stanley returned to the Congo in the 1880s as Leopold's
agent to set up the Belgian monarch's colony. Building a road,
and later a railway, around the impassable rapids on the lower
Congo River was key to the king's dream of opening up the Congo
River system and Stanley set about the task with brutal determination. Local tribesmen were rounded up at gunpoint and
forced to work in chain-gangs. Thousands died from disease,
mistreatment and malnutrition. When Conrad came here in 1890
to serve on a steamboat on the river, he described the hellish trek
along the primitive roadway over the Crystal Mountains, marked by grisly cairns made from the bones of dead labourers, some still
wearing their shackles.

The jeep broke down four times on this leg of my journey and we
were forced to stop and waste hours negotiating our way past
checkpoints too numerous to remember. But crossing the Congo
had made me accustomed to delay and I spent the time trying to
make sense of what I had learned from my adventure.

In part my journey had been about gauging the scale of
problems faced by the continent, and in this regard the Congo had
been a revelation. In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had
touched the heart of Africa and found it broken. While the
Western world moves ahead with advances in medicine and
technology, the people of the Congo are falling further and further
behind. There was one sentence that stays with me after hearing
it right across the country, from Lake Tanganyika in the east to the
lower Congo River in the west. It came up in conversation with
almost every Congolese person I met: villagers, priests, miners,
fishermen. As I asked them about their situation they would,
inevitably, tell me about some sort of disaster that had befallen
them, whether it was an attack by rebels, a major flood or a
political crisis, and, just as inevitably, they all finished with the
same words: `And we fled into the bush.'

I found it extraordinary that for millions of Congolese in the
twenty-first century the rainforest offers the safest sanctuary.

And as the hours passed on my jeep ride, I thought more and
more about Stanley and his role in creating the Congo of today. In
the late nineteenth century he was heralded as a hero of the great
age of African exploration - he was knighted by Queen Victoria
in 1898 - but today's received historical wisdom is less flattering.
His tactics in the Congo, especially the use of weapons to open
fire on any tribesmen who got in his way, and his role in installing
Leopold's rule, taint him as arch-colonial brute.

I was fully aware of Stanley's negative image when I started out, but my journey nevertheless taught me a grudging respect for
my Telegraph predecessor. I had seen the scale of his achievement, the difficulty of the terrain he had crossed, the rigour of the
climate and the constant threat from hunger and disease. The fact
that he survived the three-year trek from one side of Africa to the
other taught me respect for his determination, stamina and spirit.
His three white companions all perished, but the little Welsh
bastard toughed it out.

And I would disagree with those who dismiss him as an utter
racist. When he reached the Atlantic, he had the chance to sail
north to Europe to claim the fame and fortune he knew to be
awaiting him following his feat of exploration. But instead of
rushing home, he insisted on ensuring that his surviving African
bearers made it safely back to their homes in Zanzibar. This
decision meant it would be months before he returned to London
as he sailed south, stopped over in Cape Town and eventually
rounded the Cape of Good Hope to return his loyal expedition
members to their island home in the Indian Ocean. This gesture
suggests more empathy with Africans than he is normally given
credit for.

But as I sat in the relative comfort of the jeep, driving in just two
days a distance that it took Stanley five months to cover, inside
me I felt an anger towards him welling up. His expedition could
have been a positive turning point for Africa and its people. A
continent cut off from the outside world could have benefited
hugely from Stanley's achievement, as the positive aspects of the
modern world - medicine, education, technology - were made
available to Africa for the first time. But what enraged me was
how Stanley's trip turned into one of the greatest missed opportunities of modern history.

Instead of bringing positive aspects of the developed world to
Africa, it brought only the negative. For decades Leopold's
apologists - Stanley being one of the loudest - described the
Congo Free State as an exercise in civilising philanthropy, but in reality it was an exercise in asset-stripping. The colonialists took
ivory, rubber, copper, timber and any other natural resource they
could find, killing millions and millions of Congolese in the
process. It took years of work by Edwardian human-rights campaigners to force the Belgian king to give up the Congo Free State
and transform it into a full Belgian colony. Even after this transformation the Congo's enormous wealth of natural resources,
such as diamonds, gold and copper, continued to be misappropriated, first by colonials and then by Mobutu's kleptocrats.

But the major lesson I learned on my trek through modern
central Africa was that the most valuable asset stolen from the
Congo was the sovereignty of its people.

Before Stanley and white rule, the people of the Congo
genuinely enjoyed a sense of local power. Society was tribal, with
authority lying in the hands of village chiefs and, above them,
paramount chiefs. But local people enjoyed sovereign power to
the extent that they could get rid of unpopular chiefs. No chief
could afford to ignore totally the will of his subjects. Decisions
had to be taken, at least in part, with the interests of the people in
mind.

All of that changed with white rule, not just in the Congo, but
across colonial Africa. All aspects of sovereignty were stripped
from the people of Africa and they have never, to this day, fully
got it back. One of the great fallacies about white rule in Africa
was that when it ended, power was handed back to the people of
Africa. I saw in the Congo how this simply is not true. At
independence, colonial powers surrendered authority, but the
point was that it never ended in the right place, back in the hands
of the people. Instead it was hijacked by elites who publicly
claimed they were working in the interests of their people, but
were in fact only driven by self-interest. Mobutu's chartering of
Concorde to deliver champagne to a palace specially built in the
jungle is nothing but a colourful, extreme example of what
African leaders do routinely right across the continent - enjoy grotesque luxury while ignoring the plight of their people.

I can think of no concept more abused in modern Africa than
sovereignty. It is used by dictators and undemocratic regimes to
fend off criticism of their rule and to conceal their own maladministration and corrupt pilfering. They cloak themselves in it
to dismiss the right of any outsider to hold them to account. The
greatest shame arising from Stanley's Congo journey was how it
started this pattern of sovereignty-stripping, a process whereby
the vast majority of Africans in the Congo and elsewhere have
ended up not just without any say in the running of their country,
but abused and exploited by their African leaders.

While outsiders led by Stanley can be blamed for creating this
situation, the people of Africa must share responsibility for
showing themselves unable to change it. The Malaysian naval
officer on my river boat was right to ask why former European
colonies in Asia have been able to develop since independence,
while those in Africa have regressed. The cruelty and greed of
African dictators is mostly to blame, but it is also true that the
peoples of Africa have not been capable of working together to
rein in the excesses of dictators. People power in Africa has a
wretched record.

The challenge for the future must be to restore some sense of
sovereignty and control to all in Africa, not just the elite.
Elections are a necessary part of this, but by themselves they will
not be sufficient. To make up for decades of misrule and
exploitation, Africa needs help in installing meaningful legal
systems that can hold leaders to account and ensure that national
funds are spent on public projects and not funnelled into private
bank accounts. This will need a fundamental change of attitude,
not just from donors and foreign companies accepting a greater
degree of transparency in their dealings with Africa, but also from
the leaders and people of Africa, who must admit both how much
they need help and that they are willing to compromise.