Blood River (39 page)

To save not just the Congo, but the entire continent of Africa, from its downward trajectory, a completely different way of
thinking is needed. There are a few positive early signs. It is in the
Congo that the International Criminal Court has begun pioneering
work, investigating alleged atrocities committed in the warravaged east of the country. This admission by the Congolese
authorities that it simply does not have the capability to ensure
law and order by itself, and needs outside help, is a first step. But
much more will need to be done to finally return authority to its
rightful place, into the hands of the Congolese people themselves,
and to right a wrong that Stanley did so much to perpetrate.

In August 1877 a messenger clambered half-dead down the
seaward side of the Crystal Mountains. He was heading for the
tiny port of Boma, the only European trading station for hundreds
of kilometres on Africa's west coast, with orders to deliver a
handwritten note addressed 'To Any Gentleman Who Speaks
English'. The note was a desperate plea for help from Stanley:

I have arrived at this place with 115 souls, men, women and
children ... We are now in a state of imminent starvation ...
We are in a state of the greatest distress; but if your supplies
arrive in time, I may be able to reach Boma within four days
... I want ten or fifteen man-loads of rice or grain to fill their
pinched bellies immediately ... Starving people cannot wait
... The supplies must arrive within two days, or I may have
a fearful time of it among the dying ... What is wanted is
immediate relief; and I pray you to use your utmost energies
to forward it at once ... For myself, if you have such little
luxuries as tea, coffee, sugar and biscuits by you, such as one
man can easily carry, I beg you on my own behalf that you
will send a small supply ... And add to the great debt of
gratitude due to you upon the timely arrival of the supplies
for my people.

Stanley signed the note, but he added a postscript. Boma was
one of the world's most distant backwaters, but he nevertheless
presumed that his reputation had reached there. Under his
signature he wrote, `You may not know me by name; I therefore
add, I am the person that discovered Livingstone in 1871.'

For the traders, the wretched plight of the expedition
described by Stanley was not the most dramatic aspect of the
letter. What made the letter truly astounding was that it had
arrived overland. For four centuries European traders had been
regular visitors to Boma, but they had all arrived by ship and the
African hinterland remained as much of a mystery to them in
1877 as it was in 1482 when the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao
first reached there. No white man had ever penetrated more than
a few kilometres inland from Boma. And the few who had tried
had all used Boma as a starting point, so the traders would have
known of any recent mission. If this letter was to be believed,
then the author must have come through territory widely held to
be impassable.

The bearer with the message later recalled how a short,
bespectacled white man came out from one of the wooden
buildings at Boma demanding to see the letter. At first he could
not believe what he was reading and hearing - the messenger was
able to explain himself in English as he had been to a mission
school on the island of Zanzibar, on the other side of Africa,
thousands of kilometres away. His pathetic pleading for help
backed up what the trader was reading.

The bearer reported how the sceptical white man fired a series
of questions at him, wanting to know about the journey down to
the smallest detail. Then the trader, believed to be John Harrison,
the local agent for Hatton & Cookson, a Liverpool trading company, composed himself, ordered a meal for the messenger, and
began preparations for a large relief convoy to rescue Stanley's
expedition.

It set out the following morning with everything Stanley had requested, and more. The bearers carried sacks of rice, fish and
potatoes, material for new clothes and even a five-gallon
demijohn of rum. Stanley described the scenes of rapture when
the relief column came into sight. One of the expedition's boys,
he wrote, turned praise-singer, launching into a lyrical description of the hardships they had endured in crossing Africa,
chanting about how they had survived the `hell of hunger',
defying cannibals and cataracts, snakes and starvation. Stanley
wrote that the chorus was taken up loudly by the other members
of his party, as they finally understood their ordeal was over:

Then sing, 0 friends, sing; the journey is ended;
Sing aloud, 0 friends, sing to this great sea.

He described how some of his party could not wait for the rice
and fish to be cooked, stuffing their mouths with it raw, while
others rushed about gathering firewood to prepare an immense
feast. Bales of cloth had been included in the rescue package and
Stanley described how eagerly they were used to cover the
embarrassment of bare ribcages and protruding bones. As a
journalist, he had a reputation for colourful exaggeration, but I am
prepared to believe the childish delight he attributes to himself as
he opened a swag-bag of goodies from the Boma traders:

Pale Ale! Sherry! Port wine! Champagne! Plum pudding!
Currant, gooseberry, and raspberry jam! The gracious God be
praised for ever! The long war we had maintained against
famine and the siege of woe were over, and my people and I
rejoiced in plenty! It was only an hour before we had been
living on the recollections of the few peanuts and green
bananas we had consumed in the morning, but now, in an
instant, we were transported into the presence of the luxuries
of civilisation. Never did gaunt Africa appear so unworthy
and so despicable before my eyes as now, when imperial Europe rose before my delighted eyes and showed her
boundless treasures of life, and blessed me with her stores.

After a day of gorging, his group continued its march and on 9
August 1877, exactly 999 days since his expedition set off from
the other side of Africa, it reached Boma. The traders came out to
meet Stanley's party, offering him - with no apparent sense of
irony - the freedom of the city, a city that ran to only six
stockaded buildings. The traders insisted that the explorer cover
the last part of the journey in a hammock borne by native bearers,
something he later complained about for giving the appearance of
being `very effeminate'.

Within two days Stanley boarded a ship for the journey home.
As the boat headed out to sea he described his feelings at having
survived crossing the Congo:

Turning to take a farewell glance at the mighty River on
whose brown bosom we had endured so greatly, I saw it
approach, awed and humbled, the threshold of the watery
immensity, to whose immeasurable volume and illimitable
expanse, awful as had been its power, and terrible as had
been its fury, its flood was but a drop. And I felt my heart
suffused with purest gratitude to Him whose hand had
protected us, and who had enabled us to pierce the Dark
Continent from east to west, and to trace its mightiest River
to its Ocean bourne.

As we approached Boma my own sense of excitement grew.
Hippolite had been prattling on throughout our journey about
how he was well known in the area and how everyone there
respected him as an important man. I switched off and thought of
a Congo where people might one day prosper on merit and not,
like Hippolite, on tribal connections with an unelected dictatorship. Each time we were stopped at a checkpoint I would be questioned about my motive for reaching Boma. By rote I would
repeat my mantra: I am a historian interested in following the
route used by Stanley before the colonial era, and please would
the officials be so kind as to let me pass. I don't think they
believed my story for a second. I am sure they suspected I was
another white profiteer looking to exploit their country, but after
an hour or so of toying with me, they would let me pass.

We were crossing a sparse landscape of mountain plateau. Bare
hilltops rolled away to the horizon with just a thin covering of
brown grass and an occasional splash of green from the odd
cassava tree. Not far to the north of us was the narrow river ravine
down which Stanley passed on those grim final days of his
expedition. I asked Hippolite if he had heard of Isangila, the
section of the river where Stanley described leaving the Lady
Alice. He shrugged his shoulders and carried on talking about a
prostitute in Boma whose number he had been given.

Eventually the road dropped down into Matadi and I caught
sight of the river again. It was tens of metres beneath us, below the
span of the Marshal Mobutu bridge. We were waiting at another
checkpoint having my paperwork examined before I was to be
allowed to use this strategic military asset, and I watched as a
large ship struggled against the current heading upriver to
Matadi's dockside. The bridge spans the river just below the
lowest set of cataracts, and even from my high vantage point I
could see the brown water was alive with eddies and undertows
as it was squeezed through a steep-sided rocky gorge. If the
hillsides had been covered in pines and the outside temperature
about thirty degrees Celsius colder, I could have been looking at
a Norwegian fjord.

By now I was on the edge of my seat. I had less than a hundred
kilometres to go to reach Boma. This last stretch of road carried no
container trucks and so it had not been repaired by foreign money.
It was badly pitted and our speed dropped accordingly. Forest
returned on either side of the road now that we were down off the mountain plateau, and every so often we would see villagers
cutting timber or carrying baskets. As we passed a group of
children, I watched as one of them, who appeared to be carrying a
large pine cone, flicked his wrist extravagantly. The 'pine cone'
uncoiled like a yo-yo, stretched out straight and then bundled
itself back up into a ball. I shouted at Roget to stop the jeep. The
children came running and I had a better look at what they were
holding. It was a pangolin, a nocturnal forest animal that I had
only ever read about and never seen. Like a hedgehog, it defends
itself by rolling into a tight ball, but instead of a hedgehog's
prickles it hides behind an armour of bony plates. `You want to
eat, you want to eat,' cried the pangolin's chief tormentor.

Finally we reached Boma. It has a sad, passed-over air. There are
a few old colonial-era buildings close to the river's edge, but a
modern town of dirty streets and shacks spreads up a hillside on
high ground some way from the river. Stanley made Boma his
capital when he came back here to set up the Congo Free State for
Leopold and, after I had been interviewed at length by the town's
chief immigration officer, I was eventually allowed to look
around the relics of that period. There was a tiny Catholic church
made completely from cast iron. A foundry in Belgium had
moulded the wall panels, window frames, roof and spire before it
was shipped out here and reassembled. I tried to go inside, but it
was locked. On a hillock overlooking the church was the old
governor's house and below it an abandoned hotel. A rather
elegant gallery wrapped around the second storey, its edges
decorated with filigree ironwork, red with rust.

I wanted to picture the scene when Stanley arrived here, halfdead from sickness and starvation after trekking from the other
side of the continent. I tried to imagine the thrill he felt when he
learned that Cameron, the Royal Navy officer who had set off two
years before him, had not beaten him here and it was he who was
the first outsider to chart the Congo River.

In my heart I also felt thrilled. When Stanley got here he was
heralded as a hero by the Europeans manning the Boma trading
station, because they knew how important his journey was. They
knew it changed everything, solving a geographical mystery
dating back hundreds of years and promising more visitors, trade
and development. My thrill was more private. I had faced down
the Congo, the most dangerous, chaotic, backward country in
Africa.

I walked by myself down to the water's edge and thought about
the river. Forty-four days earlier I had started my trip where Lake
Tanganyika drains into the headwaters. From there I had watched
the river gather strength through the savannah of Katanga and the
thickening jungle of Maniema, before its sweep across equatorial
Africa all the way to Boma. But the river did not just link me to
the places passed through by Stanley. The river was the thread
running through the continent's bloody history, connecting me
not just to Stanley, but to Leopold, Conrad, Lumumba, Mobutu
and other spectres from Africa's dark past.

Taking one last glance at the river before turning for home, I felt
a lump in my pocket. It was a pebble I had picked up from the
river shallows on my pirogue 2,000 kilometres upstream. Its
surface was cracked and uneven. I rolled the stone between my
fingers, imagining how the waters of the Congo River had washed
over it year after year. I looked at it for a final time. It was the
colour of dried blood.

In the two years since I completed my journey, much has
happened in the Congo and yet little has changed.

In general the peace treaty of 2002 has held without a return to
full-blown war. This does not mean the Congo has been free from
violence. In southern Katanga, just weeks after I left, the town of
Kilwa was seized by anti-government rebels, driving thousands of
refugees across the border into neighbouring Zambia. Without
any vehicles of their own, troops loyal to Kinshasa requisitioned
jeeps from a nearby foreign-owned copper mine and descended
on the town. According to eye-witnesses more than a hundred
people, including women and children, were summarily
executed as the soldiers ran amok.

Further north, rebels have continued to kill and cause mayhem
across a large swathe of Congolese territory close to Uganda and
Rwanda. MONUC, now the largest United Nations peacekeeping
mission in the world, has adopted a much tougher posture than
in my time, deploying attack helicopters and well-armed troops
on combat patrols. They have been moderately successful at
persuading some rebel groups to lay down their weapons, but this
has not been without cost to the UN. In the worst incident in
February 2005, nine Bangladeshi peacekeepers were ambushed
and executed in the Ituri region of eastern Congo. Before they
died they were tortured and mutilated.