Blood River (5 page)

In keeping with the prevailing attitude of racial superiority
assumed by almost all white visitors to Africa, Stanley paid little
heed to the millions of native Congolese. There were times where
he went through the motions of arranging 'treaties' with local
chiefs, drawing up documents that effectively ceded the rights
over the land to the 'king over the water'. It was hardly a
negotiation between two equals, as the chiefs knew perfectly well
what would happen if they did not sign. They would be overrun
by the motley gang of well-armed colonial pioneers and camp
followers accompanying Stanley. And just like the European slave
traders of 400 years earlier. Stanley was adept at playing the tribes
off against each other, providing arms, clothing and alcohol to one
group so that it could conquer its local rival. Like dominoes the
Congolese tribes fell, one after the other, to Stanley and the early
colonial agents of the Belgian king as the white man's influence
crept steadily inland across the immense river basin.

Leopold's colonising coup in the Congo led the other European
powers to reconsider Africa. France, Germany, Spain, Portugal
and Britain had largely ignored the African interior until now, but
the acquisitiveness of the Belgian king forced them to think again
and in the early winter of 1884 the great European powers gathered at a grand conference convened in Berlin to carve up
what remained unclaimed in Africa. Leopold was able to present
his colonial claim over the Congo as a fait accompli and, when the
conference ended in February 1885, the Act of Berlin gave its
legal recognition to the Congo Free State. With a surface area of
more than three million square kilometres, it was claimed not by
Belgium, but by the king himself. Never in history, neither before
nor since, has a single person claimed ownership of a larger tract
of land.

The territory was mostly virgin rainforest and savannah, crisscrossed by the Congo River and its countless tributaries,
inhabited by millions of Congolese, but in those first years of
colonial rule it was not the natives who posed the greatest threat
to Leopold's interests. Arab slavers in the east of the country - the
ones whose stories of a mighty river in the centre of Africa first
attracted Livingstone and Stanley in the 1860s and 1870s - were
a much greater concern for Leopold. Many of these Arabs had
already lived for decades in the east of the country, organising
raiding parties to plunder slaves and ivory, which would then be
transported by caravan back to the large Arab trading centres
around Zanzibar. But the Berlin Conference had been a white
man's meeting. The Arabs of east Africa had not been invited.

Various half-hearted attempts were made to forge peace treaties
between the early Belgian colonists and the Arab slavers, but an
increase in tension was inevitable as the Europeans grew steadily
more avaricious. The rising tension culminated in a brief but
bloody war that began in 1892. Both sides used Congolese tribesmen as foot soldiers and both sides committed atrocities, but
modern European weapons meant that the Belgians prevailed,
mopping up Arab resistance in a series of battles and skirmishes,
as the white colonialists sought to purge the Congo of its Arab
population and to draw up a clear frontier once and for all for the
territory claimed solely by Leopold.

Lake Tanganyika was a convenient boundary marker. It is only seventy kilometres across at its widest point, but from north to
south it runs for 650 kilometres, and the Belgian pioneers quickly
focused on it as a natural border for the easternmost limit of the
Congo Free State. First, they had to deal with the large local Arab
population on the lake's shore. Ever since they first reached the
Congo in the early nineteenth century, the Arab slavers had
arrived on boats crossing the lake. A large settlement had grown
at their principal landing site on the western shore of the lake,
Mtowa, a short distance north of the mouth of the only river that
drains the lake, the Lukuga.

On 5 April 1892 a Belgian sergeant called Alexis Vrithoff
clashed with an Arab raiding party on high ground next to the
river mouth. He was killed, but after the Belgians eventually
crushed the Arabs, the site around the estuary was developed into
the Congo's most important inland port, serviced by a railway,
completed in 1915, that brought goods from the Congolese
interior, and by ferries and steamers that crossed the lake to ports
in what is now Zambia, Tanzania and Burundi. In honour of
Albert I, the Belgian king who succeeded Leopold, the town was
named Albertville - its name was changed to Kalemie in the late
1960s - and, according to my 1951 Travel Guide to the Belgian
Congo, the construction of this great transport hub meant the port
was `destined to have a great future'.

I saw little evidence of this 'great future' once Michel finally
picked me up at the airstrip. From a distance Kalemie looked
regular enough, and as we approached, bumping along on a sandy
track contouring round the edge of Lake Tanganyika, I could see
the town's main church, a white building with a rather elegant
bell-tower standing proud on a headland, against a knobbly
horizon of tree-covered hills, commanding a fine view over the
lake. In the foreground, among the green of coconut palms and
banana trees, there were two distinct columns of rust-red,
corrugated-iron roofs flanking what appeared to be a main thoroughfare. And in the distance there was a small harbour
tucked in the lee of a graceful breakwater, next to a railway
terminus and marshalling yard.

But as the jeep laboured around the lake and we got closer to
Kalemie, the most extraordinary thing happened. The fabric of
the town grew flimsier until it seemed to vanish altogether.

What I had taken to be an estate of factories, damaged in the
recent war in the Congo, turned out to be a ruin dating from a
much earlier age. Faded advertisements could just be made out on
the walls, although the logos dated not from the 1990s or the
1980s, but from half a century ago. Grass grew long and
untroubled through the railway sleepers on the approaches to the
disused station, and the sandy soil on either side of the tracks was
drummed hard by generations of feet that had turned the old
carriageway into a simple, arrow-straight footpath, walled on
both sides by reedy grass swaying way above head height. An old
railway carriage - built decades ago in South Africa and still
bearing instructions in Afrikaans forbidding smoking - stood
rusting in the tropical heat. In one of its compartments someone
had made a small cooking fire on the floor, now surrounded by
various dirty pots, and the carriage had the smell and stains of a
doss-house.

Instead of it functioning high street, what I found was a dusty
space filled by gaggles of meandering locals. A few hawkers sat
behind small piles of stale biscuits or flat bottles of orange soda
smuggled into Kalemie by boat from Tanzania on the other side of
the lake. The more ambitious traders offered things like batteries
and radios, but while the names on the Chinese-made packets
sounded familiar, the misspellings of Philipps or Pannasonic
suggested that nothing was genuine. Pedestrians could peruse at
their leisure. They had no reason to worry about being run over as
in the entire town there was only a handful of vehicles, mainly
UN jeeps and one venerable Land Rover owned by some
missionaries. And even when I saw one of these vehicles actually moving, they could only manage a walking pace, to avoid bucking
and rearing uncontrollably over various potholes, uncovered
drainage ditches and other obstacles in the town centre.

There were bicycles, old-fashioned things with solid frames
painted black and primitive lever brakes, manufactured in China,
propped up in the shade of the roadside trees, as their owners
waited to offer them as taxis for customers willing to pay twenty
Congolese francs, or four pence, to be taken from one end of the
dusty strip to the other. I watched as women, wrapped in printed
cotton cloth, some clutching salted fish bundled up in banana
leaves, took up genteel side-saddle positions on the padded
cushions attached to the racks above the bicycles' rear wheel,
while the taxi boys heaved in the heat against the pedals. I could
hear the soft chiming of Swahili as two women passengers
chatted to each other while they were being slowly pedalled in
parallel along the roadway.

Of the buildings themselves, there was little left beyond the
fronts. Rust had not just coloured the roofs, but eaten out huge
holes, through which tropical rain had flooded for countless
rainy seasons. Damp, seasonal flooding from the nearby lake
and collapsed foundations meant the interior rooms were
mostly empty. Pipes that once brought mains water to each
building lay broken and there was not one working light bulb.
The town's main terrace of shops looked like one of those
Hollywood filmsets, which from the front has the appearance of
solidity, but from the back is nothing but a few beams propping
up a facade.

Without cobalt or diamonds or gold to draw outsiders' interest
here, Kalemie had been hollowed out by the years. Where once
there had been a substantial settlement, nothing but the husk
remained.

As we drove into Kalemie, Michel quizzed me on my motives. He
was extremely knowledgeable about the local history, and seemed delighted to have found in me someone to share his
interest.

'So you are the man crazy enough to want to follow Stanley's
route. The history of this place is extraordinary - the slavers and
their ivory, the Belgians who fought battles right here where the
town now stands, and the wars since independence - but I have
never met anyone who comes here just for history's sake. History
is a luxury people cannot afford around here, where the more
pressing things are where the next meal is coming from or the
next drink of clean water.'

He spoke slowly, concentrating hard on steering the jeep along
the bouncy road into town, sitting forward in the driver's seat,
anxiously trying to see over the bonnet to anticipate the next
pothole.

'It's not the worst town in the country I have been to, but things
are pretty basic here. The town is meant to get its electricity from a
hydroelectric plant in the mountains north of here, built back in
the 1950s - it's the one that Che Guevara attacked - but it's pretty
intermittent these days. Some places are lucky enough to get a day
of power, now and then, but we've had nothing for weeks now.'

I had read Guevara's diary about his time in the Congo. It was
1965 and he arrived here fired with revolutionary zeal, willing to
risk his life in the fight against the Mobutu regime that America
was in the process of installing. It was an era when the Cold War
was being fought in numerous proxy wars all over Africa, and
Guevara flew from Cuba to communist-controlled Tanzania to stage
his insurgency across Lake Tanganyika. During a brief stopover
in Tanzania he spent time with Laurent Kabila, then a young Congolese dissident and opponent of Mobutu. It would be more than
thirty years before Kabila eventually replaced Mobutu, but at his
first meeting Guevara was not overly impressed with Kabila's revolutionary credentials. He described him as a drunken womaniser
rather than a true freedom fighter.

With heavy historic irony Guevara, the anti-colonialist par excellence, arrived in the Congo just as Stanley, the colonial
pioneer, had done - by small boat. Guevara came under cover of
darkness with a raiding party made up of trusted Cuban
revolutionaries and a few anti-Mobutu Congolese rebels. Their
landing place could only have been a short distance from the spot
where Stanley made landfall in his British-built, collapsible boat,
the Lady Alice, and after landing Guevara's team slipped into the
heavily forested hills to the west of Lake Tanganyika, where they
spent a few weeks trying to strike a blow against the Mobutu
regime. Guevara sounds increasingly miserable in his diaries. His
zeal for revolution steadily diminished as his fellow African
revolutionaries proved incapable of organising basic supplies or
communications.

It all ended in a chaotic attack on the hydroelectric plant at
Bendera, about 150 kilometres north of Kalemie. The plant was
one of the last construction projects completed by the Belgians, in
the late 1950s, and involved an ambitious plan to dam a river in
a steep-sided gorge halfway up a mountain, before piping the
water through turbines. The terrain meant the project was
difficult to complete, but it also meant it was difficult for Guevara
to attack. When the assault failed, he blamed poor communication among his fellow fighters and the tone of his diary
suggests the fiasco made him lose faith in his Congolese
collaborators. He simply thought they were not up to the task of
running a revolution. Within a few days Guevara was back on
Lake Tanganyika, this time heading to Tanzania under cover of
darkness. He never returned to the Congo.

Michel asked me in detail about the route I hoped to follow,
from Kalemie all the way to the upper Congo River.

'I would love to go through that area. I have read about it and
flown over it, but I would love to see what is happening there, on
the ground, after all this chaos.'

'So why don't you come with me?' I asked. 'It would be great to
have some company.'

Michel shook his head. 'My bosses would never let me. Our
security rules would never allow it. Especially now, after the
latest news from Burundi. I assume you have heard what
happened?'

I nodded.

'Well, the very latest is that the leadership of the pro-Rwandan
rebels have left Kinshasa in protest at the killings. And one of the
rebel leaders has been quoted as saying the whole peace treaty is
off and the transitional government suspended. If that is true, then
I guess we can expect the war to be hack on in a couple of clays.'