In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (20 page)

Now their businesses were barely ticking over. Their numbers had shrunk as, one by one, their friends packed up and left. Resigned to keeping out of politics, they had realised they could not make money either. When they were arrested or threatened by the authorities, they found precious little sympathy at their embassies, whose young diplomats regarded them as unreconstructed colonialists largely deserving the treatment meted out. If they were still univer
sally hailed as ‘patron' (‘boss'), the title had begun to grate, the nature of their tiny ghetto had become manifest. They now knew themselves doomed to be aliens by virtue of their skin, fixed in the aspic of paternalism.

Unlike most Congolese, they enjoyed the luxury of choosing where to live. But they were trapped in a different way. Uneasy and ill-defined, they were the mirror images of the Congolese exiles trying to start new lives in Paris and Brussels. Souls in limbo, they knew they could not make things work in Congo but had nothing left to give to a European continent whose cold efficiency chilled them. When more recent white arrivals, in boorish expatriate mode, raged against the perfidy of the locals, they concealed their anger. Their tragedy was that they loved the place, but no longer expected to be loved in return. They had come to share with Mobutu the quality of obsolescence. ‘We are like dinosaurs, dying off one by one,' acknowledged the lawyer. ‘We feel so involved, but we are utterly marginalised, incapable of dictating events.'

On the banks of the River Congo, an hour's drive east of Kinshasa, before the road passes the fishing village of Maluku, I found one of the most poignant members of the breed. Strolling through groves of avocado, grapefruit, lemon and lychee he had planted and nurtured into luxuriant life, patrolling warm brown pools teeming with fish, Daniel Thomas was taking stock of a lifetime of labour destined to leave him empty-handed in what would all too soon be his old age.

His glade exhaled lazy peace, sun-drenched contentment. Troupes of guinea-fowl, their bobbing heads the bright turquoise of a tropical beetle, picked their way across the green lawns, butterflies wafted over the yellow hibiscus and a widow bird looped from bush to bush, its languid tail dipping. It was hot, and while the staff prepared an open-air barbecue, Thomas's dog determinedly dug a hole in the lawn, where it sat panting, cooling its belly on the exposed earth. From the river came the sound of a barge pushing logs cut many, many miles upstream, somewhere in the equatorial jungle where Mr Kurtz gradually lost his reason. But its chugging progress
was dwarfed by an expanse as vast as his dreams: the cloud-dotted sky meeting a mother-of-pearl sheet of water in a horizon that was no more than a shimmer of grey-blue.

From Thomas's farm the sometimes imperceptible curve of Malebo pool made itself manifest. To the right, across the water, lay a thickly forested island. To the left, you could see the slim tower of Nsele, where Chinese workers built Mobutu an ornate pavilion and the single party system was born. Behind it, the glints from the skyscrapers of two turbulent African capitals. The heat haze was pierced by the odd plume of smoke from a farmer's fire, thin threads of white trailing across the rolling, pea-green landscape that must have looked so terrifyingly alien to the eyes of Stanley and Brazzaville, accustomed to the cosy fields and neat hedgerows of Europe.

‘There was nothing here when we came in 1976, just brush to be cut down,' said Thomas. ‘Now look at these mango trees.' He bent to point out the little buds in the thick green foliage, shaking his head with wonder at the fertility of the soil. ‘They're flowering again, and we've only just finished eating the last crop, which were mouthwatering. What a feeling, to pick fruit from something you have planted yourself! There's nothing finer in the world.' His face was the colour of baked terracotta and it had the glazed quality of someone who had spent his entire life working outdoors. His teeth, stained by cheap local cigarettes, pointed in a variety of unconventional directions. But his blue eyes, though tired and watery now, still had the trusting innocence of a child. Which seemed appropriate, for Thomas himself admitted he had been truly infantile in his slowness to learn the painful lessons of experience. Bewitched by his vision of an African Garden of Eden, he had been like a toddler who tumbles, gets up, is knocked down a second time, falls once again, staggers back on his feet, only for the whole process to be repeated once more. It was hard to know whether to admire his commitment or dismiss him as a fool. Either way, you had to marvel at his energy.

Thomas and his wife, a pale, melancholy woman, had been looted not once, not twice, but three times in eight years, an escalating lad
der of theft and destruction that had worn away the huge store of optimism they had brought to the country. In fact, if you counted Zaireanisation, you could argue that the couple have been ripped off a total of four times in the land they once wanted to make a home but now talked of leaving.

He had come to Zaire in 1970 as a construction expert speaking with the twang of rural northern France, brought in to set up and run factories producing high-quality tea in the eastern Kivu province for export to the Common Market. Now associated with sprawling refugee camps and rebel uprisings, Kivu was then a peaceful province of green hills and misty mountain ranges. The madness began, Thomas was taken over by the farmer's passion for the soil. ‘The climate, the people, the land. It was paradise on earth: I bought 150 hectares outside Bukavu and lived like a king.'

Then Mobutu introduced Zaireanisation, and foreign-owned farms, factories and businesses were allocated to cronies with little desire to get their hands dirty. ‘Zaire', as Thomas put it, ‘began to self-destruct'. The tea project took only three years to collapse. Expecting to lose his own land, Thomas donated it for free to a Franciscan order and moved to Kinshasa to start again. He bought the 114-hectare site near Maluku and raised Barbary ducks, which proved profitable until most were killed by bad feed from the only suppliers. ‘I sent the feed for analysis and was told it was full of sawdust and coffee grounds. The ducks died of hunger with their stomachs full.' So Thomas taught himself how to graft fruit trees and built up a herd of cattle and sheep with which he supplied Kinshasa's Moslem community for the yearly El-Khadir festival.

Digging a three-kilometre channel to divert water from a nearby stream, he created five pools on the river bank and stocked them with tilapia and capitaine, the most popular species of fish in this part of Africa. Anglers who could tolerate the sauna conditions at the river's edge would come and catch their own. The couple built paillottes—thatched awnings—and word spread of a new place to lunch over the weekend. On a Sunday afternoon, they sometimes found themselves
running to serve roast fish, barbecued lamb and home-made ratatouille to 300 guests.

The concern was thriving by 1991, when the first round of army-led looting swept across the country. Thomas estimates that he spent 100,000 French francs (£10,500) repairing damage done to the property and replacing stock that time. Two years later, when the riots and pillaging broke out again in Kinshasa, the farm was more seriously affected. ‘We had all the kitchen and farming equipment stolen and lost 280 sheep. The damages totalled about 700,000 francs (£74,000).'

But the incidents were dwarfed by what happened in 1997 in the run-up to Kabila's seizure of power, just as the couple were about to harvest their fish. Marooned in Kinshasa, Thomas had fretted about the livestock on the farm, situated worryingly close to the road Mobutu's soldiers were meant to defend against the oncoming rebels. Finally, he set off with a stock of cash and methodically paid his way through twenty military roadblocks, until, at the last checkpoint, he was held hostage while the gardes civiles debated taking his car.

On his release, he found the scene he had dreaded. The paillotes had been burnt down, the farm stripped bare, the herds of sheep and cattle shot and for the first time the sluice gates had been opened and the pools emptied of all their tilapia and capitaine, dumped on a local market. The losses this time were a crushing 1.2 million francs (£126,000).

If businesses looted in Kinshasa through the years were hard put to identify their attackers, for the Thomas couple there was no such comforting anonymity on offer. Depressingly, the people who led the soldiers to the farm each time were local villagers. Far from regarding the farm as a project worth encouraging, or at least tolerating, for the investment and employment it might bring to the area, they monitored the farm through the years like schoolboys watching a ripening fruit, waiting for the moment when a breakdown of law and order would provide the cover for some neighbourly appropriation. ‘It's always the same hard core that incites the other villagers and brings
the soldiers here. We know who they are, we even know their names. But they've never been punished and they never will be,' said Thomas.

He had not quite managed to kick over the traces. He had restocked the fish pools and rebuilt the paillottes, though customers willing to risk the journey had become a rarity. In his stained shirt and old trousers, he toured the banks with cutters in hand, exclaiming like some modern-day Andrew Marvell over the delights of his jewel-green kingdom. He could not begrudge the money he had lavished on the farm over the years for, like the lawyer, his feelings for the land were those of the romantic lover. ‘It's like a beautiful woman, you don't count what you've given it.'

He appeared to harbour little rancour, attributing the repeated pillaging to the hunter-gatherer instincts on which the Congolese relied for survival until so very recently. But something in this man who attributed his career to ‘eternal optimism' appeared to have snapped this time, perhaps overwhelmed by the realisation that those around him never regarded him as anything more than just another white colonialist to be taken for a ride at worst, deferred to at best. Since the last looting, he said, the couple have given up their long-held hopes of building something permanent and spending their last years in Congo. ‘The punch just isn't there any more. It's obvious that nobody here understood what we were trying to do. We have no more hope. All we want is to be left in peace.' One sensed gentle pressure from his wife, who had not been well. Her face did not have his childlike gleam, it looked bleached by disappointment and betrayal. ‘We put our hearts into this place twice and our hearts were broken,' she said. ‘We have been broken. You try and you try and you try, and then you just run out of energy.'

Now in their sixties, the two found themselves caught on the horns of a financial dilemma common amongst the expatriates. Having always assumed that they would spend their retirement in Congo, all their savings were invested in the farm, which would be impossible to sell in the current political climate. They no longer
believed they could build a future here, but with the farm all they had to show for their efforts, they risked the miserly existence of the pensionless in Europe if they left.

Vaguely, Thomas talked about finding a manager who could be trusted to run the farm in his absence and send the proceeds on to Europe. But even the ‘eternal optimist' struggled to believe in the existence of such a man. The alternative scenario was all too easy to imagine: falling standards in the restaurant, livestock that mysteriously disappeared and then one day the missing manager, the faked accounts, and a clearing returning slowly to the bush.

And behind the financial problem you sensed the deeper, more philosophical quandary. The wilderness that had intoxicated Conrad's anti-hero had transformed the lowly construction worker into something rich and strange. Even if in the end Thomas's dream had shrivelled, for a time he had ruled over his verdant empire, revelling in the pleasure of moulding the landscape, watching his seedlings stretch towards the sky and his fish grow fat in the warm brown waters. After nearly half a century in Congo, Thomas, like his fruit trees, had become a strange type of hybrid, neither European nor African. It was impossible to imagine the battered lord of this riverbank kingdom hobnobbing with the locals in a French village.

The prospect, he reluctantly acknowledged, horrified him. ‘I feel ill at ease in Europe. I find people have let themselves go. Maybe they've had it too easy but they seem to have lost their initiative. I know returning won't be easy. But I'm faced with a Corneillean choice—a retirement here, full of problems and hassle, and one over there, in alien surroundings. It's my own fault. I should never have started, let alone stayed so long.'

Driving back to Kinshasa in the golden light of early evening, the mood in the car was meditative. ‘I'm willing to bet that in a year they'll still be there, saying they're about to go but not quite picking up the courage to leave,' said the lawyer. ‘In their heart of hearts, they know they'll never find the manager they're looking for. I've seen it so many times. They can't bear to leave and they can't bear to stay.'

On the highway back into town, groups of heavily armed soldiers were materialising out of the long grass with alarming suddenness. The president of Zimbabwe was expected in town, so security was being tightened. At the roadblocks, soldiers were shouting in angry Lingala at the creeping cars, pocketing bribes and ordering passengers out to be searched. The noise and nastiness shattered the lazy Sunday mood. We were being reminded who was boss.

Queuing to have my bag inspected, I looked up and spotted the Thomas couple, returning to their home in Kinshasa after a day at the farm. They were squeezed into the front of a small green pick-up, with a Congolese girl and a branch of bananas in the back. After Zaireanisation and three rounds of looting, the military roadblocks represented a more subtle form of economic looting. They would ensure the number of visitors to their farm and restaurant remained at a dribble.

They had either not understood the soldiers' orders to descend or could not be bothered to obey, and were both still behind the wheel. The setting sun was in their eyes and Thomas was squinting into the light, his face creased into well-established wrinkles. Beside him, his wife looked fatigued. They spotted me at the roadside and smiled a moment before being waved through, escaping the frisking. In this most trivial of encounters, at least, luck had been on their side.