The Ragged Edge of the World (17 page)

The plan on arrival from Wamba was to meet up with the head of a palm oil plantation partially owned by an American expatriate named Elwin Blattner, and then take Blattner's boat—described as a fast and comfortable cabin cruiser—up the Maranga River to the Lomako River to the research station, which was then run by Richard Malenky and Nancy Thompson-Handler. Lomako was actually not far as the crow flies from Wamba, but there was no passable road or navigable river that would get you there directly.

By this point there were few passable roads in all of Zaire. Harry had told us that within his memory one could drive from Kinshasa to Kisingani, a few hundred miles east of Basankuso, stopping at filling stations and well-maintained hotels along the way. Now only a few thousand kilometers of the 144,000 kilometers in gazetted roads were still passable. During the dry season many river towns were completely isolated when the water got too low for boats.

We'd made the deal for our boat in Kinshasa with Elwin, who had assured us that his staff in Basankuso would be alerted and ready and waiting for us when we arrived. Elwin, who had recently been profiled in the
New York Times
as a nice Jewish boy from New York who had decided to become an entrepreneur in Zaire, seemed every bit the competent MBA, and despite the certainty of the unexpected in Zaire, I figured that orders from the patron would be heeded.

Things start going awry upon our arrival at Basankuso's rudimentary airport. Mike had been bantering with the locals, and became alert when he heard a rumor that our boat was about to head down the Lulonga River to the Congo and toward Mbandaka, the opposite direction from Lomako. We cadged a lift from the local Mill Hill mission vehicle and raced to the port. There, waving Elwin's card, we confronted various Compagnie de Commerce et des Plantations (CCP) officials, and we gave them the news that the boss of all bosses had promised us that his boat would be available for this most important journalistic mission.

We could see the boat, or what appeared to be the boat, given that it was completely covered with Zairois. Elwin had made it sound like a sleek vessel, but what we encountered was a run-down wreck surrounded by befuddled people looking at the engine and scratching their heads. So the rumors were true: The chef de personnel had plans to take the boat to Mbandaka, and it looked as though he had paying customers. I doubt that Elwin knew about this little business venture. Mike exacted the chef's word that he would not leave until we cleared the matter up with the plantation's general manager.

We jumped into our commandeered mission vehicle and goaded the driver to hurry to the plantation, which was 16 kilometers away. There we were greeted warmly by the director general, who told us that he'd gotten a message from Elwin that we were coming. He reassured us that the chef would not leave without his say-so, and gave us a letter confirming that we had the use of the boat. Once again we hit warp speed on rutted roads getting back to the port.

There histrionically cringing officials told us that the chef and the boat had departed, despite their efforts to stop him. Apparently, he had decided that the amount he would net from this excursion would more than compensate for any loss of income that would follow from his being fired when he returned. I was furious, and when an official said,
“Il est parti
,
”
I responded,
“Il est fini!
” Mike went ballistic, scattering dark threats like cluster bombs to everyone in earshot, before we stormed back to the Mill Hill mission, hoping to find lodging. By now I'd been spending so much time at Catholic missions that I might as well have converted.

That evening we had a beer with Father Dick, another member of the Mill Hill gerontocracy in Zaire, and Father Otto, an affable Gyro Gearloose type who spent much of his time fiddling with half-assembled, obsolete electronic equipment. Father Dick brought us up to date with the inexorable decline of Basankuso. Equateur had the misfortune, shared with much of Africa, of producing goods that the rest of the world was either giving up or making more efficiently: coffee, palm oil (rich in saturated fats), and rubber (easily replaced with synthetics). Inefficiency and corruption added costs that made even these products uncompetitive. Asian palm oil, shipped in from halfway around the world, was offered at the port of Kinshasa at exactly half the price of locally produced oil from the CCP plantation in Basankuso.

The result was that money had dried up like a puddle in the sun. Father Dick said that in the early 1970s the priests would go down to the local cafés and share a beer with townspeople who had gotten off work. It was pleasant and helped seal the mission's bonds with the community. Now a beer cost a day's wages and was rarely to be seen. If they did go to the few remaining cafés, the only people who could afford to join them there would be state officials on the fiddle. The Mill Hill fathers avoided such encounters, because being seen with the roundly disliked officials would cost them the trust of the townsfolk. Father Dick said a bit wistfully that he missed the old days.

I ask Father Dick why the town seemed so devoid of goods. Earlier in the day, I couldn't find even a Coke, the world's most ubiquitous product. He explained that the lack of hard currency was one problem. (Indeed, during one of my visits just after Zaire switched to a new currency, preparatory to launching yet another round of hyperinflation, many in Equateur continued to use the ostensibly worthless old bills because people knew that at least no one would be printing any more of them.) The other problem was the disappearance of the
petits commerçants,
the traders who used to deliver goods to the interior. As the plantations fell into disrepair and closed down, the transportation system crumbled (I was to discover how much it had crumbled in the days to come), money vanished, and traders found it no longer worth their while to deal with the thousand hassles and payoffs required to get deliveries, particularly since no one had any money to buy anything.

The scarcity of money produced demographic oddities. Frans had told me about virtual towns springing up around potholes in eastern Zaire. Long lines of trucks would be backed up as they gingerly negotiated the deeper potholes, and locals would gather around the stopped trucks, setting up food stands. The settlers would give the villages names from the Mobutu family. Prostitutes would flock to these spots, too, until a little impromptu village had sprung up. Naturally, the locals would have little incentive to fix the pothole.

These villages and other truckstops brought AIDS to the interior as well as goods. Even in 1991 AIDS was everywhere (in fact, AIDS was so prevalent in Central Africa by the 1990s that I'm surprised there has not yet been a population collapse). When I asked him what the mission was doing about it, he said that they were handing out condoms and trying to educate the locals to use them. Thinking of the pope's position on condoms, I raised an eyebrow. “It's a long way to Rome,” replied Father Dick.

After drinks we sent several messages by radio to the mission at Monpoko, 120 kilometers downriver, with the notion of intercepting the boat and ordering it to return. (In the end, it didn't limp back into Monpoko until late the following afternoon, too late to do us any good.) Mike struck up a conversation with the mission's sentinel, who stood guard with a spear. When he told us he was from the Lomako area, I could see the germ of an idea form in Mike's stubborn Canadian brain.

It turned out that Mike had long had dreams of setting up an ecotourist site in Lomako, and he was determined to get there whatever the cost. I, meanwhile, had to get to a gorilla sanctuary in eastern Zaire and then to Burundi to meet up with Jane Goodall. Without a fast boat, the trip to Lomako by motorized pirogue would take at least three days, assuming we could even get something organized. I would obviously have to skip Lomako. By radio I asked Elwin to see whether any planes might be coming through Basankuso in the coming days. In the meantime I helped Mike get provisioned for his trip.

After he hired various members of the sentinel's family to find a
baleinière
to take him to Lomako, we headed into the center of this ruined and crumbling colonial town to buy provisions. The streets were rutted and scattered with the useless hulks of abandoned and stripped automobiles. Untended gardens sprouted weeds everywhere. At the local store what few goods were available lay strewn about, with piles of soap on the floor and, incongruously, an ancient stack of scratched 45 rpm records perched on a table. The look and feel were postapocalyptic.

Basankuso was becoming Africanized again. Within a few decades all traces of the colonial era may have vanished. I kept thinking about an article by William Pfaff, who argued that forty years of Russian domination could not erase Eastern Europe's millennium years of orientation toward the West. Why, then, should a century of colonialism have succeeded in erasing cultural attitudes that dated back thousands of years, and that were supported daily by climate and geography?

It is possible to meet rudimentary daily needs with very little effort in much of Africa, particularly if you are a man, since women do so much of the work. Mike took this idea even further, arguing that part of the nutritional problems in the interior were due to the typical village preference to grow manioc, which required relatively little work, instead of more varied and nutritious crops that might demand more attention.

Sunday morning we walked into town, where Mike haggled with fishermen over the rental price of a pirogue. One fellow we spoke to was a dignified older man who looked as though he had been working the river forever. I liked the cut of his jib, and we arranged to meet with him again that afternoon.

Back at the mission we were introduced to a newcomer, Father Kerwin, who was en route to another Mill Hill mission situated in Waka. He bemoaned the quality and paucity of young recruits for the mission, noting that many joined the priesthood with mixed motives. In this impoverished country, the priesthood was actually a step up for almost everyone. More to the point, in the interior, it was the fastest way to get a car. Missionaries, using French, referred to the priesthood as
“vocation Toyota.”

Efforts to find a plane proved fruitless, so I prepared to spend two more days at the mission while waiting for the next Missionary Air Fellowship flight. I helped Mike with his final preparations for his trip upriver. It was beginning to look like Stanley's expedition, and Mike seemed to be well on his way to becoming the biggest employer in town. He had hired the three sons of the sentinel, as well as two river men with a boat and a motor. Apart from money, Mike brought to the negotiations a drum of fuel, which was as scarce and expensive as caviar. The director general, a decent man who was mortified by the loss of face of having his subordinate disobey a direct order, sold him the fuel at cost as compensation for the disaster.

Mike's departure was delayed by some last-minute negotiations when the captain's unsavory cousin and an equally unsavory companion tried to insert themselves into the trip. The piratical-looking cousin insisted that Mike had agreed to a price 100,000 Zaires higher, and Mike ended up splitting the difference in order to devote his energy to keeping the unsavory cousin off the dugout. I watched the proceedings with joy in my heart that I would not be going along, and then waved bon voyage as Mike and his dubious crew pushed off and started putt-putting upstream.

With time on my hands I decided to follow a path into the fields to find the headwaters of the endless procession of women commuting by foot past the mission. Stanley wrote that women were the beasts of burden in Africa, and apparently nothing had changed in the 100-plus years since he offered that insight. Father Dick said that one reason that the women live longer than the men in Equateur might be the physical endurance they gained from their physical labor. Another might be that they don't have the leisure to drink and smoke as the men did. In Wamba the men often could not bear the loads regularly hauled by their wives.

The women carried their burdens strapped to their backs with cords looped around their foreheads and shoulders, which led to their building up huge calluses. Father Piet had earlier suggested that I conduct my own survey and see how many younger women were making the trek. I saw very few young women, leaving me to wonder what they were doing.

To be fair to the men, they did clear the fields in the countryside in the dry season, and they fished and hunted. But in the towns they did very little. Mike said that in Kinshasa the female employees were often more disciplined and honest. I wondered what kind of state Zaire might become if the women could take charge.

The next morning I went down to see Father Piet's woodworking shop. Using local labor, the shop produced an impressive variety of doors, chairs, and other furniture for all the missions, as well as for people who bought them on commission. At the shop a group of apprentices waited for instructions from Piet. He told me that until three months earlier he had had an experienced crew of woodworkers, some of whom had been there for ten years. Unfortunately he discovered that they were robbing him, and after giving warnings to several of them, he finally caught one of them red-handed. The man revealed that the entire crew of seven had organized a ring to steal wood, tools and furniture in cahoots with the watchman. Piet fired them all, and for several months he was so depressed that he worked alone.