What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (17 page)

DOUGLAS KEAR WAS A
Hamilton man who had been one of a group of tourists kidnapped while on a gorilla safari in Africa. This was international news in 1998. Efforts had been made by his family and at diplomatic levels to find out what was happening, with no success. I knew Africa quite well by then. The British introduced rubber stamps and carbon paper, so the bureaucracy is extraordinary. Add the corruption and the chiefs to that and you have a very complicated mixture. I understood what the people there liked and didn’t like when it came to foreigners coming in.

It was obvious that the people trying to locate Douglas Kear
were getting nowhere. No one could even prove whether he was dead or alive. All they knew was that he had been alive when the kidnappers released a couple of the hostages. They were believed to be in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, somewhere close to the border with Uganda and Rwanda. That is a very specific, quite small area, largely consisting of impenetrable forest, in a very large country.

The idea of finding him, or simply trying to find him in that sort of environment was very exciting. Derek was excited because this was not just an international story but one with a strong New Zealand angle, unlike most of the things I was doing.

I went to see Kear’s family before I left. I didn’t want to give anyone false hope and didn’t shy away from the fact he was quite possibly already dead. That said, I thought I might at least find out what had happened to him or get close to the people who took him, which no one had managed to do.

One of the Radio Pacific copywriters stopped me and made enquiries about my sanity in light of my plans. A lot of the things I did were obviously dangerous once I was doing them, but not so obviously dangerous during the planning. This was a case where what I was doing was unquestionably dangerous — attempting to track down people who were at best hardened killers.

I first flew into Uganda, landing at Entebbe airport, but my ultimate destination was a town called Kisoro, which was the starting point for most of the gorilla tours.

While in Kampala, I went to the offices of the local newspaper,
New Vision,
to see if I could drum up some publicity for my search. I thought that might speed things up by smoking out someone close to the kidnappers. They gave me a great
front-page
story about the search for Douglas Kear which threw up some good leads. I also told the journalist I spoke to I needed someone in Kisoro who knew his way around and could cut some corners and liaise with the various parties to find out
information for me. He recommended a cousin who I took on as an assistant.

I flew out of Entebbe airport in a small plane. As we took off I could see some of Idi Amin’s planes off to one side, slowly rusting away. And, within moments, I was flying over Lake Victoria and looking at the hippos in the water.

Kisoro was smaller than I had imagined. There was some communications infrastructure but I would have been lost without my satellite phone. There were places to stay that could almost be called hotels. Mine was a collection of huts in a compound with a kitchen and a bar area. The shower was a big piece of plastic on top of a mud roof that would fill up with rain water and heat during the day, and the plumbing was very sparse. My bed was made of thatched sticks but it had a mattress because I was in the best room. I loved it all. I got a discounted rate on the best room because I was staying for so long, and possibly because I was the only guest they had.

I met the cousin, Didas, who didn’t know much about the story but did know a lot about the various factions there and people I needed to speak to. I reasoned that the more people knew about me, the likelier I would be to get in touch with the kidnappers.

‘I want everyone in this village to know exactly who I am when they see me,’ I told Didas. ‘I want them to know exactly why I am here, exactly where I am staying. I need them to know I’m not in support of any faction or another. I’m not with the police. I’m not with the tour company. I’m not here to make a judgement or bring someone to justice. I just want to find out what happened to this man.’

Because I behaved so differently from everyone else who had come looking for Douglas Kear, there was no distrust
surrounding
me. Progress was slow, however. Near the town was a knoll where I used to go sometimes when I felt like a bit of peace
and quiet. It was in Uganda but you could touch the Congo from there and you could almost touch Rwanda. You could look down on the mist in the forest and know that was where the gorillas were. It was the strangest feeling, the same as I had when I stood in Mother House in Calcutta and thought: ‘Even if nothing comes of this expedition, being able to experience this has made the trip worthwhile.’

I soon felt at home in Kisoro. With time on my hands I got to know the people at the hotel well. I organised a working bee. We planted flowers and whitewashed the walls. I showed them how to prune and train their roses. I also got sick to death of eating goat, which was what you were fed on if you were prosperous. There were about ten ways of cooking a goat and they were all exactly the same.

‘We need fish,’ I said. ‘I fancy a bit of fish. I go to the markets all the time and they’ve got fish at the markets.’

‘Oh no, we can’t get you fish,’ the hotel cook said. So I went to the market myself and bought a huge fish, took it back, slapped it down in the filthy area where the chef used to cook and said, ‘This is my dinner.’

They laughed. I ignored them.

‘Cook it up for dinner. We’ll all have it, it’s a huge fish.’

By dinner time I was sitting in the dining hall and the room was full of people, with more looking through the windows, all there to watch crazy Paul eat a fish. It looked fantastic when it came out. I made the manager sit down with me and we both had a plate. I took the first bite. There is no way I can adequately convey to you how awful it tasted. It was like eating shit that had been cooked in vomit. I’m sure that fish had subsisted on nothing but excrement its entire life. And I have a sneaking suspicion the locals all knew that.

One day I noticed a change in the town’s mood. Normally the air was heavy with menace, but this day there was an almost
festive feeling in the town, with no festival planned that I was aware of.

‘Something’s different,’ I said to the manager.

‘The locusts are coming,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘Probably tomorrow, maybe the next day.’

‘Is there anything I need to be aware of?’

‘Just make sure your door is closed. It will be much excitement. They are a delicacy, nothing tastes like fresh locusts. Then, after the locusts go — fried locusts.’

I thought locusts meant plants being devoured and the clothes being stripped from people’s backs. The next day there were no locusts but there was increased excitement. People were collecting up every container they could find, every plastic bag and plastic bottle.

That night they rewired their huts and put all their light bulbs outside. They stood and waited, and when the first locusts arrived, they grabbed them out of the air as they flew past and stuck them in their mouths. A few hours later, there was a wall of locusts and people were frantically grabbing them and stuffing them in their containers. By the next morning the whole place was just swarming with locusts. By that afternoon, there were dead locusts everywhere. That night, there was a huge feast of barbecued locusts. And within two days it was all over. They came, they were conquered and they left.

Behind all this, violence was always in the background. This was a time when there was a lot of distrust in the air and a lot of killing going on. Some people called it intertribal conflict. Other people called it a war. I concluded that the difference was merely the size of your tribe.

Every night there were murders. The impenetrable forest was populated by pygmies who came into the village during the day and were very hostile to everyone. One used to play his guitar
for you and then expect to be paid. If you didn’t hand over any money, he hit you with his guitar. I thought of hitting him back but he was probably much stronger than me.

One day I went to see the impenetrable forest. I did not expect to be able to get in, it being impenetrable, but I got in a little way. I didn’t want to go very far because as well as the pygmies it was inhabited by a lot of anacondas. But it was as extraordinary as any natural phenomenon I have ever encountered; it was so fertile that when I crouched down I could see things growing. Climbers moved before my eyes.

One especially bad night some 50 people were murdered in the village. I could hear the screams from my hotel. Next day, I walked to a market across the border in the Congo. One of the murder victims had been slit from his throat to his genitals and pegged open on the path as a warning to others not to support his group: ‘Don’t help these people or this will happen to you.’ Women and children going to market to sell or trade their six potatoes had to walk past this grotesque sight.

There were not many other foreigners around. The violence had slowed the tourist trade right down, with few people keen enough to risk kidnapping to look at some gorillas. One aim of the kidnappers was to destabilise the Ugandan economy by disrupting the tourist industry and in that they succeeded spectacularly. The whole time I was there only one group of tourists appeared. They stayed only two days.

In a short period of time I gained a lot of intelligence and I was pretty sure that the Interahamwe, the Hutu paramilitary organisation, had taken Douglas Kear. Because of my contacts, other people came through wanting to cash in on my intelligence. A pair of Africans from Kampala attempted to befriend me. They wanted messages taken to the Interahamwe. This was all to do with Ugandan, Congolese and, to a degree, Rwandan politics, and I wanted no part of it.

‘If you help us, we can help you,’ they said, but I couldn’t really be sure who they were. I didn’t understand their motivations and had no way of finding out.

One day I got a message telling me to call the British high commissioner in Kampala.

‘Mr Henry, this is the best possible intelligence we have,’ said the high commissioner when I finally got through. ‘You are being hunted down and you will be killed. You need to know that the only responsible, reasonable thing you can do is get out of there now. And I mean right now. You should not be there tonight. There is one other thing you need to know: if you choose to stay, no one is going to come in to get you out if you go missing. You are entirely on your own.’

‘Well, I feel I’m getting quite close to finding out what’s going on,’ I said.

‘You must be getting quite close for people to want to kill you,’ he said.

So in a way the trip had been a success, because I had got closer than anyone else. But I hung up wondering how I could explain to people that was a success and that this was the time to leave. Was I leaving because I was scared or because I was not stupid? Why was I leaving instead of staying when I was so close and could presumably go all the way?

So I decided to stay.

After that phone call I started sleeping on the floor in case anyone tried to shoot me in my bed. Every night I would wake up at the slightest sound, which was often gunfire. It was an uncomfortable and unpleasant time.

When I needed to arrange meetings I communicated with people I didn’t know and couldn’t see via messages I put in newspapers with my contact details and where I could be found. There would have been no point making my location secret. One of the people who worked for me passed on the newspapers to
people in the impenetrable forest or wherever they would be likely to see them. Then he was killed, and I had reason to think it was because he was a local and helping me. That changed things for me. It was my adventure but it wasn’t just my life at risk. And for what? I was sure Douglas Kear was dead. Staying didn’t really make sense.

Not long after, one of the Africans from Kampala who had contacted me before came to see me.

‘We need to go and meet some people,’ he said. ‘I’ve arranged it.’

It was a four-hour walk to get to the meeting place, and I had a very bad feeling about it. I thought about calling it off, even as we were on our way. Then I realised that, as dangerous as it was, this could be as close as I would get to finding out what happened to Douglas Kear. So I carried on, knowing it was quite dangerous. We came to a clearing where the meeting was to take place, and while we were waiting my companion told me he had a gun. I was furious.

‘You shouldn’t have brought a gun,’ I said. ‘There is no chance that you can kill all of the people that are coming to this meeting before they kill us, so why would you kill any? You kill one and there’s no chance we’re going to stay alive.’