Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

  As the day’s heat built up, I began to doze. Images in my mind began to blur. I thought of Stanley coming down this same stretch of the river, his boat bristling with guns pointing at the river bank. And here I was, almost 130 years later, with a Uruguayan sailor peering down the sights of a General Purpose Machine Gun trained on the same river bank. And the gun he was using came from Belgium, the country that had colonised the Congo on the back of Stanley’s discovery. It all seemed a rather strange amalgam of history folding in on itself. I fell asleep to the throbbing of the diesel engines.

  ‘Cocodrilo’ was the word that roused me. I did not have to understand Spanish to understand what they were talking about. The engines had stopped on both patrol boats and the crews had gathered on the port side pointing at a distant sand bank.

  ‘We have not seen a crocodile before on the river, so we will go to investigate,’ Cdr Wilson was grinning broadly as he spoke. He then looked over my shoulder and ordered a rubber dinghy to be made ready for a river safari.

  It was the highlight of the day for the five or so sailors chosen to come along. They joshed and giggled like Girl Guides on a field trip as we headed towards the basking crocodile, a large specimen at least three metres in length. Commander Wilson let out a sigh as he peered at it through his binoculars. ‘It is so big, so big,’ he whispered and ordered the engines to be cut.

  Crocodiles, hippos and other river wildlife were once a common sight along the Congo River. My mother told me of large pods of hippos she saw from her river boat in 1958, sending up jets of water as they shifted their bulk out of the way of the boat. But the Congo’s collapse has led to nearly all river life being shot out by starving riverside villagers desperate for protein. Our crocodile sighting was a rare treat.

  As the day wore on, I grew increasingly anxious. I would soon have to make a decision: stay with the Uruguayans and head back to Kindu, or leave the sanctuary of their boat and risk everything on a river descent by pirogue.

  By the time Cdr Wilson summoned me shortly before sunset, a wonderful sense of confidence had settled on me.

  ‘This is as far as I can take you, I am afraid. We are still a long way from Ubundu. Are you sure you want to go?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  Barking orders to his men, he gestured to the side of the patrol boat, where a small, black rubber dinghy with an outboard was being readied by a crew member. As I clambered down into the dinghy with the commander, all the other Uruguayan crew members gathered on the side of the larger boat. They had obviously been told I was planning to go it alone. Several of them silently shook their heads as we peeled away and headed towards the shore.

  The commander said nothing as the river bank approached. We were heading to where some pirogues had been drawn up on a beach beneath a high river bank. The sound of the little outboard engine had stirred some villagers into life and I could see them hurrying down to the water’s edge.

  Cdr Wilson raised his eyebrows, said nothing and nodded. The dinghy slid up onto the west bank of the Congo River and I jumped out with my gear. He shook me by the hand and told me that, according to his map, we were near the village of Lowa. He wished me luck and pushed off. The sound of the dinghy’s engine slowly fading into silence as the boat disappeared in the twilight is a memory that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

  8.

  Pirogue Progress

  Stanley Falls as recorded by H.M. Stanley in 1878

  Author approaches Stanley Falls by pirogue, August 2004

  THE CONGO HAD already taught me one clear lesson: towns bad, open spaces good. It is a country where gatherings of people promise not sanctuary and support, but threats and coercion. As I stood lonely and terrified on the river’s edge that evening, I knew the safest place for me was out on the river, away from Lowa and its potential for trouble.

  My legs ached with fear, but I tried to stride up the river bank with confidence, approaching a group of men sitting silently on the ground next to a quiver of beached pirogues.

  ‘I need to reach Ubundu by the river. Who can take me?’ I asked in French.

  My question stirred an immediate flurry of discussion and after a few minutes a tall, wide-faced man in his twenties signalled for me to join him a few paces away from the group. For negotiations, he wanted privacy.

  ‘It is more than one hundred and fifty kilometres to Ubundu. That will take four days if I come with you alone. It will be quicker if we take more than one paddler.’

  ‘How many dollars will it cost?’

  He paused and tried to look away, but my fixed gaze held his attention.

  ‘The maximum number of paddlers on our pirogue is four. That will cost one hundred dollars for everything.’

  Now it was time for me to pause. I did not want to seem gullible by accepting his first offer, so I countered.

  ‘I will pay fifty dollars if you get me there in four days, and double if you get me there in two. But I want to leave now – right now.’

  My offer met with immediate approval. He span on his heel, shouted back that his name was Malike Bade, ordered me not to speak to any other paddler and ran over towards the others, snapping instructions. Three of them immediately jumped up. All four of them jogged up a steep muddy ramp cut into the river bank and disappeared out of sight. Darkness was gathering quickly and I wanted to be on my way. I did not like the look of an armed man who had just arrived on the beach wearing the tatty remnants of a uniform and clutching a firearm. He started to approach me. Remembering the trick used by my pygmy friend, Georges, back in Katanga, I rummaged in my bag and offered him a UN pamphlet. It had the desired effect. He grabbed it and walked away triumphantly as a gaggle of children mobbed him to demand a peek.

  My crew of four reappeared, each carrying nothing but a paddle and something small bundled up in banana leaves. In the failing light I could not quite make out what it was until they formed a circle, dropped onto their haunches and unwrapped what was effectively a fast-food meal. Inside the leaves was a wedge of cassava bread and some small, bony fish. The men were fuelling up for the journey. Apart from their paddles they brought nothing – no change of clothes, no cooking pots, nothing to eat or drink. The journey back upstream from Ubundu, against the current, would take at least twice as long as the descent, so they could be leaving their home for more than a week, but they were empty-handed.

  They wolfed down their meal, still managing to sift and spit the fish bones from each pulpy mouthful. Within a few minutes they stood up and walked together to the river’s edge. They had a cocky swagger, like a gang of urban punks in a city. Strange, given that on the muddy bank of the upper Congo River we were about as far away from an urban environment as it is possible to be. They approached the pirogues drawn up on the water’s edge. There seemed nothing special about the one they chose. Like the others it was just a bare, hollowed-out tree trunk containing a puddle of water from a rainstorm earlier that day. One of the paddlers used his hand to bail it dry, before I lugged my gear on board and prepared to settle myself in the middle of the boat.

  ‘Wait,’ Malike shouted and hopped back onto the river bank before looking for something among the grass. It was almost pitch-black, but he grunted with satisfaction and came back to the pirogue offering me a low, home-made wicker tripod seat. I thanked him and sat on it. It made me feel a little self-conscious. Did this special treatment make me no different from the Belgian hunter from 1913 with his hammock borne by porters?

  With two paddlers taking up their station at the helm and two at the stern, we pushed off. There was no current to speak of, but within a few strokes the pirogue was far enough away from the beach for the militiaman to be lost from sight in the failing light.

  After a day of looming anxiety over whether to leave the safety of the Uruguayan patrol boat, that moment of slipping out onto the river provided a blissful release. I arranged myself on my little stool. The low wicker seat was smaller than my backside, but it was surprisingly comfortable
and as the paddlers began to find their rhythm, I let my fingertips trail in the river water. It was as warm and soothing as a bath.

  I ran my wet fingers across the coarse hull of the pirogue, tracing gouges left by the boatmaker’s adze. They felt like a rough-hewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed and cursed by this great natural phenomenon. It is a waterway that offers much, but which has run with blood from the moment Stanley paddled past here aboard the Lady Alice at the head of a flotilla of stolen pirogues. At every stage of the Congo’s history, the river had sluiced away its dead – natives shot on their war canoes by Stanley’s people in the 1870s; agents of Leopold drowned during clashes with Arab slavers in the 1890s; Belgian officers killed by disease as they toiled to build a modern colony high up an African river in the 1930s; Congolese rebels mown down by white mercenaries in the 1960s; civilians slaughtered in 2000 by African armies sent to the Congo by its greedy neighbours.

  The modern world had used this river for its toehold in central Africa. Towns had been built along its banks. Motorboats had been assembled here. But while the towns were now abandoned and the boats left to rust, the one constant was the pirogue. It gave the river its pulse, moving people and goods across a swathe of central Africa that was all but abandoned by the outside world.

  I sat in the darkness, thinking of my journey so far and how remote this area had become. A yachtsman on the southern seas or a climber in the Himalayas had more chance of rescue than I did. The Uruguayans were long gone and would not be back to this stretch of water until their fuel supplies were replenished in another month or so; anyway, I had no way of communicating with them. High on the Congo there were no helicopters to summon, no rescue teams to call on. I felt very alone.

  But instead of being overwhelmed by helplessness, I found it liberating. My journey through the Congo had its own unique category. It did not quite do it justice to call it adventure travel, and it certainly was not pleasure travel. My Congo journey deserved its own category: ordeal travel. At every turn I faced challenges, difficulties and threats when in the Congo. The challenge was to assess and choose the option best suited to making progress. But there were moments when there were no alternatives, or shortcuts or clever ideas. At these times, ordeal travel became really no ordeal at all.

  That evening on my pirogue was one such moment. I felt I had no alternative other than to commit myself utterly to the river. There was nothing left other than, quite literally, to go with the flow. I felt horribly alone, but more than at any moment on my trip I also felt relaxed and content.

  My sense of well-being grew as a full moon rose brightly in the east, its beam perfectly reflected in the broad, still waters of the river. I pushed the stool out of my way and stretched out on the gritty bottom of the boat and, to the gentle sound of scraping as the paddles rattled down the side of the pirogue, I fell into a deep sleep.

  A clap of thunder woke me. I opened my eyes and at first I could see nothing. The moon was long gone, but a flicker of lightning gave a nasty snapshot of busy, angry-looking clouds overhead. Pulling myself upright, I could no longer hear the scraping sound of the paddles on the hull. They were drowned out by the pounding of freshly whipped waves that made the hull of the pirogue shudder and vibrate.

  There was an urgency in the strokes of the four paddlers that I had not noticed when we set off from Lowa.

  ‘We must find shelter, or the rain will fill the pirogue and we will capsize,’ shouted Malike, struggling to make himself heard above the noise of the wind and waves. I thought of the crocodile I had seen the day before. Capsizing would not be good.

  As the paddlers made for the shore, we raced a curtain of rain that I could hear, but not see, approaching from behind. We lost the race by only a short distance, but it was still enough to see me soaked through, struggling to keep my camera bag clear of the water welling in the bottom of the boat. I had felt sorry for the paddlers when I saw how little they brought with them, but now I was the one with the problem of having to deal with wet equipment.

  The paddlers had spotted a break in the riverside forest and some tied-up pirogues being clattered by the waves, so I knew we were near a village. Slithering up a muddy bank, we found ourselves at a thatched hut shuddering in the wind. There was nobody to ask permission from, so we just bundled in through the small door and collapsed on the floor. By the time I had retrieved my soggy head torch and cast a light around the room, my four companions were asleep, their limbs all folded together for warmth like the blades on a Swiss Army knife. I turned off the torch and settled myself on the ground, watching as every so often the mud-hut walls glowed to the flicker of lightning outside.

  A very watery dawn broke over the village of Mutshaliko. We were on the west bank of the upper Congo River and by the time I emerged from the thatched hut, where we had gained sanctuary, the sun was clear of the horizon, but struggling to break through the remnants of the storm clouds. I sat down outside on a large log and tried to spread out some of my wet gear so that it would dry.

  Three of the paddlers slept on, but Malike was already awake.

  ‘I must go speak with the village chief, to pay our respects,’ he said before disappearing down a track leading away from the river bank.

  There was nobody around. From the top of the river bank I had a perfect view out over the full breadth of the river. With the sun so low in the sky, the greens of the forest on my side were picked out perfectly. There was the bright emerald green from banana leaves, all ribbed and symmetrical with a bright waxy sheen; a lighter peridot green from reeds swaying in the muddy water’s edge; and a green so dark it was almost black on menacing-looking palm fronds, the same shape and sharpness as a broadsword. Eating biscuits given to me for the journey by the bishop’s family back in Kindu, I watched a pied kingfisher, its black body flecked with white, as it darted along the river’s edge before it picked a suitable overhanging branch from which to spy. For minutes it sat motionless, before plunging into the storm-churned water and emerging with a silver morsel in its beak.

  The bird flew away when Malike returned. He was not alone. Behind him trouped a group of children and an elderly, grey-haired man wearing a baseball cap. I turned round and stood up to shake the man’s hand.

  ‘My name is Liye Oloba,’ he said. ‘I am the administrative secretary for the village.’

  He joined me at my jumble sale of drying clothes and I asked him about the village and how it had fared during the war.

  ‘When I was young, the ferryboats used to come by here almost every day, up and down, but they never stopped in our village. Our place is too small. So even though I have not seen a boat for years, I don’t think there is any great difference. The only difference is that gunmen come from time to time and take everything. They came through here a few times in the last few years, but we don’t know where they come from or who they are fighting for. They just take our chickens and our goats and our cassava and then leave.’

  His baseball cap bore a message in English: ‘Not Perfect But Damn Close’. It came from the busy trade in donated clothes that has grown up between the developed world and Africa. Clothes given in the West to charity shops are sold for peppercorn sums to traders more interested in quantity than quality. The traders bale them up and ship them here in bulk for sale in street markets. No matter that they are so tatty or unfashionable in Western eyes as to have no value, here in Africa people are willing to pay good money for them, and the bizarre clothing I saw all over the Congo suggested it was big business. My favourite was a T-shirt that had obviously been given to contestants in a 1994 pistol-shooting competition in Dallas, Texas, only to end up, more than a decade later, as the main component of a Congolese villager’s wardrobe. I wondered by what meandering path Liye’s baseball cap ended up on the banks of the Congo River.

  I asked him about the houses.

  ‘The river floods every year, so we must be able to rebuild our houses,’ explained Liye. ‘The waters sometimes
carry everything away, so we must start again using what we find in the forest. Those modern houses built during the colonial period do not last. They are not suitable for our conditions.’

  He explained that flooding was regarded as an occupational hazard for the subsistence farmers of his village. The village had to be built close to the river because it was here that the best soils were found, washed down by seasonal floods. But those same floods meant the houses were threatened with destruction. It was a classic development trap – to survive, these villagers lived somewhere that any attempt to build bigger, better homes was wasted because of the flood threat.

  Liye had been friendly enough, but suddenly he changed. Leaning forward he started to whisper, ‘I have a lot of work to do as the administrative secretary here and I need money to pay for our work.’ His face was almost touching mine, and this first request was made sotto voce. He almost seemed embarrassed to be asking. But when I hesitated he started to threaten me, demanding to see written permission from the local militia commander for my presence in the village. In the face of these threats I caved in, slipping a ten-dollar note into his hand, but I was not happy until Malike and the crew returned to the pirogue and whisked me back out into the safe anonymity of the river.

  The daylight hours passed very slowly on my pirogue. The paddlers chatted and sung in Swahili. The sun was as strong as I have ever known. We were just a short distance from the Equator and the storm had washed the sky clean of any screening clouds. While the crew were impervious to the sun’s force, it had me cringing in a puddle of shade under my wide-brimmed hat, pathetically splashing my face and arms with river water the same colour and warmth as tea, praying for the evening shadows to reach us.

  The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled wooden paddles. About three metres long, they were shape of spades from a deck of cards, only stretched out to mansize, with shafts that were thin and shiny, polished by years of being slid through calloused hands. The leaf-shaped blade spread broad and fat before tapering gracefully to a point. It was no surprise when later on the journey I saw them being used both as trays for food and as weapons for fighting.