I had joined the small group of foreign journalists who flew to Kinshasa after news emerged of Kabila’s shooting. All scheduled flights were cancelled, so we chartered planes and scrambled for visas. The Congo’s reputation made that flight unique, even for seasoned hacks. Instead of the excited chatter and world-weary cockiness that I had experienced among colleagues on other journeys to major news stories, that flight was deafeningly quiet. We sat in silence as the plane dipped down through thick tropical cloud cover and I caught my first glimpse of the Congo River, a wide smear of gun-metal grey under rainy-season skies. Near Kinshasa, the river balloons to twenty kilometres in breadth, a reach still named Stanley Pool after the explorer. The city below us is home to nine million people, but from the air it seemed as small as a riverside village next to the vast expanse of water. I tried to imagine how Stanley felt when, at the end of his three-year-long journey, he reached this sea-like stretch.
My own feelings were perfectly clear as I reached the scruffy arrivals hall at the airport. I was terrified. I can still picture the pudgy face of the airport security official as he spotted a Ugandan visa in my passport. Like the reels of a slot-machine shuddering to a jackpot, his pupils flickered both with suspicion and greed. Uganda was still at war with the Kabila regime and, seeing that I had been there only a few months earlier, the official started whispering to his boss. The only word I could make out was espion, spy, but it was enough to make my heart stand still.
I was bundled into a side-room. My passport disappeared and I was left alone. Over the next few hours a series of officials traipsed in and out, alternately threatening and then reassuring me. It was ghastly. In the end, I was forced to pay a ‘recovery fee’ for my passport, ushered out of the office and told to get lost.
It set the tone of the trip. Even in Africa, the Congo has few rivals for corruption. A hanger-on at the airport jumped into my wreck of a cab before coolly informing me that he was a government-approved minder and must be paid hundreds of dollars for his services. Once I had reached one of only two hotels still functioning for outsiders, I bundled my bags onto the pavement at the feet of a security guard and felt bold enough to brush him off. But when it came to the ‘journalist’s accreditation fee’ demanded by officials at the Ministry of Information, I was more feeble. Along with all the other foreign reporters I had been made to stomp sweatily up to the ministry’s seventeenth-floor offices, in a government building where the lift had not worked properly for years, and along with the rest of my colleagues I dutifully handed over hundreds of dollars for my ‘press pass’ for Kabila’s state funeral.
All of this I viewed as par for an African country in crisis. What made that trip so memorable was that never had I been so professionally out of my depth. As a reporter I had worked in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein’s rule, in Sarajevo under Serbian siege and in Algiers when its people were being slaughtered by Muslim fundamentalists, but I have never been as petrified, disorientated and overwhelmed as I was during that first trip to the Congo. None of us could find out who was behind the assassination, why it had happened or what it really meant for the Congo, but at least we were not alone in our ignorance. Nobody seemed to know what was going on – not the local army officers, not the diplomats and certainly not the country’s political leadership. Writing now, four years later, there is still no clear account of who killed Kabila. There are plenty of conspiracy theories and rumours: the most colourful suggests that the dictator was killed for welshing on a diamond deal with Lebanese gangsters. But the mystery surrounding Kabila’s death remains intact.
Back then, the reporters barely ventured outside Kinshasa’s functioning hotels and, when we did, we soon hurried back to swap stories of how we had been detained by rogue army units, had our press passes sold back to us by corrupt officials or been set upon by angry crowds of Congolese people whipped into xenophobic hysteria by the local media.
On Friday 26 January 2001 the Democratic Republic of Congo failed spectacularly to live up to its name when it installed Kabila’s son, Joseph, as head of state without bothering with any election. We journalists struggled for information about the new leader. It was almost impossible. We could not even find out his age. Within hours of his accession, I joined all the other foreign reporters scurrying home on the first flight after the funeral, shaking our heads at the chaos in the country and taking solace in the advice of the older, more experienced hands, who said this was quite normal for the Congo.
It was deeply unsettling to be so completely beaten by a story. My journalistic vanity had been pricked and I was too proud to let it pass. Crossing the Congo was now my personal obsession, and it was clear that if the Congolese government could not help, then I would have to get to know some of the rebels.
It took a volcanic eruption to cement my relationship with one of the Congo’s most important rebel leaders. I was walking my dogs early one morning in Johannesburg when my mobile phone rang. The echo on the line told me it was a call from a satellite phone, and the booming voice with a heavy French accent told me I was speaking to Adolphe Onusumba, the leader of the main rebel group based in Goma, Congo’s most easterly town on its border with Rwanda.
‘The volcano has erupted above Goma and the whole town is being consumed. You must come quickly and tell the world we need help.’ Adolphe sounded frantic.
Six months earlier I had first approached Adolphe about crossing the Congo. As president of the RCD (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie), the principal pro-Rwanda rebel group involved in the war, he had influence over some of the gunmen active in the east of the country. After the disappointment of my visit to Kinshasa, these were the groups I had to get to know.
Throughout the war he and the other major rebel leaders were flown from time to time to peace talks sponsored by the United Nations. I arranged an appointment with Adolphe during one of his stops in South Africa. It was mid-winter and we met in a modest hotel, where he was being put up by the UN. He was the leader of one of the largest unofficial Congolese militias responsible for atrocities that many describe as war crimes, so I admit I was rather apprehensive. I expected a man with military bearing and a cold demeanour. Instead, the figure who greeted me in the hotel coffee shop was young, jolly and shambling, with rather a friendly smile.
He listened closely as I explained my historical connection to Stanley through the Telegraph and how his Congo trip changed Africa. I had already delivered the same pitch to aid workers, journalists and diplomats, so I treated him to my party trick, rolling out an old map of the Congo that I had bought from a hawker in Kinshasa and on which I had traced my rough route all the way from Lake Tanganyika on the country’s eastern approaches to its western edge where the Congo River joins the Atlantic.
The map was a handsome thing produced in 1961 by the geographical institute of the Belgian Defence Ministry. Across the Congo reached a red web indicating roads, black dashes for the railways and pale-blue streaks for navigable rivers, the whole thing studded with topographical markings for mines, churches, missions and settlements.
Adolphe bent over the map as I continued to deliver my patter. I was getting into my stride, talking about the historical importance of the trip, when it became apparent that he was not actually listening. He was tracing his forefinger up and down the middle of the map, mumbling to himself. My voice trailed away to nothing and for several minutes I watched him as he concentrated in silence.
Finally he snorted. ‘There,’ he said, pointing carefully with his fingernail and turning his beaming face up to mine. ‘That is where I was born.’
‘When were you last there?’ I asked as I peered at the minuscule script next to a confluence of Congo tributaries where he was pointing.
‘Maybe fifteen years ago. I cannot remember, to be honest. There is nothing there now.’
I found it very moving when he pleaded for a copy of the map. No better map had been produced since 1961, and it seemed to connect him to a lost childhood. He knew the red road
system had been reclaimed by the jungle and the mission stations abandoned, but, for a moment at least, the map took him back to a cherished memory of an earlier, less chaotic Congo.
‘At this time I cannot guarantee anything. The fighting is too bad and there are too many groups operating there, many of whom answer to no outside authority. But the situation can change, and so let’s keep in contact.’ In the circumstances, it was the best I could hope for. The leader of the Congo’s largest rebel group had not ruled out my trip completely.
When I arrived in Goma six months later to cover the eruption, Adolphe had better things to worry about than my travel plans. Millions of tonnes of molten volcanic rock had glugged in a malodorous slick from the peak of Mount Nyiragongo straight through the town centre. This eruption was not of the explosive, carry-all-before-it sort. It was more sedate, just an endless flow of liquid rock creeping inexorably down the mountainside, burning and smothering everything in its path. You could walk faster than the lava flowed, so few people actually died. They simply made their way to high ground and watched as the lava stream consumed their houses and much of their town, before slopping steamily into Lake Kivu. Goma was built on the shore of the lake as a riviera-style resort for Belgian colonialists, and the lava flow passed through the remains of some of its grandest lakeside villas, with their old boathouses and sun terraces.
By now I was beginning to believe the Congo had some strange hold over bad news. It was somehow no surprise that Africa’s worst volcanic eruption in decades should happen here. While the lava flow could have gone in countless other directions from the mountain top, damaging nothing but rainforest, the stream had in fact come straight down the main street of Goma, swallowing the town’s Catholic cathedral and cutting the airport runway neatly in two. In July 1994 the town witnessed hellish scenes after an outbreak of cholera among hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees, who had fled to the town from neighbouring Rwanda when the Tutsis took power. The disease killed so many that bulldozers struggled to dig mass graves quick enough to dispose of the bodies. Atrocities were committed in Goma in 1997 and 1998 when Tutsi soldiers from Rwanda tried to clear Hutu gunmen from the town’s remaining refugee camps, and yet again this benighted town had been hit.
‘I told them this would happen. I told them an eruption was imminent and it would come through the town centre.’ Dieudonné Wafula sounded like a raving madman when I first bumped into him among the crowds watching the lava stream. He was holding a bundle of papers, waving them furiously, so I asked if I could have a look.
‘There it is,’ he said, pointing at the top sheet. It was a letter he had written several months earlier, accurately predicting Nyiragongo’s eruption. ‘I sent it to the Americans but they did not listen, they did not listen.’
Dieudonné was no evangelist. He was the Congo’s sole volcanologist.
I spent the next few days with Dieudonné and his story enthralled me. He was proof that the Congo had once worked as a country. In the 1960s and 1970s the education he enjoyed allowed him to develop into a genuine expert on volcanoes. No matter that today he lived in appalling conditions in Goma and went unpaid as he slogged up and down the forested slopes of Nyiragongo, plotting the levels of its lava lake. In Dieudonné I saw proof of how sophisticated the Congo had once been.
One day we blagged two seats on a creaking Ukrainian-crewed UN helicopter as it flew up to the top of the volcano. Dieudonné peered anxiously out of the porthole windows, taking notes and marking furiously his home-made sketch of the summit plateau, but I was more interested in what I could see out to the west. We were on the Congo’s eastern edge and, as the helicopter climbed higher, I could see nothing but an unbroken spread of vegetation.
I was looking at the Congo’s rainforest, one of the natural wonders of the world. Conservationists describe it as one of the Earth’s lungs, an immense expanse of oxygen-generating green, matched in size only by the Amazonian rainforest. Explorers recorded it as one of the most impenetrable and hostile environments on the planet – as clammy as a pressure cooker, thick with disease, capped by a tree-top canopy too solid for sunlight to penetrate. They recorded it was almost impossible to navigate through. As I peered through the porthole on the helicopter, it stretched all the way to the far horizon and, I knew, a whole lot further beyond. It was a formidable natural barrier and somehow I would have to find a way through it if I was going to cross the Congo.
I flew back to Johannesburg with the Congo squatting on my conscience, refusing to surrender to the stream of colleagues, friends and journalist contacts who said my plan to cross the Congo was doomed.
A couple of years passed. Various African crises came for me to cover, but the Congo was my constant. It reminded me of Philip Larkin’s ‘Toad’ poems that I read as a child. He wrote that for the middle Englander, work was like a toad, sitting on his shoulder, teasing and nagging. My toad was the Congo, and wherever I went the toad was there, working away at me.
The office in my Johannesburg home took on the air of a bunker where I brooded and plotted. Jane would occasionally join me, patiently listening to me droning on about how I planned to tackle the journey, humouring what she half-suspected would always remain a fantasy. On the walls, I hung maps and pictures, trying to match place names used by Stanley with later names from the colonial era and beyond. No corner of the Internet was too remote, as I searched for clues. I visited white-supremacist websites, designed by American racists, in which the Congo was held up as proof of the black man’s inferiority. I scoured the sites of missionary organisations, praying I might find a missionary with knowledge of the back roads of eastern Congo. And I discovered a mysterious American scientist who had dared to venture into remotest Congo during the war to continue research into the okapi, a peculiar forest beast that is part-antelope, part-zebra and part-giraffe. There were even websites run by former Belgian colonials forced to leave the Congo forty years ago, where rose-tinted memories of the old days were exchanged.
A stream of second-hand books arrived, ordered on the Internet from dealers all over the world. No matter how obscure, if there was a Congo connection, I was interested. I bought mining manuals with pages of data on Congo’s copper production in the 1930s and 1940s; a propaganda puff for Belgian rule in the Congo that painted Leopold as a benign, benevolent force for good in Africa. Much of what I was reading belonged to an age long gone, like the missionary diatribes with the title ‘Do Missions Spoil the Natives?’
I discovered I was not the first person to have the idea of following Stanley. In the 1960s an American television journalist had tried an identical crossing of the Congo, but was blocked by war, rebellion and logistical problems. His attitude to journalism was a little different from mine. At one point he described how he not only joined a band of white mercenaries, but armed himself with a rifle and went out on combat patrol. His book made me particularly gloomy. In the four decades since he had failed, every aspect of Congo travel had become harder.
There were setbacks in my research, like the day I received an email from an African explorer who had canoed the headwaters of the Congo decades ago. I approached him to help me with crossing similar territory, but the title of his email told me exactly what he thought of my plan. All it said was ‘Death Wish’. Even the Telegraph thought the idea too dangerous, refusing to back me in case I was killed. In a formal letter from the paper’s Foreign Editor I was told, ‘In view of the great dangers involved in the trip, it is not one that I would endorse on behalf of the Telegraph.’ He later added, in a more personal, hand-written note: ‘For God’s sake be careful.’
My dream seemed to be log-jammed. The Congo was so large and so fractious that I could find nobody who could make sense of the entire country. The largest United Nations peacekeeping operation in the world – known by its French acronym MONUC – had been deployed there during the latest war, but it was grounded in a few barracks dotted across the country in places where there had once been towns. It was too dangerous f
or these peacekeepers to travel overland and they simply flew in, served their time and flew away again.
I refused to give in to the doomsters who sent me newspaper reports written during visits to aid projects in the east of the Congo. The reports were almost always rich in accounts of cannibalism and black magic, mutilation and lawlessness. One of my best friends in Johannesburg took great pleasure in arguing that crossing the Congo today would be more dangerous than when Stanley did it in the 1870s. ‘At least the natives back then didn’t have Kalashnikovs,’ he smirked.
With the help of diplomats, mercenaries, missionaries and aid workers I managed to piece together a picture of the modern Congo. It was not pretty. The entire country had been effectively carved up by three armed factions ‘mining’ various natural resources, such as diamonds, gold or cobalt.
Mining might convey an image of industry or technology, but I found this was not the case in the Congo. In the so-called ‘mines’, a brutally primitive process was in place involving what was effectively slave labour clawing minerals from the earth so that they could be shipped to eager cash buyers in the developed world. President Kabila headed what was effectively a cobalt and diamond cartel, while two rival factions (one backed by neighbouring Uganda, the other by Rwanda) divided up the rest of the country’s resources. Crudely, Uganda got gold and timber, and Rwanda got tin and coltan – a mineral used in mobile telephones.
These groups were interested in nothing but these ‘mines’. They built, ran and protected facilities deep in the forest, using airstrips to export the product and banking their money overseas. Outside the perimeter fence, the rest of the Congo – its roads, towns, schools, railways, ferry boats – rotted in the tropical heat, squabbled over by warring militia. What passes for economic activity in the Congo involves uncompromising (many would say unscrupulous) businessmen paying bribes to gangster politicians in return for a slice of the mining action. I know this because a representative of one of the most uncompromising groups told me so.