Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

  From the moment I saw Hippolite, I did not trust him. He was a big, lumbering oaf with a gormless expression. When I gave him my passport, I pointed out the yellow-fever certificate tucked between its pages and asked him to take particular care of it. Vaccination regulations are a common source of friction when travelling in Africa. If you don’t have the right certificates you can find yourself being charged large sums by officials and proof of yellow-fever vaccination was often asked for. By the time Hippolite came back with my passport, the certificate was missing.

  I stared at him angrily and asked what had happened. His gaze dropped to the ground and he mumbled something about not knowing what I was talking about, followed by a swift warning that I would need a yellow-fever certificate when I eventually left the country and a promise that, for a fee, he could arrange a replacement. I said we would sort it out later, but that exchange confirmed my first instinct about Hippolite’s integrity.

  We left early in the morning for the drive to Boma. There were three of us in the jeep: Roget, a locally hired driver, Hippolite in the front passenger seat and me, trying not to look conspicuous in the back. We would be passing through numerous checkpoints and I wanted to attract minimal attention from bribe-hungry officials. It took a long time to get past the city-centre traffic – we drove past a smart private school just as hundreds of children, offspring of politicians and aid workers, were being dropped off in limousines and 4×4s. I saw a traffic cop wearing the same uniform of yellow helmet and white gloves that I had seen weeks earlier in Kindu on the other side of the country. And, just as in Kindu, everyone ignored his gloved mime actions and whistles. It took us an hour to inch past the school.

  Once we had left the city behind, our speed picked up and I felt the sensation of being in a car moving at full speed, something I had not done since arriving in the Congo six weeks earlier. The timing of my trip was lucky. Repairs on the trunk road between Kinshasa and Matadi had just been completed. The first half of it had been rebuilt with Chinese government assistance and the second half with European money. This is the main highway of the entire country, joining the capital city with the country’s solitary deep-water port for ocean-going ships, Matadi, the main entry point for imports, and yet the government had to rely on foreign money to keep the road passable.

  Now that traffic was moving again between Kinshasa and Matadi, another problem had developed – highway robbery. Armed gangs routinely robbed and killed people on the road. Most attacks happened after dark, but there had been a few during daylight hours. The situation was so bad that roadblocks were erected before sunset, stopping all overnight travel.

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  The only other vehicles on the road were trucks, which we saw every so often hauling containers to and from the port at Matadi. Along with their regular loads, almost all of them had a miserable human cargo. Maurice was right when he told me there were no taxis or buses on this route, so the container lorries were being used for public transport. The driving compartments would be crammed with people begging a ride, but they were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were forced to risk their lives, clinging to the bare roof of the containers or perching precariously between the back of the cabin and the container. They had to stand there for hour after hour, with little to hold on to for safety. On some of the larger, articulated trucks the end of the container would shift towards them as they went round corners, threatening to squash them. Many of the lorries carried little signs banning passengers. Nobody paid any notice. I even saw policemen and soldiers taking their chances among the other passengers.

  We came across a grizzly scene. A truck was jack-knifed across the road with a trail of blood, gore and body parts smeared across the tarmac in a line leading to its back axle. The truck had been forced to brake suddenly, some of the passengers had fallen off and the rear wheels had gone straight over them.

  It made me think of Conrad’s description of this same road. The Matadi–Kinshasa road had been a symbol of death and cruelty since Stanley returned to the Congo in the 1880s as Leopold’s agent to set up the Belgian monarch’s colony. Building a road, and later a railway, around the impassable rapids on the lower Congo River was key to the king’s dream of opening up the Congo River system and Stanley set about the task with brutal determination. Local tribesmen were rounded up at gunpoint and forced to work in chain-gangs. Thousands died from disease, mistreatment and malnutrition. When Conrad came here in 1890 to serve on a steamboat on the river, he described the hellish trek along the primitive roadway over the Crystal Mountains, marked by grisly cairns made from the bones of dead labourers, some still wearing their shackles.

  The jeep broke down four times on this leg of my journey and we were forced to stop and waste hours negotiating our way past checkpoints too numerous to remember. But crossing the Congo had made me accustomed to delay and I spent the time trying to make sense of what I had learned from my adventure.

  In part my journey had been about gauging the scale of problems faced by the continent, and in this regard the Congo had been a revelation. In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken. While the Western world moves ahead with advances in medicine and technology, the people of the Congo are falling further and further behind. There was one sentence that stays with me after hearing it right across the country, from Lake Tanganyika in the east to the lower Congo River in the west. It came up in conversation with almost every Congolese person I met: villagers, priests, miners, fishermen. As I asked them about their situation they would, inevitably, tell me about some sort of disaster that had befallen them, whether it was an attack by rebels, a major flood or a political crisis, and, just as inevitably, they all finished with the same words: ‘And we fled into the bush.’

  I found it extraordinary that for millions of Congolese in the twenty-first century the rainforest offers the safest sanctuary.

  And as the hours passed on my jeep ride, I thought more and more about Stanley and his role in creating the Congo of today. In the late nineteenth century he was heralded as a hero of the great age of African exploration – he was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1898 – but today’s received historical wisdom is less flattering. His tactics in the Congo, especially the use of weapons to open fire on any tribesmen who got in his way, and his role in installing Leopold’s rule, taint him as arch-colonial brute.

  I was fully aware of Stanley’s negative image when I started out, but my journey nevertheless taught me a grudging respect for my Telegraph predecessor. I had seen the scale of his achievement, the difficulty of the terrain he had crossed, the rigour of the climate and the constant threat from hunger and disease. The fact that he survived the three-year trek from one side of Africa to the other taught me respect for his determination, stamina and spirit. His three white companions all perished, but the little Welsh bastard toughed it out.

  And I would disagree with those who dismiss him as an utter racist. When he reached the Atlantic, he had the chance to sail north to Europe to claim the fame and fortune he knew to be awaiting him following his feat of exploration. But instead of rushing home, he insisted on ensuring that his surviving African bearers made it safely back to their homes in Zanzibar. This decision meant it would be months before he returned to London as he sailed south, stopped over in Cape Town and eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope to return his loyal expedition members to their island home in the Indian Ocean. This gesture suggests more empathy with Africans than he is normally given credit for.

  But as I sat in the relative comfort of the jeep, driving in just two days a distance that it took Stanley five months to cover, inside me I felt an anger towards him welling up. His expedition could have been a positive turning point for Africa and its people. A continent cut off from the outside world could have benefited hugely from Stanley’s achievement, as the positive aspects of the modern world – medicine, education, technology – were made available to Africa for the first time. But what enraged me was how Stanle
y’s trip turned into one of the greatest missed opportunities of modern history.

  Instead of bringing positive aspects of the developed world to Africa, it brought only the negative. For decades Leopold’s apologists – Stanley being one of the loudest – described the Congo Free State as an exercise in civilising philanthropy, but in reality it was an exercise in asset-stripping. The colonialists took ivory, rubber, copper, timber and any other natural resource they could find, killing millions and millions of Congolese in the process. It took years of work by Edwardian human-rights campaigners to force the Belgian king to give up the Congo Free State and transform it into a full Belgian colony. Even after this transformation the Congo’s enormous wealth of natural resources, such as diamonds, gold and copper, continued to be misappropriated, first by colonials and then by Mobutu’s kleptocrats.

  But the major lesson I learned on my trek through modern central Africa was that the most valuable asset stolen from the Congo was the sovereignty of its people.

  Before Stanley and white rule, the people of the Congo genuinely enjoyed a sense of local power. Society was tribal, with authority lying in the hands of village chiefs and, above them, paramount chiefs. But local people enjoyed sovereign power to the extent that they could get rid of unpopular chiefs. No chief could afford to ignore totally the will of his subjects. Decisions had to be taken, at least in part, with the interests of the people in mind.

  All of that changed with white rule, not just in the Congo, but across colonial Africa. All aspects of sovereignty were stripped from the people of Africa and they have never, to this day, fully got it back. One of the great fallacies about white rule in Africa was that when it ended, power was handed back to the people of Africa. I saw in the Congo how this simply is not true. At independence, colonial powers surrendered authority, but the point was that it never ended in the right place, back in the hands of the people. Instead it was hijacked by elites who publicly claimed they were working in the interests of their people, but were in fact only driven by self-interest. Mobutu’s chartering of Concorde to deliver champagne to a palace specially built in the jungle is nothing but a colourful, extreme example of what African leaders do routinely right across the continent – enjoy grotesque luxury while ignoring the plight of their people.

  I can think of no concept more abused in modern Africa than sovereignty. It is used by dictators and undemocratic regimes to fend off criticism of their rule and to conceal their own maladministration and corrupt pilfering. They cloak themselves in it to dismiss the right of any outsider to hold them to account. The greatest shame arising from Stanley’s Congo journey was how it started this pattern of sovereignty-stripping, a process whereby the vast majority of Africans in the Congo and elsewhere have ended up not just without any say in the running of their country, but abused and exploited by their African leaders.

  While outsiders led by Stanley can be blamed for creating this situation, the people of Africa must share responsibility for showing themselves unable to change it. The Malaysian naval officer on my river boat was right to ask why former European colonies in Asia have been able to develop since independence, while those in Africa have regressed. The cruelty and greed of African dictators is mostly to blame, but it is also true that the peoples of Africa have not been capable of working together to rein in the excesses of dictators. People power in Africa has a wretched record.

  The challenge for the future must be to restore some sense of sovereignty and control to all in Africa, not just the elite. Elections are a necessary part of this, but by themselves they will not be sufficient. To make up for decades of misrule and exploitation, Africa needs help in installing meaningful legal systems that can hold leaders to account and ensure that national funds are spent on public projects and not funnelled into private bank accounts. This will need a fundamental change of attitude, not just from donors and foreign companies accepting a greater degree of transparency in their dealings with Africa, but also from the leaders and people of Africa, who must admit both how much they need help and that they are willing to compromise.

  To save not just the Congo, but the entire continent of Africa, from its downward trajectory, a completely different way of thinking is needed. There are a few positive early signs. It is in the Congo that the International Criminal Court has begun pioneering work, investigating alleged atrocities committed in the war-ravaged east of the country. This admission by the Congolese authorities that it simply does not have the capability to ensure law and order by itself, and needs outside help, is a first step. But much more will need to be done to finally return authority to its rightful place, into the hands of the Congolese people themselves, and to right a wrong that Stanley did so much to perpetrate.

  In August 1877 a messenger clambered half-dead down the seaward side of the Crystal Mountains. He was heading for the tiny port of Boma, the only European trading station for hundreds of kilometres on Africa’s west coast, with orders to deliver a handwritten note addressed ‘To Any Gentleman Who Speaks English’. The note was a desperate plea for help from Stanley:

  I have arrived at this place with 115 souls, men, women and children … We are now in a state of imminent starvation … We are in a state of the greatest distress; but if your supplies arrive in time, I may be able to reach Boma within four days … I want ten or fifteen man-loads of rice or grain to fill their pinched bellies immediately … Starving people cannot wait … The supplies must arrive within two days, or I may have a fearful time of it among the dying … What is wanted is immediate relief; and I pray you to use your utmost energies to forward it at once … For myself, if you have such little luxuries as tea, coffee, sugar and biscuits by you, such as one man can easily carry, I beg you on my own behalf that you will send a small supply … And add to the great debt of gratitude due to you upon the timely arrival of the supplies for my people.

  Stanley signed the note, but he added a postscript. Boma was one of the world’s most distant backwaters, but he nevertheless presumed that his reputation had reached there. Under his signature he wrote, ‘You may not know me by name; I therefore add, I am the person that discovered Livingstone in 1871.’

  For the traders, the wretched plight of the expedition described by Stanley was not the most dramatic aspect of the letter. What made the letter truly astounding was that it had arrived overland. For four centuries European traders had been regular visitors to Boma, but they had all arrived by ship and the African hinterland remained as much of a mystery to them in 1877 as it was in 1482 when the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão first reached there. No white man had ever penetrated more than a few kilometres inland from Boma. And the few who had tried had all used Boma as a starting point, so the traders would have known of any recent mission. If this letter was to be believed, then the author must have come through territory widely held to be impassable.

  The bearer with the message later recalled how a short, bespectacled white man came out from one of the wooden buildings at Boma demanding to see the letter. At first he could not believe what he was reading and hearing – the messenger was able to explain himself in English as he had been to a mission school on the island of Zanzibar, on the other side of Africa, thousands of kilometres away. His pathetic pleading for help backed up what the trader was reading.

  The bearer reported how the sceptical white man fired a series of questions at him, wanting to know about the journey down to the smallest detail. Then the trader, believed to be John Harrison, the local agent for Hatton & Cookson, a Liverpool trading company, composed himself, ordered a meal for the messenger, and began preparations for a large relief convoy to rescue Stanley’s expedition.

  It set out the following morning with everything Stanley had requested, and more. The bearers carried sacks of rice, fish and potatoes, material for new clothes and even a five-gallon demijohn of rum. Stanley described the scenes of rapture when the relief column came into sight. One of the expedition’s boys, he wrote, turned praise-singer, launching into
a lyrical description of the hardships they had endured in crossing Africa, chanting about how they had survived the ‘hell of hunger’, defying cannibals and cataracts, snakes and starvation. Stanley wrote that the chorus was taken up loudly by the other members of his party, as they finally understood their ordeal was over:

  Then sing, O friends, sing; the journey is ended;

  Sing aloud, O friends, sing to this great sea.

  He described how some of his party could not wait for the rice and fish to be cooked, stuffing their mouths with it raw, while others rushed about gathering firewood to prepare an immense feast. Bales of cloth had been included in the rescue package and Stanley described how eagerly they were used to cover the embarrassment of bare ribcages and protruding bones. As a journalist, he had a reputation for colourful exaggeration, but I am prepared to believe the childish delight he attributes to himself as he opened a swag-bag of goodies from the Boma traders:

  Pale Ale! Sherry! Port wine! Champagne! Plum pudding! Currant, gooseberry, and raspberry jam! The gracious God be praised for ever! The long war we had maintained against famine and the siege of woe were over, and my people and I rejoiced in plenty! It was only an hour before we had been living on the recollections of the few peanuts and green bananas we had consumed in the morning, but now, in an instant, we were transported into the presence of the luxuries of civilisation. Never did gaunt Africa appear so unworthy and so despicable before my eyes as now, when imperial Europe rose before my delighted eyes and showed her boundless treasures of life, and blessed me with her stores.

  After a day of gorging, his group continued its march and on 9 August 1877, exactly 999 days since his expedition set off from the other side of Africa, it reached Boma. The traders came out to meet Stanley’s party, offering him – with no apparent sense of irony – the freedom of the city, a city that ran to only six stockaded buildings. The traders insisted that the explorer cover the last part of the journey in a hammock borne by native bearers, something he later complained about for giving the appearance of being ‘very effeminate’.