Blood River (15 page)

Author crossing eastern Congo, August 2004

The sound of singing woke me on my first morning in Kasongo.
There was not a breath of wind, but the toffee-thick drone of the
male voices seemed to stir the tropical air as I slowly came round.
Dawn had broken and I could see my surroundings fully for the
first time. I was in a room of a cement and brick building, maybe
fifty years old, lying on a sagging mattress surrounded by old bits
of clothing and luggage. The room was modern enough to have a
window complete with glass pane, and a door, although this was
kept shut by a bent nail. A patina of dust and grime covered
everything. It was a replica of the room where I stayed in Kalemie,
a staging post for itinerant aid workers.

Walking out onto the front porch I found Tom Nyamwaya, the
head of the Care International operation in Kasongo, sitting on a
home-made wooden chair. The success of my trip so far was
entirely down to Tom and his willingness to risk two of his staff
and two motorbikes. I started to thank him, but he silenced me
with his hand and I could see he was straining to listen to the
singing. He only spoke after the voices finally fell silent.

'Those voices you hear are the voices of soldiers. I don't like it
when they start singing. The last time they did that was in June
after the Bukavu crisis. I have sent someone to try to find out what
is going on.' Tom's English was clear with a heavy accent from
east Africa. He was Kenyan, employed by Care International to
run this outpost deep in francophone Africa, and he was clearly
happy to have someone to speak to in English.

'It's a problem when I have to speak French. I only just started
lessons and I am not finding it that easy.'

Over breakfast I explained more about my trip. Tom and I had
only had a brief email exchange and he seemed interested to learn he was living in a place that once played a central part in the
colonial history of the region. But what he wanted to know, more
than anything else, was how I had managed to dodge the mai-mai.

'We were lucky,' I said stuffing my mouth with a hunk of
sticky, browning banana. 'The only ones we saw were friendly
enough and we somehow avoided all the others.'

Tom shook his head.

'Well, you must be as crazy as Stanley. God knows what they
would have done to you if they caught you. What makes you do
this sort of thing? I would not travel anywhere in this country
except by plane. You would have to be mad to go out there into
the hush. This place is like nowhere else I have ever worked. You
never know when trouble is going to start. At the time of the
Bukavu crisis, we were under pressure from our head office to
evacuate. I was in two minds, because we are the only aid group
in Kasongo. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on us - and
only us. So when we went to the airstrip, the guys who call
themselves the authorities and police, the same ones we have
been working with for months, turned on us. One of my staff was
pistol-whipped. We were all threatened. It blew up in a second
and all of a sudden things were out of control.'

I was curious. `How do you feel about living out here? There are
no UN peacekeepers here, no other aid groups. You are as
exposed as the first Belgians slaughtered here in the 1890s.'

'Well, it's not the best feeling. The uncertainty. The instability.
The volatility. I don't think I can stand more than a few months
and I will leave as soon as I can. There are some jobs like this in
the aid world, which you have to do to get on. It's just the way it
is.

He explained more about the conditions he lived in. His was
the only home in the old 'white' suburb of Kasongo that was still
inhabited, and this was because his aid-group employer was able
to maintain supplies using aircraft. But the air bridge was fragile,
with irregular flights made haphazard by tropical weather conditions and non-existent facilities at Kasongo's airstrip.
Across that rickety bridge came everything for his work and home
life: food, fuel, communications equipment and work supplies.
Everything had to be flown in.

I wanted to know how I could reach Kindu, the port on the
upper reach of the Congo river, 200 kilometres further north.

`You look tired and ill, so maybe you should rest for a while
here. The journey to Kindu is a tough track, which takes a few
days by motorbike. Two of our bikes are due to head that way
some time next week, but first you must drink more water. You
look terrible.'

It was only three days since I had left Kalemie, but already I was
feeling groggy and feverish. I began to worry. I still had thousands
of kilometres ahead of me. Maybe I was not strong enough to cope
physically with a Congo crossing. My anti-malaria pills did not
help. They made me feel even more nauseous after I took them
each morning.

But after a day of rest in Tom's house, I began to feel stronger
and convince myself the sickness was down to my stupid
miscalculation over water. I had made a huge mistake assuming
we would have time to boil water as we travelled through Katanga
and had not anticipated the urgent need to move as quickly as
possible. Next time I would prepare adequate water supplies
before I set out. I would not make the same mistake again.

The town of Kasongo is an Atlantis of central Africa, a once major
city now swamped by the advancing jungle. The scale of its decay
was breathtaking, but what made it so intriguing for me was how
it reeked of the worst excesses of Belgium's involvement with the
Congo.

Kasongo was the epicentre for the 1892 war between Belgium
and Arab slavers. The Arabs had developed it into the capital of
their slave state. It was near here that Livingstone witnessed the
raids that made him such an ardent opponent of slavery. In Kasongo the Arabs built slave markets where tribesmen, caught
by raiding parties, were traded; prisons where slaves had their
necks wedged into timber yokes, so heavy and cumbersome they
made escape impossible; storehouses where elephant tusks and
other booty pillaged from the local villages were collected before
being hauled back to Zanzibar by chain-gangs of slaves. These
early Aral) invaders of the Congo were not bootleggers looking for
a quick profit. They took the long view, happily staying `up
country' for years, taking native girls as wives, merging and
mixing bloodlines to create a complex social structure of Arabic
overlords, Arabic-African mulatto foremen and African vassals.

The most notorious of them all was Tippu-Tip, a bear of a man
described by Stanley as `tall, black-bearded, of negroid complexion, in the prime of life, straight and quick in his movements,
a picture of energy and strength'. Tippu-Tip moved his base a great
deal, but he lived in Kasongo for many years. It was his son, Sefu,
who was involved in the incident that gave the town its notoriety.

What the Indian Mutiny was to Britain, the 1892 Kasongo
incident was to Belgium, a moment of anti-foreigner brutality
used to justify decades of colonial control. It took place during the
war between Leopold's colonial agents and the Arabs. Ever since
Stanley came back to the Congo in the early 1880s to set up
Leopold's colony, Belgian officers and agents had spread across
the Congo River basin staking the land exclusively for the Belgian
monarch. The size and importance of Kasongo made it an obvious
target, so two Belgian soldiers, Lieutenant Lippens and Sergeant
de Bruyne, arrived here as early ambassadors to Sefu in the early
1890s. By the time they reached Kasongo they were riddled with
fever and exhausted, but the Arabs began by looking after them
well, offering them a comfortable villa next to Sefu's.

But when the first skirmishes of the Belgian-Arab war broke
out, the position of the two men became precarious. There is
some dispute about whether Sefu was directly involved in what
happened next. What is without dispute is that both men were murdered by a mob. One version has it that de Bruyne was
dragged from his writing desk by the killers. Both were disembowelled and had their hands and feet cut off and sent to a
nearby Arab leader as proof of their murder.

The Belgian response was ruthless. After coercing as allies one
of central Congo's fiercest tribes, the Batetele, who enjoyed a
bloody and entirely justified reputation for cannibalism, a
Belgian-led expeditionary force descended on Kasongo. With
modern European weapons they routed the Arabs, storming the
city on 22 April 1893, plundering the villas abandoned by the
Arabs and allowing the Batetele to indulge in some gruesome
revictualling.

Kasongo's association with blood did not end there. It was in
remote centres like Kasongo that early Belgian colonialists committed unspeakable cruelty at the end of the nineteenth century
on behalf of Leopold. When he persuaded the European powers
at the Berlin Conference to recognise his claim to the Congo Free
State, he presented it as an exercise in using free trade to bring
civilisation to backward African tribes. This was a sham. From
the very beginning, the Congo Free State was an exercise not in
trade, but in plunder. It began with ivory in the 1880s, then the
most valuable commodity found in the Congo, but moved on to
rubber in the 1890s as demand for tyres surged with the mass
production of cars. One of Congo's many natural resources is a
thick, fast-growing ivy that occurs naturally in the rainforest and
produces a sap from which top-quality rubber can be produced.

Belgian colonial officers in backwaters like Kasongo were told
to do whatever it took to maintain the flow of ivory and rubber.
They did not pay for what they took, devising ever more violent
ways to acquire it. Playing tribe off against tribe, they gave guns
to some of the people and unleashed them on their neighbours,
uninterested in what methods were used to bring in the ivory and
rubber. Pour encourager les autres, whole villages would be
slaughtered, women raped and children taken as slaves. The Belgians developed their own particular way of spreading fear
among tribesmen by ordering their henchmen to cut off the hands
of their victims, spreading terror across a wide area and ensuring
obedience. This (lid not just happen once or twice. It became such
common practice that early human-rights campaigners travelled
all the way to the Congolese jungle to gather evidence of these
atrocities. A black-and-white photograph taken by one such
campaigner around the end of the nineteenth century shows
Congolese tribesmen staring impassively at the camera. Only at
second glance do you notice they are holding human hands,
trophies from one of these raids.

The Congolese forest is so impenetrable, so laden with hazards,
that even today places like Kasongo have a terrifying sense of
isolation, a feeling that the normal rules of human decency might
break down here. I felt it strongly as I explored the decaying ruins
of the once-sizeable town, troubled by images in my mind of
African villagers fleeing from wanton violence unleashed by
Belgian colonials, smug in the knowledge that places like
Kasongo were too remote for them ever to he held to account.

These images played on my mind as I followed footpaths
snaking through the undergrowth, deviating round large trees
that had grown in the middle of what had once been wide
boulevards, occasionally tripping over an old fence post, broken
pipe or other remnant of the old order. I was trying to picture
what it must have been like back in the days of white rule. I could
tell where the colonial properties had stood because through the
native undergrowth pushed huge flamboyants, a tree with a
distinctive red blossom, originating in Madagascar and nonindigenous to central Africa. It was a standard ornament for
colonial gardens across all parts of Africa, a botanical calling card
left by white outsiders.

In Kasongo, I saw many flamboyants. They would once have
stood in the front gardens of the city's smarter houses but, while
the trees remained, the buildings had rotted to nothing.

Walking through a section of open grassland, next to what
might once have been an avenue, I was amazed to find the
mayor's office still standing. I was even more amazed to find there
was a mayor inside.

Verond Ali Matongo was born two years after the Belgians gave
Congo independence in 1960. His story summed up perfectly
what had gone wrong in Kasongo ever since.

`I was two _years old when the uprising against white rule came
to Kasongo. It was started by Pierre Mulele, a leader from northeast Congo, whom no-one in the town had ever heard of before.
All of a sudden we were told his followers, the Mulele Mai, were
coming and we must leave. They attacked anything they associated with the outside world, they killed white people or anyone
they believed to be with Belgium. It was chaos. Of course, I was
too small to remember anything, but I have been told the reason
my life was saved was because I was lucky - the deputy commander of the rebel force took pity on me and made me his
godson and I was taken to the bush. It was years before I came
back here again, when Mobutu had taken control of the country.
I have no idea what happened to my real family.'