Blood River (16 page)

He was speaking in the old chief administrator's office. Outside
I could just make out a decaying sign carrying the old slogan from
the 1970s Mobutu period. It said `Peace, Justice, Work' - three of
the things one would least associate with Mobutu's bloody,
criminal, indolent dictatorship.

Mayor Matongo's office looked as if it had not been touched
since the 1970s. There was a desk, a table, some chairs and an old
bookshelf, teetering under the weight of some large, dusty books.
His entire authority resided in a circular, plastic stamp and wellstamped ink pad, the sort of thing that can be purchased at a
stationery shop in Britain for a pound or two, which sat on his
desk. He wielded it on the rare occasions when he actually had
pieces of paper to deal with.

`What do you actually do now?' I asked looking around. `What
powers do you have?T

`I am the mayor, appointed by the transitional government in
Kinshasa. But I have no contact with them because we have no
phone, and I can pay no civil servants because I have no money
and there is no bank or post office where money could be received,
and we have no civil servants because all the schools and hospitals and everything do not work. I would say I am just waiting,
waiting for things to get back to normal.'

'And when was the last time things were normal?' His smiling
face suggested he did not find my question overly rude.

`The 1950s. From what I hear, that is when this town was last
normal.'

I walked across to the bookshelf and picked up one of the thick
books. The spine was bound with canvas and the A4 pages had
a line printed down the middle, with Flemish text on one side
and French on the other. I picked up another and found it was
arranged in exactly the same way. They were an almost complete
set of official gazettes from the Belgian colonial period, one for
each year from the early twentieth century right up to the late
1950s.

Some were in an advanced state of decomposition, flaking to
my touch as I thumbed the pages. Others were more solid and
the print was clearly legible, listing that year's inventory of
ordinances, regulations and bylaws imposed by the colonial
authorities in Leopoldville, the colonial name for today's
Kinshasa. They covered topics as arcane as traffic-light distribution and the construction of what were euphemistically
called cites, but were in fact the slums occupied by black
Congolese. There were long lists of how much each province,
city, town and village produced in terms of agriculture or mining.
And there were detailed accounts of tax revenue and income.
Like so many other colonial powers, Belgium clearly believed
in bookkeeping. Handling the tomes made me think of the petti fogging Belgian bureaucrats so savagely satirised by Evelyn
Waugh and Georges Simenon, the pompous buffoons who lived
deep in the African bush, thousands of miles from Belgium,
nitpicking over bylaws.

`Why to do you keep these?' I asked.

`For reference. One day we will need these jungle books for
reference' was the reply.

The first I saw of Jumaine Mungereza was his fez bobbing through
the shoulder-high grass in the centre of town. He had heard there
was a person passing through Kasongo who was interested in the
nineteenth-century period of Arab slavery and British explorers,
and he identified in me a clear commercial opportunity.

`I am the expert on all these matters of slavery and Mr Stanley,'
he said.

His appearance was not entirely convincing. Seventy-two years
old with grubby spectacles and a wrinkled face covered in a
whiskery fuzz, Mr Mungereza did not appear at first glance to be
an expert on anything. He was also dressed up like a pantomime
Arab, complete with fez and a one-piece cotton gown. I later saw
him wearing tattered trousers and T-shirt, so I reckoned his Arab
costume had been donned solely for my benefit.

`I used to be an author of books. In 1979 I wrote the best book
on Islam in Kasongo, with the help of one of the local
missionaries, Father Luigi Lazzarato. If you want to, I can sell you
a copy.'

This sounded intriguing. This was the first person I had met in
the eastern Congo with an interest in nineteenth-century history,
so I asked him to show me his work. It turned out to be a booklet
of crudely photocopied pages, stapled together inside a green
card cover. I flicked through to see references to Stanley,
Livingstone and Cameron.

He wanted $50 for a copy, a huge sum in a place as backward
as Kasongo. When I hesitated for a second, he dropped the price to $10. He was delighted when I bought his only copy, but before
he disappeared I wanted to know more.

'My tribe, the Mamba, were one of the first to be fully Arabised
at the beginning of the period of slavery. It was a case of survival.
If we had not taken on the Arab customs, we would have been
taken with the other tribes as slaves. We adopted Islam, spoke
Swahili as fluently as our mother language, KinyaMamba, and for
a long time we were the elite of this community. Then the
Belgians came and the Muslims were pushed down.'

He was speaking as we walked through the cite of Kasongo, the
crowded African community a world apart from the abandoned
cement buildings of the `white' suburb. The cite was a place of
subsistence living, but it was still densely populated, with shoals
of children swirling between terraces of thatched mud huts,
pointing and giggling at me, the stranger. I asked Jumaine if he
would show me a mosque.

Rounding the corner of a thatched hut, we came to an open
space of beaten brown earth and Jumaine announced with clear
pride in his voice, 'There it is. The Grand Mosque of Kasongo.'

Less imposing than the town's Catholic cathedral of Saint
Charles, it was impressive all the same. A rectangular structure,
the roof must have reached ten metres from the ground, and the
windows and door frames were finished in rather delicate brickwork. The whole thing was the same brown tone as the earth, but
as I peered through one of the windows I expected to see a splash
of colour - an old Arab carpet, perhaps, or a prayer niche. There
was nothing. The floor was beaten earth and the walls were
muddy brown.

`There used to be many thousands of Muslims in Kasongo who
worshipped every day,' Jumaine was reminiscing as we walked
back through the cite. 'But something happened and the numbers
became less. I don't know what it was. Maybe the old religions of
the forest came back.'

With that, Jumaine, a living relic of the Arab slaving empire of Kasongo, wandered off, his fez the last thing I saw disappearing
behind the thatch of a hut's roof.

The next piece of headgear I saw made me laugh out loud and feel
homesick, all at the same time. It was a cap made of Scottish
tweed, the sort of thing I would expect my father to be wearing,
black with rain on the banks of a salmon river. It did not look like
the most appropriate hat for the sweaty tropical African bush, but
that did not seem to bother its owner, an energetic eighty-twoyear-old called Vermond Makungu.

He was one of many elderly characters I met in the Congo who
conveyed to me such a vivid picture of a country in decline, a
backward community that was not just undeveloped, but
undeveloping. They all had stories about how life used to be
relatively normal, sophisticated even, but how the modern reality
was so much worse.

'I used to work for the big tropical hospital here in Kasongo
back in the 1960s and 1970s.' Vermond seemed happy to have
someone with whom to discuss what he called the Good Old
Days. 'I was responsible for buying equipment for the hospital,
so I would fly all over the world to buy X-ray machines,
respirators and that sort of thing. I went to Kinshasa often. It was
there that I bought this hat, from a trade fair. You can see it was
exported to the francophone world, because the label here has
the French for "Made in Scotland". But I flew to Japan, to Rome,
to Brussels, all over Europe. Now look what has happened. Look
at where I live.'

We were standing in an old shop in what one day had been a
terrace close to the Belgian monument in Kasongo. Part of the roof
was missing and the damp floor was cluttered with rather secondrate bric-a-brac - broken furniture, stained clothing, dirty cooking
pots. Vermond clearly had a thing about hats because among his
possessions I spotted a classic icon of Belgian colonial rule, a
cream-coloured sun helmet, the sort of topi Tintin wore through out his Tintin Ali Congo adventures. Seeing it made me think of
all the black-and-white photographs I had seen during my
research of Congolese colonials carrying out the business of
colonialism - stalking past railway stations or peering from road
bridges or surveying copper mines - and always doing it while
wearing one of these topis.

When I explained my ambition to follow Stanley's original
route across the Congo and my interest in the local history,
Vermond listened carefully and then started thinking. He turned
out to be very dynamic for his age.

'When we were children in the 1930s and 1940s tourists used
to come to Kasongo to see the old sites from the days of the Arab
wars. Would you like to see?'

As he led me past the cathedral, I heard something that threw
me for a second. It was the sound of a motorbike, the first engine
noise I had heard since arriving in Kasongo several days back
with Benoit and Odimba. Round the corner came an odd-looking
priest. He looked odd not just because he was wearing a trilby and
ski gloves in spite of the sweaty heat of the day. He looked odd
because, although he was black, he did not look even remotely
African. But after introducing himself as Simone Ngogo, he
explained that he was very much a local, born just after the
Second World War in a nearby village. I could not stop looking at
his very Caucasian features and yet African skin. It was intriguing. Perhaps he was proof that Simenon had been right when
he described, in his short stories, the colonialists' sexual
domination of native Africans.

I asked him if he remembered when things were better in
Kasongo and he nodded enthusiastically. He said after the shock
of the Mulele Mai uprising in the early 1960s, Kasongo enjoyed a
brief boom period in the early years of Mobutu's rule. High
copper prices meant the country's working copper mines
generated substantial earnings and Les Grosses Legumes, the fat
cats of the Mobutu regime, had not yet plundered everything. Towns like Kasongo were comfortably off, he said, and the
tropical disease hospital - the one for which Vermond used to
procure equipment - was a centre of excellence for the region.

`But things went wrong when Mobutu became interested only
in clinging to power in the late 1970s and 1980s, to putting people
in jobs just to win their support. These were people who took
everything, but did nothing. The decline began when he created
the cult of the personality and self-divination, describing himself
as Man-God sent to help Congo, and when he nationalised everything - businesses, schools, shops, everything - and it all went
down from there.'

I asked him how he kept in touch with his congregation. He
pointed at his motorbike and explained it was how he completed
his parish rounds, but only if he could buy fuel flown into
Kasongo from time to time. Revving the engine, he raised his
voice as the bike belched blue exhaust smoke that spoke of fuel
filthy with impurity.

`This area around Kasongo has known all of the Congo's wars,
one after the other, and the people use Christianity to survive. It's
a struggle, but somehow they survive.'

Vermond led me down the slope at the back of the cathedral. It
was badly overgrown, but gradually I made out symmetry in the
trees on either side of us as we walked. We were following what
had been laid out as an avenue of mango trees.

`This was the site of the big Arab villas during the slaving
period, the main centre of the city,' Vermond said. I was sweating
heavily, but he somehow retained his cool, even with the tweed
hat on.

After a few hundred metres he stepped off the track into a
particularly thick tangle of nettle, grass and reed, straining his
neck. He was looking for something. I heard occasional words as
he used his hands to clear a path. `It's somewhere around here ...
I am sure of it . . . It's been such a long time. Cannot quite remember.' And then it cry of triumph. 'Come over here. I have
found something to show you.'

I joined him, ripping through tendrils of ivy and thorn that
snagged my clothes, before reaching an open section. Vermond
was standing triumphantly looking at the ground, his right foot
resting on a straining bunch of grass stems that he had pushed out
of the way to reveal a sign that read 'Slave Market'.

'This was the place where the tourists used to come. These
signs were made so they could see the old sites, like the slave
market. Just over there is another sign marking the site of Sefu's
villa, and beyond it the house where the two Belgians were
staying when they were killed. Kasongo played a big part in the
history of this place and people were interested enough to come
all the way here to see. You must be the first visitor for decades.'

We wrestled our way back to the track, but I could make out
nothing of the old villas, long since consumed by the jungle. I was
finding the heat intense and we walked slowly back up the hill,
talking about decay and decline. He told me about the grim days
of the Mulele Mai rebellion. There was genuine terror in his voice
as he described the feeling in town when rumours emerged from
the bush that the rebels were coming.

'Some fled into the forest, others stayed to defend their homes.
It was terrifying. There were still some white people here then,
and I remember two of them decided to try to flee to the river and
find a boat. They never made it. The rebels caught them on the
road between here and the river.'