Blood River (2 page)

It was at the city's airport in the middle of January 1961 that
Lumumba was last seen in public. Members of the UN, already
deployed to Katanga to try to deal with the secession crisis,
watched Lumumba being bundled out of a cargo plane by soldiers
loyal to Tshombe. They said he had been so badly beaten on the
flight that he barely moved when he was pushed into a waiting
vehicle that whisked him away to a nearby villa owned by a
Belgian colonialist. For a long time, what happened next was one
of the great mysteries of modern African history, mainly because
Lumumba's body was never found. There were rumours that it was
cut up and fed to pigs, or even thrown into the headwaters of the
Congo River that rises in mountains to the north-west of
Lubumbashi. Tshombe's regime initially refused to admit he was
dead, but when they finally did, they lied, claiming he had been shot dead by villagers after he escaped on foot from police custody.

It took almost forty years before the mystery was eventually
solved by a Belgian academic, Ludo De Witte, piecing the history
together from official documents released by Brussels in the
1990s. He discovered that various Belgian policemen and
security officers - nominally under the command of Tshombe
but, in reality, following orders from Brussels - had, on the night
of 17 January 1961, driven Lumumba from the villa where he had
been taken to rendezvous with a firing squad of local Katangan
soldiers about forty-five minutes' drive from the airport.
Lumumba, his face battered almost beyond recognition and his
clothes spattered with blood, was made to stand against a large
anthill illuminated by the headlights of two cars. He was then
executed by firing squad and his body buried in a shallow grave.
Fearful the grave might be discovered and turned into a shrine,
the Belgians and their Katangan stooges later moved to erase all
traces of the Congo's elected leader. The day after the execution,
the corpse was exhumed and driven deeper into the Katangan
bush, where it was reburied in another shallow grave until
arrangements could be made to get rid of it once and for all.

Under cover of darkness on 22 January 1961 two Belgian
brothers, with connections to the Belgian security forces,
returned and exhumed the body for a second time. They used a
hacksaw and an axe to dismember the decomposing corpse,
before dissolving the remains in a 200-litre petrol drum filled
with sulphuric acid taken from a nearby copper-processing plant.
One of the brothers later admitted he used pliers to remove two of
Lumumba's teeth as souvenirs.

Thoughts of assassination, acid baths and dismembered bodies
were not the only dark images in my mind as the plane descended
towards the tarmac at Lubumbashi. In 1997 a close friend of mine
had come closer to death at this airport than at any time in his
long career covering international crises as a journalist. It was during the last chaotic days of Mobutu's rule when Laurent
Kabila's Rwandan-backed insurgency was about to topple the
ageing dictator. Troops loyal to Mobutu were becoming
increasingly desperate and had gathered at the country's few
functioning airports hoping to escape. It was at Lubumbashi
airport that my friend was seized by some of the Special
Presidential Guard, a notoriously brutal cadre of Mobutu
supporters who could expect no leniency when his regime's end
came. He was stripped to his underpants and threatened at
gunpoint for several terrifying hours. It did not help that he was
with a fellow journalist who had a video shot some time earlier of
Rwandan troops on the march towards Kinshasa. When the
guards discovered the tape, they said they were going to execute
the reporters as Rwandan spies. It took them hours of desperate
pleading to convince the guards they were simply journalists.

Looking out of my window as the plane descended towards
Lubumbashi, just before the moment when the ground blurrily
rushes into one's field of vision, I caught sight of a single figure, a
Congolese woman standing right on the edge of the tarmac
runway. She was barefoot, dressed in rags, with a pile of firewood
balanced on her head and a cold, wide-eyed expression on her
face. No matter that this was one of the Congo's major international airports of considerable military importance, for her it
was a place to gather firewood.

From my earlier visits to the Congo, I knew what to expect
when the fuselage door finally opened. At the bottom of a set of
stairs, manually wheeled into position, a crowd of people had
gathered, all claiming to be an official of some sort and all
demanding payment. I watched as the Asian lady I had spotted at
Johannesburg airport stepped gingerly into the melee, only to be
tossed and spun like a piece of flotsam, blasted by loud demands
for payment. The last I saw of her was an unedifying spectacle.
She was fighting back tears, bidding for her own luggage that was
being auctioned back to her.

Before boarding the flight, I had played the first of my
Congolese jokers. I had contacted Clive, the Zimbabwean
businessman who had good connections with the Kabila regime,
and asked for his help. The Kabila family originally came from
Katanga and, while the regime's control of much of the country
was nominal, they made sure their home capital remained in their
hands. Clive's cobalt-mining operation was based in Lubumbashi
and although he was not going to be in town when I arrived, he
warned me the only way I would get through the airport in one
piece was if his people smoothed the way. It was with relief that
in the crowd down on the tarmac I spotted a man holding up a
piece of paper with the name `Kim Butcher' written across it. I
caught his eye and he threw himself bravely into the muddle,
before grabbing me reassuringly by the shoulders and leading me
through the scrum.

'Welcome to Lubumbashi. My name is Yav,' he said in French
from behind imitation Ray-Ban sunglasses. He had to shout to
make himself heard above the din of jet engines and grasping
officials, but there was a steadying calm about him. Turning to a
large man standing next to him, he spoke again. `Let me introduce
you to the director of immigration at the airport. This is the man
who helps us, when our visitors come through the airport.'

The director looked at me coldly and nodded a silent
acknowledgement. I knew enough about Congolese officialdom to
keep my mouth shut. Yav was clearly happy that the nod represented all the necessary formalities and he nudged me firmly past
the director and up the path to the 1950s-built terminal, where
some of the noisier luggage-auctioning was going on.

'There is just one fee you need to pay, an entry fee of ten
dollars,' he said. I handed him a twenty-dollar note, which he
then passed to an underling, who disappeared into a side-room
with my passport. The man came back two minutes later and gave
Yav change of a ten dollar note. Yav immediately rubbed the note
between his fingers and frowned. `This is not a real dollar note. This is counterfeit. Get me a good one,' he said, raising his voice
at the underling and sending him back inside.

It took a few minutes for my rucksack to appear. I stood in the
crowd trying to look inconspicuous, yet confident. The Congo is
a police state maintained by numerous security services, military
units and gendarmerie, all of whom take a close interest in any
outsider daring to venture into the country. I knew from my
earlier visits that roving journalists in the Congo are subject to
particularly close scrutiny, and I was anxious to get through the
airport as quickly as possible. Journalists were routinely expected
to go to Kinshasa and pay officials large amounts in bribes for
`accreditation' that took weeks to complete, before they could
even think about trying to move around the country. I wanted to
avoid this lengthy detour to Kinshasa and was hoping to slip into
the Congo through Lubumbashi and then use the UN flight to
reach the east of the country, where Kinshasa's authority did not
hold. If I made it up there, I had in my rucksack a `To Whom It
May Concern' letter signed by the Congolese Ambassador to
South Africa, introducing me as a writer trying to follow Stanley's
historical route. This, I gambled, would at least allow me to open
negotiations with what passes as officialdom in the east of the
Congo before they detained me on suspicion of being a spy.

Without Yav, I would not have made it through Lubumbashi
airport. I could see by the way he breezed past soldiers guarding
the entrance to the baggage hall that he was a man of standing,
something that I exploited unashamedly as we waited for the
luggage to appear. I edged closer to him, trying to look at ease and
not catch the eye of various officials whom I could see closely
questioning the other white man from my flight. There was a
bullet hole in the glass partition above the door leading into the
baggage hall, and a rusty fan, mounted on the ceiling, hung
motionless. Apart from brightly painted signs advertising mobilephone companies, nothing seemed to have changed from the time
when the airport staged the brutal finale of Lumumba's life. Eventually I pointed to my bag and Yav barked at an official to
take it outside to his waiting car.

Rather unexpectedly, he began to quiz the baggage handlers
about a set of golf clubs that had been due in on the flight for one
of the senior mine employees. Years earlier I had met some
wealthy Zimbabweans who told me an amazing story about how
the wealthy live in Lubumbashi. The city is only a few kilometres
from the border with Zambia, connected by one of the Congo's
few functioning roads. One of the wealthy white mine owners is
so keen on show-jumping that each winter in Lubumbashi he
hosts his own event, inviting Zambian, Zimbabwean and South
African show-jumpers to drive their horses all the way to the
Congo. Border guards are bribed and special supplies flown into
Lubumbashi. No matter that the Congo is ravaged by war, poverty
and corruption, this man is wealthy and eccentric enough to
convene his own Horse of the Year Show in the Congo. If it is
possible for Lubumbashi to have its own show-jumping competition, I suppose I should not have been that surprised that it
has a golf course.

For almost a hundred years Katanga's growth had been based
almost completely on copper. For a long time the province was
known as Shaba, the local Swahili word for the metal. But the
problem with copper is that the production process is relatively
complex. Expensive mining equipment is needed, as well as
skilled labour and large amounts of chemicals for processing and
other supplies that have to be imported. This was all possible
during the Belgian colonial era when law and order existed, but
through the chaos of Mobutu's rule during the 1970s and 1980s,
foreign investors saw their copper mines repeatedly flooded,
supplies plundered and attempts to bring in replacement
equipment blocked by corrupt and incompetent local officials.

By the time I reached Lubumbashi, copper was in decline, but
the town was in the grip of a new boom, one driven by cobalt. Cobalt had suddenly become commercially attractive because the
world price had been driven upwards by a surge in demand from
China's fast-growing economy. The cobalt price had grown by
300 per cent in less than year, from $8 to $24 per pound, a
dramatic change that had had a dramatic effect in Katanga, home
to some of the world's greatest and most accessible cobalt
deposits.

Cobalt mining in Katanga does not require massive investment
or expensive processing. Here, a man with a shovel can become a
cobalt miner, simply by digging away the topsoil and looking for
the darker, greyish or purplish rock that is rich with cobalt salts.
The rock is then purified in the most primitive way, using a
hammer to chip away the non-cobalt-rich rock, a process that the
Congolese miners call `cobbing', a word imported from Britain
where it was first used by seventeenth-century Cornish tin
miners. The demand from China is so great that middlemen in
Lubumbashi, often Lebanese or Indian, are willing to pay cash for
sacks of the grey rock. The sacks are then collected, packed on
trucks and driven on a long and tortuous journey past grasping
officials on the Congolese border with Zambia and then 2,000
kilometres south to the closest functioning port, Durban, in South
Africa, before finally being shipped to China.

The whole procedure is relatively straightforward, and for a
while I almost bought into the sentiment expressed on a road sign
I spotted as Yav drove me into Lubumbashi. The sign said,
`Lubumbashi - City of Hope'. There were plenty of cars in the
town centre, a few shops were open, and I was told a hotel near
the main square had just started taking guests again for the first
time in years.

But during the four days I spent in the city, staying at the guest
house in the compound used by Clive's cobalt-mining operation,
I learned how this sense of normality was an illusion and how
regular rules of commerce simply do not apply in the Congo. For
those who think Africa's problems can simply be solved by the injection of money, I would recommend a crash course in cobalt
economics in the Congo.

In 2004 the cobalt boom meant there was plenty of money in
Lubumbashi, but the presence of money did not guarantee that
the local economy grew or even stabilised. In the town's Belgian
Club, I saw Chinese traders and Lebanese middlemen splashing
money around on $20 pizzas and expensive imported beer. They
had plenty of cash and they wanted to spend it on raw cobalt ore.
But in spite of this substantial income, the pernicious reality of
Congolese commerce meant that norms of economic development
did not apply.

In order for the investor to make any money he needed the
necessary paperwork to drive the cobalt out of the country, and in
order to arrange the necessary paperwork he needed to pay off the
Ministry of Mines, not just locally in Lubumbashi, but also at the
national level in Kinshasa; and if the Minister of Mines changed,
which happened regularly, a whole new matrix of payments and
bribes had to be put in place for the new man in the job. And once
you finished with the Ministry of Mines, you would have to
repeat the whole process at the Immigration Department, the
Department of Customs, the local Governor's Office, and so on. So
gross were the profits to be made on the cobalt that some investors
were prepared to pay the web of bribes and unofficial 'taxes'
demanded by the authorities, and to tolerate this commercial
chaos.