Blood River (26 page)

Democracy was shunned by Mobutu, who defied calls for free and
fair elections and centralised power into the hands of a close-knit
cabal of friends, family and cronies.

There was a certain brilliance to Mobutu's evil. He was the
consummate showman, luring George Foreman and Muhammad
Ali to his capital, Kinshasa, for the most famous bout in boxing
history, the 1974 'Rumble in the Jungle'. Concorde, the world's
only supersonic airliner, would be chartered specially to fly
supplies of pink champagne from Paris to his jungle palace
complex at Gbadolite in the north of the country. The runway was
specially extended so that the jet could land. Symbolically,
Mobutu was the first leader of the Congo to tame the mighty river,
building the only bridge to span the Congo River, the Marshal
Mobutu suspension bridge. And with his leopardskin hat and a
sense of the dramatic, he established himself as one of the most
iconic African figures of the Cold War. I have a journalist friend
who remembers Mobutu flying to the scene of a bush atrocity
deep in the Congolese jungle back in the 1980s, quoting Conrad.
With the press within earshot as he looked at the mutilated bodies
of his countrymen, the Congolese leader effortlessly quoted Mr
Kurtz's last words from Heart of Darkness: `The Horror! The
Horror!'

But his showmanship should not disguise the corrosive effect
his rule had on Congolese society, destroying completely any
national sense of order or justice.

Long before Stanley passed through here, the Congolese had
their own system of tribal justice. Onto these roots eighty years of
Belgian colonial rule had grafted its own skewed, whitedominated legal system. Mobutu's most damaging achievement
was to undo this, to create the sense of anarchic self-help that
characterises today's Congo. Under the pre-colonial tribal system,
no single chief was powerful enough to hold dominion over the
entire Congo River basin. There were scores of tribes - 200,
according to early twentieth-century anthropologists - each responsible for a chunk of territory, but the power of any chief
was held in check by his people. If a chief grew unpopular, his
people could oust him. Oustings were often bloody and brutal
affairs, but the point was that a chief could not ignore his people
completely.

These checks and balances were done away with in the postcolonial period as African dictators like Mobutu adroitly used
Cold War rivalries between the superpowers to skew the system.
Aligning himself with the West, Mobutu enjoyed such generous
financial and military support from Washington that he became
untouchable. He used these resources to do something no
Congolese leader had ever been able to do - to run the vast
country as one single fiefdom, centralising so much power that it
became effectively impossible for any dissenting rivals to oust
him for decades. By distorting the old rules, the post-colonial
period became one of anarchy and decay.

Modern weapons made it almost impossible for Mobutu to be
removed, so if you could not beat Mobutu's methods, there was
only one realistic option - copy them. By raiding the national
treasury he made sure government employees went without pay.
How could one expect an unpaid soldier in the army of the Congo
to behave correctly when every other member of the military
system followed the country's leader and simply helped
themselves to whatever they could get away with? The corruption
that travellers to the Congo have experienced since the early
Mobutu reign is an exercise more of self-preservation than of
exploitation. If government officials at the airport were not being
paid, then it made sense for them to graft cash from anyone
unfortunate enough to cross their paths.

The picture on the priest's table was the first official portrait of
Mobutu I had seen during my trip. Mobutu spent his thirty-two
years in power inflating the cult of his own personality, claiming
this country as his own personal plaything. His picture hung in
every official building; newspapers covered every detail of his life, no matter how mundane; his name was attached to any large
bridge, sports stadium or other construction project embarked on
during his rule; and national television broadcast his image day
in, day out. Just seven years after Mobutu's departure I found that
almost all traces of his cult had disappeared.

It was rather unsettling to see him there in the priest's house.
Here was an icon of modern African evil, an individual who did
more than almost anyone else to set the Congo and the wider
region of central Africa on its downward spiral.

It was an early official portrait, taken in the first few years of his
rule when he still called himself Joseph-Desire Mobutu and
described himself as President of the Congo. Some years later, in
the 1970s, Mobutu embarked on an Africanisation programme to
strip away the remnants of colonial nomenclature. He reinstalled
the river's ancient name, Zaire, and named his country after it.
Western Christian names were ordered to be replaced by
authentic, tribal names, so Joseph-Desire Mobutu became Mobutu
Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, which translates as 'the
all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in
his wake'. And he dropped Western clothes, preferring what he
presented as a more genuine African look of short-sleeved, safaristyle tunic, capped with his trademark leopardskin hat.

`I keep it to remind me of the old order. Back in the 1960s this
country still had hope. But then, around the time of this picture,
it began to go wrong,' Father Adalbert said.

I looked closely at the portrait. Mobutu had adopted a very
presidential pose, turning his bespectacled and very young face
- he could only have been in his thirties when the picture was
taken - away from the camera with studied nonchalance. He
was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant general, a rank he
thought more appropriate for a head of state than the rank he
reached as a colonial paramilitary under the Belgians. Under
their rule, he made it to sergeant major, still an impressive feat in a colonial force where black recruits were banned from
holding the rank of officer. There was a gold chain of office
hanging across his smart military tunic, red flashes on the tips
of his collar and rank after rank of medals. This man had almost
single-handedly destroyed any chance Congo once had of
developing as a normal nation. I found myself shivering in spite
of Ubundu's tropical heat.

The priest could offer me no food or supplies. He apologised but
explained that every two months he would send someone on the
roughly 300-kilometre round trip by bicycle from Ubundu to
Kisangani to buy essentials like flour, sugar and oil. When I
arrived, he was at the end of his two-month cycle and his supplies
were out. All there was to eat was some banana fried in palm oil.
I noticed that he kept every door locked in all the church buildings,
including his house.

'You have to remain prudent every day. Really, you must leave
as soon as you can.' He did not sound inhospitable. He sounded
genuinely worried that it would be safer for me if I left Ubundu.

When I explained my plan to meet up with the aid workers
from Kisangani delivering vaccines, he said he knew where they
would have spent the night and sent a messenger on foot. While
waiting for the messenger to return, I flicked through a pile of old
magazines that I had found in the front room of the priest's house.
One was called Zaire Afrique and clearly came after Mobutu's
temporary name change from Congo to Zaire. Inside were earnest
articles about some of the crazier aspects of Mobutu's misrule,
such as the period in the early 1990s when he thought it a good
idea to allow one of the country's provinces, Kasai, to issue its
own currency in parallel to the main national currency, the
Congolese franc. It was cloud-cuckoo-land economics but it met
with the approval of the Congolese economist writing in the
magazine, who praised Mobutu's sagacity and grasp of macroeconomics.

Ubundu had no working cars, so when I heard the sound of
engines approaching later that morning, I guessed they belonged
to three motorbikes from the International Rescue Committee.
This was the same aid group that had put me up in Kalemie, on
the shore of Lake Tanganyika, so I felt as if I was meeting
members of the same family when they circled in front of the
house. The riders, all local Congolese from Kisangani, had exactly
the same Yamaha bikes that Benoit and Odimba had used to bring
me from Lake Tanganyika to the Congo River, complete with the
same livery of mud splatters and crazy luggage arrangement of
jerrycans and plastic bags strapped down with old inner tubes.

`We were told to look out for someone staying with the priest,
but to be honest I did not think you would make it. Where have
you come from?' Michel Kombozi grinned as he shook my hand.
When I told him I had come from upriver, his eyes opened wide
in amazement. `We come here every two months or so to deliver
medicines to the local clinic, but we have never heard of anyone
coming here along the river. I thought it was much too
dangerous.'

Michel was a big man, a father of nine children back in
Kisangani. He was as purposeful and efficient as Benoit, ordering
one of his colleagues, a cool-looking man who wore a reversed
baseball cap, and wrap-round sunglasses, to strap my gear to his
bike as quickly as possible. Father Adalbert continued to look
anxious. He was genuinely worried that my presence in Ubundu
would cause trouble, so after thanking him I urged Michel to
leave as soon as possible. He did not argue. Above the revving
engine I heard him shout, `The distance is only a hundred and
forty-three kilometres to Kisangani, but the track is bad so it takes
all day. Let's go.'

The three IRC riders showed the same skill and strategy as Benoit
and Odimba. Once we got going, they were reluctant to stop for
anyone or anything. So after leaving Saint Joseph behind, they started threading their way quickly through the narrow footpaths
criss-crossing Ubundu, splashing through puddles, sending
chickens squawking out of our way in feathery explosions, and
using the momentum from the bikes to surf along the lips of huge
muddy furrows carved in the track by rainstorms. I saw a man
with a gun take a second look at us after he spotted my white face
riding pillion, but before he could raise his weapon we had
already moved out of sight. After the torpor of Kindu and the
crawling pace of the pirogue, I relished the sense of being on the
move again, even though our progress was hardly swift.

Within moments of leaving Ubundu we entered full rainforest.
There were trees so high I could not make out any detail of the leaf
canopy tens of metres over my head. Some of the trunks were
pleated into great sinews that plunged into the earth, as massive
and solid as flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral. And high
above my head, but beneath the gloomy leaf canopy, I could make
out boughs as square and broad as steel girders.

The going was much slower than in Maniema and Katanga
because the forest here was that much more fecund. Stanley had
had a grim time of it here too, dragging his canoes around the
seven stretches of cataracts that make up the Stanley Falls.
Whenever he left the river, his expedition had to expend huge
effort hacking a path through the fringe of the rainforest, along
which they could portage their canoes to the next stretch of
navigable water.

The track I was travelling along was the remnants of the main
road between Ubundu and Kisangani, which used to have regular
four-wheeled traffic back in the 1950s. During my research for
the journey, I had had a bizarre exchange with officials from the
British government's foreign-aid arm, the Department for
International Development (DFID), in which they assured me the
road still existed and was already being upgraded, following the
2002 peace treaty, using British government funds.

This sounded like good news for my plan to travel through here, but when I pushed them a little harder, the DFID people
admitted that they had no further information and that I should
speak to a UN official appointed as their agent. In spite of various
messages and telephone calls, no-one at DFID was able to track
down this mysterious agent and the whole experience left me
feeling despondent at the efficacy of the aid effort in the Congo.
Here was an important piece of infrastructure - a road around one
of the biggest sets of cataracts on the river - and here was one of
the world's most experienced aid providers, DFID, and yet there
was a terrible disconnect somewhere. I was saddened by the
thought that the DFID people back in London were attending
meetings, summits and seminars at which they assured the colleagues in the aid community that the Kisangani-Ubundu road
upgrade was in hand when, as I was finding out, this was not the
case.

There was absolutely no work taking place on the road. The
advancing jungle had choked it to a single-track footpath, snaking
around mature trees growing up from the centre of the old
carriageway and past vast mudslides and dramatic rockfalls.
Bridges had been washed away, making us pick our way down to
the bottom of water courses and then charge up the other side.
Recent rains made the whole exercise a dirty and dangerous one
as the bikes slithered in the glutinous mud time and again, often
pitching me onto the deck. One fallen tree caused a twentyminute delay as the only route for our convoy of three bikes was
up and over the top. This meant unloading everything, carting it
over to the other side and then heaving the bikes over the fallen
trunk, all the time sliding in mud that stood no chance of drying
out because the dense leaf cover kept out any direct sunlight. The
sticky heat felt as if we were toiling inside a hothouse.

At one point an obstacle made us stop in a thicket of giant
bamboo. Canes as thick as my leg sprouted close together before
splaying out as they grew longer and thinner. I spotted a long,
thin black line that looked like a gunpowder trail from a western movie. Walking closer, I saw the line begin to move. At first it
shifted as one, but as I got nearer it separated into millions of
component parts - a column of ants.