Blood River (27 page)

`Get away, get away,' Michel shouted at me. I had heard stories
of Congolese ant columns descending on villages and eating
everything in their path. Infants, the elderly and the infirm will
perish if left to be consumed by the column. A hunter told me that
he would prepare the trophy from an antelope hunt by deliberately finding one of these ant columns and then throwing the
dead animal's skull into its path. When he came back the next
day, the bone would be spotless, stripped of every last piece of
flesh and gristle, tendon and tissue.

Stupidly ignoring Michel, I approached to what I took to be a
safe distance and started taking photographs. Within seconds I
had a bite on my knee, and then one on my thigh, then another on
my back. As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my
trousers I brushed them off like soot. It took ten minutes to
undress and rid every last ant from the creases in my clothes. The
worst of the bites stung for days.

From time to time we would spot other road users, pedestrians
carrying heavy loads or pushing bicycle frames laden with food.
Just as earlier on my trip, these people carried possessions that
belonged not to today's world, but to an earlier time. Loads were
wrapped in old leaves and then bundled up with woven grass
into primitive rucksacks carried on a headstrap reaching round
the forehead. Several of the walkers had large African snails stuck
to the side of their leaf bundles. The snails did not have to be tied
on, as their gooey, muscular foot kept them firmly attached until
the moment when they were taken off and cooked. The only other
food we saw was cassava paste tied in small rectangular leaf
packets. Cassava smells pretty rich even when it has just been
cooked, but this stuff was even more rank having been carried for
days, unrefrigerated, along the sweaty jungle floor.

I saw a husband and wife plodding along at the pace of one of these mealtime snails. Both were carrying heavy loads borne on
headstraps of fibrous bark reaching under the baskets and then
around their foreheads. They were sweating heavily and after I
persuaded Michel to stop, I took a hold of the man's basket. I
could barely lift it and he was carrying it for 143 kilometres, the
distance clocked by my bike's odometer between Ubundu and
Kisangani, with the entire weight borne by his neck.

I asked the man about an atrocity that happened on this very
track in early 1997. Thousands died when a column of Hutu
refugees from Rwanda was attacked by rebel forces loyal to the
new Tutsi regime in Rwanda. For a few weeks around the end of
March and beginning of April, aid workers described what
happened here as one of Africa's worst war crimes. I wanted to
know what impact it had had on the local community.

The man listened to my question and thought for a moment
before shaking his head.

'I come from Ubundu, but I don't know what you are talking
about. There have been many attacks and many massacres. When
it happens we flee into the bush, but nobody ever knows the
details.'

I was stunned. An hour later we stopped in a trackside village
called Obila. The IRC maintained a solar-powered fridge there
inside a thatched hut to preserve vaccines and medicines, which
are given out at a clinic of other thatched huts. Again, I asked
about the 1997 massacre. Again, my question was met with
shrugs.

It taught me a lesson about one of the Congo's chronic
problems, its lack of institutional memory. The loss of life during
the slaughter on the Ubundu-Kisangani road was of the same
order of magnitude as the 11 September 2001 attacks in the
United States, and yet in the Congo there were no repercussions.
There was no memorial, or historical account of what happened,
or court case to hold the perpetrators to account, or international
response. The killings simply got lost in the Congo's miasma of misery. I wondered what hope there can be for a place if such
lessons from the past are never heeded.

It was during this part of the journey that I had one of my most
profound Congolese experiences. Since we left Ubundu several
hours earlier we had seen nothing but forest, track and the
occasional pedestrian or thatched hut. The scene I saw in the
twenty-first century was no different from that seen by Stanley in
the nineteenth century or by pygmy hunter-gatherers over earlier
centuries. It was equatorial Africa at its most authentic, seemingly
untouched by the outside world.

Suddenly, our convoy stopped. One of the bikes needed
refuelling, or one of the riders had taken a tumble, I don't remember. What I do recall was the sense of Africa at its most brooding.
The engines had been switched off and the silence was absolute.
There was no birdsong, no screech of monkeys. Everything edible
had long since been shot or trapped for the pot by local villagers,
and the thick canopy way above our heads insulated us from any
sounds of wind swishing branches or rustling leaves.

The ground was brown with mud and rotting vegetation. No
direct sunlight reached this far down and there was a musty smell
of damp and decomposition. Above me towered canyons of
green, as layer after layer of plant life filled the void between
forest floor and treetop. I felt suffocated, but not so much from the
heat as from the choking, smothering forest.

I took a few steps and felt my right boot clunk into something
unnaturally hard and angular on the floor. I dug my heel into the
leaf mulch and felt it again. Scraping down through the detritus,
I slowly cleared away enough soil to get a good look. It was a castiron railway sleeper, perfectly preserved and still connected to a
piece of track.

It was a moment of horrible revelation. I felt like a Hollywood
caveman approaching a spaceship, slowly working out that it
proved life existed elsewhere in time and space. But what made it so horrible was the sense that I had discovered evidence of a
modern world that had tried - but failed - to establish itself in the
Congo. It was a complete reversal of the normal pattern of human
development. A place where a railway track had once carried
trainloads of goods and people had been reclaimed by virgin
forest, where the noisy huffing of steam engines had long since
lost out to the jungle's looming silence.

It was one of the defining moments of my journey through the
Congo. I was travelling through a country with more past than
future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but
backwards.

The railway track belonged to the Equator Express, a line built
by the Belgians to circumvent the Stanley Falls, cutting straight
through the Equator. Katharine Hepburn described taking the
train to The African Queen set, and the grim conditions during
the eight hours it took the train to cover just 140 kilometres.
Some of the film crew members tried to deal with the heat by
pouring buckets of water over themselves, but she judged it a
waste of time because the effort of raising the bucket made you
sweat even more, so she sat in a puddle of inertia willing the
journey to end.

I heard a rumour that an enterprising Belgian official had
placed a plaque alongside the rails to mark the exact spot where
they cut the Equator. I would have liked to have tried to find the
sign, but our bike track had deviated far from the overgrown railway line at the relevant place. I had to make do with holding my
GPS device in my hand as I bumped along behind Michel on his
motorbike and praying that it would work. I had used it to follow
my journey from Kalemie, six degrees south of the Equator, and
wanted to know the exact spot where I would cross from South to
North. But to function it needed to pick up signals direct from a
satellite and the thick tree cover meant the machine had trouble
registering a signal. I cursed.

Then all of a sudden we reached an opening in the tree canopy
and a clearing on the ground for a village. The machine pinged
into life and the screen registered a long line of noughts. I was
smack on the Equator on the noughth degree of latitude. I tapped
Michel on the shoulder and asked him to stop so that I could find
out the name of the village, Batianduku, which enjoys the status
of straddling the Equator and being in both the northern and
southern hemispheres.

The journey continued with the same rhythm of all my
Congolese motorbike experiences. I would peer over the shoulder
of the rider, trying to read the track so that I could brace myself
for the next pitch forward or lurch to one side, through a blurred
tunnel of forest green whipping past the periphery of my vision.
Green, green, green, broken only occasionally by the brown of
mud huts in a village clearing before more green, green, green.
The odometer on the bike's handlebars counted down the kilometres to Kisangani, but the more I stared at it, the slower it
seemed to move. In the end I stopped looking, my mind too numb
to care.

And then, with a rush of light, the forest curtain was lifted and
we reached one of the great jungle cities of Africa. Initially I felt
excited, but disorientated. The buildings, the wide roads, the
crowds of people and moving cars made me feel a little giddy.
Kisangani was built mainly on the right (eastern) bank of the river
and our track had brought us to the less-developed left bank.
Pirogues ferried people backwards and forwards and these were
special pirogues, very different from the ones I had used
upstream, because they had outboard motors.

The sun was setting behind us by the time we had found one to
ferry our bikes across the Congo River and, with the sun on my
back, I had time to prepare myself for the big city. It felt like a
moment of discovery. After weeks of mud huts, jungle tracks and
hollowed-out canoes, I had found a pocket of modernity. The city
docks glowed in the soft light to reveal a line of crane gantries on the wharf, an impressive cathedral with twin towers, a miniature
version of Notre-Dame, and even some high-rise buildings. And
in my pocket my mobile phone chirruped back into life.

THE SEVENTH CATARACT, STANLEY FALLS.

Final cataract in the Stanley Falls as recorded, above, by H.M. Stanley in
1878 and, below, by the author in 2004

My euphoria at reaching Kisangani did not last long. The gentle
sunset on that first evening might have given it the appearance of
a regular city, but as I explored I found it to be a shell, prone to
spasms of brutal anarchy and chaotically administered by inept,
corrupt local politicians. And it owed what little stability it had
to the artificial props of a large UN force and foreign aid workers.

For the first days I was in recovery mode. I checked into the
most lavish hotel the town could offer, the Palm Beach, which at
$75 a night gave me comforts I had not enjoyed for weeks: a bed
with laundered sheets, a shower, a door with a lock. It was built
at the end of the Mobutu era and was already more than ten years
old, but the two-storey structure was the most modern in the city.
Skirmishes during the wars following Mobutu's death had
imbued the hotel with quite a reputation - the bodies of eleven
Ugandan soldiers killed in the grounds were stored for days in a
bathroom because the kitchen refrigerator had been destroyed,
and I kept hearing sketchy and unverifiable accounts of a foreign
journalist whose dead body had recently been discovered in one
of the rooms.