Blood River (36 page)

On its deck hundreds of people sat under tarpaulins and pieces
of plastic sheeting watching a tiny pusher, marked with the name
Mompoto, as it tried in vain to shift the bigger vessel.

'They might have to wait for the rains to raise the water level,'
Ali said.

'Do you ever stop to help them?' I asked.

'If they were sinking, we would of course stop to help. But we
cannot stop for every boat that sets out overloaded or without the
right amount of fuel. These people are only a day's pirogue from
Lisala, so they will not starve. They must be patient.'

It was on the third day of the river journey that I began to feel sick.
It started as nausea shortly after I took my morning malaria pill.
During my trip I had learned that the pills had to be taken on a full
stomach or they made me feel awful, but this time I felt grim even
though I had already eaten. I was groggy from another bad night's
sleep and thought at first that a day of shade and lots of tea would
sort me out. I was wrong. My head started to throb, my limbs
began to ache and in my heart I began to panic. We were days
away from medical help.

I started to fantasise. I had killed a mosquito in the cabin one day. It was easy to swat precisely because it had fed well and was
moving slowly, bloated with blood. It had left a bloom of livid red
on the palm of my hand. I began to worry that I had been looking
at my own, diseased blood. How long does the malaria pathogen
take to develop? How long before the first dangerous symptoms?
I knew from my time in Africa that incubation takes at least a
week, often longer, but, in my fried mental state, common sense
deserted me. I convinced myself this mosquito had made me ill.

Ali could not have been kinder, breaking open his medicine
chest to give me painkillers, salt tablets and vitamin pills. But the
feeling of sickness did not abate and I started saying no to meals
and struggling to stomach water. By the seventh day of the
journey I was a mess. I rarely ventured out of Ali's cabin, clinging
to the shade in my puddle of sweat, willing the boat to reach
Mbandaka.

By the time we eventually got there, a week after leaving
Kisangani, it was all I could do to climb off the boat and back onto
terra firma. The town sits almost smack on the Equator and has a
grimly high attrition rate among its UN personnel, felled by
malaria or dysentery or any of a host of other tropical diseases
found in the town. Illness has clearly played a major role in
Mbandaka's history. It was leprosy that brought Graham Greene
here in the 1950s when he visited a local leprosarium while
researching his novel A Burnt-Out Case.

The fabric of the town appeared to have been ravaged by
disease. Like all the other Congolese towns I visited, Mbandaka
lay in ruins, with potholed roads connecting tatty buildings. The
only half-decent place was the UN headquarters, a two-storey
disused factory that had been given a lick of paint and a strong
perimeter fence. A few hundred metres from where our boat had
tied up I could see a collection of rusting river hulks. Bracing
myself against a throbbing headache, I made my way there
gingerly to ask about river traffic to Kinshasa. The scene was exactly the same as the port in Kisangani. Crowds of Congolese
sat on rusting decks, huddled around cooking pots, next to
bundles of bedding, clothes and possessions, waiting in quiet
desperation for news of a departure.

'There are no plans for any boats leaving here for Kinshasa. You
will have to wait. It could be weeks, maybe longer,' I was told by
a man who described himself as the Person Responsible for
Mbandaka port.

I walked slowly back to Ali's boat. For the first time on my trip
my determination to stick to Stanley's route downriver wobbled.
I was feeling just too ill to face another delay of unknown
duration. It had taken me two weeks in Kisangani before I had
been lucky enough to find a place on the UN pusher. God knows
how long I would have to wait here in Mbandaka for my next
break.

As the sun began to dip, I gathered my strength for another
walk. I needed to mull over my options. Like the other Congolese
towns I had passed through, Mbandaka was little more than a sad
collection of ruins. I felt a sense of deja vu. The decay was just like
what I had seen in Kalemie, Kabambarre, Kasongo, Kibombo,
Kindu and elsewhere across the Congo. I tried to convince myself
that I had already seen enough in my journey to understand what
the Congo is really like. I had achieved more than I had thought
possible before I started this trip. I had covered more than 2,000
kilometres on Stanley's route. Would my sense of achievement
overcome the disappointment of skipping the next section?

I stewed all night, agonising over what to do. There was no
hotel in Mbandaka, so the floor of Ali's cabin was the most
comfortable place for me to stay. He was due to head back
upstream in the next few days, and the prospect of being sick in
Mbandaka without any tolerably clean place to stay tormented
me. I could be trapped here, just like I was in Kisangani. I lay on
the deck thrashing around in my mosquito net, churning the
options in my head. I knew from Ali's contacts in the UN mission that a weekly helicopter shuttle to Kinshasa left the following
day. I did not have much time to decide.

By morning I had made up my mind. Reluctantly, I would skip
the river descent from Mbandaka to Kinshasa.

A day later, I found myself onboard a UN helicopter flying to
Kinshasa. The shame I felt at temporarily abandoning Stanley's
route was more than outweighed by a growing sense of relief that
my ordeal was nearing its end. It took three hours to fly a distance
that would have taken me weeks by river boat.

For most of the journey all I could see from the helicopter
porthole was jungle. Then, just as we began our final approach to
Kinshasa, I caught sight of the Stanley Pool where the Congo
River gathers itself in a huge, lake-like expanse, twenty kilometres in width, before its final, tumultuous plunge to the sea.
From the air all I could glimpse was an immense body of water,
silver in the setting sun like the flank of a Goliath Tigerfish. I was
disappointed to have missed this final section of the river, but all
I could think about was the town of Boma, a few hundred kilometres off to the west, where my journey would finally end.

There can be no capital city in the world more unrepresentative
of its country than Kinshasa. It has tarmac roads busy with traffic,
shops selling imported goods, a music scene as prolific as any in
Africa, even a swanky hotel where the doors are opened by swipecards. After all that I had seen on my journey, Kinshasa felt as if
it did not even belong in the Congo.

Despite these first-world trappings, Kinshasa also has the
chronic problems standard to many African capitals. Most of its
nine-million-strong urban population crowd into squalid squatter
camps without adequate drinking water, electricity, health care
or basic services. Corruption corrodes every aspect of day-to-day
life, forcing its people to rely on international organisations - the
UN, aid groups, donors - to prop up the failing state. But by
comparison with the country's medieval hinterland, Kinshasa is
centuries ahead.

I found the disconnect between capital and country bewildering when I arrived by UN helicopter. And it got worse after I was
met by Maurice, the local representative of my cobalt-mining
contact from Lubumbashi, and whisked away in his jeep. We
passed city sights that I recognised from my earlier visit in 2001:
the long central artery of the city, `The 30th of June Boulevard',
which locals boast of as the `longest independence avenue in
Africa'; the house where Patrice Lumumba briefly ran his
doomed post-independence government before he was assassinated on the orders of Washington and Brussels; the stadium
that staged the `Rumble in the jungle' boxing match; and the
Belgian diplomatic compound where I met one of Mobutu's
surviving cronies in 2001 and first discussed my plan to retrace
Stanley's journey.

But it was not the fact that I was seeing familiar sights that
confused me. It was the way that, in my mind, I could not connect
these places with the Congo I had travelled through, a country
where I had seen human bones lying too thick on the ground to be
given a decent burial; where a stranger like me was implored to
adopt a child to save him from a life of disease, hunger and
misery; and where some people were so desperate they actually
pined for the old and brutal order of Belgian colonial life.

My bewilderment was complete when Maurice dropped me at
the Kinshasa headquarters of the mining company, a brand-new,
luxury villa built on a prime piece of city-centre real estate
fronting directly onto the Congo River. Armed guards nodded
towards Maurice at the entrance to the exclusive, private estate
and when they slammed the cast-iron gate behind us, there was
an instant when I felt they had shut out the chaos of an entire
continent. The estate would have looked at home in any major
European city. There were well-tended gardens, cul-de-sacs
curving between neatly laid-out kerbstones and family cars
parked on driveways. The house Maurice led me to had features
lifted straight from a Milanese loft apartment: polished wooden
floors, stainless-steel designer kitchen units and a huge television
screen wired into the most comprehensive satellite-television
network money could buy. It was when I stepped into the shower
and warm, clean water started to pulse from an array of nozzles in
the glass cubicle for an all-over-body-massage that my compass
went completely haywire. It was just too far removed from everything I had experienced.

I had entered the world of the Congo super-elite. It was a world
of enormous wealth and power, made possible because of close
connections to the regime of President Joseph Kabila. Without
these links it would have been impossible to get modern kitchen
units or any of the other expensive fittings into the country. As I
experimented with the multi-setting, remote-controlled airconditioning, I could see there was enough money sloshing around the Congo to make anything possible, given the right
connections.

My contact's links with the Kabila regime could not have been
stronger. When Joseph's father, Laurent, was assassinated in
January 2001, the mining group helped ensure he was succeeded
by his son, and not by a rival Congolese power broker. Within
hours of the shooting, Laurent's body was secretly flown out of
Kinshasa on the mining firm's private company jet. He was
already dead, but to buy time a false story was put about that he
had survived the attack and was receiving hospital treatment.
This raised fears that rivals might stage another attempt to finish
him off, so the mining firm even arranged for a second, dummy
plane, supposedly carrying Laurent, to be seen landing at the
airport in Harare, capital of Zimbabwe.

The ploy bought Joseph enough time to be made ready for
succession. He was only in his twenties at the time and was
completely unknown in Kinshasa, where his father's dictatorship
had ruled for just four years since ousting Mobutu in 1997. The
Kabila clan came from central Katanga, over on the other side of
the country, where people speak Swahili and look more to the
east, to the anglophone Indian Ocean nations of Kenya and
Tanzania, than to francophone Kinshasa on the western side of
the Congo. Joseph did not even speak Lingala, the language of the
Congolese capital.

In those volatile days after the assassination, what Joseph
needed most was time to allow his safe installation in Kinshasa.
Coups are a common feature of the Congolese political landscape.
I was in Kinshasa at that time and can remember the rumours of
takeovers, counter-coups, mysterious forces marching on the
presidential palace and secret military deployments.

Stability returned only after Joseph was seen in public for the
first time, an occasion I witnessed. It was out at Kinshasa's main
airport and he was meeting his father's coffin as it was flown back
into the Congo. I remember how overwhelmed the young pre tender looked. His ill-fitting dark suit swamped him and his eyes
darted around as a line of tribal elders wearing leopardskin caps
paid their respects to the world's then youngest head of state.
Bodyguards and militiamen milled around with their weapons
cocked. They included a large number of troops from Zimbabwe
- the Kabila clan's closest international ally - and they were
taking no chances. The road into his new capital was deemed too
dangerous, so the new president was spirited to and from the
airport by helicopter.