Blood River (37 page)

For its role in Joseph Kabila's succession, the mining company
had been rewarded handsomely. It enjoyed large cobalt concessions
for its mining operations in Katanga and export licences through the
Katangan capital, Lubumbashi. But Lubumbashi lies 1,700 kilometres south-east of Kinshasa and, as Joseph started to spend more
time in the capital, it became essential for the firm to maintain a
presence there to iron out operational problems. The mining
company rented this villa as a sort of forward operating base, so that
its executives could fly in from time to time to deal with any
glitches with the regime.

None of the cobalt miners were there when I stayed in the house,
although I was not alone. After Maurice had dropped me off, I
found a short, rather sinister-looking white man lying full-length
on a plush leather sofa in the sitting room, cursing into a mobile
phone, while his eyes followed muted coverage of the 2004 Ryder
Cup golf competition on the satellite television. He had dark,
slightly threatening eyes and, although he was in his forties, he
was nuggety, without any flabby give in his weather-worn skin.
Seeing televised sport for the first time in a month reminded me
that the Athens Olympics had been about to start when I began
my Congolese journey, so when he eventually ended his call I
asked the man what had happened at the Games.

`They finished weeks ago,' he snapped impatiently. `Where the
hell have you been?'

I told him.

'You've come all the way from Lake Tanganyika. No way.
That's not possible,' he said, swinging his legs onto the ground,
clicking off the television and suddenly sounding much more
approachable.

It took me a while to convince him I was not lying. I explained
my route, overland through Katanga, and then along the upper
Congo River to Kisangani and finally downstream by river boat to
Mbandaka. He listened closely. When I finished, he exhaled in
admiration, leaned forward to shake my hand, introduced himself as Johnny and began talking knowledgeably about Africa, and
the Congo in particular.

His life story belonged in a Wilbur Smith novel. Born in
Rhodesia, he was too young to enlist during the Rhodesian war of
independence in the 1970s, when the white minority struggled
against the black independence movement that would eventually
transform the former British colony into Zimbabwe. This had not
stopped him from being shot, however. He hoisted his shirt and
showed me several scarred splash marks on his abdomen,
explaining how he had been ambushed on a dirt road near his
family's farm while motorbiking home from school. `Ambushes
were normal out in the rural areas back then, and I was hit four
times. But we all carried guns, even us school children, so I shot
back. Killed one of the "terrs",' he said, chuckling and using the
abbreviated form of the word `terrorist' favoured by white
Rhodesians to describe their wartime enemy.

After Zimbabwean independence in 1980, he joined the South
African armed forces and served in Angola, when South African
troops became involved in the former Portuguese colony's
tortuous and complex civil war. After some years he left the army,
but returned to Angola, earning a living in the rich but chaotic
diamond mines on the country's north-eastern frontier with the
Congo. He described working closely with Jonas Savimbi, the
bearded bush warrior who led the UNITA rebel force through thirty years of guerrilla fighting in Angola. It was diamond sales
that kept UNITA going for so long, as well as financial and
military support from the West. Like Mobutu in the Congo,
Savimbi enjoyed generous backing from America and the West as
his rebel force challenged the socialist MPLA government for
control of Angola. Johnny had colourful stories of Savimbi
entrusting him with bags of rough diamonds to be smuggled out
of Angola, through the Congo, for sale at the diamond market in
Antwerp. He chuckled when he described how a diamond mine
he was working at was suddenly surrounded by MPLA soldiers,
and he was forced to run for his life through the bush, surviving
days out in the open before he reached safety.

There was something about Johnny's steely expression that
convinced me he was not making any of this up. I let him
continue.

In the late 1990s he started to spend more time in the Congo,
working in the cobalt mines near Lubumbashi. Johnny was close
to Zimbabwean businessmen with links to the first Kabila
president, Laurent, and for a year or so they enjoyed bumper
profits as the cobalt price boomed. And then his business contact
fell out with Kabila, and Johnny ended up detained for several
months by Kabila's troops. He was now back in the Congo plotting an ambitious diamond project down on the Congo-Angola
frontier, using his close relationship with another Zimbabwean
businessman well connected to the Kabila clan. As he enthused
about his new diamond-mining operation, I heard echoes of
Stanley and generations of other white adventurers who had
come to the Congo over the previous 130 years and been
enthralled by its economic promise.

`You would not believe the potential down near the border
with Angola, on the Tshikapa River. It is amazing. It is just a
matter of getting the equipment in place to be able to mine the
diamonds,' he gushed.

The name Tshikapa rang a bell. When I had rented the satellite phone for my trip from a South African dealer back in Johannesburg and told him I was going to the Congo, he said something
about Tshikapa. He described it as the densest source of satellitephone communications on the planet, outside post-war Iraq.
'And all of those satellite phones are being used by people
looking for diamonds.'

'People who say there is no money in Africa are talking
complete bollocks,' Johnny said. `I have seen with my own eyes
that there has always been plenty of money, whether it's for
diamonds, cobalt, safari hunting, whatever. And with China
needing resources to keep up their current economic boom, there
is more money around today for African raw materials than ever
before. But the point is the money goes to only a few people, not
to the country in general. If you think you can solve Africa's
problems with money, then you are a bloody fool. You solve
Africa's problems by creating a system of justice that actually
works and by making the leaders accountable for their actions. If
that happens, I guess things would get a lot more competitive for
my business, but it would be good for Africa.'

When I flew into Kinshasa I was worried about my health. I was
feeling weak and nauseous after the river-boat journey, but I was
still 400 kilometres short of Boma, the place where Stanley
completed his trip. It was only after two days of sleeping in a bed
with laundered sheets, drinking clean water, eating healthy food
and dosing myself with antibiotics in the comfort of the luxury
house that I started to feel strong enough to contemplate attempting this final leg.

When Stanley's flotilla paddled across the huge expanse of the
Stanley Pool in March 1877 they were in high spirits. Two of
Stanley's three white companions had died of disease earlier in
the expedition, but the last one, Francis Pocock, felt a surge of
confidence when he saw tall, white cliffs rising up on the right
bank of the river, because they reminded him of the cliffs at Dover near where he was brought up in Kent. `I feel we are nearing
home,' he enthused.

The confidence was premature. A short distance further west
and the Stanley Pool narrowed dramatically, choked through a
narrow rocky cleft, only a few hundred metres across. Stanley
could have had no idea what other perils lurked beyond these
first cataracts but he described how, in the space of just a few
metres, the entire character of the Congo River was transformed:

It is no longer the stately stream whose mystic beauty, noble
grandeur, and gentle uninterrupted flow ... ever fascinated
us, despite the savagery of its peopled shores, but a furious
river rushing down a steep bed obstructed by reefs of lava,
projected barriers or rock, lines of immense boulders,
winding in crooked course through deep chasms, and dropping down over terraces in a long series of falls, cataracts and
rapids.

Stanley decided on the same tactic he used 1,900 kilometres
upriver when the expedition first encountered the Stanley Falls.
He would approach as close to each cataract as was safe by boat,
and then hack a track through the bush on one of the river banks
so that the boats and expedition equipment could be dragged
round to the next safe section of water. This had worked as a way
to get round the Stanley Falls and he had no reason to doubt it
would work on this lower section of river.

What he did not know was that the falls on the lower Congo
River were a quantum level more hazardous than anything he had
so far encountered. For the next 250 kilometres the river forms an
almost unbroken chain of cataracts and rapids as it is funnelled
through a tight fissure in the Crystal Mountains, a range
separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Congo River basin.
Hydrographers later charted thirty-two major sets of cataracts as
the river snakes its way through the break in the mountainous plateau, but from Stanley's viewpoint, sitting low down on the
water on his collapsible Thames river boat, the Lady Alice, he had
no idea what he was embarking on when he gave the command
for his boats to enter the gorge.

Stanley's description of this section grew ever more pathetic.
As the cataracts became more dangerous, the river banks became
increasingly rocky and more difficult to traverse. His expedition
suffered from acute hunger, with local tribes reluctant to sell
food. These tribes had been trading in European goods for
hundreds of years - goods that had been shipped to the mouth of
the Congo River, on the other side of the Crystal Mountains, ever
since the Portuguese sailors first discovered the river in the
fifteenth century. Stanley describes how the beads and wire that
he had used to trade for food earlier in the expedition were no
longer enough to impress the tribes on the lower Congo River,
where tastes had grown more sophisticated:

Gunpowder was abundant with them, and every male
capable of carrying a gun possessed one, often more. Delft
ware and British crockery were also observed in their hands,
such as plates, mugs, shallow dishes, wash-basins, galvanised iron spoons, Birmingham cutlery, and other articles
of European manufacture.

The condition of his expedition plummeted. Disease became
rampant, made worse by the gnaw of constant hunger and
malnutrition. So many canoes were washed away by the river that
the expedition had to camp for several weeks so that two suitable
trees could be found, felled and turned into replacements. Ever
faithful to the newspaper financiers of his expedition, Stanley
named rivers feeding into this lower reach of the Congo River
after his newspaper-editor sponsors, but his efforts to continue
mapping and charting the river could not conceal the growing
danger that the entire expedition might perish in those last few kilometres before the Atlantic Ocean. After three months of
slogging through the gorge, Stanley lost his last white companion.
With feet too damaged by ulcers to be able to walk around a
particular set of falls, Pocock stayed onboard his canoe a moment
too long. It was caught by the current, swept down some rapids
and he was drowned.

The survivors struggled along the river for another two months,
but with the cataracts getting no easier Stanley took one last
gamble. The expedition would leave the river, abandon the boats
and attempt to reach the trading station at Boma on foot. The river
had been his handrail, guiding him for 2,500 kilometres across
Africa, and by leaving it he risked getting lost and dying of
starvation before the next food supplies could be found. He
describes in emotional terms his parting from the Lady Alice:

At sunset we lifted the brave boat after her adventurous
journey across Africa, and carried her to the summit of some
rocks ... to be abandoned to her fate. On 31st July 1877, after
a journey of nearly 7,000 miles up and down broad Africa,
she was consigned to her resting-place above the Isangila
Cataract, to bleach and to rot to dust!

In theory the journey from Kinshasa to Boma should have been
the simplest part of my entire trip. The only functioning highway
in the entire country traverses the Crystal Mountains in a southwestward arc for 350 kilometres from Kinshasa to the port of
Matadi, built just below the lowest set of cataracts. The road then
crosses the river on the Marshal Mobutu suspension bridge before
continuing another 100 kilometres or so to Boma.

I naively thought I could do it in a single day round-trip. That
was until I discussed the journey with Maurice.

`It's highly irregular for an outsider to want to travel there, you
know,' he said. `You will need written permission from both the
national security service and the department of immigration.'

I remembered my rule for Congo: towns bad, open spaces good.
Here in Kinshasa, the biggest city of all, I faced the worst
pettifogging of my entire journey. Maurice heard my sigh of
exasperation, but continued with the bad news.

`And how do you propose to travel there? There are no buses.
You cannot take a taxi. There are no hire-cars. The old railway
does not work. You have to remember that Kinshasa looks like a
city, but it is largely an illusion. Things that you take for granted
in other cities - like buses, taxis, hire-cars - just don't belong in
Kinshasa.'

'Well, I thought I would be able to hitch a lift . . .' My voice
trailed off. Even to myself, I sounded like a naive fool.

Maurice took pity on me. He explained he was part of a
Katangan clique that had followed Laurent Kabila to Kinshasa
when he took power in 1997. He said he had good connections
with the various departments of immigration and national
security, most of which were run by Katangans. If I gave him my
passport, I was assured it would take just a day or two for the
necessary paperwork to be prepared. And if I was willing to pay
for a local driver, I could take the jeep that belonged to the mining
company. His only condition was that one of his colleagues,
Hippolite, must accompany me.