Blood River (4 page)

We exchanged emails. Brian jokingly dismissed his motorbike
adventure as an 'interesting way to get a sore backside' and I
eventually summoned the courage to ask him directly if I could
borrow a motorbike and a guide from his Care International staff.
The fact that he did not turn me down flat meant I was in with a
chance. He promised to mention my idea to his staff around
Kindu and urge them to see if they could coincide one of their
reconnaissance trips with part of my itinerary.

These half-chances suggested by Michel and Brian had been the
grounds for my decision to fly to Kalemie but they were not
enough to convince Jean-Claude ('Call me J-C') - a thirdgeneration Belgian colonialist who worked for Clive's mine
operations. He seemed to take a mawkish pleasure in telling me
my trip was doomed.

When I told him that all I had with me was my 'To Whom It
May Concern' letter introducing me as a writer following
Stanley's route, he snorted dismissively. 'That won't be enough.
You will need written authorisation from the local intelligence
service. They are very strict here and without their permission
you won't get anywhere,' he said. And when I told him I had
a satellite telephone, he snorted even more loudly. 'You won't
get far with that unless you get permission from the military
police. They will take it away from you the moment they find it.

It will cost you a lot of money if you try to get it back.'

I was beginning to take against J-C.

'I've got a map here. Come and show me where you want to go,'
J-C said on my first day in Lubumbashi, unfolding an out-of-date
map of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I stood over it and pointed to Kalemie, the port on Lake
Tanganyika. Technically it is in the same province as
Lubumbashi, Katanga, but it lies 1,000 kilometres to the north. As
I described the major sections of the trip, overland from the lake
to the headwaters of the Congo River, J-C rather irritatingly
sucked in his breath and shook his head, uttering something like
,not possible' or 'cannot be done'.

After I finished he launched into a hugely pessimistic
declamation.

'I know all this area really well from when I was younger. This
area is not a cobalt area like down here in the south of Katanga,
but a gold area. Not big-scale stuff, but artisanal, small-scale gold
mines. So with the presence of these mines, you are going to get
people with guns wanting the gold action. And I am sure you
know what happened up here recently.' He was pointing at
Bukavu, the scene of the attack by pro-Rwandan rebels just a few
months earlier.

'Well, all the government troops have now gone into the town
to punish the rebels. And so those rebels have fled into the bush
about here.' He was now pointing to an area close to Kalemie.

'And that means the militia who were already living in the
bush have been pushed further south, to where you want to go.'

He shook his head and, with a final flourish, pronounced his
judgement. 'You don't stand a chance.'

I had had enough of J-C and took solace in the house's South
African satellite television. I turned on the news and could not
believe what I heard. The anchorman told me that 156 ethnic
Tutsis from the Congo had just been murdered at a refugee camp
across the border in Burundi where they had sought sanctuary from the turmoil caused by June's events in Bukavu. I tried to
follow what the anchor was saying about who might be
responsible. His version was muddled and confusing, but one
thing was perfectly clear to me. My journey had just got a whole
lot more complicated.

Laissez-passer issued to the author, August 2004, by Congolese
authorities in the province of Katanga

The Belgians called the port of Kalemie the 'Pearl of Tanganyika'
and I was hoping it would gleam for me as I approached on the
UN flight from Lubumbashi. The light aircraft bucked and yawed
as the pilots slalomed between skyscraper storm clouds, but my
face stayed firmly glued to the tiny porthole, anxious for my first
glimpse.

Lake Tanganyika is a scientific oddity. Scientists believe it to
be the oldest and deepest lake in Africa, with many of its own
unique species of water micro-organisms and creatures. And
unlike the other Great Lakes of Africa, it is drained not by a large,
permanent river but by a more modest stream, the Lukuga, which
acts like an overflow in a bath. For much of the year the river is
stagnant and silted up, only surging into life during the rainy
season when the lake level rises.

Folklore among the tribes who live on the lake's edge says it
was created as a punishment. The tradition goes that a family,
living on the sweltering savannah of central Africa, had enjoyed
their own private spring for generations, drawing from an
unlimited supply of cool, fresh water and feasting on the sweettasting fish that lived in the pond formed where the water issued
from the ground. The family was sworn to secrecy about the
source of the water and the fish, and was issued with a dire
warning that all would be lost if the secret was betrayed. One day,
the family's matriarch began an affair while her husband was
away. The lover was treated to a feast of fish, his thirst slaked with
the cool, fresh spring water. He became so enraptured with the
sweet taste of the water and fish that he insisted on knowing
where they came from. The woman was initially reluctant, but
finally gave in to temptation and the spell was broken. At that moment the earth was rent and a great flood welled up from
below, drowning the lovers and creating the lake we see today.

When I first read this fable, I was struck by how good an
analogy it is for the entire Congo. Local tribesmen had survived in
peace for generations before outsiders - Arab slavers and white
colonials - turned up and beguiled them into giving up first
slaves, then ivory, then rubber and mineral wealth, before the
traditional Congolese way of life was overwhelmed by the
outsiders.

Five hundred kilometres or so east of my flight path, on the
other side of Lake Tanganyika, was the air space of Tanzania.
Light aircraft would be a common sight there, ferrying tourists
between Africa's biggest mountain, Kilimanjaro, and the
country's world-famous safari parks. But on my side of the lake,
visitors to the Congo were rare and light aircraft rarer still. It had
taken a month to negotiate my way onto the plane, but I had no
other option. Like all UN missions, MONUC can be criticised for
being bureaucratic and inefficient, but in the absence of any
meaningful government in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
MONUC was the closest the country came to a genuinely national
organisation and, for me, it provided the only way to reach
Kalemie.

Sadly, the `Pearl of Tanganyika' did not glimmer for me that
day. The cloud cover was too thick and all I saw of the lake was a
slab of grey in the distance as the aircraft made its final, frantic
lunge for Kalemie before bouncing to a halt on the bumpy strip.

The airstrip might technically be described as a UN military
installation, but such a term would be an overstatement. The
runway was unfenced, crowded on all sides by unkempt scrub,
and the old grey tarmac of the strip was pitted with divots and
splodged with dark repair patches. The only military structure
was a white, wooden watch tower, with a platform just three
metres off the ground, where I could see a UN infantryman. His tin helmet was painted UN blue, crammed low on his head, while
his shoulders were bulked up by a flak jacket, also blue. The gap
between helmet and body armour was tiny and his anxious,
beady eyes looked like those behind the prickles of a balled-up
hedgehog summoning forlorn defiance at an approaching lorry.

Our plane was the sort in which the pilot has to inch his way,
bent double, back through the tiny cabin to free the passengers. I
followed, slowly unfolding myself from my boxed-in sitting
position, relieved to be able to stretch, as I went down the threestep ladder onto the ground. I might not have been able to see the
lake but I could smell it now - a rich, sedgy aroma in the still,
steamy atmosphere. Although Kalemie is in Katanga, the same
province as Lubumbashi, the eco-system is radically different.
The city lies on a dry plateau or veld, but the lakeside port is
surrounded by lusher, more tropical forest. By the time I finished
stretching, I could feel the first drops of sweat pasting my longsleeved shirt to my back.

There was not a single building in sight, although the MONUC
soldiers had set up a bunch of prefabricated containers to act as
an arrivals hall. These white, box-like units are a common feature
of any UN operation around the world. If connected to an electrical generator and a water tank, they can provide an anodyne,
air-conditioned living space, no matter whether you are up a
snowy mountain in Afghanistan or in the deserts of the western
Sahara. They ensure each UN mission operates in its own little
bubble. There might be a war going on outside, but UN
peacekeepers can expect to have one of these little white boxes in
which to work, sleep, eat or even connect to the Internet .

`Please follow me,' said a white girl wearing a crisp uniform of
blue and grey. Her English had a Slavic accent and her name tag
bore the flag of her homeland, Croatia. The outside atmosphere
was hot and cloying, but she was wearing several layers of
clothing - her workspace was heavily air-conditioned. After
following her inside to have my name ticked off the passenger manifest, I shivered. I hurried hack outside to wait for Michel
Bonnardeaux, the UN worker whose optimism had brought me
here in the first place. He had promised to meet me off the plane,
but as I stood there with the sedgy smell of Lake Tanganyika in
my nostrils and my shirt increasingly sodden with sweat, there
was no sign of him.

Kalemie was one of the first settlements developed by Belgian
colonial agents in the Congo after Stanley's journey of discovery.
When the explorer finally reached Britain in 1878 with proof the
Congo River was navigable for thousands of kilometres halfway
across Africa, he first tried to persuade London to claim the
territory as a British colony. He failed. At the time the British
colonial authorities were not impressed with the returns offered
by Britain's relatively modest African holdings. Vast fortunes
were being made in India and the Far East, but Africa, in the age
before its large gold and diamond deposits had been discovered,
was not nearly as attractive. Maintaining the Cape Colony around
Cape Town at the foot of Africa was costing Britain a great deal.
British troops were being lost in a series of frontier wars with the
Xhosa and battles with the Zulu that would lead, within a year, to
the disaster of Isandlwana and the defence of Rorke's Drift. The
timing of Stanley's approach was not good and his suggestion that
Britain should colonise the Congo River basin was firmly rejected
by Whitehall.

In Brussels, Leopold proved more receptive. He had been
dreaming for years of establishing his own colonial empire, but he
had failed to locate the right piece of territory. When he learned
of Stanley's success in charting the river, he invited the explorer
to his palace in Brussels and made sure Stanley was treated
lavishly. Within a few weeks the pair had hatched an ambitious
plot. The ruler of one of Europe's smallest and youngest nations
(Belgium was founded in 1830) commissioned the Welsh-born,
naturalised American to stake the entire Congo River basin as the private property of the king. Stanley would be paid handsomely
and Leopold would have the foundation for his empire.

Just two years after he crossed the Congo as an explorer,
Stanley returned as a coloniser. This time he came by ship to the
mouth of the river, before heading inland with a party of roadbuilders, determined to construct an access route through the
Crystal Mountains that guard the impassable lower reaches of the
river. It took two years and cost the lives of hundreds of African
labourers, who were literally worked to death, but slowly some of
the most inhospitable terrain in Africa was tamed. It was this
display of indefatigability, as much as any of his other actions
during his African expeditions, that earned Stanley the Swahili
soubriquet Bula Matari, or Breaker of Rocks.