Blood River (6 page)

For two years Michel had worked at the UN mission in Kalemie
as a sort of combat disc jockey, learning Swahili and immersing
himself in the traditions and lore of the local Congolese tribes. He
ran the local office of Radio Okapi, a UN hearts-and-minds
operation broadcasting to the 200,000 Congolese crowded into
the town. Kalemie might be one of the biggest towns in the Congo,
but it has no state radio or television, no newspapers, no landline
telephones and no Internet access. I arrived the day after the
opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympics in Athens but, were it
not for Michel's radio station, the event would have passed
unnoticed in Kalemie.

We passed the ruins of the old airport, a single-storey 1950s
building perforated with bullet holes and surrounded, on all
sides, by puddles of shattered, red roof tiles. It had been shot up
so many times that I was sure even the bullet holes had bullet
holes. On top of one of the piles of broken masonry sat a
Congolese militiaman, who seemed to scowl directly at me, idly
waving his assault rifle, as our jeep crawled past.

Michel noticed me wince and tried to sound reassuring. 'In
town itself, things have been pretty quiet since the peace treaty.
As you probably know there was some pretty had fighting hack
here during the war and air raids by pro-government war planes,
but the rebels, the mai-mai, and the government troops now seem
to he getting on.'

I was only half-listening as I watched a group of charcoalburners struggling to bring the produce of their day's work into
town. Large chunks of charcoal had been crammed into floppy
cages woven from thin strips of brown bark. The cages were then
flung across the handlebars and frame of old bicycles, with more
cages piled on top. The crazy, tottering loads were on the final leg
of their journey, heaved through the sand into town by the barechested men, whose already dark bodies were streaked with
smears of sweat-congealed, jet-black charcoal powder.

But then Michel said something that brought my attention
straight back to him.

As you probably know, like all of the eastern DRC, we had a bit
of a wobble a few months back. If you look over there you will see
what I mean.'

Kalemie was just a few hundred kilometres south of Bukavu,
the scene of the June attack by pro-Rwandan rebels. It had
prompted a backlash by the Congolese authorities against anyone
linked with Rwanda, especially the Banyamulenge, a tribal group
from eastern Congo who trace their ancestry back a few hundred
years to the Tutsi tribes of Rwanda. No matter that the
Banyamulenge have been in the Congo for generations, their
association with Rwanda was enough to see them murdered and
persecuted today by the Congolese.

'There you can see our local Banyamulenge,' Michel said as we
passed in through the gate of the UN base in Kalemie. He was
pointing at a 200-strong crowd, mainly of children, gathered
around a standpipe where they were messily filling brightyellow, plastic water containers. 'They arrived at the gate one day
in one big group and said they feared for their lives. They have
been here, living right there under plastic sheets out in the open
for the last few months. We don't know quite what to do with
them, but for the moment we are happy for them to camp at our
gate.'

Evelyn Waugh was not overly impressed with Albertville when
he passed through here in 1930. He arrived by ferry, spent two
nights in the town and then headed west into the Congo proper
by train. He wrote a travel book about his journey called Remote
People, in which the Congolese section of the trip was described
in unflattering terms. The relevant chapter is entitled 'Second
Nightmare' and in it Waugh grizzles at length about the petty
bureaucrats responsible for immigration at the port and the lack
of anything for the visitor to do in Albertville, although he is
fairly complimentary about the service he enjoyed at the port's
principal hotel. He describes how he took out his portable
typewriter and wrote some of the early chapters of the travel book
as he was dive-bombed by mosquitoes, before he got into a
steaming row with an irksome ferry-boat captain, who marooned
him on the Congo River.

Michel told me it was not possible for me to stay at the UN base,
so we went in search of the hotel Waugh described as offering
`fairly good food'. What we found was a two-storey ruin on the
main street with flaking paint and broken windows. A spacious
first-floor balcony was supported by a number of elegant, fluted
columns, but they were all pock-marked with what appeared to
be bullet holes, and when I looked further up the front wall I
could see why. The hotel had been converted, years after Waugh
passed through, into an officers' club for the Congolese army, and
the name still painted on the front wall, Mess Des Officiers, made
it suitable for target practice during any of the town's subsequent
periods of instability.

`Try the Hotel Du Lac along the road,' a man shouted from the
balcony when I asked if I could have a look around. `This is a
military building now. You cannot come in.'

A larger three-storey structure, a short distance away, bore the
hotel's name. Its construction in the 1950s came during
Albertville's belle epoque, the period when the town was
booming, and at the time it must have been an impressive place, the largest hotel for hundreds of kilometres. I stood back on the
other side of the road and tried to picture it with cars parked
outside, music coming out of the dining room, fans spinning in
the rooms to keep down the heat and the mosquitoes. It took quite
a leap of imagination. Fifty years after it was built, the hotel had
no electricity or water and the rooms were mostly empty shells.
Some people sat on chairs on what was once a terrace in front of
the hotel, but when I asked about rooms they shook their heads.

I cursed silently. The American journalist who had tried to
follow Stanley's route in the mid-1960s had passed through
Albertville. The civil war was already five years old when he
arrived in Albertville, and he described his euphoria at making it
safely to the port. After all my own troubles reaching this spot, I
recognised the same sense of euphoria in myself, but what I did
not recognise was the town he portrayed, with its comfortable,
functioning hotel offering hot water in every room.

I had one other option for accommodation. During my research
I had made contact with the International Rescue Committee, an
American aid group, which kept an office in Kalemie during the
war. I had tried to contact the office manager, Tommy Lee, by
email, but he was using a fairly intermittent system that relied on
a satellite telex that only worked a few hours each week, so I was
not entirely sure if my messages had got through.

`The IRC house is just down the road, but before I take you
there, I want to show you something you might find interesting.'
Michel was really getting into his role of Kalemie Tour Guide.

He drove me back along the main road, past the bicycle taxis
and the derelict terrace. The awful road surface meant we only
managed a walking pace and Michel was forever greeting people
in Swahili, joshing and waving out of the jeep window, before he
steered the vehicle up a steep hill, bouncing violently over some
exposed tree roots and parked in front of what looked like a pair
of giant, brown beetles.

'What on earth are those?' I asked.

'Go see for yourself,' answered Michel.

It was as I got out of the car that I spotted the gun barrels
emerging from under the scarab-like metal covers that looked like
overturned, oversized woks.

'First World War naval guns,' said Michel. 'The Belgians
brought them here when Albertville was worth defending. I guess
they remind you that once upon a time Europe thought this town
worth fighting over.'

In 1915 Kalemie was strategically important enough to stage
one of Africa's most peculiar episodes from the First World War.
Two British motor launches were smuggled here by the Royal
Navy for a surprise attack on a flotilla of German warships, which
was enjoying unchallenged control over Africa's deepest lake.
The railway might be a ruin today, but almost a century ago it was
so well established that British naval planners used it to bring
their attack boats here by train, after an overland journey from
Cape Town, almost 5,000 kilometres to the south. The subsequent
successful raid on the German ships became part of British naval
lore, and a bowdlerised version of the story formed the basis for
C.S. Forester's novel The African Queen, which was made into a
1951 Hollywood film starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey
Bogart.

Michel dropped me outside the IRC house in Kalemie, a rather
sinister-looking building built from dark, volcanic stone, made
even more imposing by its formidable iron gate. As his jeep
pulled away, I heaved my rucksack onto my back and knocked
loudly. A small shutter, the size of a letterbox, clunked open in
the gate at eye level and a pair of eyes looked me up and down.
Before I said anything, the gate swung open. Being white was
clearly enough to gain entry.

`Please come in, we were expecting you, Mr Tim.'

It took me it moment to work out what had happened. My
emails must have got through and my name must have been passed to a gatekeeper who was not exactly overwhelmed with
white visitors.

'Please go inside the house. You will find Monsieur Tommy
there.'

I put my luggage down on the steps leading up to the house and
made my way inside. In the front room, a black man lay dozing on
a tired-looking sofa, and so, treading gingerly, I entered a large,
dusty sitting room with a television at one end and a dining table
at the other. The room was crammed with the furniture and kit I
associated with itinerant aid workers - piles of food sacks,
rucksacks and an array of electrical equipment like computers,
satellite phones and cables - all covered in a filigree of dust and
all connected to the same overworked power point.

'Mr Lee, Mr Lee,' I called faintly. Kalemie's position just south
of the Equator meant twilight would last only a few minutes.
Darkness was already gathering, so I flicked a light switch.
Nothing happened, so back outside I went, trying not to wake the
man I assumed to be the housekeeper.

I failed, and in a blather of blinking and yawning, the figure sat
upright and spoke to me in the strongest American accent I had
ever heard.

'Hi. You must be Tim. Welcome to Kalemie. I am Tommy Lee,
a pleasure to meet you.'

I sat with him for a while on the sagging sofa as he came round.
Night had fallen and, without any lights in the town, the darkness
was complete. Tommy stirred, saying something about this being
the worst time for mosquitoes, and he checked that all the
screened doors and windows were fully closed. He asked me
about my plans and raised two heavy, querulous eyebrows when
I said that I had come to Kalemie to try to travel to the river.

'Folks don't move around much overland here.' He spoke
slowly and deliberately. 'Some of our staff use our motorbikes to
visit our projects out in the bush, but they don't go far.'

I could not let the mention of motorbikes pass, so I plunged in.

'Would there be any chance I could pay you to use two of your
bikes?T

I was disappointed, but at least I now knew that it was possible
to get motorbikes along some of the bush tracks.

It was now very dark, but inside the main room I could make
out a shadowy figure moving around, skilfully managing to avoid
bumping into the furniture. I peered harder and Tommy spotted
my curiosity.

'That's our cook. We eat early round here and that's dinner she
is laying out. We have a generator, but we don't have much fuel
so we don't turn it on until we really need it. Come on in, it's time
to eat.'

He shouted over his shoulder for one of the security guards to
turn on the generator and, after a distant mechanical roar, the
house lights flickered into life and for the first time I could have
a good look around. On the simple (lining table two places had
been set and between them sat a large, battered cooking pot and
I could see the red blinking lights of various pieces of valuable
communication equipment as they greedily took their nightly
recharge.