Blood River (7 page)

Tommy saw me staring at the plug. Keeping the batteries of my
camera, satellite phone and laptop topped up required careful
husbandry and I did not know when I would next have it chance
to recharge.

'I am lucky because we are just about the only house in town
with power right now, but it takes a lot of effort to get the right
fuel, make sure it's clean and keep the generator running. Sure,
you can recharge, but we only run it for a few hours so you better
sort it out now.'

The tour of the house continued as we turned down a single,
dark corridor.

'At the end there, that's the bathroom. It's not much, but the
water is clean enough to wash with, and here is your room.'

The room was more passed through than lived in. Without
many alternatives for accommodation in Kalemie, this house
would have been visited not just by the IRC staff, but by all sorts
of hangers-on like me, and the room reflected this. A large bed, as
saggy as the sofa outside, filled the middle of the room, boxed in
by a cavernous mosquito net, and around the edge of the room
were various old bits of luggage and clothing abandoned by
previous visitors.

Back at the dinner table, Tommy was already serving me rice
and chicken, before offering me a glass of water. A few hours
earlier Michel had pointed at a crowd of women washing in the
stagnant water of the Lukuga River and told me about Kalemie's
recent cholera outbreak, so I paused before accepting the offer.
Tommy tried to reassure me. 'We boil all our water and then we
filter it - it's routine.'

After dinner, the generator was turned off and I sat in the
darkness listening as Tommy told me about himself. I could make
out the shadows of his hands tweaking the whiskers on his chin
as he described a career spent largely doing aid work in Africa. He
had served most of his time in francophone west Africa, which
explained his excellent French and Nigerian wife, and had only
arrived in the Congo relatively recently. But in the short time he
had been here, he had already had a grim experience.

'I was in Bukavu in June, when those rebel soldiers came into
town. It was a bad scene, man, a really bad scene.'

I asked him to explain.

'As you may know, Bukavu is like the capital for the aid
community working in that region of the eastern Congo. Every
group is there. And for the sake of security, all the groups are on
the same radio net, so we all know what is going on. When the rebels arrived, we all just hit the deck, staying in our houses and
listening in on the radio to try and work out what was happening.
Well, there was this small aid group with a compound, where a
young Irish girl was working with an older woman - from
Denmark or Sweden, I think. Anyway, the rebels got in there
somehow and we all lay there on the ground, listening on the
radio, as this young woman was raped.

`It was horrible. But the older woman, who had been shot but
was still alive, kept telling us what was happening. She was a
nurse and somehow she kept her voice under control the whole
way through, describing things clearly and factually. It was awful,
man. We had a running commentary. She hoped the message
would get out to the UN troops up there from South Africa, but
they were fucking hopeless, man - it took them more than a day
before they eventually came into town.

`That was my welcome to the Congo. Scary, eh?'

With that Tommy got up and left me, muttering something
about needing to check his messages from the United States. I sat
in silence, thinking about the story he had just told, before
heading to the sanctuary of my net-shrouded bed. The last I saw
of Tommy that night was through the window of his small office.
It was dark apart from the glow of his laptop reflected on his
whiskery face, as he tapped out messages for relay via satellite
phone and swatted insects attracted to the only light source for
kilometres around. It made me think of the mosquito-plagued
Evelyn Waugh, tapping away on his portable typewriter as he
worked on his first draft of Remote People, in this same town
seventy years earlier.

The following morning I was woken by a voice asking, insistently,
for Monsieur Tim. Dawn had broken, but it was still early and
there was no sign of Tommy. I hauled on my trousers and shirt
and emerged blinking to find a smartly dressed Congolese man
sitting on my favourite Baggy sofa.

`Good morning. My name is Benoit Bangana. I work for Care
International and have been told you need help with motorbikes.'

`Yes, that's right.' I was not yet fully awake and was struggling
to take this in. Brian Larson, the boss of Care International based
thousands of kilometres away on the other side of the country,
had delivered on his half-promise of help.

`Well, I am here with one other colleague. We have two motorbikes and, if you are prepared to take the risk, we will take you
some of the way.'

Still half-asleep, I was not sure I could believe what I was
hearing. It just did not compute with everything I had been told
about this place. A series of questions came blathering out from
me, as my sleepy head cleared. Where had this man come from?
How had he got here? Was he serious about heading overland to
the Congo River?

`I am based in the town of Kasongo, a little over halfway
between here and Kindu on the river. Kasongo is about five
hundred kilometres from here, and Care International is the only
aid group based there. Normally we come and go by plane, but
recently we have been trying to extend our area of operation and
for the past few months we have been preparing to go overland
from Kasongo to the town of Kabambarre, about three hundred
kilometres from here. Motorbikes are the only way to travel.
When we got the message that you needed help, I was already
planning a trip to Kabambarre, so my boss asked me if I would
come all the way here and take you back.'

I was thrilled.

`How far can you take me? Do you know the way?'

Benoit smiled and tried to sound reassuring.

`I reckon I can get you to Kasongo. Our bikes are good and I
think we can buy enough petrol here in Kalemie. Out there, there
is nothing, so we will have to take everything we need for the
journey from here, all the food, all the water, everything.'

That was progress, but my main concern was the security situation. `Is it safe? What about the rebels and the mai-mai?'

At this Benoit stopped smiling and looked more sombre.

`For the security situation, well, that would be your own risk -
I cannot guarantee your security. You can meet mai-mai anywhere out there and if you are lucky, and they are not drunk, then
you can get through. I am not so sure about a white man, though.
I have never travelled here with a white man. I am sorry, but I
cannot guarantee anything out there.'

Those words stayed with me long after he stopped speaking. 'I
cannot guarantee anything out there.' They tempered the excitement I felt about securing a motorbike. When I conceived this
trip, I hoped to slip round the rebel soldiers, but Benoit seemed
adamant this was not possible.

We took two cups of black tea from the cook, who had returned
to her cooking station - a charcoal burner on the back step of the
house - and discussed options. I wanted to know more about
Benoit and why he was prepared to risk his life in the badlands of
Katanga.

`I am an engineer by training, but there is no work in the Congo
apart from with aid groups like Care International. Now the war
has ended we can hope again for an improvement in our lives, but
the improvement will only come if there is normality, and there
will only be normality if you can, once again, travel safely across
our country. Someone has to be the first to go along these roads
after the war, and as long as I make all the right preparations, then
I am happy to be the first person.'

'But aren't you scared when you travel in these sorts of areas?'

`I am afraid a little, but then I think about the good that will
come to the people of Katanga if the roads are made safe again and
life can go back to normal. Every village we reach, every stream
we cross, is another small movement towards normality again in
the Congo.'

`What about travelling with a white man? Won't that be even
more risky for you?T

'I always ride with my colleague, Odimba, and we have
developed our own little strategy when we think it looks
dangerous - we try not to stop. Out in the forest the rebels are not
expecting bikes, so if we are lucky we hurry past them and the
first they see of us is our backs, disappearing into the forest. If we
keep going they have no idea if we are black, white, Congolese or
foreign.'

I looked at Benoit very closely. I was not just asking him to risk
his life on my behalf. I was considering trusting him with my
own. It was a big call, but the thing that swung it was the way he
answered my question about how much I should pay him for his
help.

'I am paid by Care International, who have asked me to extend
our range around Kasongo. Travelling with you is part of my job,
so you don't have to pay me anything. If we get to Kasongo, you
can talk to the senior man there about the cost of hiring the bikes.
But as for me, I don't expect any payment.'

That was the moment I decided Benoit Bangana was a man I
could trust, but before I made any more decisions about the
security situation, I thought it wise to ask Michel's advice.

I found Michel at work in his radio station, a standard-issue UN
container at the garrison headquarters built in the ruin of a
Belgian-era cotton factory on the outskirts of town. Thousands of
workers had once processed raw cotton grown in the sweaty
Congolese interior and shipped here by lorry and train. Terraces
of brick houses had been erected for hundreds of workers, but
most of them lay in ruins now outside the razor-wire perimeter of
the UN base.

Michel was deep in thought, trying to work out how the local
UN commander should deal with an imminent public-relations
crisis. Peacekeepers in Kalemie and elsewhere across the Congo
had been caught paying local girls, under the age of consent, for
sex. Almost all UN missions suffer from the same problem, with bored, well-paid young men deployed to places where poverty is
so acute that girls are willing to sell themselves. Michel had just
come from a meeting where the large scale of the problem in
Kalemie had been revealed. He seemed happy for the distraction
I provided when I introduced Benoit and explained about the
motorbikes. Michel was impressed.

'You move fast. Having a motorbike is great news. Well done.'

`But I am still worried about security. Benoit says there are maimai all along these tracks. Do you know anyone local they might
listen to, who could help me get through?'

`There is one person I know about from Kalemie who dares to
travel regularly through the bush. He is a pygmy and he runs a
small aid group here in town that tries to protect the rights of
pygmies. The group's name is La Voix des Minorites, Minorities'
Voice, and the man's name is Georges Mbuyu. I have interviewed
him many times.'

The name sounded familiar. I looked back at my research notes
and saw that an Anglican missionary from Uganda had once told
me of Georges Mbuyu and his pygmy rights group. I had read a
report about the role Georges played in negotiating the release of
four local villagers arrested during the war by the pro-Rwandan
rebels, who were then in control of Kalemie, but the missionary
had told me that getting in touch with Georges was impossible
from outside the Congo. Now that I was in Kalemie, Michel
assured me that finding Georges could not be simpler.

Benoit and I piled into Michel's jeep and drove back through
town, past the bicycle taxis and the hawkers. We followed the
road up past the church on the headland and, just as we came
level with a derelict Belgian villa, Michel stopped. The facade
was cracked, standing on half-collapsed foundations left exposed
by numerous seasonal rains. A small man, a tad under five foot in
height, wearing a T-shirt, dark trousers and plastic flip-flops,
emerged from inside. When he saw Michel, he grinned.

The pair greeted each other warmly in Swahili and then Michel broke into French, introducing me as a writer. Georges raised his
eyebrows in astonishment and then seemed to remember his
manners.

'Please come into my office,' he said, leading me over the
broken verandah and into a bare room where most of the plaster
had either fallen off the wall or was about to. He proffered me a
rickety chair and asked me my business.

'I want to go overland from here all the way to the Congo River.
I want to follow the same route used by the explorer, Stanley,
when he became the first white man to cross the Congo. But I am
worried about security. Can you help?'

He thought for a moment.

'I cannot remember the last time a white man went through that
area. It has been many, many years. But I know some of the maimai near town. It is not just the pygmies that my group represents.
We represent all minorities, and sometimes that includes mai-mai.
Some of the mai-mai are not rebels, they are just villagers who want
to protect themselves. These are good people and I can talk to them.
The problem is the outsiders who come down here into our
province of Katanga - they are the ones who are out of control.'

'Would you be prepared to accompany me, by motorbike,
towards the river?' I tried not to sound too desperate as I asked the
question.

For a moment, Georges was quiet. He looked at his colleague, a
much taller man, Mutombo Nganga; they had a brief exchange in
Swahili and then he turned to me.

'I cannot go with you all the way, but I am prepared to take the
risk along the roads close to Kalemie. I think you will be safe if I
go with you. I know these mai-mai well. I grew up in the bush and
I know their families and their villages, so I could try to help you.'