Blood River (9 page)

A lopsided sign was tied to a tree. It was a piece of bark that had
been flattened and a name had been written using ash in crude,
uneven letters on its pale underside. It reminded me of
illustrations from A.A. Milne books and it read 'La Voix des
Minorites', the name of the group run by Georges. The village was
composed of tiny grass huts arranged around an area of dirt
beaten flat by shoeless feet. As Georges spoke to the village elder,
a group of children wearing rags played a rather hazardous game,
which involved the player trying to pick up as many sticks as
possible that had been scattered on the ground while dodging a
coconut thrown at her by rival players.

Back on the bikes, the road climbed and the bush got thinner
until finally I got the view of the lake I had been hoping for. I
stopped my bike and climbed up a bank. The lake stretched away
to the east as far as I could see, but just below me was the village
of Mtowa and a headland, the first piece of Congolese land
Stanley touched when he arrived here by boat across the lake in
September 1876.

`I know everything about Stanley.' The words of the village chief,
Idi Kavunja, grabbed mV attention. It had taken me a week to get
here from Johannesburg, but I was finally on the trail of the
explorer. Hearing his name, pronounced in the French style of
'Stan-lay', threw me. I was talking to a chief whose forebears
could have met the explorer, but the magic of the moment was
lost when it became clear he was talking rubbish.

'He is buried here. If you pay me money, I will show you the
grave.' I looked into a pair of eyes that had an oily, unfocused
sheen. The chief was now craning forward, the sinews on his
scrawny neck as tight as guitar-strings, and his breath was
pungently high. `You are a white man, you have a phone. I am a
chief, I need a phone. You must give me your phone.'

There was nothing threatening about the chief. He was a slight
man, wearing the remnants of a pin-striped suit that was several sizes too big for him. Inside a wide and grubby shirt collar, his
neck rattled around like a turtle's, giving him the impression of a
child dressed up in his parents' clothes. But there was nothing
child-like about his next outburst.

'You white men only ever come here to profit from the Congo.
Stanley was the first. Then came the Belgians. How do I know you
have not come here to profit?'

Georges looked embarrassed and I made a polite but firm
apology and returned to our bikes. We rode down to the water's
edge, following a track through the reed beds that was used by
fishermen. When it got too muddy for the bikes, I parked and
walked down to a break in the reeds where the fishermen had
pulled up their dugouts. A boy was standing ankle-deep in the jetblack mud, hunting for worms. I shouted a question, asking if he
knew the name of this place.

He nodded and shouted back. 'Mtowa.'

I wanted to see if any of Mtowa's history still lingered about the
place, asking, 'Do you know the old name? It used to be called
Arab's Crossing. This was where the slavers used to arrive from
the other side of the lake.'

The boy thought for a moment, shook his head blankly and
continued worming. Suddenly he shouted something in Swahili,
something that made Georges become visibly more tense.

'He said there are land mines all around here, left by Ugandan
troops when they occupied this area during the war.' Georges was
now peering into the reedy undergrowth.

'Look there,' he shouted, pointing at a red warning sign. In large
black letters it said: 'Beware! Mines!'

Very slowly, we followed our footprints back to the bikes for
the return trip to Kalemie.

As a trial run, the trip to Mtowa was a success. The bikes stood
up well to the shocking conditions of the track and we had
managed about ten kilometres an hour. I had not hurt myself, and
both Benoit and Georges had been helpful companions. But the words of the chief stayed with me, as my first hint of the residual
bitterness felt by Congolese for centuries of suffering at the hands
of outsiders.

The old man might have been drunk, but he was right.
Outsiders have robbed and exploited the people of the Congo ever
since the days of the first European and Arab slavers. The
territory that Stanley staked in the name of Leopold witnessed
what many regard as the first genocide of the modern era, when
millions of Congolese were effectively worked to death trying to
meet the colonialists' almost insatiable demand for resources,
most notably rubber. And since independence, foreign powers
have toyed with the Congo, stripping its mineral assets and
exploiting its strategic position, never mindful of the suffering
inflicted on its people. And that really was the point. At every
stage of its bloody history, outsiders have tended to treat
Congolese as somehow sub-human, not worthy of the consideration they would expect for themselves. For progress to be
made, outsiders must treat Congolese as equals and they could do
worse than follow the example of an amazing white woman I
discovered after we got back to Kalemie.

It took some time to track down the town's last white, Belgian
resident. Michel had lived there for two years, but he had only
ever heard mention of the mysterious woman, who kept herself to
herself, living in an old villa on the hill behind the main church.

Genevieve Nagant's house was tucked some way off the main
road. It took some finding, and I had to clamber through rough
bush before I finally found the front door and knocked. From
inside, I could hear various locks being undone before it was
opened by the smiling seventy-seven-year-old. The door opened
into a hall and ground-floor room that were musty and full of
books. The humidity had caused most to swell and lose their
bindings. Many had been rewrapped in unmarked, brown-paper
wrappers. It looked like the study of an eccentric Oxford don, an image Mlle Nagant reinforced as she fussed about, apologising for
the mess, thrusting books and pamphlets at me, before shooing
me upstairs to a much fresher, first-floor living room, which
opened out onto a balcony.

On entering the room, something immediately caught my eye.
On the wall there were two pictures. They were crayon drawings
of tribal figures, paddling a canoe against a backdrop of thatched
huts and bush. It was a hot afternoon, but the pictures gave me
goosebumps. They were exactly the same as the ones my mother
bought when she passed through this town in 1958.

'Do you like these pictures?' Mile Nagant had noticed my
reaction.

'They remind me of my home in England. My mother bought
some pictures just like these when she travelled through the
Congo before I was born. Seeing them makes me think of the
stories she told about her journey.'

Mlle Nagant smiled and for a moment we looked at the pictures
together. 'In the late 1950s, Albertville was the best it ever got.
The trains would arrive at the station and the passengers could
connect with the liners. I remember you could hear the whistles
of the ships as they left the port, and sometimes you could even
hear the band playing on the top deck in first class.'

We went to sit outside on her balcony. The house stood on
the headland near the church and from tip there I got a fine
view of the lake. The sky was clear and the bright sun made the
water sparkle for the first time during my visit to Kalemie. At
last I could see why the Belgians knew it as the `Pearl of
Tanganyika'.

'I was horn near Liege, but arrived here in 1951. I was in my
twenties and my job was as a teacher of social science. My duties
were to teach Congolese ladies who came from villages about life
in towns such as this one. We had classes in water hygiene,
cooking, baby care and that sort of thing. People remember the
Belgian colonial rule as a time for cruelty, but towards the end progress was being made across all of society. I used to live with
a nurse who worked on a health programme that was successful
in ending leprosy in the area and much of the malaria. Can you
imagine that? Today, leprosy and malaria are killing thousands of
people all over the Congo.'

In 1960, within days of independence being granted to the
Congo, the first violence broke out. In Albertville, almost the
entire Belgian community left within a matter of weeks. Why had
Mlle Nagant stayed?

Her elegant reply revealed that she was a rare breed of Belgian
colonial, one who genuinely cared for the local Congolese people.
'Because when you plant a seed you must tend it before it will
blossom.'

Since independence, she had lived through four decades of
chaos. Her tiny Belgian civil-service pension used to be sent here
through the post office, but when the postal service collapsed in
the 1970s she began relying on the kindness of Belgian
missionaries, who would courier the small amount of money
back when returning from leave.

And how does the situation today compare with what Mlle
Nagant has witnessed since 1951?

'I am sorry to say that today is worse than ever before. I have got
used to the lack of water. I have got used to the lack of power. I
have got used to the lack of supplies in town. But the thing that
makes today so bad is the lack of the rule of law. There was a time
when at least there were some police who could keep some sort
of order, or even soldiers youu could go to, but today there is
nothing. Everything is upside down. Today, a driver for the UN
here is paid ten times more than the provincial governor from the
government. How can you run a government in circumstances
like that? As I said, everything is upside down.'

She went inside and emerged a few moments later with a
clinking tray. On it was a recycled wine bottle and two glasses.
We watched as the blue of the lake steadily darkened with the dipping of the sun, and she toasted my health with her homemade white wine.

I asked her how she filled her days and she explained that she
was writing an anthropological thesis on the early Congolese
tribes discovered by the first Albertville residents in the last years
of the nineteenth century. She was particularly interested in a
local man, Stephano Kaoze, a priest who became the first black
abbot of the Congo. It had become her life's work to record the
thoughts and writings of Abbot Kaoze.

When I told her about my plan to travel overland to the river,
she thought for it moment and went to get something from the
chaos of her study downstairs.

'Here it is - this is one of the sayings of Abbot Kaoze, which
might be of value to you.'

I took the flimsy notebook she offered me and read what she
was pointing at. In the late 1890s Abbot Kaoze had this to say
about travel. When going on a journey it is not just the strength
of a man's legs, but the provisions he prepares for the trip.'

I walked back through the derelict ruin of Kalemie thinking about
my own provisions and preparations. My mind was working as I
tried to decide what I should do in the aftermath of the killings in
Burundi and the resulting threat by the pro-Rwandan rebel group
to rip tip the peace treaty.

If the war restarted, there was no way I would take the risk of
trying to cross the Congo. Michel said the UN alert state had
already been raised as a result of the killing, but the UN was
waiting to see the next move by the various rebel groups before it
began the subsequent stage of its security plan - withdrawing all
civilian staff, like Michel, from the Congo.

I had until 5 a.m. the following day to make up my mind.
Benoit and Odimba had been away from their Care International
base for more than a week and, with the security situation
deteriorating, they were anxious to get themselves and their precious motorbikes back to base as soon as possible. They told
me they would be leaving at 5 a.m., with or without me.

The sun had set and the town was deathly quiet as I walked
down the hill past the empty plinth, where a statue of the Belgian
king, Albert I, had once stood before an angry crowd had ripped
it down in the aftermath of independence. I continued past the
silent railway station, where my mother had arrived in the 1950s,
and the ruins of the hotel, where Evelyn Waugh stayed in the
1930s.

It had taken me four years of research and patience to get to this
point. If I did not take my chance tomorrow, there was a risk it
would be years before the next opportunity would come round.

UBUJWF: AND UGUHA 131EAD-DRE8B.