Blood River (10 page)

UGUHA IIEAD-DRESS.

Hairstyles from eastern Congo as recorded, above, by H.M. Stanley in
1878 and, below, by the author in 2004

As I emerged from the house on the morning we were to leave
Kalemie, Benoit appeared to be wrestling with eels. It was still
dark, and with my head torch all I could make out was his shape,
leaning over the back of one of the motorbikes, struggling with
various long, black things with a springy and clearly disobedient
life of their own. The eel image was reinforced by Benoit's outfit.
He was wearing a bright-yellow plastic raincoat, with heavy
gloves, kneepads, goggles and black, shiny wellington boots. He
looked like a ninja North Sea trawlerman.

'Can I help?' I asked without much conviction.

He ignored me and, in between the grunts and curses, I worked
out what was going on. He was using old bicycle inner tubes as
luggage straps to attach my kit to the back of his motorbike.
Knowing the balance of his bike and how it depended on the
loading, he insisted on doing it by himself. Eventually, after much
stretching, snapping, knotting and restretching, he stood back, let
out a sigh and pronounced himself satisfied everything was
secure. To me, it looked anything but. The 100cc motorbike was
now sitting heavily on its rear wheel, with my rucksack, a jerrycan and various other pieces of gear bulkily taking up most of the
rider's seat. Above the handlebars was another hulking
arrangement of fuel bottles, water canisters and other bundles,
trapped in its own web of straining inner tubes. And on top of it
all, Benoit was wriggling into two rucksacks - one on his back,
the other slung in reverse across his chest.

He could see I was sceptical. 'It's okay; these bikes are
amazingly strong.'

I found him reassuring. The same cannot be said for Fiston. My
`local hire' motorbike-man had turned up stinking of booze, swaying extravagantly and mumbling something about needing
more petrol. The day before I had impressed upon him the
importance of having a full tank when we set out, and had paid
him part of his fee in advance so that he could make sure it was
full. In retrospect, this was a stupid thing to have done. He had
clearly spent the cash on getting wasted. I grimaced, but, yet
again, Benoit was the one who dealt with the problem.

'I thought this might happen,' he said. 'Last night I bought
another few litres of petrol for emergencies.'

In a town like Kalemie where there are no petrol stations, fuel
is sold on an ad hoc basis. It is of dodgy provenance, having been
smuggled here by boat from Tanzania, and of even dodgier
quality, `watered down' with palm oil or any other suitable
solvent. It is sold in old bottles, jars or cans and nobody cares too
much about making sure they are clean. By torchlight I watched
Benoit filling Fiston's tank from a plastic bottle. Instead of
throwing it away, once he finished pouring he carefully crushed
it flat, screwed the top back on and tucked it under one of his
tame eels.

`Never know when you might need that,' he said quietly.

A frantic footfall announced the arrival of Georges. He barged
through the gate, panting an apology for being late. As he caught
his breath, there was a brief conflab about who would ride where.
Benoit would ride alone with his unfeasibly large luggage load;
Odimba, Benoit's colleague from Care International, also dressed
like a ninja trawlerman, would follow with Georges as a
passenger; and I would sit behind the sozzled Fiston and pray for
him to sober up.

The engines of the three bikes stirred into life. It would be an
exaggeration to say they roared. But in silent Kalemie even these
puny machines sounded pretty impressive and we made quite a
din as we swept out of town. In eastern Congo, a land of
pedestrians and bicycles, the 100cc motorbike is king.

In our headlights I could see we were approaching the iron bridge across the Lukuga River on the northern edge of town. A
Royal Navy officer, Commander Verney Lovett Cameron, had
been the first European to explore the river. Cameron was one of
the great `what if' figures of African exploration, an adventurer of
no less ambition than Stanley, but who somehow never quite
staked his own place in the public's imagination. He never came
up with a soundbite as memorable as `Dr Livingstone, I presume?'
Cameron actually beat Stanley to this spot by two years. He, too,
had heard tales from the Arab slavers about an immense river
somewhere out there to the west. And he, too, was willing to trek
through the bush for week after week to check if it were true.

But, unlike Stanley, he failed to make the river descent. Once
he reached the upper Congo River he tried to persuade local
villagers to take him downriver in their canoes, but they refused.
He spent several weeks camped on the swampy river banks
becoming more and more frustrated with the intransigence of the
river tribes, and more and more sick from malaria. Eventually he
abandoned the plan to follow the river, setting off overland due
west instead, ending up on the coast of what is now Angola.
Cameron's journey was an amazing achievement, one of the earliest and most significant trans-African treks, but his failure to solve
the riddle of the river has seen history pass him by. What if
Cameron had descended the Congo River? What if Cameron, more
of a British establishment figure than his parvenu rival (Cameron
dedicated his book, Across Africa, to Her Majesty Queen Victoria,
while Stanley dedicated his to the newspapermen who commissioned him), had returned to London having charted a navigable
river reaching across Africa and had successfully persuaded Britain
to stake the land as a colony? How different would African history
be, had a British Congo, not a Belgian Congo, dominated the centre
of the continent?

Not so different, is my conclusion. I have met British colonial
types in Africa who scorn what Belgium did in the Congo and try
to draw a distinction between the colonial system imposed by Brussels and that imposed by London. So much crueller than any
British colony, they say', so much more brutal towards the local
Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting
independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa,
from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and elsewhere, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in
the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were
predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew
best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as
underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the proindependence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder,
torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the
mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium
when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside
world's tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose
corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where
the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its
people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted
the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee
stability and an end to civil strife.

Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it,
but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent's colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be
shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but
colonialism in its purest, basest form.

I thought of Cameron as our bikes clattered over the loose
planks on the river bridge, because his first attempt to reach the
Congo River had begun right beneath us, on the Lukuga. It is the
only river that drains Lake Tanganyika and the young naval
officer was convinced he could descend it by boat, all the way
to its confluence with the much bigger, then-unknown river
somewhere out there to the west of Lake Tanganyika. What he
had not understood is that the Lukuga is impassable by boat because of the odd geographical feature that it only moves when
the lake level rises during the rainy season. Cameron managed
to get his small boat just a short distance down the Lukuga
before he hit an immense and impenetrable barrier of silt and
reed beds. He struggled for days, trying to hack his way through.
He described how his heart sank as the channels he cut were
immediately filled by matter floating up from below. It must
have been wretched work - sweaty, insect-plagued and,
ultimately, doomed.

Within minutes of crossing the bridge we left behind the sticky
atmosphere that tormented Cameron. The air began to cool nicely
as we followed a track climbing up and away from the lakeside
still. Nightjars roosted on the path. I would pick them up in our
headlights and watch as they sat frozen to the spot, exploding at
the last second from underneath the lead motorbike, peeling up
and away into the darkness. Although Kalemie had appeared
asleep as we left, for the first few kilometres I kept spotting
ghostly figures on the roadside. They were women, with baskets
and tools perched on their heads, making their way out to the
bush to tend plots of cassava and other crops. From a distance I
would make out their dark shapes against the lightening sky and
then, for an instant, they would be caught in the headlights, the
colours of their cotton wraps bright and their wide eyes frozen in
surprise.

I love starting a journey very early in the day. It offers the
comforting sense that if something goes wrong, there is still the
whole day to sort it out. As we left Kalemie before dawn that
August morning, I felt a strong sense of well-being. The track was
overhung with dew-drenched branches and twigs, and within a
few minutes my wet clothes showed why Benoit and Odimba
were wearing waterproofs. But the fact that I was soaked did not
dim my spirits. After all the planning and worry, I was finally on
the track of Stanley in the Congo, picking my way from Lake
Tanganyika across ridges and through valleys that he had traversed in 1876. 1 can remember feeling excitement. And I can
remember just how the euphoria began to ebb a few kilometres
down the track when we had our first flat tyre.

I was bouncing happily along the track, tucked up behind Fiston.
The fresh air had sobered him up and although the track was
appalling, he was riding well, anticipating the divots, holes and
obstacles, slowing down with his gears and using just the right
amount of power to manoeuvre round them. For the first hour or
so everything seemed perfect. August was the last month of the
dry season and the rising sun had quickly dried the dew from my
clothes. In spite of the track, we were skipping along at a healthy
speed, peaking sometimes as high as 30 kph. But all of a sudden
I saw Odimba, the rider ahead of us, slowing, peering down at his
rear wheel and stopping.

The tiny form of Georges slipped off the back of Odimba's hike.
Within a few minutes Odimba had undone the wheel, slipped off
the tyre and begun searching for the leak in the inner tube. It
reminded me of repairing punctures on my bicycle as a child.

Dawn had now broken and the low sun lit the feathery heads of
the long grass on either side of the track. Without the sound of the
bike engines, it was a scene of still beauty. We were within a few
degrees of the Equator, but the early morning temperature was
comfortable and the hush was still relatively open savannah, not
the dark, claustrophobic hothouse of true rainforest. With good
rivers, heavy dew and rich soil, no wonder the early Belgian
colonialists here believed they had found an Eden.

Behind me I heard murmuring. I turned to see Odimba hand
Benoit something. It was a rusty, bent nail about three centimetres
long. Since we had left Kalemie an hour back we had seen
nothing modern or man-made and yet we had managed to find an
old nail.

Benoit and Odimba were clearly a team. While Odimba dried
and prepared the inner-tube hole, Benoit cut an appropriately sized patch from his store of old, recycled tubes, the same ones he
used as luggage straps. Having cut the right shape, he used a file
to scour the surface of the patch so that it would grip glue.