Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart Read online

  Knowing that Bennett would not risk being outdone by a rival British newspaper, Stanley skilfully persuaded the Telegraph to back his venture with £6,000 and used this to leverage exactly the same amount from Bennett. He needed the money because unlike explorers such as Livingstone, who travelled light, carrying barely more than a change of clothes and a Bible, Stanley approached African travel like a military deployment. His party would be heavily armed and equipped with the best navigational technology that Victorian London could offer, including the latest surveying instruments – three chronometers that were to be carried in their own special cases packed with cotton wool – and the most modern medicines to protect against tropical disease.

  The crowning glory of the expedition’s kit was Stanley’s brainchild, a collapsible boat commissioned from a Thames boat-builder, James Messenger of Teddington, to be made from Spanish chestnut. Twelve metres long, the vessel would break down into five sections that could be carried by bearers through the African bush and launched on the various lakes and rivers that he knew he would encounter. He named her the Lady Alice, in honour of his American fiancée, Alice Pike, and then set about recruiting other members of his team.

  Stanley’s fame was so great that when the two newspapers announced his next African adventure, he was inundated with replies. He received a total of 1,200 letters from ‘colonels, captains, midshipmen and mechanics’. Stanley was scornful of them all:

  They all knew Africa, were perfectly acclimatised, were quite sure they would please me, would do important services, save me from any number of troubles by their ingenuity and resources, take me up in balloons or by flying carriages, make us all invisible by their magic arts, or by the ‘science of magnetism’ would cause all savages to fall asleep while we might pass anywhere without trouble.

  In the end, Stanley took just three white assistants, all men of lower social standing who would not pose any risk of challenging his authority as leader. They were Frederick Barker, a clerk at the Langham Hotel where Stanley was staying in London, and two brothers, Francis and Edward Pocock, who worked as crew on the luxury yacht owned by the editor of the Telegraph and moored on the River Medway near Maidstone.

  As well as human companions, Stanley took two mastiffs, Castor and Captain, which had been presented to him as gifts, and three other dogs: a retriever called Nero, a bulldog called Bull and a bull terrier called Jack, which Stanley adopted from the Battersea Dogs’ Home.

  It took six months for Stanley to complete his preparations for the journey and to reach his starting point in Zanzibar. Finally, on the morning of 17 November 1874, the expedition column gathered on a sandy beach track on Africa’s east coast and stirred to the sound of Edward Pocock’s bugle. Consisting of 352 bearers, some carrying bundles of supplies and others sections of boat, it stretched for more than a kilometre and bringing up the rear came the four white men, mounted on asses, with the five dogs padding along by the side.

  Stanley noted that most of the bearers smoked cannabis, which made progress slow. By the end of the first day the column had moved only a few kilometres and Castor, the bigger of the two mastiffs, had already died from heat exhaustion. It was an inauspicious start to the most ambitious expedition in the history of African exploration.

  3.

  Cobalt Town

  Advertisements from The Guide to South and East Africa (for the Use of Tourists, Sportsmen, Invalids and Settlers), 1915

  THE AIRLINE THAT was to fly me to the Democratic Republic of Congo in August 2004 was as rickety as the country’s latest peace deal. Hewa Bora had been cobbled together from the remnants of various bankrupt versions of the national carrier – Congo Airlines and Zaire Airlines – and although the flight I was waiting for was a scheduled one from Johannesburg to Lubumbashi, the Congo’s second city and capital of the south-eastern province of Katanga, there was something about the behaviour of the ground crew and my fellow passengers that suggested it was anything but routine.

  A middle-aged Congolese man, hoping to make it to Lubumbashi, spotted my concern as I winced at the check-in muddle. He tried to reassure me. ‘I have family here in South Africa, but whenever I travel with Hewa Bora I never know for sure if the plane will take off, or even if there is a plane. It really is a Maybe Airline – Maybe You Get There, Maybe You Don’t.’

  I waited patiently, watching the ebb and flow of the passengers’ mood. One minute they seemed happy, as a female member of staff in Hewa Bora uniform – an elegant blue cotton wrap spotted with yellow teardrops – checked the name of the person at the front of the queue against the manifest. But then the same member of staff would get up from her chair and disappear from view, prompting groans of frustration from the crowd. The flight was not full, but my fellow passengers all seemed to be carrying unfeasibly large amounts of luggage, mostly electrical goods like televisions and CD players, wrapped in the woven-plastic, tricolour bags of red, white and blue that you see all over the developing world.

  Against this bulky display, my own luggage seemed rather meagre. I had a green rucksack packed with clothing, bedding and a mosquito net, and two shoulder bags for my notebooks, camera, laptop computer and satellite telephone. I wanted to keep it as light as possible so that it could be carried on foot if need be, so the only book I brought with me was Stanley’s account of his journey, Through the Dark Continent. I had read it several times, but if my journey was successful I wanted to be able to make a direct comparison between what he found in the late nineteenth century and what I found in the early twenty-first.

  My first problem was how to reach the spot where Stanley arrived in the Congo in September 1876. He had been following the established route of Arab slavers across what is now the east African country of Tanzania, before crossing Lake Tanganyika by boat and arriving in the Congo at the village of Mtowa on the lake’s western shore. Under the Arabs, Mtowa developed into a large centre for the trans-shipment of slaves and ivory. Its name is not to be found on modern maps of the Congo, but I had been able to establish that it lies about thirty kilometres north of Kalemie, a once-prosperous port set up by the Belgians on the lake. Fifty years ago it was possible to reach Kalemie by rail, road and ferry, but today its only regular connection with the outside world is a weekly shuttle flight arranged by the United Nations peacekeeping mission, MONUC, to serve Kalemie’s small garrison of peacekeepers. The shuttle flight leaves from Lubumbashi, capital of the Congo’s Katanga province, and a UN administrator had promised that if I made it to Lubumbashi, I could take my place on a waiting list for the trip to Kalemie.

  The chaos at the check-in desk in Johannesburg took hours to sort out, but I was in the wonderful position of being under no time pressure. Whenever my journalism has taken me overseas, time has always been of crucial importance, a situation made worse by twitchy foreign editors, deadlines and competitive colleagues. But this time I faced no such constraints. For my attempt to cross the Congo I was entirely on my own. It was pleasantly liberating and as time passed at the airport I was happy to people-watch, trying to guess the nationality of the one other white person on the flight, or why an Asian lady was travelling solo to the Congo.

  Johannesburg International Airport is one of the great hubs of modern African travel, a first-world airport offering flights to some of the rougher third-world destinations. As I headed to the gate for the Lubumbashi flight, I looked at the well-stocked boutiques and felt the downwash from the powerful air-conditioning, and wondered when I would next experience the same.

  The Hewa Bora cabin crew had laid out copies of a Kinshasa newspaper, L’Avenir, on the seats in business class and I snaffled one as I shoulder-barged my way to my economy seat. It was more of a samizdat newsletter than a newspaper, comprising four pages amateurishly printed on a single folded sheet of very cheap, coarse paper. The ink came off on my fingers and there were no decipherable photographs. But I could decipher the paper’s tone, a tone that was rabidly anti-Rwandan. There were various articles claiming that the p
aper had seen documentary evidence proving Rwanda was about to attack the Congo and there were vicious denunciations of various pro-Rwandan Congolese rebels, such as my old contact, Adolphe Onusumba. Under the terms of the 2002 peace deal that was meant to have ended the Congo’s war, all the major rebel groups, including the pro-Rwandan ones, had taken their place in a transitional, power-sharing government in Kinshasa. The arrangement was fragile and, as I could see from the deeply xenophobic tone of L’Avenir, the fault line separating Rwandans from Congolese remained explosive.

  Since the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has been regarded by many outsiders as a tiny, frail country bullied by its larger neighbours. This is a grossly inaccurate generalisation. With a government now dominated by Tutsis, Rwanda punches way above its weight in regional affairs. There are clear parallels with Israel, another small country of people driven by the memory of mass murder committed against them to dominate its neighbours militarily, and the neighbour that Rwanda bosses most is the Democratic Republic of Congo. On a map, tiny Rwanda is overshadowed by the vastness of the DRC, but for the past ten years it has been Rwanda that has loomed over the DRC. In 1996 Rwanda’s Tutsi-dominated forces invaded the country and orchestrated the ousting of Mobutu the following year, and in 1998 the same forces turned on Laurent Kabila, the man they had installed as Mobutu’s replacement, starting the conflict that has so far cost four million lives.

  For many Congolese, the Tutsis who now rule Rwanda play the role of bogeymen. Tutsis are taller and thinner than their ethnic neighbours, with finer features, and I heard many Congolese cursing them for ‘not looking like us’. There were plenty of less polite insults. The Tutsi/non-Tutsi divide is one of central Africa’s great social divisions and it was to have enormous impact on my attempt to cross the Congo.

  Eight weeks before I flew to Lubumbashi, an ethnic Tutsi Congolese warlord broke the terms of the 2002 peace treaty when he mobilised a force and launched an attack on the Congolese town of Bukavu that sits on the border between DRC and Rwanda. His motives were unclear, but the result fitted into the depressing pattern of central African turmoil. After thirty-six hours of savagery, scores of people lay dead, thousands had fled their homes and the entire eastern sector of the country was pushed to a state close to war. The Congolese authorities were quick to blame the Tutsi-led regime across the border in Rwanda, accusing them of arming and protecting the rebels. The accusations were soon followed by retaliatory attacks from Congolese troops on groups linked to Rwanda’s Tutsis. I knew that the relationship between the DRC and Rwanda was tense, but the racist bile I read in L’Avenir revealed the depth of enmity between the two sides. All I could do as the plane made the three-hour crossing from South Africa over Zimbabwe and Zambia en route to Lubumbashi was pray that some sort of calm would be re-established before I reached eastern Congo.

  If you look at a map of the Congo, you see that the country appears to have grown a vestigial tail around its bottom right-hand corner, known as the Katanga Panhandle. On the surface there seems no clear reason for this outcrop of Congolese territory surrounded on three sides by its southern neighbour, Zambia. It is below the soil that you find the reason why the early Belgian colonialists in the late nineteenth century staked the territory so obstinately, in defiance of British pioneers probing northwards from what was then Rhodesia. The panhandle includes some of the richest deposits of copper, cobalt and uranium on the planet, a geological quirk that the early Belgian colonialists identified more smartly than their British counterparts.

  While Congo’s other provinces have large diamond and gold deposits, it was mainly on Katanga’s mineral wealth that the Belgian colony grew rich in the mid-twentieth century. The uranium for the atom bombs dropped by America on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from a mine in Katanga, and it was Katanga’s vast copper deposits that really powered the colony’s growth when the reconstruction of Europe and Japan after the Second World War drove a surge in demand for copper. Most of the mineral profits from Katanga were taken by the Belgians, repatriated to Brussels and divided among shareholders from various private corporations, or Sociétés, created by the colonial authorities. But some of the profits were reinvested in Katanga, to build a number of mines, processing plants and factories, serviced by new towns built out of the virgin bush and connected by a web of roads and railways. By the mid-twentieth century Katanga was the most developed province in all of the Congo.

  The blessing of Katanga’s mineral wealth became its curse when Belgium granted independence to the Congo on 30 June 1960. While maintaining the illusion of handing over a single country to the black Congolese, the authorities in Brussels secretly backed the secession of Katanga from the Congo, financing, arming and protecting the pro-Belgian Katangan leader, Moise Tshombe, in return for a promise that the Belgian mining interests in Katanga would be protected. It was one of the most blatant acts of foreign manipulation in Africa’s chaotic independence period, and it culminated in one of the cruellest acts of twentieth-century political assassination, when Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese national figure to win an election, was handed over by Belgian stooges to be murdered by Tshombe’s regime.

  Lumumba’s mistake was to hint at pro-Soviet sympathies. The mere possibility of the Congo, with its huge deposits of copper, uranium and diamonds, falling into the Soviet sphere of influence during the Cold War was too much for the Western powers. Several African nations were already moving into the Communist camp but the Congo was, in the eyes of the West, simply too important to lose so Brussels, with the connivance of Washington, engineered Lumumba’s arrest, torture and transfer to the capital of Katanga, then known by its Belgian name of Elisabethville, today’s Lubumbashi.

  It was at the city’s airport in the middle of January 1961 that Lumumba was last seen in public. Members of the UN, already deployed to Katanga to try to deal with the secession crisis, watched Lumumba being bundled out of a cargo plane by soldiers loyal to Tshombe. They said he had been so badly beaten on the flight that he barely moved when he was pushed into a waiting vehicle that whisked him away to a nearby villa owned by a Belgian colonialist. For a long time, what happened next was one of the great mysteries of modern African history, mainly because Lumumba’s body was never found. There were rumours that it was cut up and fed to pigs, or even thrown into the headwaters of the Congo River that rises in mountains to the north-west of Lubumbashi. Tshombe’s regime initially refused to admit he was dead, but when they finally did, they lied, claiming he had been shot dead by villagers after he escaped on foot from police custody.

  It took almost forty years before the mystery was eventually solved by a Belgian academic, Ludo De Witte, piecing the history together from official documents released by Brussels in the 1990s. He discovered that various Belgian policemen and security officers – nominally under the command of Tshombe but, in reality, following orders from Brussels – had, on the night of 17 January 1961, driven Lumumba from the villa where he had been taken to rendezvous with a firing squad of local Katangan soldiers about forty-five minutes’ drive from the airport. Lumumba, his face battered almost beyond recognition and his clothes spattered with blood, was made to stand against a large anthill illuminated by the headlights of two cars. He was then executed by firing squad and his body buried in a shallow grave. Fearful the grave might be discovered and turned into a shrine, the Belgians and their Katangan stooges later moved to erase all traces of the Congo’s elected leader. The day after the execution, the corpse was exhumed and driven deeper into the Katangan bush, where it was reburied in another shallow grave until arrangements could be made to get rid of it once and for all.

  Under cover of darkness on 22 January 1961 two Belgian brothers, with connections to the Belgian security forces, returned and exhumed the body for a second time. They used a hacksaw and an axe to dismember the decomposing corpse, before dissolving the remains in a 200-litre petrol drum filled with sulphuric acid taken from a nearby copper-processing plant. One of the brothers later admitted he u
sed pliers to remove two of Lumumba’s teeth as souvenirs.

  Thoughts of assassination, acid baths and dismembered bodies were not the only dark images in my mind as the plane descended towards the tarmac at Lubumbashi. In 1997 a close friend of mine had come closer to death at this airport than at any time in his long career covering international crises as a journalist. It was during the last chaotic days of Mobutu’s rule when Laurent Kabila’s Rwandan-backed insurgency was about to topple the ageing dictator. Troops loyal to Mobutu were becoming increasingly desperate and had gathered at the country’s few functioning airports hoping to escape. It was at Lubumbashi airport that my friend was seized by some of the Special Presidential Guard, a notoriously brutal cadre of Mobutu supporters who could expect no leniency when his regime’s end came. He was stripped to his underpants and threatened at gunpoint for several terrifying hours. It did not help that he was with a fellow journalist who had a video shot some time earlier of Rwandan troops on the march towards Kinshasa. When the guards discovered the tape, they said they were going to execute the reporters as Rwandan spies. It took them hours of desperate pleading to convince the guards they were simply journalists.

  Looking out of my window as the plane descended towards Lubumbashi, just before the moment when the ground blurrily rushes into one’s field of vision, I caught sight of a single figure, a Congolese woman standing right on the edge of the tarmac runway. She was barefoot, dressed in rags, with a pile of firewood balanced on her head and a cold, wide-eyed expression on her face. No matter that this was one of the Congo’s major international airports of considerable military importance, for her it was a place to gather firewood.