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

  From my earlier visits to the Congo, I knew what to expect when the fuselage door finally opened. At the bottom of a set of stairs, manually wheeled into position, a crowd of people had gathered, all claiming to be an official of some sort and all demanding payment. I watched as the Asian lady I had spotted at Johannesburg airport stepped gingerly into the melee, only to be tossed and spun like a piece of flotsam, blasted by loud demands for payment. The last I saw of her was an unedifying spectacle. She was fighting back tears, bidding for her own luggage that was being auctioned back to her.

  Before boarding the flight, I had played the first of my Congolese jokers. I had contacted Clive, the Zimbabwean businessman who had good connections with the Kabila regime, and asked for his help. The Kabila family originally came from Katanga and, while the regime’s control of much of the country was nominal, they made sure their home capital remained in their hands. Clive’s cobalt-mining operation was based in Lubumbashi and although he was not going to be in town when I arrived, he warned me the only way I would get through the airport in one piece was if his people smoothed the way. It was with relief that in the crowd down on the tarmac I spotted a man holding up a piece of paper with the name ‘Kim Butcher’ written across it. I caught his eye and he threw himself bravely into the muddle, before grabbing me reassuringly by the shoulders and leading me through the scrum.

  ‘Welcome to Lubumbashi. My name is Yav,’ he said in French from behind imitation Ray-Ban sunglasses. He had to shout to make himself heard above the din of jet engines and grasping officials, but there was a steadying calm about him. Turning to a large man standing next to him, he spoke again. ‘Let me introduce you to the director of immigration at the airport. This is the man who helps us, when our visitors come through the airport.’

  The director looked at me coldly and nodded a silent acknowledgement. I knew enough about Congolese officialdom to keep my mouth shut. Yav was clearly happy that the nod represented all the necessary formalities and he nudged me firmly past the director and up the path to the 1950s-built terminal, where some of the noisier luggage-auctioning was going on.

  ‘There is just one fee you need to pay, an entry fee of ten dollars,’ he said. I handed him a twenty-dollar note, which he then passed to an underling, who disappeared into a side-room with my passport. The man came back two minutes later and gave Yav change of a ten dollar note. Yav immediately rubbed the note between his fingers and frowned. ‘This is not a real dollar note. This is counterfeit. Get me a good one,’ he said, raising his voice at the underling and sending him back inside.

  It took a few minutes for my rucksack to appear. I stood in the crowd trying to look inconspicuous, yet confident. The Congo is a police state maintained by numerous security services, military units and gendarmerie, all of whom take a close interest in any outsider daring to venture into the country. I knew from my earlier visits that roving journalists in the Congo are subject to particularly close scrutiny, and I was anxious to get through the airport as quickly as possible. Journalists were routinely expected to go to Kinshasa and pay officials large amounts in bribes for ‘accreditation’ that took weeks to complete, before they could even think about trying to move around the country. I wanted to avoid this lengthy detour to Kinshasa and was hoping to slip into the Congo through Lubumbashi and then use the UN flight to reach the east of the country, where Kinshasa’s authority did not hold. If I made it up there, I had in my rucksack a ‘To Whom It May Concern’ letter signed by the Congolese Ambassador to South Africa, introducing me as a writer trying to follow Stanley’s historical route. This, I gambled, would at least allow me to open negotiations with what passes as officialdom in the east of the Congo before they detained me on suspicion of being a spy.

  Without Yav, I would not have made it through Lubumbashi airport. I could see by the way he breezed past soldiers guarding the entrance to the baggage hall that he was a man of standing, something that I exploited unashamedly as we waited for the luggage to appear. I edged closer to him, trying to look at ease and not catch the eye of various officials whom I could see closely questioning the other white man from my flight. There was a bullet hole in the glass partition above the door leading into the baggage hall, and a rusty fan, mounted on the ceiling, hung motionless. Apart from brightly painted signs advertising mobile-phone companies, nothing seemed to have changed from the time when the airport staged the brutal finale of Lumumba’s life. Eventually I pointed to my bag and Yav barked at an official to take it outside to his waiting car.

  Rather unexpectedly, he began to quiz the baggage handlers about a set of golf clubs that had been due in on the flight for one of the senior mine employees. Years earlier I had met some wealthy Zimbabweans who told me an amazing story about how the wealthy live in Lubumbashi. The city is only a few kilometres from the border with Zambia, connected by one of the Congo’s few functioning roads. One of the wealthy white mine owners is so keen on show-jumping that each winter in Lubumbashi he hosts his own event, inviting Zambian, Zimbabwean and South African show-jumpers to drive their horses all the way to the Congo. Border guards are bribed and special supplies flown into Lubumbashi. No matter that the Congo is ravaged by war, poverty and corruption, this man is wealthy and eccentric enough to convene his own Horse of the Year Show in the Congo. If it is possible for Lubumbashi to have its own show-jumping competition, I suppose I should not have been that surprised that it has a golf course.

  For almost a hundred years Katanga’s growth had been based almost completely on copper. For a long time the province was known as Shaba, the local Swahili word for the metal. But the problem with copper is that the production process is relatively complex. Expensive mining equipment is needed, as well as skilled labour and large amounts of chemicals for processing and other supplies that have to be imported. This was all possible during the Belgian colonial era when law and order existed, but through the chaos of Mobutu’s rule during the 1970s and 1980s, foreign investors saw their copper mines repeatedly flooded, supplies plundered and attempts to bring in replacement equipment blocked by corrupt and incompetent local officials.

  By the time I reached Lubumbashi, copper was in decline, but the town was in the grip of a new boom, one driven by cobalt. Cobalt had suddenly become commercially attractive because the world price had been driven upwards by a surge in demand from China’s fast-growing economy. The cobalt price had grown by 300 per cent in less than year, from $8 to $24 per pound, a dramatic change that had had a dramatic effect in Katanga, home to some of the world’s greatest and most accessible cobalt deposits.

  Cobalt mining in Katanga does not require massive investment or expensive processing. Here, a man with a shovel can become a cobalt miner, simply by digging away the topsoil and looking for the darker, greyish or purplish rock that is rich with cobalt salts. The rock is then purified in the most primitive way, using a hammer to chip away the non-cobalt-rich rock, a process that the Congolese miners call ‘cobbing’, a word imported from Britain where it was first used by seventeenth-century Cornish tin miners. The demand from China is so great that middlemen in Lubumbashi, often Lebanese or Indian, are willing to pay cash for sacks of the grey rock. The sacks are then collected, packed on trucks and driven on a long and tortuous journey past grasping officials on the Congolese border with Zambia and then 2,000 kilometres south to the closest functioning port, Durban, in South Africa, before finally being shipped to China.

  The whole procedure is relatively straightforward, and for a while I almost bought into the sentiment expressed on a road sign I spotted as Yav drove me into Lubumbashi. The sign said, ‘Lubumbashi – City of Hope’. There were plenty of cars in the town centre, a few shops were open, and I was told a hotel near the main square had just started taking guests again for the first time in years.

  But during the four days I spent in the city, staying at the guest house in the compound used by Clive’s cobalt-mining operation, I learned how this sense of normality was an illusion and how regular ru
les of commerce simply do not apply in the Congo. For those who think Africa’s problems can simply be solved by the injection of money, I would recommend a crash course in cobalt economics in the Congo.

  In 2004 the cobalt boom meant there was plenty of money in Lubumbashi, but the presence of money did not guarantee that the local economy grew or even stabilised. In the town’s Belgian Club, I saw Chinese traders and Lebanese middlemen splashing money around on $20 pizzas and expensive imported beer. They had plenty of cash and they wanted to spend it on raw cobalt ore. But in spite of this substantial income, the pernicious reality of Congolese commerce meant that norms of economic development did not apply.

  In order for the investor to make any money he needed the necessary paperwork to drive the cobalt out of the country, and in order to arrange the necessary paperwork he needed to pay off the Ministry of Mines, not just locally in Lubumbashi, but also at the national level in Kinshasa; and if the Minister of Mines changed, which happened regularly, a whole new matrix of payments and bribes had to be put in place for the new man in the job. And once you finished with the Ministry of Mines, you would have to repeat the whole process at the Immigration Department, the Department of Customs, the local Governor’s Office, and so on. So gross were the profits to be made on the cobalt that some investors were prepared to pay the web of bribes and unofficial ‘taxes’ demanded by the authorities, and to tolerate this commercial chaos.

  At the Belgian Club I drank Simba beer and ate chips doused with mayonnaise, in the Belgian style, with one of the few Europeans bold enough to risk involvement in Lubumbashi’s cobalt boom. Belgium’s links remain closer with Katanga than with any other province of their old colony and a photograph of the Belgian royal family looked down on us from the wall as I listened to his mind-boggling stories about local business anarchy. On numerous occasions trucks had been loaded in Lubumbashi with sacks of cobalt ore worth $50,000, but when they arrived in South Africa the sacks were found to contain nothing but worthless soil.

  ‘Between here and South Africa you don’t just have thousands of kilometres of tarmac road,’ he said. ‘You have three international borders, from the Congo into Zambia, from Zambia into Zimbabwe and from Zimbabwe into South Africa. At each one, you have officials demanding handouts. Each one of them can be bribed by a rival cobalt shipper to cause you delays and other problems. And the drivers can be bought off by rivals, so when they stop to sleep at night, God knows what happens to the bags of ore on the back. Some of the buyers who come here to Lubumbashi decide it’s cheaper just to set themselves up on the main road south through Zambia, say, and wait there with a gang of gunmen armed with AK-47s to help themselves to whatever comes down the road. The truck drivers are so badly paid that they are not going to risk their lives to protect the load. If you offered them a hundred-dollar bill, most drivers would pull over and let you pinch some or all of what’s on the back.’

  There was nothing funny about some of his other stories. The cobalt mining was, for the large part, unlicensed and chaotic, as artisanal miners – men with shovels – dug deeper and deeper pits to get at the grey, cobalt-rich rock. The stories of miners being killed by landfalls were so routine the authorities did not bother responding to them. And an attempt to restart one of the old processing plants near Lubumbashi had raised other health hazards. The processing uses local ores known to be rich in uranium. Without any meaningful local environmental standards, there were concerns that radioactive isotopes of uranium were being released by the process into the atmosphere as smoke particles.

  What made it so galling to me, the outsider, was that of the large sums paid by the various mining companies, brokers and traders, only a tiny fraction ever reached the local economy. The vast bulk was lost in bribes demanded by corrupt officials at all levels. Lubumbashi’s cobalt bonanza brought home to me how money alone will not solve Africa’s problems. Until the Congo’s economy is underpinned by the rule of law and transparency, it will remain stagnant, chaotic and unproductive.

  Those days in Lubumbashi spent waiting for the UN shuttle flight northwards to Kalemie felt rather surreal. I rarely ventured from the sanctuary of the compound, which lay behind a high perimeter wall in a relatively smart area of Lubumbashi, near the governor’s residence. The view I got from there was entirely skewed. For those, like Clive, with good enough connections, it was possible to live comfortably in the Congo’s second city. It was hugely expensive, as everything – from cartons of milk to the satellite television dish – had to be imported, mostly by plane from South Africa. When I got there a large box of umbrellas had just arrived in anticipation of the next rainy season. But it was clear the potential profits from cobalt were so enormous that as long as the mine kept producing and the trucks managed to get past the corrupt customs officials into Zambia, then the whole operation was cost-effective.

  The problem with Lubumbashi’s cobalt boom was that it was too inefficient to be of genuine economic benefit to the million or so Katangans living in the city. A mining expert I met explained one of the main inefficiencies.

  ‘The cobalt-rich rock is simply bagged and driven out of the country,’ he explained. ‘That way ensures the smallest amount of benefit to the local economy – just the few dollars a day paid to each miner. If the local authorities were interested in helping the local economy, then they would have a processing plant here in Lubumbashi that converts the cobalt-rich rock into concentrated cobalt salts. It is not a complex procedure, but it multiplies the value of the cobalt product by fifty times, maybe a hundred times. It is much more efficient to transport the concentrate than the untreated rock and the profit margin is much greater. Under the system we have now, some plant in South Africa or China makes the profit on the treatment of the rock, a profit that is lost to the Congo.

  ‘But the reality is this. The authorities in the Congo are not interested in how cobalt mining benefits the local economy. They are only interested in what they can take in bribes. And it is easier to count sacks of rock at the border and work out how many dollars you can cream off per bag. Until that fundamental attitude changes, then the cobalt boom driven by China will not benefit more than a few members of the Congo elite.’

  There was one entirely personal and self-indulgent thing I needed to do while I was in Lubumbashi. I wanted to go to the town’s railway station and see where my mother had caught the train that took her across the Congo in 1958.

  Simon, a factotum from the mine office, agreed to take me there on a Sunday morning when, I gambled, there would be fewer police and gendarmerie in the town centre demanding to see my papers. As we drove into town, I was struck by Lubumbashi’s resemblance to other southern African cities. In my mind the Congo belonged to the continent’s sweaty, tropical centre, but Lubumbashi’s topography and climate were much closer to those of Johannesburg or Harare. The air was dry and the land was covered not by dense rainforest, but open scrub. It was more high-veld plateau than steamy equatorial river basin. The streets were even lined with the same fast-growing jacaranda trees that I recognised from the garden at my Johannesburg home, although Lubumbashi’s position closer to the Equator meant they were already putting on their bright-purple display of springtime blossom two months earlier than those in chillier South Africa.

  We passed the Cathedral of St Paul and St Peter, a large redbrick structure in the centre of Lubumbashi, built in 1919, and I could see it was full of worshippers. Some of the older, wider boulevards were paved with hexagonal cobbles made from some sort of dark, possibly volcanic, rock. The work that went into laying these roads must have been enormous, but they were in much better condition than the potholed modern roads.

  Apart from being tatty, Lubumbashi’s town centre is largely unchanged since the Belgian colonial period. There is a 1950s post office fronting a main square from which various roads radiate between some fine Art Deco buildings. There are a few modest general stores selling imported goods, although fresh bread is available from a Greek-owned patisserie.
We walked the last few hundred metres to the railway station. I had heard that a two-year work programme by foreign aid groups had recently enabled the station to reopen for the first time since the war, connecting Lubumbashi with Kindu, a port on the upper Congo, and I wanted to see if this was really true.

  Simon and I approached a man in dark glasses standing guard at the gate that led onto the platform.

  ‘Please can you tell me about the train to Kindu.’

  ‘Who are you? What is your business here at the station? This is a military installation, who gave you permission to come here?’

  The man was not just drunk, he was aggressively drunk. I recoiled and let Simon deal with him. Simon edged forward, took the guard’s hand in his hand and started speaking in Swahili, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. I made to look away as Simon slipped the guard a folded-up bank note. The gate opened.

  I walked out onto an open platform. Unlike British railways where the platform stands much higher than the track level, this station was of a more continental European design, the tracks only a few centimetres below the platform. I looked around and saw a blackboard with a message chalked across it referring to the train to Kindu. It said that it leaves every first of the month. Simon assured me this was nonsense as no train had left in the first two weeks of August. But the thing that was oddest about Lubumbashi station was the complete lack of trains. There was no rolling stock, no carriages, nothing. The whole place was silent and empty.

  *

  The longer I spent in Lubumbashi, the more nervous and sick I felt. The powerful anti-malaria tablets I was taking caused the nausea, but the nervousness came from the growing sense that my whole trip now depended on the next few days. I knew my attempt to cross the Congo would have to begin in Kalemie, but I also knew it might end there. During my months of research at home in Johannesburg, I had trawled the small number of aid workers and missionaries based in the town, but none of them had ever heard of an outsider travelling overland from Kalemie deeper into the Congo.