Authors: Tim Butcher
We were walking so slowly that I spotted something I had
missed on the way down, a stone cross standing proud of the
undergrowth, off to one side of the track.
'That's the old Belgian graveyard,' Vermond explained. 'I think
the two men who tried to flee are in there.'
The graveyard had surrendered to the advancing undergrowth
years ago, but several of the gravestones were so large they had
not yet quite been swamped. The entrance was marked by two mango trees that had grown enormous in Kasongo's hot, humid
climate. Their canopies were so thick that little grew underneath
them and we scrunched through piles of dry, dead leaves as we
made our way into the old cemetery.
Vermond performed the same trick as before, mumbling to
himself as he searched. The first grave he came to had a metal
plaque and I heard him scraping away dead leaves and reading
out the details of a Belgian missionary who died here in 1953,
before shaking his head and moving on to the next one, a Belgian
woman who died in 1933. Finally he shouted out.
'Here they are.'
I climbed through the undergrowth and there were the graves
of two men, Leon Fransen and Jean Matz. They were both in their
thirties when they died and the inscription described them as
agents of the Cotonco, the cotton company that used to be such a
large employer here in Kasongo. Their gravestones confirmed that
they died on the same day, 11 November 1964.
Tom took me to Kasongo's weekly market to show me what was
available locally. It was pretty meagre. The market consisted of a
group of women sitting in front of piles of leaves, or fruit or smoked
river fish - tiny things the size of minnows - or white cassava flour,
while gaggles of other women milled around, inspecting the wares.
Some of the women had teased their hair into long, elegant
tendrils. In his diary, Stanley had drawn just such hairstyles. I
called the style 'antenna hair'. But the striking thing was just how
painfully thin everyone was. There were no tubby faces. Everyone,
seller and buyer alike, had the same haggard appearance, with
faces so wan they appeared more grey than black.
'It's the cassava,' explained Tom. 'It is the only staple for
millions and millions of people across the Congo because it is the
easiest thing to grow, but in terms of nutrition it is not really any
good because it lacks many basic nutrients. And without any
large-scale farming or animal husbandry, the main source of protein is the meat of animals from the forest - monkeys, deer,
that sort of thing. They call it bushmeat. But the animals have
long since been shot out from densely populated areas like
Kasongo, so really the only thing left is cassava with the occasional fish. We are seeing malnutrition levels here as if this place
was suffering from a full famine.'
During my motorbike journey I had already seen just how
pervasive cassava is, in spite of various attempts that have been
made to encourage Congolese to adopt more nutritious crops, like
maize. An American aid-worker friend spent two years in the
province of Katanga during the 1980s working as a volunteer with
village communities, on an ambitious national programme trying
to wean people off cassava. It failed. The reality is that the ease
with which cassava grows makes it the default crop in a country
like the Congo where economic chaos makes it unviahle to farm
anything but the easiest plants.
After planting, cassava grows quickly into a small tree with
edible leaves. You don't need to prepare a field for cassava. A
burned patch of forest will do. The leaves are moderately tasty
and palatable, but it is the tubers on its roots that are its most
valuable asset. Without maize or corn or any other source of
starch, the cassava root fills the empty belly of central Africa. The
tubers are vast, bulbous things, with coarse, leathery skin stained
the colour of the soil in which they grow. They have to be scraped
and then soaked in water to leach away harmful toxins that occur
naturally under the skin. As we biked over streams, I had often
seen spots in the river beds that had been hollowed out and filled
with soaking cassava tubers, pale without their skins. After it has
been washed for a couple of days, the tuber is cut into fragments
and dried. Again, most villages that I had passed through had
piles of drying cassava fragments balanced on banana leaves
drying on the thatched roofs of huts. By that time it is as white
and brittle as chalk, so the next stage is simply to pound it with a
pestle and mortar into cassava flour. This can then be made into a bread, known as fufu. I was not surprised to hear about its
meagre nutritional value. It looked like wallpaper paste, smelled
of cheese and tasted of a nasty blend of both. In the absence of any
alternative, I ate a lot of cassava in the Congo and I was left feeling
sorry for anyone whose daily diet never varies from the stuff.
Tom sounded downhearted as we continued walking around
the market. `I come from east Africa, Kenya, where people die of
starvation because of drought. There is never enough rain for the
crops or the animals. But here in the Congo, they have all the rain
they need, rivers full of fish, and soil that is unbelievably rich. If
you stand still here in the bush you can actually see plants
growing around you, the growth is that powerful, that strong. And
yet somehow people still manage to go hungry here because of the
chaos, the bad management. It breaks my heart to see all this
agricultural potential going to waste.'
We continued through the market. Under a tree a young boy
was selling water pots made from red, earthy clay. And against
the ruins of a building a woman had hung out some coloured
cotton cloth for sale as wraps for women. I asked her where the
cloth came from and she told me a story showing that even in a
weak economy like the Congo's, the power of globalisation can
still be felt.
`The best cloth used to come from Britain and Holland, a long
time ago, maybe even a hundred years ago, but it became too
expensive. Material from China is the cheapest now. It is not the
same quality as the old material, but people buy what they can
afford and that means the cheapest is best. So this material you
see today has come to Africa by God only knows what route. It
arrives in Kalemie somehow and from there people bring it all the
way here by bicycle.'
I remembered the bike traders I had seen all along the 500kilometre motorbike route I had just completed from Kalemie. It
might beat feebly here in the Congo, but the free market is still
strong enough to motivate people to drag bicycles laden with Chinese cloth for vast distances through the tropical bush, to earn
a living.
The colours of her display made for a strong photograph, but as
I was fiddling with my camera I heard someone shouting.
'Stop there, stop there.' The voice came from a big man bustling
towards us. 'This is a security zone, show me your permission to
take photographs. Come on, show me.'
He was tall, well-built and clearly obnoxious. He jostled my
arm and started to raise his voice again before Tom stepped in. In
English, Tom told me firmly to put my camera away and in
rudimentary French he charmed the stranger, before nudging me
out of the crowd and hack to his house.
'You see that is all that is left of the state. People who have no
jobs or income, trying to make money by creating problems for
outsiders.' Again, he sounded very forlorn about the Congo.
Back at Tom's house, I slowly got my strength back. Living
conditions were bleak and I could not stop thinking about the
contrast with the luxurious villas the Belgian soldiers found
when they conquered Kasongo. Tom's house was the smartest in
town, but even so its comforts were modest. A barrel of rainwater
had been set up over a grimy old bath; in the sitting room a
collection of old car batteries was connected to a generator that
ran only when there was enough fuel; and the kitchen had
basically been relocated outside to where Yvonne Apendeki,
Tom's maid, cooked over a charcoal burner. She kept an African
grey parrot for company, and most mornings I heard him
whistling along with the kettle as she boiled water and fiddled
around with the few pans and plates that Care International had
shipped in for Tom.
She was only twenty-five but had lost count of the number of
times rebels and mai-mai had come to Kasongo, forcing her to flee
to the forest.
'I have one son and one daughter, and I carry them with me when we have to run away. I don't know who is fighting who here
any more. Everyone says they are against the government or for
the government. It is not important. We all know it is not safe to
stay here, so we just flee.'
As we spoke the parrot started to jump on his perch and
become more animated as a man walked around the back of the
house and sat down with the air of someone very familiar with
the set-up. I introduced myself and asked him his story.
'My name is Pierre Matata. I was a garden boy when Belgians
still lived in Kasongo and I have worked in this house since 1976.
Back then the person who lived here was an Italian doctor
working in the hospital.' Like the other denizens of Kasongo he
was skeletally thin.
`When do you think the problems began here?'
'It was the first rebellion, the Mulele Mai revolt in 1964. It was
anarchy, complete chaos. These guys came from the bush and
they basically settled grievances that reached back years and
years against the outsiders, the Belgians, the Arabs, everyone who
was not what they regarded as a real Congolese. But it was not just
the whites they targeted. Any Congolese like us who lived in the
town were an object for their hatred. They saw us as collaborators
with the whites and they were cruel with us. They killed
absolutely anyone connected with the white world, the modern
world. You see that flask there on the floor?'
He was pointing at an old vacuum flask Yvonne used to keep
boiling water hot.
'If they saw you with that, they would kill you. That would be
enough for them to think you belonged to the modern world.'
It was a gruesome story. I thought of the Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia and their attempt to drag their people back to the
Year Zero, to rid themselves of external, colonial, foreign
influences.
'And since then we have rebels come through the town every
so often. We flee into the forest, they steal everything and we come back and survive on what little is left. That is the cycle of
our existence.'
After I had been in Kasongo for three days I noticed Tom
becoming more nervous. His satellite message system kept bringing him news from Kinshasa about problems in the transitional
government, in the aftermath of the recent killings in Burundi.
Various rebel commanders, whose presence was essential to the
long-term success of the government, had flown out of Kinshasa
to return to their hush headquarters in the east of the country.
Tom said he had been ordered to prepare to withdraw his ex-pat
staff and close his operation in Kasongo.
`What happened back in June was bad. We are not going to go
through that again. The safest place for you right now is to get to
Kindu. At least they have a UN base there. So if you are feeling
strong enough, I will send you there by motorbike. Is there
anything else you would like to do here?'
The one thing I had to do was give my thanks to Benoit. I found
him at the Care International office. It was a short walk from
Tom's house, in an abandoned school building in the old `white'
suburb of Kasongo. Care International was the only aid group
functioning in Kasongo, but working conditions were grim. They
relied on air deliveries for all their supplies, so they could only
attempt relatively modest projects such as track clearing or well
digging. This was primary-level aid work. More complicated
work, like running a clinic, was a far-off dream for Kasongo.
Benoit was wearing crisp, clean clothes and looked totally
recovered from his 1,000-kilometre round trip to collect me from
Kalemie. I owed him a great deal, but all I could offer was my
thanks and a few hundred dollars. He had not asked for a penny,
but I felt I owed him a huge debt for his skill, stamina and
efficiency.
'What happens if they have to evacuate this office?' I asked
before we parted.
'Well, I will have to make nay way home. I am not ex-pat staff,
so there will not be a place for me on any plane that comes. I will
have to go home by myself. I am not from Kasongo originally. I
come from the town of Bukavu itself', the one which had the
problems in June. I guess I will have to make my way there. I don't
know how. It will be difficult, but I will find a way.'
I leaned forward to shake Benoit by the hand, but could not
stop myself feeling guilty as if I was abandoning him to an awful
fate. I found it heartbreaking that a man as decent and talented as
Benoit was trapped in a Congolese life lurching from crisis to
crisis. I tried to sound positive.
'If anyone can find a way, you can, Benoit. Thank you for
everything.'
Benoit could not be spared by Tom, but Odimba was available. I
set oft from Kasongo once again riding as his passenger, surrounded by numerous plastic bottles of specially cleaned water.
Careering along the track, nay head clattering every so often
against Odimba's motorbike helmet, I thought more about
Kasongo. During the slavery period it had peaked as a capital city,
and during the colonial era its strong agriculture and tropical
medicine hospital had kept it alive. But in the chaos since the first
Mulele Mai uprising it had been slipping backwards.
As I approached the Congo River I found myself on the same
track that the two Belgian cotton agents had used when they tried
to flee that first rebellion in 1964. I thought of their graves back in
the overgrown cemetery in Kasongo and shuddered. There is
something about the violence of Congo's post-independence
period that is seared into the minds of those whites who call
themselves African - second- and third-generation colonials
whose ancestors took part in the Scramble for Africa that
Stanley's Congo trip precipitated. They remember dark fragments
of what happened in the Congo after independence in 1960 -
killing, rape. anarchy. The two cotton traders of Kasongo were just a small part of a much larger number of victims whose deaths
still cast a sinister shadow through the older white tribes of
Africa.