Authors: Tim Butcher
None of this mattered much to me during those first euphoric
days. The hotel was my sanctuary. I felt I had earned a break from
the hardship of Congo travel, so I locked the room down, with the
shutters blocking out the light and the noise of air-conditioning
drowning out all sounds of the Congo's second city. The bathroom plumbing worked and I took my first proper shower in three
weeks. A few minutes later I took my second. It was only after my
third that the water stopped running off me milky with grime. I
looked at myself in a full-length mirror for the first time in weeks.
I had lost more than a stone in weight. My face and forearms were brown as teak, but the rest of my body had the pasty pallor of
unpolished marble. My spindly arms did not look as if they
belonged to my body. And at the end of these unfamiliar limbs
were something even stranger - claws. Ever since childhood I
have not been able to stop biting my nails, but in the Congo some
subliminal fear of its bugs and diseases made me stop biting. I
scrubbed them time and time again, but for weeks they would not
lose a grubby tinge of brown. None of these bathroom shocks
could keep me from sleep. To the hum of the air-conditioner, I
collapsed onto the bed and did not stir for fourteen hours.
The hotel even had a functioning restaurant. On my first
morning I thought I had slept through breakfast, but a waiter in a
black bow tie assured me all was in order and ushered me to a
table with a clean, white tablecloth. The breakfast menu was short
- fruit and eggs - but that was not the point. I was ordering food
from a functioning kitchen, a very different experience from what
I had encountered so far. The waiter brought me a place setting
and on the saucer was a paper sachet of instant coffee. Some of
the best coffee in the world used to be grown near Kisangani, but
now the finest hotel in the city served only imported Nescafe. I
had been longing for a cup of coffee and I felt a bit crestfallen. But
all was forgotten when a plate of pineapple arrived. It was the
sweetest, smoothest pineapple I have ever tasted. I could feel my
internal battery indicator flickering from the red to green as the
sugars ran into me.
I spent the first day or so in Kisangani locked in my room. I
slept a lot, washed repeatedly, and laundered my filthy clothes in
the bathroom. But most of all, I gathered my thoughts about what
I had been through and primed myself for the next challenge. I
wrote up my daily notes and used the luxury of the hotel's electricity supply to fire up my computer to edit the digital photographs I had taken. I unfolded my maps and tried to estimate how
much more time I would need. It had already taken me three
harrowing weeks to cover 1,200 kilometres and I was still not even halfway towards my endpoint, the port of Boma near the
mouth of the Congo River. But I consoled myself that nobody had
expected me to make it this far and, anyway, the really dangerous bit was now behind me. Surely, my ordeal could not get any
harder.
When I planned my trip, I pictured Kisangani as a major milestone on my attempt to follow Stanley, not least because for sixty
years the city had borne his name. As a cartographical tribute
paid to the explorer for his role in staking the Congo for the
Belgian king, the city was called Stanleyville, until it was
changed to Kisangani in the 1960s.
Sitting in the dark and cool of my hotel room, I reread Stanley's
account of his trip and how he dared not dawdle when he first
passed here.
It had taken him weeks to descend the seven sets of rapids in
the Stanley Falls. There were chaotic moments when some of the
expedition canoes were caught by the current and dragged into
the white water, drowning crew members. Stanley expressed
regret whenever he lost one of the crew, but he sounded just as
annoyed when one of the expedition's rifles was lost overboard.
One lucky man survived only because he clung to a rock in midstream, just above a cauldron of white water. It took Stanley and
the other team members several hours to rig up a rope long
enough to reach the man and persuade him to let go of the rock
and trust they would pull him to safety. Time after time Stanley's
team had to portage the Lady Alice and its flotilla of canoes
around white water, and time after time the expedition fought
with local tribes.
The river was inhabited by the same Wagenia fishing tribe that
Stanley had clashed with hundreds of kilometres back upstream
near today's Kindu. Jungle drums used by the Wagenia had
brought news of an expedition of outsiders coming downriver.
Earlier raiding parties by Arab slavers had taught the Wagenia that strangers brought trouble, so when Stanley's expedition
came into sight the first reaction from the locals was hostile. As
war canoes were launched from riverside villages, Stanley lined
up his flotilla in attack formation, with the Lady Alice in the lead
and his pillaged canoes, including the Telegraph, spread out
behind. During his river descent Stanley described thirty-two
pitched battles and, while he enjoyed a military advantage in the
modern rifles his expedition was equipped with, when he
ventured ashore to portage his boats he often lost members of his
expedition to tribesmen, expert at using the jungle as cover and
deadly with bows and arrows carrying poisoned tips.
The town begins right at the bottom of the last set of falls, and
when Stanley reached this place he described how he took
immediately to the open water, safe at last from attack on the river
bank. The expedition paddled as fast as it could out into the
middle of the river and did not set foot on the right bank where
the city of Stanleyville was to grow. Instead the expedition began
the longest river stretch of their journey. It would be 1,734
kilometres before the river was blocked again by rapids near the
country's capital, Kinshasa.
I sat in my hotel room, a hundred metres or so from the river,
and plotted how I would follow him downriver. First, I would go
and look for a Wagenia fisherman called Oggi Saidi.
A South African television reporter had recommended Oggi to
me. In 2003, after the peace treaty was signed, he had flown to
Kisangani to travel downriver in a kind of homage to Conrad. The
river passage from Kisangani to Kinshasa has been one of the great
African journeys since Conrad immortalised it in Heart of
Darkness. Conrad began life as a merchant sailor and, more
specifically, a professional skipper of steamboats. Steamboat
crew in the late nineteenth century played a pioneering role in
the Scramble for Africa as the continent fell under white rule, and
in the early days of the Congo Free State, when Leopold's agents developed the colony for the Belgian monarch, skippers were at a
premium. Conrad was one of many hired for duty on the Congo
River.
In the first part of the twentieth century, regular ferry services
covered the 1,734 kilometres between Leopoldville (Kinshasa) and
Stanleyville (Kisangani) in less than a week, for those who wished
to emulate Conrad. But the journey became more hazardous and
intermittent after independence in 1960, and during the war that
began in 1998 river passage was utterly impossible.
The South African television reporter had spent months of
pleading with corrupt government officials before he found a boat
descending the river, but he only got as far as Bumba, a few
hundred kilometres downstream from Kisangani.
`It was the worst experience of my entire career reporting on
Africa,' he said. `But if you are going to stand any chance, then go
and find Oggi. He knows the river as well as anyone.'
After several days of recovery in the Kisangani hotel, I felt strong
enough to search for Oggi. My advice had been to go to the main
fishing village closest to the falls and ask there. The village was
located just above the cataracts that could be seen from the town
centre, so one clear, sunny morning I set off on foot. I walked past
the Falls Hotel, once the most glamorous establishment in
Kisangani, but now a ruin swarming with prostitutes. Several of
them were out on their tatty balconies and when they saw me, the
only white man on the street, they started wolf-whistling and
cooing terms of endearment in fluent Russian. Clearly, the
charms of the Falls Hotel were enjoyed by the aircrew from the
former Soviet Union, who fly contraband in and out of Kisangani.
Opposite the hotel was a large plinth where a statue of Stanley
had once stood. It was taken down shortly after the Congo became
independent, and the plinth now bears a plaque commemorating
not the nineteenth-century explorer, but the aid group that
recently refurbished a water spring below the spot where Stanley's likeness once stood. When I passed by, some of the
women froth the hotel were scrubbing their underwear in the
spring water.
Behind me I heard a tramping of feet and a chorus of chanting
male voices. The street cleared of pedestrians and the washerwomen scuttled back across the road to the hotel. Round the
corner came a terrifying sight. About fifty men, wearing ragtag
clothes and scraps of military uniform, jogged slowly past in
formation, responding as one to the calls of their leader running
alongside. Their synchronised footfall and voices had me cowering behind the plinth where the statue of Stanley once stood. It
felt for a moment as if the spirit of the old man, my Telegraph
predecessor, was looking out for me. Kisangani was supposedly
run by a mai-mai general promoted to city commander under the
terms of the 2002 peace treaty, but in reality various military
formations still lurked in the shadows. From time to time
different units would go on the rampage, killing and looting with
impunity. No wonder the people I saw on the street fled when
they heard the approaching soldiers and it took several minutes
for the street to return to normal once they had passed.
It had been a mistake to search for Oggi on foot. The air was still
and the heat difficult to bear. Within minutes I was covered in a
slick of sweat. My skin was as slimy as a cake of soap left too long
in water. For a short distance I followed a tarmac road, the first I
had been on since Lubumbashi. I could see it was being eaten
away at the edges. Locals were using the hard surface of the road
to sharpen their machetes, knives and other blades, rubbing away
the tarmac surface little by little, slowly sending this modern road
the way of the railway track I had seen lost under the forest floor.
After a kilometre or so I picked up a footpath snaking through a
patch of tall grass in the direction of the falls. The sun was fierce
and the humidity cruel. The pace of my walking slowed as the
rate of my breathing surged.
Stanley left this spot in a hurry when he passed here in January 1877, but he found time to describe the fishing methods of the
Wagenia around the main cataracts and even illustrated his book
with an ink drawing of the scene. I held up the sketch and found
nothing had changed. There were the same wooden frames
erected near the water's edge, made from entire tree trunks driven
into cracks in the rock. Attached to the frames, suspended four or
five metres above the ground, were specially made tapered rattan
baskets, with a wide opening at the upstream end, but narrowing
to a tight knot in the downstream direction. When the water level
rose, fish would be washed past the gaping mouth of the basket
and would become trapped in the narrow section, unable to swim
back up against the weight of water.
I was there in early September, when the water level was at its
lowest. The dry season south of the Equator was nearing its end,
so this was off-season for most Wagenia fishermen, but I had a
good view of the wooden frames hung with their basket traps.
Fishermen were already clambering over them, reattaching
baskets and refastening joints in preparation for rising river levels
later in the year.
I walked across exposed flanks of the black rock, which, in a
few weeks, would be underwater. Eventually I came to the edge
of the lowest rapids, where the entire upper Congo River came
crashing through a 200-metre-wide cleft in a rock shelf, throwing
up a pleasantly cooling spray and churning the brown water into
a creamy white lather of eddies and wavelets stretching hundreds
of metres downriver. Stanley took great pride in the discovery of
the falls that even today bear his name, describing them as more
impressive and powerful than any others he had seen during his
African wanderings:
The river at the last cataract of the Stanley Falls does not
merely fall; it is precipitated downwards. The Ripon Falls at
the Victoria Lake outlet, compared to this swift descent and
furious on-rush, were languid. The Victoria Nile, as it swept down the steep declivity of its bed towards Unyoro, is very
pretty, picturesque, even a sufficiently exciting scene: but the
Livingstone [Stanley's name for the Congo River] with over
ten times the volume of the Victoria Nile, though only
occupying the same breadth of bed, conveys to the sense the
character of irresistible force, and unites great depth with
tumultuous rush.
The 'tumultuous rush' was a stark contrast to the placid body
of water down which my pirogue had travelled. Enjoying the cool
of the spray, I watched a few bold fishermen working their
pirogues from below the falls into the white water, paddling
furiously to make progress against the current and then launching
small hand-nets over the side.
`The fish that live in the biggest current are the strongest,' said
a voice. It belonged to a barefoot fisherman wearing torn red
shorts who had joined me on the ledge.
'Do you know Oggi Saidi?' I asked.
'Of course. Everybody here knows Oggi. Come with me.' He put
down his hand-net and led me back across the black rock. We had
only walked about a hundred metres when we approached a
small man with a tiny head, wearing a smart blue shirt.
'I am Oggi. How can I help?' His words startled me. He was
speaking fluent English.