Zaire - part 4

Kisangani, formerly Stanleyville , just below the cataracts marking the end of the Congo as a river navigable from the sea, still retained a hint of its colonial days. There were Belgian mansions in which lived the Greeks and Lebanese Christians who controlled Kisangani’s commerce, the houses cracked and stained maybe, but still a grand epicentre to a sprawling shantytown. In all my time in of Zaire I met not a single resident Belgian expat, a reflection perhaps of that nationality’s depth of emotional commitment to King Leopold’s colonial folly of the vanities. A Greek orthodox church was situated not far from the town’s most splendid building, the Primus brewery.

Primus beer should appear in every schoolboy economics primer as a text book case. The price of a bottle varied not only with inflation, running by then at around five percent a day, but also exactly with travelling time from the brewery. Zaire’s mineral wealth is almost all exported. Primus, together with less desirable sister Skol – which failed to meet the crucial demands of the tropical third world: it frothed violently and tasted terrible when served warm – was apparently the main tradable commodity of the internal economy. The ferry spent many days filling its holds with bottles of Primus before setting off back downriver to leave a bargeload of beer at every Congo riverside settlement, thence to be transported to the interior. Truckloads of the stuff headed to the villages further east.

In the central square were a number of almost passable restaurants, serving French cuisine to Lebanese merchants in Greek brasseries with Zairean staff. My favourite had a chef who told us he had trained in Paris before returning home to start his own business. But he had no capital, he said, and the Greeks did not appreciate Africans owning things, so they had boycotted his restaurant until he was forced to sell it. The menu where he now cooked was fortunately rather short, for it had to be rewritten daily as the prices of meat and vegetables increased in the market. I ate there with four Frenchmen staying in my hotel, something of a traveller’s mecca since it offered hot water on tap, run by a couple who shrewdly insisted on being paid in hard currency. Eschewing the Landrovers and Landcruisers favoured by Anglophone overlanders, the French quartet had rather splendidly driven from Paris to Kisangani in two Citroen 2CVs. These vehicles, they said with a cunning smile, were much preferable for they had no moving parts and so never broke down.

Theirs were not the only vehicles with no moving parts. There was no fuel in town. To leave Kisangani by vehicle was impossible until, at last, a diesel tanker made its uncertain way along the tracks from the north and the trucks could queue for a fill up. On hearing rumour of its arrival, I walked to the police checkpoint on the road east of the city, offered cigarettes to the gendarmes (I don’t smoke, but one should always carry cigarettes in Africa, just in case of gendarmes) and slept under its eaves until, 24 hours later, an eastbound lorry finally appeared. I was expecting it to be full, but the grumbling passengers explained that the driver knew full well he was the only source of transport and was charging double the standard fare; many people preferred to wait. My own suspicion was that inflation had probably doubled the standard fare anyway since there had last been any fuel available.

The route east was a long, straight trail of sticky, brown mud, closed in on both sides by thick forest broken only by the occasional village. To pass another vehicle was a lengthy and complex manoeuvre, fortunately required only a few times a day. Great water-filled potholes blocked the route. On encountering these the driver’s assistant, a small man clad only in mackintosh and shorts, would dismount and walk into the water to establish its depth. Often it rose above his chest. The passengers would then climb down, the menfolk would hack at the undergrowth at the side of the track, and the lorry would ease its way between the trees and the mud-hole.

The main road from West to East Africa: Trial...

...and error

We passed a broken down vehicle whose crew purchased cigarettes from our driver. They had been camped there six days already, waiting for spares to arrive, which they fervently hoped would be within another week.

Food did not appear to be included in the fare on this occasion, so when we stopped for the night in a small village I ate thick bean stew in what was clearly the transport café, and slept on the load in the back of the truck, under the tarpaulin and out of the heavy rain. In the morning we set off again at dawn, and by mid-morning reached a settlement where I dismounted as the truck was turning off for the interior.

 

I was beckoned over by a middle-aged man waving bottles of Primus. He offered me one, I countered by offering to pay for both, and we settled amiably that I would buy a second round from the stall over the road which had a fridge powered occasionally by a generator. A qualified engineer, he had saved enough money from working in Europe to retire back to his village, rich by local standards, but he missed conversation of matters in the world beyond Zaire and loved to talk with passing travellers. This was proven in startling fashion when a westbound truck pulled up briefly for a comfort stop and a young Japanese, complete with rising sun headband, climbed down. I attempted to greet him, but it appeared he had taken on the daunting challenge of crossing Africa without a word of either English or French to his name. Diagnosing the problem, my host switched effortlessly to apparently passable Japanese, established that the young man needed the toilet, and directly him to the (spotlessly clean) cess pits at the back of the village, discretely partitioned by walls of wooden stakes. “I worked in Osaka many years ago,” explained the engineer in reply to my astonished questions, before turning back to the Japanese, who was almost sobbing with delight and relief being able to speak his own tongue for once. He returned to his truck with great reluctance when it hooted to reassemble its passengers.

Another day, another truck. At Mambasa however, marked on my map as a town of some significance but in reality little more than an overgrown village, there was a problem. “The road east is has a great hole in it, 50 trucks are queueing, there is no way through.” Indeed the talk of travellers all around for many days was of The Hole. I looked at my map. It marked a small side road. I wondered what a ‘minor road’ as indicated by the legend would be if I had just been travelling on a ‘major road’. “This road is also damaged, no trucks have passed for a week,” I was advised. The map claimed it was fifty miles to Beni, my target near to the Ugandan border, so I decided to walk.

 A short way out of Mambasa I was joined by a man in his twenties, walking to visit his mother’s house. Ten kilometres, he said, before adding rather alarmingly “one hour.” I struggled to keep up for a while, then he grinned, pointed at his battered sandals and my trainers and commented “good shoes go slowly.” I invited him to swap my rucksack for his string bag and he laughed but slowed to a more manageable pace.

A few miles from town, with the forest once again thick on either side of the ‘minor road’ he needed to relieve himself and made his excuses momentarily. I walked on a little, and then froze in amazement as a pair of black gorillas stepped out of the trees perhaps a hundred yards ahead of me. They paused to consider, but as I reached for my camera my companion returned and they lumbered off back into the forest. He looked at my stunned expression unperturbed.

 “Ah yes, big monkeys, you see them round here all the time. Have you seen a lion or a leopard yet?”

Zaire - part 3

There was only one other guest in my hotel in Lisala, a young Afrikaaner, on his way home from Germany to visit his mother. “I hate Ifrica, and I hate the blicks,” he announced, which is why he had decided to travel back overland. I struggled to follow his logic. I suspected he did too, for he seemed to live entirely on pot, sold to him in bulk by the hotel manager. He had no money, he explained, which was why he smoked so much weed.

Lisala, so I had been told, was where one could get The Ferry Up The Congo from. The alternative was many days arduous travel by truck on non-existent roads through the jungle. My guidebook painted a romantic picture of this ferry as a sort of floating circus town for which one could purchase a remarkably cheap first-class ticket and sail, Evelyn Waugh style, sipping G&T on the upper decks whilst enjoying the antics of the natives below. I made enquiries. “Two ferries, both broken,” was the reply. I could take a cargo barge. One was due to leave in a couple of days. The ticket office was over there. It would be open tomorrow after lunch.

Several tomorrows later, I finally found the office open in the afternoon. An upper class Scottish couple were attempting to arrange a passage for themselves and their Land Cruiser up river to Kisangani. They had been there several hours already. The ticket-officer regarded my entry as a welcome distraction; clearly he was already well launched on the standard tactic of delaying for as long as possible in the hope that the Scots couple would give up negotiating and accept his vastly inflated price. I was given a form to complete and asked for my passport. On handing it over he frowned. “English?” he asked rhetorically, before launching into a lengthy rigmarole, delivered in extremely rapid and heavily accented French, the gist of which was that the last Englishman to pass through had failed to complete some arcane item of bureaucracy correctly, causing unspecified material losses to the ticket-officer. As usual I would have to pay more than the face value for my journey. “He wants a bribe,” noted the Scotsman helpfully. I agreed a suitable recompense for the failings of my countryman and left with my ticket.

The Scots, their negotiation complicated by the need for a passage for their vehicle, were less fortunate. Forty-eight hours later I found them by the boat, neurotically supervising the attachment of chains to their smart Land Cruiser allowing a crane to winch it aboard. Did they get a good price in the end, I asked. Possibly, they replied, but one had to be rather careful. A few weeks previous an overland holiday tour operator had, so they said, negotiated rather too keen a price. Unhappy with their resulting cut, the crew of the crane had winched the tour truck right over the barge, and dropped it into the Congo.

The boat itself was made up of seven or eight large rust-red cargo barges, each perhaps 30 metres long and 8 wide, lashed together. The majority were flat, with lids for the cargo bays, but the rearmost had a white painted bridge to which one ascended by steep stairs. On the first floor were the officers’ quarters, where the roost was ruled by their wives, fat smug looking women, dressed in brilliant coloured fabrics, who sold bottled beer from a large chest fridge. On the second floor, beyond a small flat area of quarterdeck, was the control room full of antique-looking radio equipment.

Every available surface of the barges was covered with people, their children and their chickens. Fish was drying in wickerwork cages, rice was being boiled in vast cauldrons over gas burners, fibrous white luggage sacks were set out to demark family territories, a baby was being roasted on a grill. I looked again. Thankfully it was not in fact a baby but a small monkey, whose hair had been singed off by the cooking heat, leaving nude pink skin. I hunted around for a space and eventually found a strip of deck just large enough to claim with my sleeping bag.

Cargo barge up the Congo

In late afternoon the engines started up, their throb resonating through the metal of the barges. Traffic of humans and goods between shore and boat became even more frantic. An hour or so later, we finally pulled away from the shore and set sail upriver. Overflowing with people, the boat was indeed the circus-town promised by my guidebook but alas my accommodation was not first-class. At dusk a dense mist descended over the river and we pulled over near to the bank where we halted for the night. The air became thick with mosquitoes, so I fetched out some lengths of green window gauze I had purchased in Nigeria and used to line my rucksack as extra protection against slash-and-grab thieves. The gauze kept out the insects, but not the rats, who operated a busy road near my head. Occasional overtaking manoeuvres apparently demanded a detour across my sleeping bag. The deck was very hard, and the engines were kept running so that their vibration carried through the surface. I did not sleep well, and resolved on improving my situation before the next night.

We started off again at dawn, and the main entertainment for the trip began. The Congo at this juncture was perhaps a mile wide, and in general our boat stayed near its centre. From the jungle villages lining either bank emerged pirogues, dugout canoes. They were rowed by villagers whose objective it was to catch hold of one of the many ropes trailing from the sides of our barges, ascend to our decks, and sell their produce: bananas, pineapples, clothing of all kinds, great catfish as long as a man. Although our boat moved at a stately pace, it was still much faster than a pirogue could be paddled. To catch a hold without being swept away required both skill and luck. Many were left stranded in mid-river forlornly clutching their wares, others capsized spilling both occupants and goods into the soupy brown water. Occasionally an officer’s wife would point out a canoe containing a particularly choice item, waddling up the steps to the control room to draw attention to it, at which we would slow down to offer a safer moorage for the lucky vendors.

Chasing down the barge

The ships officers and their families were members of a rare segment of the population: the middle-classes who were not part of the military. Well meaning western attempts at democratic reform and alleviation of poverty in the third world all too often forget western history. British democracy emerged in stages, via barons, burghers, property owners before finally heading for universal suffrage. At each step, the middle-class had to feel secure enough to extend its privileges to the rung below. In a society such as Zaire divided simply into three rungs – the tiny elite, the army and the poor – such a process cannot happen, and if imposed, the army must react in the only way available to it, by military takeover. It seems to me that if we really wish to see the third world set on the road to stability and prosperity, our aid should be directed at the establishment of a commercial and educated counterweight to the soldiers. This is probably not a popular viewpoint, particular as it would involve focussing our aid on the less immediately needy and taking the (very) long view. Be that as it may, the officers on my boat were a cheerful bunch, who, once I had purchased a round or two of beers, allowed me the run of the pleasantly cool control room and, more importantly, let me move my gear to the little open quarterdeck and sleep up there away from the rats.

My one remaining problem was food and drink. For the first day aboard my supply of bottled water and tinned food purchased in Lisala sufficed, and in fact made me quite popular with my neighbours as the empty bottles and especially tins were valuable as containers. Running out of liquid first, I tried some of the water hauled up from the river in buckets, tempered by the addition of an iodine purification tablet (earnestly recommended by my guidebook). The mixture of iodine and silt flavourings made it undrinkable, so the only alternative was to purchase drink aboard, and the only beverage for sale was bottled beer. I then ran out of food too, and although there was much to be had aboard, I remembered all those rats, and decided to confine myself to what I could buy from the pirogues. I could not cook a catfish, so this was mainly bananas leavened with the occasional pineapple. I cannot recommend several days living largely on beer and bananas in a tropical climate. Nonetheless, sipping my beer from my corner of the quarterdeck and surveying the activity below, I did seem to have come a long way towards my romantic picture of this journey.

Occasionally we would stop at a small riverside town, detach one of our barges, and attach one or more replacements. Frenzied activity ensued on each occasion as the entire village living on the departing barge had to transfer itself to a new one. Not so frenzied, however, as at the town where a ticket inspector came aboard, an event which caused utter chaos for several hours.

One afternoon we drove unexpectedly and quite hard into the river bank. Many men clutching machetes leaped ashore, led by our Chief Engineer, a bulky man moving surprisingly quickly. He returned sweating happily a few minutes later clutching a large bunch of twigs and leaves. “Aphrodisiac,” he grinned in response to my raised eyebrows. A tourist became sick with Malaria, and his guide treated him with the (then) new drug Lariam. He recovered almost overnight, and a minor altercation ensued when the Captain then wished to purchase the tour party’s entire Lariam stocks. “Never have I seen anyone cured of le palu so fast,” he declared, shaking his head in wonderment.

On the last night aboard it rained a little, and I awoke on my corner of the quarterdeck to find it, and me, crawling with cockroaches, three or four inches long, which had been washed down the pipework from the roof. I leapt hastily out of my damp sleeping bag and began to kick the creatures overboard. A passenger rush up, outraged. “Stop Monsieur, stop!” he cried. He produced a pan, proceeded to scoop up as many cockroaches as he could gather, and returned the results to his wife. She added tinned milk, boiled the pan and mashed up its contents into a kind of porridge. I was offered some – they were my cockroaches after all. I declined, accepting instead a very welcome mug of coffee as a change from bottled beer. After all, you can’t eat what you’ve just slept with, can you?

Zaire - part 2

I began the journey along the track from Bumba to Lisala, where apparently I would be able to board a boat up the Congo, one late afternoon on the top of a grossly overladen goods lorry. It soon began to rain and many of the twenty or so other passengers elected to take shelter under the tarpaulin. As I preferred to be able to see out, even at the cost of getting wet, this allowed me to move to grab a spot at the front, overlooking the top of the drivers’ cabin. Initially there was some consternation at this, which turned out to be caused by the fact that I had chosen as a seat a cardboard box containing wine glasses. Zaire is not noted for its wine.

Peering ahead into the early evening gloom, I saw a woman some distance ahead flagging down our truck by waving her large black handbag. We slowed, the driver evidently anticipating another fee paying passenger. As we drew nearer to the woman, however, it became apparent that her handbag was in fact a dead monkey, its tail pulled up and around its neck before rigor mortis had set in and then employed as a waving-handle, which she wished to sell us for our supper. Our driver declined. I was glad of this at the time, but rather regretted it later when our evening meal, apparently included in the fare, turned out to include some exceptionally ‘mature’ goat stew. Fresh monkey, I could not help but feel – and that monkey could only have been fresher than my portion of goat – would have been greatly preferable.

After our disturbing meal, we continued in darkness until apparently we reached the end of our ride on this particular truck. We were in a small, sleeping village, and the other passengers quickly dispersed. I found a dry doorway and got into my sleeping bag.

Next morning there was no transport. A small stall sold warm Fanta and tinned Moroccan sardines (every stall in Africa sells tinned Moroccan sardines), so I bought some for breakfast. Many of yesterday’s passengers reappeared and settled down to wait for some means of leaving the village. I fell into conversation with a travelling businessman named Raoul. He was sitting on a large sack of plastic sandals purchased from the Central African Republic which he planned to sell at the market in Lisala. I bought him a warm Fanta while we chatted. At some point I revealed that I was English. A thoughtful look came into his eyes and he beckoned me over to a quiet corner.

 

“Do you know, about, ahh, men’s problems?” he whispered. “Problems with sex I mean,” he clarified. No reply suggested itself, especially in my O-level French, so I nodded noncomitally. He reached into a pocket and produced a piece of paper. It turned out to be a letter, written in the most ornate official-style business French, addressed to a firm in Minnesota which produced – presumably – devices which would assist with “men’s problems.” The names of the products had been laboriously, but unfortunately, transcribed letter by letter from their original English, probably from an advert in the back of a magazine. The letter solemnly requested samples be sent of, amongst others, the ‘Sunrise Ejection Assistent.’

“I sent this letter,” Raoul explained, sipping his tepid Fanta, “but I have had no reply.” I tried to imagine what the firm in Minnesota had made of an earnest written request in a foreign language for samples of their probably bogus products to be sent to a small town in Zaire. “I wonder,” went on Raoul diffidently, “if they did not reply because I did not write in English?” It was possible, I agreed, while attempting to conjure a picture in my mind of the Sunrise Ejection Assistent. “Could you possibly write me a letter in English expressing my request?” he asked.  It would pass the time constructively and make a positive contribution to a third world economy, so I set about a written request for a specimen Sunrise Erection Assistant for evaluation with a view to a larger order being made if its performance was satisfactory.

As I completed this task, a small van driven by a government contractor pulled up, looking for paying passengers to Lisala. Most of the other travellers had too much luggage for the van, and the contractor was asking double the usual fare as well, but pointing to my small rucksack they urged me to board.

Travel-stained

After the trucks of the previous days, sitting in a proper car seat, and unbelievably reaching 80km per hour at one point along the tracks, this was first class travel, Zairean style. Five of the other six passengers were a cheerful bunch too, sharing a bag of nuts with me and asking me what England was like. The sixth, strapped into a seatbelt and occupying a premium space on the back seat by the window, was a large white goat, which bleated conversationally throughout the journey.

They dropped me off in a “motel” at the edge of Lisala. I was shown to a pleasant looking room with a fine white-tiled bathroom and a sort of mock-chandelier with a lightbulb still fitted in its centre. I was in the process of haggling over the price when a maid hurried in. She set down a couple of candles and some matches on the table, and heaved her full bucket of water into the bathroom. “If you need more water to wash or to flush the toilet, you can ask Maria here, or you can draw the water from the well yourself.”

Zaire - part 1

I crossed the river border from the Central African Republic into Zaire at Mobaye, near a modern-looking hydroelectric dam. Whether it generated any electricity I was unable to discover; at no point during my time in Zaire did I encounter any functioning facility powered by mains electricity, although many buildings were optimistically equipped with fittings.

On the same ferry was a Landrover driven by a group of Australians. They were in desperate need of both fuel and the French vocabulary necessary to purchase some. The latter deficiency had apparently defeated them throughout the Central African Republic and their petrol shortage was now acute. They offered me a lift to the nearest town on their roof-rack in exchange for my services as an interpreter.

We arrived in Gbadolite, the hometown of President Mobutu, then still firmly in power. According to the locals, he maintained a substantial palace nearby, and ran the satellite settlement as a kind of show town. Amazingly, there was a supermarket. It stocked only Worcester Sauce. We changed some money with the manager. Zaire was suffering from the gradual onset of hyperinflation – the exchange rate to the dollar doubled during my month there. I received a large wad of impressively clean and new 50,000 Zaires notes, bearing Mobutu’s face on one side and a picture of mountain gorillas on the reverse. “Monkey money,” I was told later. “Look, you see, it has a monkey on both sides.”

 After a lengthy and complex negotiation including the tasting of both the surface and depths of the petrol to verify that it was not watered down, gasoline was successfully purchased and the Australians dropped me off on the track south. Northern Zaire has no useful road transport system, and in anyway no roads for it to use. I enquired why not: “A fellow dictator is overthrown by rebels and rings to ask Mobutu for help. ‘How did they come and get you?’ asks Mobutu. ‘They came by road,’ replies the fallen despot. ‘Ah well, I told you not to build roads,’ says Mobutu sagely.”

The only semi-reliable means of travel apart from the Congo river itself is to ride in/on goods trucks, not in the cabin of course, but as part of the load. Even this is hampered by whole towns being without fuel for days on end, disabling all trucks. However, my luck was in, and I was able to purchase a ride in the back of an empty truck bound for Bumba.

Situated on the northern bank of the Congo, Bumba is as attractive a town as its name implies, with nearly as much to do. It was in Bumba that I encountered “The Belgians”. The Belgians were an Explore/Encounter-overland type holiday operator, driving a rather splendid bright-orange truck with cutaway sides and throne-like seats for the tourists aboard. As I was to discover in subsequent conversations with other travellers, they enjoyed a legendary reputation.

The Belgians’ trip had, according to the stories, started in Ghana. Their tour was led by a charming husband and wife team. On the day their new party were due to land in Accra, Ghana’s capital, they had set out for the airport to meet their guests when they were stopped by the police. In common with many African countries, Ghanaian law requires that one carries ID documents – a passport for foreigners – with one at all times. The husband and wife had left theirs in the hotel. The normal procedure throughout the continent in such situations is simply then to negotiate an appropriate ‘fee’ with the police – “il faut discuter un peut” in francophone lands -, whose size is inversely proportional to how long you are prepared to hang around, and then everybody proceeds on their way. The husband and wife took umbrage, and so, therefore, did the police, resulting in a night in the local jail and their tour guests with no previous experience of Africa having to find their way to an unknown hotel in an unfamiliar city in a foreign language.

Neither husband nor wife could cook. Accordingly, they had hired a Ghanaian to carry out this very necessary duty in a land where restaurants can be few and far between and the food inedible even when there is an eatery. The Ghanaian had no papers, but somehow made it through Togo and Benin as far as the Nigerian frontier, where he was forced to leave their expedition. I crossed paths frequently with The Belgians over the next few weeks. “Monsieur Chris, we have some food spare,” was the usual greeting from the tour guests. Of course I was not about to pass up such free delights as tinned ravioli (prepared by the wife) accompanied by cream crackers (prepared by the husband). One day, I know not how, they offered me lumpy blancmange.

Much later, I heard that The Belgians had embarked their guests on the ferry up the Congo, but taken their vehicle by the overland route, where it became stuck in one of the coach-sized potholes which can obstruct travel along jungle mud-tracks for days on end when it rains. The grand finale of The Belgians’ trip was to be visiting a mountain-gorilla sanctuary near the Rwandan border (the troubles in Rwanda were not yet serious in early 1991). They never made it, and eventually had to fly home at great expense from a bush airstrip.

I first met The Belgians when they drove their truck very hard into the gatepost of my hotel.

The Belgians: whoops, missed

Central African Republic - part 2

I was dropped off at Sibut, a small town of low, brown-white houses set around a patch of red-earth mud, sleepy in the noon sun. Three ragged girls came to stare at me, the eldest, aged perhaps seven, clutching a large blunt knife. Their mother, arriving to chase them away, asked what I wanted and showed me the track to Mobaye. “You can wait here, the van will come soon,” she said, pointing to a welcome patch of shade under a broad tree.

Villagers at Sibut

To my surprise, the van did come soon, and passengers appeared as if summoned by a witchdoctor from the silent houses. The van itself was a small Toyota pickup of great antiquity designed to carry three people and perhaps a couple of goats in the back. There were more than twenty passengers in addition to the driver and his teenage son, so adding my rucksack to the great pile of luggage, I stood on the footplate at the back. There was little danger in this, for the Toyota could manage barely quicker than walking pace downhill. Uphill the younger men took turns to stroll to ease the load, and easily outpaced the van.

The Sibut bus service

 We had travelled maybe four miles of earthen road when something snapped inside the engine and we ground to a halt. Undisturbed, we dismounted while the driver and his son, after inspecting the damage, cut long strips of bark and set about tying back together whatever had broken. Someone plucked ripe wild avocados from plants growing near the track, and offered them around. I was the subject of many curious stares but no one ventured into conversation except to borrow my penknife for their avocado. It was very peaceful with barely even the hum of insects from the brushland through the hot, humid air to disturb the silence. The vast blue sky, the red-brown earth, the tall green of the plants, the battered Toyota a dazzling white in the vertical sun, the vivid costumes of the women: it was Africa painted by Van Gogh. Half an hour later we were on our way again, bumping sedately over the mud.

Perhaps five miles later, the engine gave out again, and we freewheeled downhill into a small village. There was more agitation this time, which was calmed only by the reappearance of the driver’s son with a villager holding a pair of two-litre plastic oil cans. They proved to contain not oil for the van but palm wine for the passengers. I was invited to join them, – “you have also paid your fare Monsieur” – rusted tins were handed round to drink from and a measure of thin yellow-white liquid poured into each.

The drink tasted largely of tin can  (I tried some elsewhere from a plastic cup and it still tasted metallic) but it was potent stuff; tongues were loosened enough to permit a detailed interrogation to begin. After some while we arrived at the inevitable “how much do you earn Monsieur?” I reduced the real figure by a factor of three, but it still brought envious looks. Of course I had to pay a great deal in taxes, probably more than half, I offered in mitigation of my unreasonable wealth. “Taxes are just theft by the government, to pay for guns and soldiers.” Maybe so in the Central African Republic, I agreed, but in England they pay for schools and unemployment benefit. This last concept fascinated them and I explained further under detailed questioning. There was much discussion in their native tongues before the follow up “what else do your taxes pay for?” I told them about the National Health Service, back home not necessarily a topic of great British pride. Out here it was a source of wonder. They listened, questioned, talked heatedly amongst themselves: was I really telling the truth? “C’est une vie sans peur!” – it is a life without fear -, cried one man in the end, convinced but amazed.

The van was mended, a state which lasted approximately five minutes, just far enough to be within pushing distance of the next village. The sound of women beating wooden pestles with giant wooden mortars pulsated through perfectly round mud-brick houses with straw roofs; coffee I was told on enquiry, grown further up in the hills. This time the passengers, sour with palm wine were less easily mollified. It was evening, we would have to stay in the village, our van driver should pay for our dinner. He was not in agreement, but twenty to one was difficult odds to overcome. Village children chased a pair of chickens down the track which, after much shouting and clucking, reappeared in our stew as night fell. After dinner we were shown to a pair of empty huts and fell rapidly into palm-wine induced stupor.

In the morning our van was, allegedly, mechanically sound once more, the driver and some villagers having worked all evening. It would not, however, start. The solution was apparently to roast the battery over a fire, which rather surprisingly did the trick. It stalled a couple more times on the way, and each time the lengthy roasting process resolved matters. About ten kilometres from Mobaye something else went wrong in the innards of the Toyota. We gave up and walked the rest of the way. A journey of twenty-five miles had taken twenty-eight hours.

Central African Republic - part 1

The leg through the Central African Republic from the western border to the capital at Bangui was perhaps the only stage of my whole journey where I mildly regretted not having my own transport. The minibuses were slow, cramped and uncomfortable, it was difficult to see out due to a combination of cracked windows and rain, and there was usually little to see anyway except the jungle growing tall on both sides of the road. Just occasionally, however, we would climb a few hundred feet up, the vegetation would break for a moment, and there would be a brief glimpse of a huge vista of empty land covered in trees from one horizon to the other, illuminated by shafts of light as the sun fought its way through the storm-clouds. We broke down quite frequently but never, it seemed, anywhere with a view.

A frequent event

My neighbour for part of the route was Bernard. He was a teacher, well-qualified he claimed, but unable to get a desirable job in Bangui because “my family is not well connected”. Forced to work in the remote provinces, he was heading to the bright lights of the capital for entertainment during the summer holidays. I shared the cost of a room with him at an overnight stop. Its only furniture was an extremely long single bed, with a rather serious design flaw: instead of cross-ways slats, it had length-ways slats. With a mattress this might not have been so unfortunate but of course there was none, and with just a thin sleeping-bag thrown over it for padding, it was impossible to lie in any position where the slats did not dig in sharply somewhere. I slept instead on the comfortable mud-floor, leaving Bernard with the bed. Due to complications with finding the right change, I had paid fractionally more than my half share of the room price, and moreover I had bought him a warm Fanta at dinner, so he protested that this entitled me to claim the bed; I was quite certain that it entitled me to claim the floor. When I woke next morning, he was still fast asleep… on the ground not the bed.

The Fanta had been necessary to cope with the food. The only choice was sticks of some sort of dense, dark, barbecued flesh. Probably it was goat, but it looked like snake and it was definitely venomous. A small skewer was sold accompanied by about a teaspoonful of chilli-powder in a twist of paper, for dipping in an attempt to make it edible. The vegetable accompaniment was manioc, a grey white tube that looks, smells, feels, and (OK I am guessing here) tastes like a condom. It was also sold accompanied by chilli-powder, for the same reasons.

In the next town, drowning the food with warm beer from a street bar in preference to warm Fanta, I met a middle-aged Frenchman who had lived the majority of his life in Centrafrique. He had come over with “the Legion” he said (there was still a huge French military presence), and then stayed on. The country was going steadily downhill, successive governments worse than their predecessors, despite the regular coups and revolutions each promising a better future. “Il faudra que quelque chose changera” he stated determinedly, gesturing with a fist – something has to change. I asked why, if things were so bad, he did not return to France. “I know no one in France,” he replied, “it is thirty-five years since I was in Bordeaux. How would I live there? My wife is African. I cannot go back.”

The French connection was even stronger in Bangui itself. Back in Algeria I had met a young Frenchman turning around after his vehicle had irretrievably broken down even before attempting the Sahara crossing. On learning that I might end up in Bangui he had scribbled an address and a rather cryptic note in the back of my diary: “Hello Marie, please give lodgings to this guy, I will be back when I can, Jean-Pierre ‘the devil’”. Having nothing to lose I presented myself, was offered a reasonably priced bed with clean white sheets and a splendid mosquito net, and discovered that this was the capital-city hostel for the VP, the French equivalent of VSO (voluntary service overseas). As the VP offered an interesting alternative to doing military service it was not short of volunteers, and when a group of them returned in late afternoon they cheerfully invited me along to the evening’s entertainment.

We headed to a Lebanese-run restaurant, with a full Lebanese-mezze meal, served entirely free of charge; the ingredients were presumably expensively sourced from the inevitable French supermarket. (The troubles in Lebanon had driven something of a diaspora, although it was difficult to understand why anyone with a free choice would select the Central African Republic.) The tables were then cleared away, diesel generator power up, the sound-system turned to full volume, disco-lighting switched on, the bar opened-up by a large group of staff, and a further free bottle of beer mystifyingly issued. Rather baffled by this gratuitous hospitality, I awaited developments. After perhaps half an hour, minibuses began to arrive outside, and disgorged their contents: large number of French soldiers with a week’s pay to burn. Local girls in extremely short skirts or skin-tight jeans began to drift in looking for customers. The reason for the free hospitality became clear: our group of volunteers included a number of young Frenchwomen, and their presence helped create the illusion for the soldiers that the nightclub was better than just a clip joint. There were clearly some regulars; around midnight the dance-floor cleared suddenly, the music changed, and a burly soldier and lithe African girl proceeded to give a spectacular exhibition of rock-and-roll dancing.

Next evening, after a disorientating visit to the cinema to see an English film dubbed into French with English subtitles, I was invited by the same group to “our house in the country for the weekend”. A small contribution to the cost of food and drink was requested, and in the morning we set off in a couple of battered vehicles via the supermarket. A couple of hours from Bangui, we pulled up in a village outside a nondescript concrete building. The driver disappeared inside, and emerged with an extraordinarily well-groomed girl in tow. His girlfriend he explained. I assumed she was another French volunteer, until she introduced herself in French but with a strong American accent. The building was the Central African training centre for the US Peace Corps, she explained, and she was the training manager. She would bring the new recruits out, but please would I remember that they were forbidden to speak any language other than French, except for 30 minutes each day during their evening meal. They trooped out, mainly rather bewildered looking girls, and a surreal conversation ensued in first-form French. They had each volunteered to work in Africa, but had not nominated any country preference or else their preference was “full”. Accordingly they had been assigned a country at random, in this case one that they had mostly never heard of until receiving their posting. (Advice to young American gentlemen: should you wish to enjoy almost unlimited time in the isolated and exclusive company of numerous attractive and educated young American ladies looking for supportive companions, learn a little French in advance, and then volunteer for a Peace Corps placement in Africa).

I was slightly reluctant to leave, but eventually we headed on to pick up a trio of post-training “placed” volunteers, young women despatched in pairs to isolated villages in the middle of Africa where they were expected to educate the local population. In one case, the girl’s partner had become ill and so she had a territory to herself, based out of a small, if solidly built, village hut. She looked glad of the company and appeared to enjoy the weekend, but she told me later that she had grown to appreciate the quiet of the jungle and was not sure she was looking forwards to her time as a volunteer ending, despite the seeming futility of the actual educational programme she was supposed to deliver.

As I talked to these volunteers, this theme recurred over and again. Mostly they were enjoying the unconventional freedoms that remote Africa brought them (especially the French, muttered the Americans sourly, because they received double the monthly allowance as VP work was considered equivalent to military service and not simply volunteering), but they found it difficult to believe in the actual work itself. The reason was consistent: they were supposed to be educating the local population with new skills, in a sort of “train the trainer” scheme, but instead ended up simply performing the tasks themselves. “I am taking a year out in the middle of training to be a vet,” one told me, “I should be teaching these people the fundamentals of animal medicine. Instead I am a bush doctor patching up wounded sheep.” The Peace Corps programme was mainly focussed on nutrition, essentially trying to get the villagers to eat their greens, a task one of the girls compared with the similar training of her baby sister except that the locals could just ignore her and say no. Evidently they preferred their regular diet of venomous goat and rubberised manioc.

Cameroon

Cameroon was wet... very wet. Double-checking a map online to write this, I have just discovered that a village close to where I first stayed in the country is listed as one of the five wettest places on earth. It certainly was while I was there. Travel on unmetalled roads was slow and tedious as they turned into swamps. Travel on metalled roads was slow and tedious as the foot traffic which would normally have stayed in the verges strayed out onto the carriageway in an attempt to avoid the worst of the mud.

There were compensations however. Cameroon boasted a Guinness brewery under licence, the drink was still being sold under the “Guinness Is Good For You” slogan, supported by the traditional Toucan-advertising, and was available bottled in most bars and cafes. Coffee and chocolate are both significant cash crops. For a couple of days I indulged in a dark brown diet.

Being English was a significant advantage. The biggest (non-political) event in recent Cameroon history was the (soccer) world cup of 1990. Cameroon began gloriously by beating the reigning champions Argentina in the opening game, and were eventually knocked out in a quarter-final which finished 3-2 to England after two English penalties in extra time, and despite Cameroon probably objectively playing the better. Penalty decisions are invariably a source of controversy, and on discovering my nationality every citizen aged 13 or over wanted to discuss them in detail. Although football is by no means my preferred sport, fortunately I had watched the match. By the end of my time in Cameroon, I could discuss those penalties fluently on a second-by-second basis. It helped to pass the tedious journeys through the rains, and discussions that could switch mid-sentence from French to English – Cameroon has both as official languages, a legacy of the post first world-war partition of the previously German colony – helped to add to the time-passing value.

Being unable to orientate myself in the rain on arrival in Yaounde, the capital, I opted for a short taxi ride. As the taxi pulled away, someone shouted a warning through the window “that man has a knife monsieur, get out”. Travelling light has its advantages. (Nine kilogrammes, or about 20 pounds, of luggage including a sleeping-bag saw me around the world for a year. Compare your suitcase weight next time you check-in for your flight for a week’s holiday). At the next traffic pause I did get out with my bags, before the driver could react. An alternative taxi took me more sedately to the landmark of the inevitable capital-city-aid-agency-workers’ French supermarket, from where I was able to get my bearings and locate a place to stay. Tired from the wet journey and another Guinness, I fell asleep at dusk, only to be woken abruptly a couple of hours later by an incessant, and extremely loud, bass beat: the roundabout just along the street from my ground-floor room apparently doubled up as the Saturday overnight street disco. Dancing in the streets, OK, singing in the rain, maybe, but singing in the torrential and continuous downpour seemed a bit unreasonable. I was surprised the wiring didn’t simply fuse.

For the journey northeast, hopefully into a slightly less damp region, there was a train with magnificent new sleeping carriages. The ticket office only seemed to open for a few random minutes at a time, requiring most of a day spent in a nearby café spying on it before seizing the moment and sprinting over before the window shut again. I was lucky and secured a sleeper ticket, sharing a compartment with a junior air-force officer going home to visit his family. The majority of the remaining passengers in the carriage appeared to be well-to-do French tourists, heading to the drier north intending to shoot things in various private game reserves.

The border with the Central African Republic (CAR, or more euphoniously Centrafrique in French) was a slow, dripping clearing in the jungle, with the usual queues of patient trucks negotiating passage. The CAR border guards evidently felt the need to supplement their income, and had devised an unusual way to do so. A medical checkpoint had been added to the usual steps of checking documents and looking hopefully through luggage in search of confiscate-able items of decent resale value. Yellow fever vaccination? I had the standard issue certificate. How about cholera? The nurse had refused to inject me with it, pointing out that the vaccine was now reckoned to be useless and probably actually increased susceptibility. She had, however, been prepared to salve her conscience and issue an internationally valid certificate of cholera vaccination after injecting me with a microscopic quantity of saline solution; as she pointed out, it probably increased my immunity when compared with receiving the vaccine itself. Then how about meningitis? There was no recognised documentation for this, and it must have brought in a steady income for the border guards. I was equal to it: I had a letter on impressively headed notepaper, bearing the names of multiple doctors and signed with a dramatic flourish. The guards admitted defeat after a few minutes half-hearted argument regarding translation (meningitis in English = méningite in French, close enough for victory to be mine), and I was waved through.

Queueing at the border

They were missing a trick: there was one vaccine which I definitely did not have. When the nurse had asked for a list of countries I planned to visit on my trip, I pointed out that I didn’t really know. In the end we settled on a list which seemed to promise a comprehensive portfolio of standard travel immunisations. She then scanned a lengthy printout: “are you planning to visit southern Tanzania?” Maybe, maybe not, I shrugged, and asked why. “Do you want the bubonic plague vaccine?