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.”