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?