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?”