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CHAPTER 1
Africa's Broken Heart
It was a strange setting for a revelation. I was sunbathing on the beach of a luxury hotel next to the Indian Ocean, wearing nothing but blue swimming trunks and sunglasses, reading a book on African history. I know exactly what I had on, because around that moment someone took a photograph of me. It shows me concentrating hard, my fingers, slimy with sun-cream, splaying the pages. What it cannot show, though, is the racing surge in my heartbeat. I had just read something about the Congo that was going to change my life.
Recently appointed as Africa Correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, I was doing what every new foreign correspondent must: cramming. My reading list was long. After Africa's early tribal history came the period of exploitation by outsiders, starting with centuries of slavery and moving on to the Scramble for Africa, when the white man staked the black man's continent in a few hectic years at the end of the nineteenth century to launch the colonial era. Then came independence in the late 1950s and 1960s when the Winds of Change swept away regimes that some white leaders had boasted would stand for ever. And it finished with the post-independence age of economic decay, war, coup and crisis, with African leaders manipulated, and occasionally murdered, by foreign powers, and dictatorships clinging to power in a continent teeming with rebels, loyalists and insurgents.
The one constant through each of these episodes was the heavy undertow of human suffering. It gnawed away at every African epoch I read about, no matter whether it was caused by nineteenth-century colonial brutes or twenty-first-century despots. Generations of Africans have suffered the triumph of disappointment over potential, creating the only continent on the planet where the normal rules of human development and advancement simply don't apply.
It was this sense of stagnation that troubled me most as I worked through my reading list. Sub-Saharan Africa has forty-one separate countries of stunning variety - from parched desert to sweaty rainforest, from wide savannah to snow-tipped volcano - and yet as I did my background research, the history of these varied countries merged into a single, pro-forma analysis. I came to focus on which Western country exploited them during the colonial period and which dictator abused them since independence. The analysis was as crude as the underlying assumption: that African nations are doomed to victim status.
Things had been different when I was younger. I grew up in Britain in the 1970s and collected milk-bottle tops so that my Blue Peter children's television heroes could dig wells for Kenyan villagers. My last day at school in 1985 was the day when the Live Aid concert rocked the world for victims of the Ethiopian famine. And as a student in the late 1980s I did my bit to bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa, boldly refusing to use my cashpoint card in British banks linked to the white-only government.
But by the time I started working in Africa as a journalist in 2000, its patina of despair had thickened to impenetrability. An old newspaper hand took me to one side shortly before I flew out to Johannesburg and gave me some advice. This man was no fool and no brute. He had stood on a beach in west Africa twenty years earlier and watched thirteen members of the Liberian cabinet shot by rebel soldiers wearing grubby tennis shoes, a horror that scarred his soul until the day he died. But his only advice to me, the novice, was: 'Just two things to remember in Africa - which tribe and how many dead.'
The Congo was prominent in every African era. As a child I had prided myself on knowing some of its history, about how Joseph Conrad used his time as a steamboat skipper on the mighty Congo River as the basis for his novel Heart of Darkness. I am of the Apocalypse Now generation and can remember earnest conversations in school common rooms about how film-maker Francis Ford Coppola had borrowed directly from Conrad to create his cinematographic masterpiece on the depths the human soul can plumb. My friends and I would argue about whether Conrad was being racist, suggesting that black Africa was in some way inherently evil, or whether he used equatorial Africa simply as a backdrop for a novel about how wicked any human can become.
In my early months working in Africa, the Congo's contemporary woes soon became clear. It was in the Congo that the world's bloodiest war was raging. It began in 1998 and, by the time I started work, it was claiming more than 1,000 lives a day. But the truly staggering thing was how this loss of life barely registered in the outside world. Like so many other places in Africa, the Congo had come to be seen as a lost cause, and the costliest conflict since the Second World War passed largely unnoticed.
Before my moment of revelation, I found all of this a curiosity. What drove my interest up a quantum level was when, lolling on my sun lounger, I discovered a direct, personal link to the Congo and its turbulent history. I read that it had all been started by another reporter sent to Africa by the Telegraph more than a century before me. His name was Henry Morton Stanley.
In the Victorian era, Stanley was the world's best-known journalist, famous for the scoop of the century - tracking down the Scottish explorer, David Livingstone, in November 1871. The soundbite he came up with was as glib and memorable as any a modern spin doctor could conjure. Stanley's 'Dr Livingstone, I presume,' greeting remains so dominant that it has overshadowed his much greater and more significant achievement.
It came on his next epic trip to Africa between 1874 and 1877, when he solved the continent's last great geographical mystery by mapping the Congo River. Commissioned jointly by the Telegraph and an American newspaper, The New York Herald, he hacked his way through a swathe of territory never before visited by a white man, crossing the Congo River basin and proving that the continent's previously impenetrable hinterland could be opened up by steamboats on a single, huge river. He presumed to name the river Livingstone, in honour of his mentor, but it is now known as the Congo. His methods were brutal, opening fire on tribesmen who did not instantly obey, pillaging food and supplies. And his brazenness in describing his methods when he eventually reached home stirred angry controversy among humanitarian activists of the day. But their complaints were deafened by the hero's welcome Stanley received when he returned to London in 1878.
His Congo fame was fleeting. At the Telegraph's London headquarters today there is a modest collection of paintings and busts of the paper's luminaries. But there is no mention of Stanley or his Congo trip, even though it changed history more dramatically than anything the newspaper has ever been involved with.
Stanley's adventure caught the eye of a minor European monarch, Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Leopold read about Stanley's expedition in the newspaper, seeing past the reporter's colourful account of cannibals, man-eating snakes and river rapids so ferocious they devoured men by the canoe-load. Desperate for a colony that would mark Belgium's arrival as a world power, Leopold saw rich potential in Stanley's story. The explorer had found a river that was navigable across much of central Africa and Leopold envisaged it as the main artery of a huge Belgian colony, shipping European manufactured goods upstream and valuable African raw materials downstream.
Stanley's Congo expedition fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa. Before his trip, white outsiders had spent hundreds of years nibbling at Africa's edges, claiming land around the coastline, but rarely venturing inland. Disease, hostile tribes and the lack of any clear commercial potential in Africa meant that hundreds of years after white explorers first circumnavigated its coastline, it was still referred to in mysterious terms as the Dark Continent, a source of slaves, ivory and other goods, but not a place white men thought worthy of colonisation. It was Leopold's jostling for the Congo that forced other European powers to stake claims to Africa's interior, and within two decades the entire continent had effectively been carved up by the white man. The modern history of Africa - decades of colonial exploitation and post-independence chaos - was begun by a Telegraph reporter battling down the Congo River.
Reading about this epoch-changing journey seeded an idea in my mind that soon grew into an obsession. To shed my complacency about modern Africa and try to understand it properly, it was clear what I had to do: I would go back to where it all began, following Stanley's original journey of discovery through the Congo. The historical symmetry of working for the same paper as Stanley was appealing, but this alone was not enough. What really stirred me was the sense of challenge that the Congo represented. I had covered wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and elsewhere, but the work had started to feel routine. I wanted to leave the journalistic herd, to find a project that would both daunt and inspire me. Facing down the Congo was just such a project.
I don't need that beach photograph to remind me how excited I felt at that moment. And I don't need it to remind me how fear overwhelmed the excitement. It was not just the war that made the idea of crossing the Congo dangerous. There was something far more sinister.
For me the Congo stands as a totem for the failed continent of Africa. It has more potential than any other African nation, more diamonds, more gold, more navigable rivers, more fellable timber, more rich agricultural land. But it is exactly this sense of what might be that makes the Congo's failure all the more acute. Economists have no meaningful data with which to chart its decline. Much of its territory has long been abandoned to a feral state of lawlessness and brutality. With a colonial past bloodier than anywhere in Africa, the Congo represents the sum of my African fears and the root of my outsider's shame.
Decay has hollowed the Congo name. It has a rich history, but of its present, precious little is known. People remember flickers from its past - the brutality of the early colonials, the post-independence chaos of elected leaders beaten to death, corrupt dictators whittling away the nation's wealth, mercenaries running amok in wars too complex for the outside world to bother with, rebels who rely on cannibalism and fetishism. Foreign journalists smirk at an old Congo story dating from the 1960s when rape was so common that a British reporter approached a column of refugees demanding, Is there a nun here who's been raped and speaks English?' Travellers have long since stopped venturing there and the remnants of a once-booming African economy are regarded as too murky and risky for most conventional business travellers. Today, only a handful of aid workers, peacekeepers and journalists dare visit, but the vast scale of the place - from one side to the other is greater than the distance from London to Moscow - and the depth of its problems make it difficult to focus on much beyond a particular project in a particular place. I wanted to do something more complete, something that had not been done for decades, to draw together the Congo's fractious whole by travelling Stanley's 3,000kilometre route from one side to the other.
In part my obsession came from another Congo journey that had nothing to do with Stanley. In late 1958 two young, middle-class English girls, lugging trunks full of souvenirs and party frocks, crossed the Congo. My mother and a close school friend were in their early twenties and, for them, the Congo was simply another leg in a rich travel adventure. Sent to colonial Africa as a sort of unofficial finishing school, they had worked, danced, giggled and charmed their way through a series of jobs and house parties, from Cape Town in South Africa to Salisbury, then the capital of Rhodesia.
They were nearing the end of their journey when they entered the Congo. Within a year the country would be at war, but today my mother recalls no sense of that impending doom. In all honesty, she remembers little about the trip by rail and steamboat, and it was only after I began my Congo research that she let me in on a family secret she had not talked about for decades. She was only twenty-one at the time, but while in Salisbury she had fallen in love and become engaged to a retired officer. The fact that he was divorced with three children was too much for my maternal grandmother, a woman so unutterably proper that she talked of 'gells' rather than 'girls'. My granny flew all the way to Rhodesia to bully her daughter into breaking off the engagement. T howled all the way through the Congo' is how my mother describes the trip, which she otherwise remembers as being no trickier than any other part of her 1950s African journey.
And that really was the point. Half a century ago there was nothing out-of-the-ordinary about the Congo. It was integrated, not just with the rest of the continent, but with the rest of the world. The Congo's colonial capital, Leopoldville, named after the acquisitive Belgian monarch, was the hub of one of Africa's largest airline networks, and the country's main port, Matadi, was served by a fleet of ocean-going liners. I have a picture of a poster from a Belgian shipping line that overlays an image of a ship on an outline of a very tame-looking Congo. The image was not of a sinister place at all, but of a swathe of African territory accessible by railways represented with cross-hatching, or by shipping routes depicted by elegant red arrows. Trains from the neighbouring Portuguese colony that later became Angola shuttled in and out of the Congo through its copper-rich Katanga province. There were bus links with Rhodesia and across Lake Tanganyika a fleet of ferries moved goods and people to the former colony of German East Africa.
A flavour of that era comes from a guidebook I discovered in a second-hand bookshop in Johannesburg. The 1951 Travel Guide to the Belgian Congo runs to 800 pages of information for visitors. Some of the detail is wonderfully mundane. The names and location of scores of guest houses are listed, along with prices of meals and journey times between local towns. The procedure for buying a hunting licence is spelled out, along with lists of the national parks and their viewing hours. Maps show, in precise detail, the country's road network, spreading right across the rainforest and climbing over mountain ranges, and the book lists itineraries with helpful hints about turning left at Kilometre 348 or buying pottery from the natives, les indigènes. It has hundreds of black-and-white photographs that show a functioning country - bridges, churches, schools, post offices and towns. And, in blue ink, the inside cover is inscribed 'Annaliesa'. In my imagination, Annaliesa used it to plan genteel trips to visit waterfalls or go on safari. Today those same journeys would be impossible.
The book conveys the sort of normality my mother recalled. Mum described her steamboat journey through virgin rainforest and how she would lean over the rail to point at sparring hippos, and spot the breaks in the bush where fishing villages of thatched huts stood on the river bank. You could always identify the villages, she said, because of the cluster of needle-thin canoes hanging in the river's current beneath each settlement. She remembered how the boat dropped her off, apparently in the middle of nowhere, only for her to scramble up the muddy river bank and find, halfhidden by towering elephant grass, a steam-train waiting to take its passengers on the next leg of their journey, with a steward, clad in a peaked cap of rail-company livery, anxious to keep to the timetable.
On the wall of our home in a Northamptonshire village she hung some of the souvenirs she bought from Congolese hawkers. There were brightly coloured crayon pictures of tribal stickmen dancing and hunting against an elegant background of grass huts or canoes. On a rainy day in the British Midlands in the 1970s they took a child's mind far away to equatorial Africa, to a country my mother still cannot bring herself to call anything but The Belgian Congo'.
She still has packs of unsent postcards produced in Leopoldville. The cards, printed in 1950s Technicolour, show naive Congolese scenes - tribal hunters in headdresses, jungle elephants glaring at the camera and loincloth-clad fishermen. My mother's view was just as rose-tinted. She knew nothing of the brutality that the Belgians used to maintain their rule, or of the turbulent currents then drawing the Congo towards independence. As a child, I would ask her what had happened to this place where officials stamped her passport with funny French messages in red ink, but she knew little and cared even less.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Blood River"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Tim Butcher.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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