Tracking Congo's misery

I was panting in Congo's equatorial heat, but I saw something that gave me goose bumps. A picture hung on the wall of a timeworn colonial-era house. It showed three stylized African figures, stooped over paddles as they canoed toward a river bank.

The picture was all too familiar. During my stolid childhood in the British Midlands of the 1970s, my mother would light up gray days with stories of her African travels, illustrated by props including souvenir drawings she had bought in what is now Kalemie, the hollowed-out ruin of a town on the shores of Lake Tanganyika where I now stood. The stark contrast between my mother's genteel stories and the ghastly reality of today's Congo was chilling.

I had ventured into the country out of journalistic curiosity. In four years of covering Africa for The Daily Telegraph, I found many of the continent's problems were connected to Congo. Drawn to the place Joseph Conrad immortalized in "Heart of Darkness," I took a six-month leave and came to Kalemie, planning to reach the upper Congo River by land and then follow it to the Atlantic, a journey of 2,000 miles.

My reasons for going were complex, but mostly, I wanted to hear from the people - to discover how they lived their daily lives amid some of the worst conditions on the planet. Several people called my idea "suicidal."

Back in 1958, when my mother passed through Kalemie, known then as Albertville, the Belgian Congo was a going concern. Its tropical medicine was the envy of the world. Foreign businessmen invested there. Travelers no more adventurous than my mother, a graduate of a London secretarial college, routinely used a network of trains, riverboats, buses and ferries.

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When I came to Congo, those connections had long since vanished. Since June 30, 1960, when Belgium officially ended colonial control, an almost-unbroken tide of war and rebellion has savaged the country.

On Nov. 8, 1960, nine Irish soldiers serving as UN peacekeepers were on patrol at the nearby Niemba railroad bridge when they were ambushed and massacred by hostile Baluba tribesmen. A couple of years later, Che Guevara tried to blow up the town's power station, and white mercenaries fought rebels on the palm-lined boulevard where colonialists used to promenade. In the 1990s, forces seeking to oust Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator who named the country Zaire, strafed the town. Ugandan and Rwandan troops, who invaded Congo in 1998 during a war with Mobutu's successor, Laurent Kabila, skirmished through its center.

Today, the once stately buildings of Kalemie are ghostly relics, with power lines connected to nothing and mains water pipes leading nowhere. As I travelled through what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo I found Kalemie's decay repeated in town after town, its violence fueled by a host of different conflicts.

Although a treaty is meant to have ended a war between Congo's battling factions in 2003 and elections were held in 2007, educated estimates put the death toll from violence at around 1,500 people a day.

Congo's neighbors contribute to its anarchy. The Lord's Resistance Army of northern Uganda keeps up its murderous campaign because its militiamen can flee to the lawless Congolese forests. The wounds of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 fester because many of the killers still find sanctuary in Congo. Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwean regime lined its pockets by controlling Congo diamond mines. Darfur rebels in Sudan earn money by cross-border smuggling with  Congo.

The seeds of Congo's turbulence - from colonial cruelty to post-colonial chaos - began with a journalist who was sent to Africa, just as I had been, by the Telegraph. His name was Henry Morton Stanley and while he is best known for tracking down the missionary-turned-explorer David Livingstone in 1871, his next trip, when he charted the Congo River between 1874 and 1877, had much greater impact.

Financed jointly by the Telegraph and the New York Herald (a forerunner of this newspaper), Stanley's Congo expedition fired the starting gun for the scramble for Africa. Before then, European powers had only nibbled at the continent's edges. By uncovering the navigable Congo River, Stanley lured King Leopold II of Belguim to lay claim to a million square miles of equatorial rainforest, savannah and marshland, leading Britain, France, Germany and other colonialist powers to grab the remaining African hinterland. Even by the standards of the day, the Belgians were notoriously cruel. They ruthlessly crushed any challenges to their rule. Though no one wants to see them back, the colonialists provided a measure of stability that has eroded since the end of their  empire.

I wanted to trace the problems of modern Congo by going back to where they began, following Stanley's original journey. The trip took years of planning and necessitated contacts with characters from the murky world of mercenaries and rebel movements. I was told that it would be more dangerous in the 21st century than when Stanley first blazed his trail. But, after writing a will, I plunged into the forests of Katanga Province, where the roads had long since been devoured by vegetation.

With the help of pygmy guides and motor-biking aid workers, I snaked for days along footpaths often no wider than my hips, crossing 300 miles to the upper Congo River, a stretch where my mother had one taken passage on a ferry. All motorized Congolese river craft had long since stopped working. I was forced to use the same method Stanley used, hollowed-out tree-trunk canoes known as pirogues.

There were countless delays, threats to my life, health scares and demands for bribes. Somewhere in the Katangan forest, a child soldier with a rusty Kalashnikov and no shoes thrust the barrel of his gun at me. But my guide, Georges Mbuyu, a pygmy with the presence of a giant, defused the situation.

I crossed killing fields, where human bones lay unburied on the forest floor, saw child soldiers wearing fetishes and hurried through burned-out villages hauntingly devoid of people.

With luck, I survived, arriving near the Congo River's mouth on the Atlantic 44 days after setting out. Along the way, I found another Congo. I found men willing to push bicycles laden with goods like palm oil for hundreds of miles through the forest for the chance to make an honest profit. I found congregations of people desperate for schooling - often at the hands of missionaries or aid workers because no state schools function. I found a land where the vast majority of people want desperately to re-engage with the world and lead lives free from chaos.

The Congolese know money sloshes around the mining centers of Lubumbashi and Mbuji Mayi and the capital, Kinshasa but they also know money alone brings no progress.

From one side of this vast country to the other, whether in the rainforest or on the river, whether in villages or cities, I heard the same message - "We don't need money, we need the rule of law."

--
Jean-Louis Kayitenkore
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