Where the clock spins backwards

Review by MARTIN SPICE

Many former colonies of the various European powers have thrived after gaining independence so why have a few in Africa degenerated into chaos?

BLOOD RIVER
A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
By Tim Butcher
Publisher: Vintage Books, 363 pages
ISBN: 978-0099494287

"THE horror! The horror!" These are the last words of Mr Kurtz at the end of Joseph Conrad's famous short story, The Heart of Darkness.

Over the years much quoted, and embedded at the core of films like Apocalypse Now, these words have come to be taken as an epitaph for the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which they were fictionally first uttered.

And, over a hundred years later, it appears after reading Tim Butcher's fine book, that the epitaph is just as appropriate now as it was then.

Tim Butcher is a foreign correspondent for England's Daily Telegraph and in 2000 he was sent to report on Africa, where an obsession with the Congo River gradually transformed into a plan to follow the route of Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley.

Stanley was the most famous journalist of his age after tracking down David Livingstone with one of the best soundbites yet devised by spin doctors — "Dr Livingstone, I presume."

In fact, claims Butcher, so famous was Stanley's greeting that it completely overshadowed his major trip between 1874 and 1877 during which he solved the last great geographical mystery of Africa by mapping the Congo River.

In 2004, Butcher decided to follow in his footsteps.

It was, of course, a journey of complete madness. There are few roads, just tracks, and the area to be travelled through for 500km had been torn apart by civil war for years.

Murder and general lawlessness were routine and the route was deemed impassable, even by local people.

The commissioner's secretary in Kalemie is incredulous:

"You want to go where?"

"I want to go to the Congo River."

"You want to go overland?"

"Yes."

"My family comes from a village on the way to the river, but we have not been able to go there for more than 10 years. How do you think you will get there?"

"With a motorbike and some luck."

"You are a white man, you will need something more than luck."

Nonetheless, Butcher sets off on a journey that will see him guided by pygmies, threatened with poisoned arrows, foraging through graveyards of long unburied dead and, on many occasions, weeping for the broken heart of Africa.

The tragedy of the Congo is that it is development in reverse. The Belgian colonisation of it was, by all accounts, brutal and barbaric. The garden of Mr Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is decorated with skulls.

Yet for all that was done in the name of colonial development, which was presumably little more than a means of satisfying colonial greed, the country had an infrastructure.

It had railways, roads and airstrips. The Congo River was navigable and boats plied their trade on its waters.

Now, those boats are rusting hulks on the river banks and movement by any means around the country is highly dangerous.

All of which leads Butcher and the reader to ask, what on earth went wrong in Africa?

In 1951, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and a Hollywood crew of forty people arrived in Ponthierville by train to film The African Queen.

When Butcher finally makes it that far, he finds the railway tracks buried under leaf mulch and soil.

"I had discovered evidence of a modern world that had tried — but failed — to establish itself in the Congo ... I was travelling through a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards but backwards."

By the end, Blood River is asking big and difficult questions. Butcher's answers are, unsurprisingly, not simple.

Whilst heaping much blame at the door of Stanley and the colonial rule that followed, he is surely right to argue that the failure of the Congo over the last 50 years cannot entirely be blamed on them.

"The Malaysian naval officer on my river boat was right to ask why former European colonies in Asia have been able to develop since independence while those in Africa have regressed." Searching for answers leads inevitably to a consideration of where post-colonial power has ended up and how that power has been deployed.

Dare one even ask why so many African leaders seem to care so little about their fellow countrymen?

If I have made Blood River sound dryly serious, then be assured that the book is as thrilling an armchair read as you will find. This is set to be a classic travel book in the best barmy tradition of impossible journeys made for the slimmest of reasons.

But as the book takes you through the darkest part of the dark continent, it is impossible not to weep along with Butcher for the plight of today's Congo and its central place at Africa's broken heart.

--
Jean-Louis Kayitenkore
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