I walked inside [the former Belgian restaurant in the Congo town of Kalemie] to find a wreck. A wooden bar ran along one wall and a Congolese lady stood behind it.
‘Do you have anything I could drink?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have anything I could eat?’
‘No.’
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, page 103)
In the 1960s it was in Maniema that thirteen Italian airmen of the United Nations were killed and eaten, their body parts smoked and made available at local markets for weeks after the slaughter.
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, p.134)
The Congo river system is potentially one of the most valuable assets in all of Africa, but in recent years it has been choked to a standstill by war and mismanagement.
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, p.295)
As the lurid title suggests, Butcher is a journalist, not a historian or scholar. He was appointed Africa correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in 2000 and this book is a colourful description of his self-appointed task of repeating Henry Morton Stanley’s famous expedition across central Africa, from Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika, across country for 500 kilometres until he hit the River Congo, and then 3,000 or so kilometres down Africa’s second longest river, right down to the sea, beyond Boma – a journey he undertook in August 2004 (just as the Athens Olympics were about to start, p.322).
Limited use as a reference
Early on, Butcher inadvertently indicates the limits of his journalistic style or knowledge or interest or research, when he knocks off a description of the Rwanda genocide and how it unravelled into the two Congo Wars, which themselves degenerated into the Great War of Africa, in a mere two pages (13 to 14).
As it happens I’ve read about six book-length or chapter-length accounts of the Rwandan genocide and the wars which followed, all of which go into vastly more detail about this complicated and terrible sequence of events, and so I flinched a bit at the superficiality and, in my opinion, errors in Butcher’s brief summary. He has an interviewee say that Mobutu ‘invited’ ‘the Hutu gunmen’, the interahamwe, to flee into Zaire. He writes that ‘the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government’ then sent troops to support Laurent Kabila’s insurgency (p.13).
This is not only very simplified but, in my opinion, actively misleading. It wasn’t just the interahamwe that fled into Zaire but the entire Hutu government and administration which had planned and carried out the appalling genocide of the Tutsi minority. Justifiably terrified of being captured and punished for their crimes, the Hutu administration terrified millions of Hutus into thinking the invading Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front would take revenge on them for the genocide, and so it turned into a mass exodus of a large part (about a quarter) of Rwanda’s population across the border into Congo.
It’s true that Mobutu had a long-standing close relationship with the Hutu leadership of Rwanda, but he didn’t ‘invite’ the fleeing génocidaires nor their million peasant compatriots into his country, they just crossed the border and presented Mobutu with a crisis (and an opportunity).
Butcher skips any explanation of the pre-existing civil war in Rwanda which was the context for the genocide and helps to explain it. Nowhere in the book does he mention the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), or its leader and still the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, or the key role the RPF played in ending the genocide when the entire international community (the UN, Britain, America, France) was standing by and letting it happen (to our eternal shame).
He nowhere explains that the Hutu génocidaires established an iron control of the vast refugee camps just inside the Zaire border and used them as bases to launch attacks against Tutsi villages inside Rwanda, continuing the genocide on a small scale while marshalling their resources to launch a re-invasion with the aim of completing the job of exterminating all the Tutsis.
He nowhere explains that the new Rwandan government of national unity repeatedly complained about the Hutu exiles to the Congo government of Mobutu, and begged the UN and international partners to step in and stop the raids and to rein in the Hutu génocidaires but that, once again, the international community did nothing.
He doesn’t explain that this was why, after a year of putting up with this destabilising presence on its western border, the RPF-backed Rwanda government decided to do something about it: to send its army into the Congo, dismantle the refugee camps, force the Hutu population to return to their country with promise of safe passage and that they would be unpunished if they just returned to their villages, while at the same time chasing the genocidal Hutu leaders and their mass-murdering militia, the interahamwe, deeper into Congo with the aim of killing them and putting an end to their genocidal plans once and for all.
He doesn’t explain how Kigali found a willing partner in the government of Uganda, which contributed its own forces, and suggested they use as a fig leaf and front man for their invasion, the drunken, womanising guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had been ‘fighting’ a small-scale insurgency against the Mobutu regime for 30 years and who they now put at the head of a new rebel force concocted for the purpose (the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo). Nor that the initial operation was so successful that Rwanda and Uganda decided to send their forces on right across Congo to the capital, Kinshasa, forcing the ageing ailing dictator Mobutu to flee the country (May 1996) and installing their puppet, Kabila, as new president of Congo.
Butcher’s narrative gives the rough shape of these events but is, on my reading of the sources, wrong in most of its details, for example claiming that Rwanda and Uganda ‘backed’ a pre-existing military campaign by Kabila rather than Kabila being a convenient front man for an armed group invented for the purpose to cover an invasion entirely planned and led by Uganda-Rwanda.
It was when Kabila, safely established in power as the new president of Congo in 1997, began attacking his own Rwandan and Ugandan backers, ordering their troops to leave the capital, refusing to obey their orders any more, that Uganda and Rwanda, infuriated that their puppet had turned against them, mounted a second invasion, in 1998, to overthrow him.
This is why people refer to two Congo wars. The First Congo War, from 1996 to 1997 was the Rwanda-Uganda invasion to a) empty the Hutu refugee camps and b) overthrow Mobutu. The Second Congo War started in 1998 and was Rwanda-Uganda’s attempt to overthrow Kabila and impose a regime more friendly to them. It was this second invasion which got seriously bogged down because many of Congo’s neighbouring countries sent forces to support either the Kabila government or to ally with Uganda-Rwanda. Generally the alliances were influenced by deals to get their hands on Congo’s mineral resources. Thus Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe supported Kabila in exchange for access to minerals in Congo’s south-east, and so units of the Zimbabwean army found themselves fighting units from other nations in the tropical jungles of Congo, an expensive and bewildering waste of men and resources which distanced the Zimbabwe army from the regime (as described in Douglas Rogers’s account of the coup which eventually overthrew Mugabe).
This second conflict unravelled as not only forces from ten or so neighbouring countries got involved, but as regional warlords arose and seized control of different parts of the huge country. This is the complicated, multi-party conflict which is sometimes referred to as the Great War of Africa. Theoretically it ended with a peace treaty in 2003 but, on the ground, much violence continued in the form of roving bands of ‘soldiers’ or warlord-led militias, who emerged from the jungle, massacred villages, terrorised towns, looted all the food, raped all the women, murdered the men, then disappeared back into the jungle.
This, then, was the deeply insecure and scary environment in which Butcher planned to stage his recreation of Henry Morton Stanley’s epic journey down the Congo river. In the event, although he hears many rumours of roving warbands, although he hears from inhabitants of towns and villages of past attacks, and although he and his travelling companions race past small guard posts, he never in fact meets or has any encounters with any of the terrifying army, militia or tribal warriors.
I’ve summarised the events of the Congo wars in such detail because they are the vital backdrop to Butcher’s adventure, and because he refers to them again and again throughout the book, but mostly in what I regard as a misleadingly simplistic way. In particular I went from being puzzled to feeling a bit disturbed by his complete omission of the context of the genocide (i.e. the Rwandan civil war) and its cause (a deliberate policy of mass extermination in the name of Hutu Power), by his systematic downplaying of the genocide itself, by his complete omission of the name of the key organisation in both the civil war, the ending of the genocide, and the Congo wars i.e. the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and his preference for using the phrase ‘the Tutsi-dominated’ Rwandan government. The repeated use of this phrase cumulatively gives the impression that the source of all the disruption and violence in the region was the RPF-backed government in Kigali.
Now it is definitely true that the two Rwanda-Uganda invasions of Congo, first to overthrow Mobutu, and then to overthrow Kabila, massively destabilised the whole centre of Africa. But you have to understand that the RPF’s aim was to dismantle the Hutu regime which had just carried out the worst genocide of modern times, and then to overthrow the génocidaires’ main supporter, Mobutu, and install a government which would ensure that such a genocide never took place again. Unless you grasp that underlying motive for their actions you make it seem as if the Tutsi government was the unmotivated source of the disorder in the region. It certainly evolved into that situation, especially once all Congo’s neighbours piled in, but that wasn’t their initial motive.
The general thrust of Butcher’s account is correct and he repeats the outline of events several more times throughout the book, but almost all the fine details and the deeper background, which would help you make more sense of these tumultuous events, are either wrong or just missing.
In particular I found Butcher’s underplaying of the genocide (he mentions it but never dwells on what a truly horrific and regionally seismic event it was), his casting of the Hutus as helpless victims, and his continual nudging references to the violence across the region being caused by the ‘Tutsis-dominated’ government in Kigali, build up into a misleadingly incomplete and worryingly biased account of events. A casual reading of the book would lead you to believe that the Tutsis are the bad guys in the story and behind all the violence.
What I’ve just written is based on the following sources:
- Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane (1995)
- We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (1998)
- In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz by Michaela Wrong (2000)
- Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern (2004)
- The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005) – 2
- Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck (2010) – 3 The Great War of Africa
- Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns (2011)
And, of course, Wikipedia:
But the same goes for Butcher’s versions of earlier events. On pages 58 to 59 he gives a brisk summary of the murder of Congo’s first president, Patrice Lumumba, which is heavy on gruesome detail (the acid used to dissolve the corpse) but very light indeed on the complex international and domestic crises Lumumba found himself facing and made considerably worse by his own troubled character and his chaotic and rash decisions, alienating the Americans who found him impossible to work with, then inviting the Soviet Union to send armed forces to help him put down secessionist movements, which alarmed all the Western powers, the Americans and the UN.
Again, Butcher’s account isn’t wrong, as far as it goes, but by focusing narrowly on Lumumba’s murder and heavily blaming the colonial power, the Belgians (Belgian army officers helped kidnap Lumumba then fly him to a remote part of the country, were present when he was badly beaten, then shot dead and buried in a shallow grave) Butcher’s account omits the six months of hectic crises which preceded it, and Lumumba’s role in exacerbating it.
He gives no sense of how Lumumba’s difficult character worsened the crises and, eventually, led everyone concerned (including many of his own ministers and his army) to believe that Congo would be better off with him out of the way and replaced by someone more stable and predictable.
I’m not defending these events. I’m just pointing out that Butcher’s zippy two-page account, focusing (like a thriller) on the gruesome events of the murder itself, omits the complexity of the context and so militates against a proper understanding.
For all these reasons I would actively advise against reading this book as any kind of authoritative source for the geopolitics of the region and the period. For that, the best place to start would be the outstanding ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’ by David Van Reybrouck (2010).
Chaps in Africa
So, having established Butcher as a poor source of historical description or analysis, I was, in a sense, freed up to read the book for what it really is: a boy’s own adventure story, a ripping yarn, a white man’s tale of derring-do in the heart of Africa etc.
The ripping yarn tone of the story explains the praise on the cover from an impressive list of white, public school-educated, male Africa hands who recognise one of their own. These include: Alexander McCall Smith, Giles Foden, John le Carré and William Boyd. Boyd is quoted as saying: ‘The day of the intrepid traveller is not over’, which can be translated as: ‘White chaps can still have ripping adventures in the jungle’, a slice of cheery public school optimism which, once you’ve actually read the book with its bleak descriptions of super violence, social collapse and cannibalism, you might come to regard as pretty inappropriate.
Look at me, I’m woke
Butcher is at pains to stay on the right side of the reviewers and modern woke opinion by lambasting the wicked colonialists who exploited Africa during the wicked colonial period (the evils of wicked colonialism are described or referred to scores and scores of time) with a vehemence typical of a certain sort of middle-aged, middle-class, literary white man.
But I found the same is true of his dogged insistence on the evils of colonialism as of his references to the origins of the Congo wars, namely he’s not wrong, but, after a while, you start to realise he’s not describing the issue in its full complexity. He is, after all, a journalist, and so he’s writing in catchy headlines and peppy phrases.
For example, in several places he elides the truly evil, wicked, genocidal regime of the disgusting King Leopold in the 1880s and 1890s with the much more benign rule of the Belgian colonialists after the Second World War. OK, maybe they still had the same racist, white supremacist beliefs, but, as his actual narrative makes abundantly clear, they no longer massacred entire villages and cut people’s hands off; instead the post-war colonial regime built airports and railways and roads, and ports and docks, and ran mines and plantations and businesses and, above all, maintained the peace, creating the basis of a potentially prosperous country. Eliding the two eras and their policies into one thing struck me as morally dubious but also historically and politically misleading.
At one point, in a typically jeering throwaway remark, Butcher says it was one of Belgium’s most notable blunders that they didn’t train up a cohort of educated native politicians and administrators to take over the running of the country when they left. This sounds fine but it’s really a cheap shot because the Belgian colonial authorities, just like the French and British ones, thought they would be running Africa for decades to come and so had plenty of time to create an infrastructure and slowly train up the indigenes.
None of them anticipated the sudden rush for independence which was triggered by the independence of Ghana (in 1957). In particular none of them anticipated a key factor, which I’ve highlighted in my reviews of, for example, Martin Meredith’s bleakly hilarious book, ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence’, which was that, once negotiations started, the African nationalist parties tried to outdo each other in demanding independence, soon, sooner, NOW!
With the result that the fiery nationalists at the conference called to discuss the future of the Belgian Congo demanded they be given independence within three months of the conference ending. Many commentators at the time thought this was wildly rash but they were, of course, all denounced as racist imperialists.
Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist is set against the backdrop of the crisis of 1960 and gives a lot of factual detail about the lead-up to Lumumba’s murder. Some of the secondary characters who the impeccably liberal protagonist meets at cocktail parties etc point out that the Africans are nowhere near being able to run a country, that handing over rule to them will lead to massacres, white flight and the collapse of the country into civil war and…they are treated as racist bigots, disliked by the woke hero, ignored by the politicians. Trouble is, those racist bigots turned out to be 100% correct and then some. Rushed independence turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for the people of the Congo.
White privilege
Butcher takes every possible opportunity to slag off the wicked Belgian colonialists, but he is considerably less attuned to the way that he, a middle-class, well-connected white westerner, with thousands of dollars stashed in his kit, along with zippy technology (laptop and satellite phone) and possessor of tiptop connections to government authorities, numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the press (his employer, The Telegraph newspaper) is only able to undertake the journey because of his (relative) wealth, his white privilege and his western privilege.
Quite a few times he walks into the offices of bureaucrats or confronts African officials who are notably more respectful of him than of their fellow Africans who they’ve just been bullying, simply because he is a white man. The entire journey is only possible because he is, by Congo standards, rich, because he has thousands of dollars stashed in his clothes and so is able to pay Africans hard cash to drive him through the jungle, canoe him down the river, and generally bribe his way out of trouble.
That William Boyd quote could more accurately be rewritten as: ‘The day of the intrepid [western white male] traveller [with lots of cash and connections] is not over’.
In the footsteps of Stanley
Butcher’s entire expedition is an attempt to recreate Henry Morton Stanley’s great expedition across country to, and then down, the mighty Congo River, in which he was accompanied by three white companions and over 300 African porters, and which took three long gruelling years, from 1874 to 1877.
As you might expect, this inevitably entails several summaries of Stanley’s biography and character, of the great expedition (pages 44 to 49), and Stanley’s narrative (and illustrations) are referenced throughout the book, in particular whenever Butcher arrives at a place which Stanley first visited, or a town he in fact founded (for example, the settlement of Stanleyville which he founded at the end of the series of treacherous rapids which he modestly named, the Stanley Falls). Inevitably, Butcher also references Stanley’s central role in opening up central Africa for the murderous genocidal regime of the truly evil King Leopold of Belgium.
But again, I found Butcher’s account good as far as it went, but it never goes much beyond the stereotype of the wicked, brutal racist Victorian explorer. Butcher takes the standard journalistic view that Stanley was a wicked, violent, racist who treated his hundreds of native porters with appalling brutality and didn’t hesitate to open fire on tribespeople who got in his way. All the subtlety and complexity about the man and his achievements to be found in the (obviously much longer) biographies like that of Tim Jeal (2007) are simply absent. Jeal doesn’t gloss over Stanley’s brutality, but places him in the context of his time, compares him with other explorers, and explains the challenges he faced, from the treacherous Arab slave traders who dominated the region, to the often violent and sometimes cannibal tribes Stanley had to deal with.
I’m not in the slightest exonerating Stanley: the work he went on to do for King Leopold, systematically swindling scores of tribal leaders out of their ancestral lands by making them sign contract with Leopold which they obviously didn’t understand and had no legal validity, was obviously wicked and inexcusable. I’m just saying that, as with the Congo wars and Lumumba’s murder, Butcher’s journalistic summaries of Stanley gloss over the far more complex, more fascinating and therefore more useful facts.
Butcher’s mum
The blurb, the preface and much of the text all emphasise that Butcher is setting out to recreate Stanley’s epic voyage of explanation down the Congo – but on pages 8 to 11 we learn of a much more homely, domestic motive for his trip. His mother did it.
Butcher’s mum was a jolly hockey sticks daughter of the empire who, aged 21 in 1958, was packed off to southern Africa, with a friend, as a sort of finishing school. She travelled from Cape Town to Salisbury (modern Harare in Zimbabwe). It was the very end of the colonial era and so all the countries she travelled through – South Africa, Rhodesia – were still run by white colonial administrations, and so there was law and order and a good travel infrastructure: planes and trains and ferries ran on time and regularly.
This applied just as much to the 1958 Belgian Congo which the two young gells crossed as the final part of their journey. Leopoldville was the hub of one of Africa’s largest airline and the Congo’s chief port, Matadi, was served by a fleet of ocean liners. Everything – trains, planes, ferries – worked like clockwork , staffed by polite porters and obliging stewards – and so Butcher’s mother, when he used to question her, had little or no memory of it.
Now, 45 or so years later (2004), the countries she travelled through have collapsed into dictatorship (Zimbabwe) or chaos (Congo), most of the infrastructure of the latter having collapsed and disappeared back into the jungle (railway lines and railway sleepers long ago dismantled and sold for scrap or burned as firewood; stations derelict; docks abandoned, as in a dystopian sci fi movie).
Butcher’s mum kept brochures and posters and timetables from her trip which Butcher describes poring over lovingly as a boy and young man. And so Butcher’s adventure has this second level, not only retracing the steps of the man who ‘discovered’, mapped, named and revealed central Africa to western readers in the 1870s and 80s – but at the same time moving through the surreal ruins of what had once been the thriving and efficient colonial infrastructure remembered by his mum and recorded in the various brochures and timetables she kept, circa 1958 (plus other 1950s documents and guides he acquired in preparation for his trip).
So: two sets of ghosts, and that’s just the white ghosts. Obviously Butcher discovers, once he enters the country, that he is also moving among spirits of all the African tribes who lived and died, fought and were enslaved, and, more recently, burned and looted, their way through the same terrain. (See Ryszard Kapuściński’s excellent book, The Shadow of The Sun, for extended descriptions of how belief in the spirits of the dead continue to saturate African culture.)
So Butcher’s trip is alive with resonances and echoes.
Kalemie
Butcher starts his journey in the port of Kalemie on the west bank of Lake Tanganyika, which is where Stanley arrived with his huge expedition of over 300 porters, after having crossed country from Zanzibar and then crossed the lake from east to west. Instead Butcher kicks off his journey by flying there, direct from South Africa. I thought this was a slightly odd decision. To fully recreate the Stanley expedition he ought to have travelled overland from the Tanzanian coast to Lake Tanganyika, as Stanley did. It would have been interesting to have his description of modern-day Zanzibar and Tanzania, and would have maybe provided a useful contrast between one African country and another.
So anyway, Butcher flies direct to Kalemie on the western, Congo, side of Lake Tanganyika and it’s here that, after quite a few digressions about Stanley, his mum, the contacts he has drummed up in preparation for the trip, and the briefings he’s had, that he finally gets the journey started.
Kalemie straightaway provides a good example of the decline and decay all of Congo has fallen into, after 32 years of Mobutu’s systematic looting of his own country, zero investment and appalling corrupt local administration, followed by seven years (1997 to the time of his visit, 2004) of increasingly chaotic and widespread conflict. From a distance it looks like a modern town but once he’s landed and looks more closely:
What I had taken to be an estate of factories, damaged in the recent war in the Congo, turned out to be a ruin dating from a much earlier age. Faded advertisements could just be made out on the walls…Grass grew long and untroubled through the railway sleepers on the approaches to the disused station…An old railway carriage…stood rusting in the tropical heat. In one of the compartments someone had made a small cooking fire on the floor, now surrounded by various dirty pots…Instead of a functioning high street what I found was a dusty space filled by gaggles of meandering locals…Of the buildings themselves there was little beyond the fronts. Rust had not just coloured the roofs but eaten out huge holes through which tropical rain had flooded for countless rainy seasons…Pipes that once brought mains water to each building lay broken and there was not one working lightbulb…Without cobalt or diamonds or gold to draw outsiders’ interest here, Kelamie had been hollowed out by the years. Where there had once been a substantial settlement, nothing but the husk remained. (pages 85 to 85)
And this in ‘one of the biggest towns in the Congo’, a town with no state radio or TV, no newspaper, no landline phones and no internet, no petrol stations or cars, where the 1950s airport the Belgians built has become a bullet-riddled ruin (p.88).
This is what decades of neglect, lack of investment, lack of law and lack of local government produce, in a place ‘run by’ officials and administrators who do nothing but loot and steal and demand bribes for every transaction, a place where the state fails to provide either teachers or doctors or police (p.105). A key word or theme or image which threads through the text is ‘ruin’, along with its cousins, ‘derelict’, ‘wreck’, ‘decline’, ‘decay’ and ‘abandoned’.
Going backwards
Butcher hires some guys to take him by motorbike (two bikes and their owners for security’s sake, and because they know the route) inland from Kalemie. The key fact to grasp is that there are no roads any more, let alone railways. In the 1950s guides and the memory of his mother (and other accounts from the 1950s, which he cites) the major cities and many of the towns were connected by good asphalt roads which the Belgians built. Every single one of these has disappeared and been swallowed back into the jungle. Several times he comes across vehicles buried under decades of tropical foliage and realises that the narrow track through the jungle where he’s standing was, 50 years previously, an open, asphalt highway busy with cars and lorries. Now all gone, disappeared.
Similarly, Congo’s main cities were joined by railway lines and all of these have disappeared. In some cases the metal rails have been removed along with the sleepers and all that’s left is a track worn flat by the trudging of African feet. In town after town he comes across derelict, abandoned railway stations. In one particularly vivid moment he’s struggling through thick tropical forest, the sky blocked out by interlocking trees swaying high above him, dense foliage pressing right up against the narrow path he’s pushing his motorbike through when his boot clunks against something metallic. When he squats down and scrapes away at the thick soil and undergrowth at his feet he is stunned to reveal a metal rail. Beneath his feet and completely swallowed up by raw jungle is a railway which was part of thriving, developing country just 40 years previously. He is staggered by how quickly, and how totally all these infrastructures have been utterly lost, by how swiftly the country has unravelled and gone backwards.
Butcher’s journey
So Butcher rides pillion on the back of a motorbike from Kalemie heading directly west, roughly following the old abandoned overgrown railway line which once ran alongside the River Lukuga and linked Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika to join the River Lualaba between Kabalo and Kongolo. But after a 110k or so they take an abrupt right turn, heading north towards Mukumbo, then onto Kabambarre, and then to Kasongo, a now-ruined port on the River Congo.
This journey doesn’t look much on the (very good) map in the book, but it was in fact a mind-boggling 500 kilometres. (The book contains one master map of the entire route, done in a professional cartographic style, and then each chapter of the actual narrative starts with a charming hand-drawn map of that particular leg of the journey, complete with hand-drawn dotted lines, place names, and distances. Sweet. And handy.)
Anyway, Butcher covered this awesome 500k on the back of a motorbike! Along rutted, narrow, earth tracks bounded by tropical rainforest and continually littered with tree roots, bumps and ravines, streams, gulley and occasional rivers. No wonder he got a sore bum!
He takes a (very basic) ferry across the river and, on the other side, contracts more motorcyclists to drive him through 200km more narrow winding jungle paths, via the (ruined) town of Kibombo and on to another riverside port, Kindu. It’s on this leg that he comes across the wreckage of an armoured car which was shelled and destroyed during a firefight on a major road paralleling the river. Now the road has completely disappeared and all that’s left is a rusting metal hulk, almost completely overgrown by jungle.
In Kindu he contacts the local UN station (‘Hi, I’m a white jounralist’) which agrees to convey him in one of their river patrol boats 150k north, to the riverside settlement (not a town, just a few huts on the muddy bank) of Lowa. Here the friendly, civilised UN sailors set him ashore, with much shaking of heads over his folly, and Butcher, very scared, approaches some local Congolese lounging near huge wooden canoes. He is greatly relieved when one of them agrees to take him by canoe, or pirogue, the 200k by river further north to the town of Ubundu. This man, Malike Bade, quickly recruits three other oarsmen and off they set.
Ubundu, the ruined town which had once been the thriving Belgian port of Ponthierville, marks the start of the 150k or so of rapids and waterfalls collectively (still) named the Stanley Falls. Butcher has to transfer from the river to dry land and hitches a ride with some motorcyclists who work for a western charity (‘Hi, I’m a white journalist’), who have just delivered supplies to Ubundu and are now returning to their base at Kisangani, the big settlement which marks the end of the Stanley Falls.
It’s on this leg that he has the haunting experience of stumbling across a rail from the railway the Belgians built running north-south parallel to the river, now not only abandoned but completely buried by the tropical jungle (pages 248 to 249).
It was one of the defining moments of my journey through the Congo. I was travelling through a country with more past than future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but backwards. (p.249)
Kisangani is the first town in nearly 1,000 kilometres which has proper roads, car, electric power, hotels worth the name, and running water, and bed with clean sheets, so he has an orgy of showers and sleeping and eating proper food, and then more showers and more eating and sleeping.
He discovers Kisangani may look like a big functioning town but most of the infrastructure here, as everywhere else in Congo, is in ruins – the ruined railway station and the ruined harbour, the riverside cranes which look so impressive from a distance but haven’t worked for decades, broken beyond repair:
a shell, prone to spasms of political anarchy and chaotically administered by inept, corrupt local politicians…It owed what little stability it had to the artificial props of a large UN force and foreign aid workers. (p.255)
And the local politicians do everything they can to undermine even these fragile elements of stability. A few months before he arrived in Congo there had been conflict in the profoundly unstable Bukavu region far to the east on the Rwandan border, with reports of Rwandan forces massacring Congolese. Instead of calming opinion, Kisangani’s officials inflamed it and blamed the deaths on the UN for failing to protect the Bukavese, with the result that angry mobs went on the rampage, looting then setting fire to UN buildings, ransacking aid organisations’ offices and warehouses, while the so-called police stood by or even joined in.
When you read of events like this you wonder, why are we bothering to give money to help people who are so absolutely determined to ruin themselves?
I heard heartbreaking stories about corrupt Congolese officials pocketing aid money intended for local public-health workers, and local soldiers not just looting aid equipment, but brazenly asking for cash to hand it back to its rightful owners. Many in the aid community spent their time counting the days until their contracts were up and they could go back to the real world. (p.285)
A Catholic missionary, Father Leon, tells him about the notorious massacre of monks and gang rape of nuns which took place here in 1964 (24 November 1964, to be precise), was widely reported, and helped crystallise world opinion that Congo was slipping back into Stone Age barbarism (pages 270 to 274).
After five days Butcher moves out of his hotel and into the last large mission being run in the city, by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. After two weeks of sounding out local ship crews and NGOs, trying to find a boat which will take him down the river, after numerous disappointments, Butcher eventually secures a ride on a UN patrol boat (‘Hi, I’m a white journalist’) which will take him the 1,000 kilometres down the river to the port of Mbandaka.
On the way he becomes ill and weak with fever so that by the time he arrives at Mbandaka, he just can’t face another week or two or three hustling for his next ride down the river. Mbandaka is much smaller and more ruinous than Kisanagani was, so there isn’t even a hotel. God knows where he’d stay. Whereas the UN riverboat captain had told him that a UN helicopter service left the following morning for Kinshasa.
Reluctantly, but with great relief, Butcher travels the 600k from Mbandaka to the country’s capital, Kinshasa by helicopter. Here he is put up in the amazingly luxurious gated compound owned by a major international mining company, which won lucrative contracts by helping with the smooth transition of power after wily old Laurent Kabila was unexpectedly assassinated (16 January 2001) and succeeded by his completely inexperienced son, Joseph Kabila, aged just 30 at the time.
Only after days of showers, lots of sleep, taking a variety of medicines, eating proper food and drinking clean water in this rich, privileged western enclave, does Butcher feel human again, and in a position to decide what to do next. He consults with the senior guy minding the mining company compound who explains that there are no buses or taxis in Kinshasa. The only possible option is to pay to have one of the mining company’s cars and driver drive him along the only remaining road in the entire country (recently refurbished with foreign aid money) the 350k to the Atlantic port at Boma. So that is what he does.
In total the journey took him ‘six harrowing weeks’, 44 days, and was a dazzling, deeply depressing insight into the state of contemporary Africa.
Butcher’s bleak view of Africa
As the Telegraph‘s Africa correspondent, Butcher is amusingly blunt: Africa is fucked, that’s his basic position. African nations were screwed by the colonial powers from the Congress of Berlin to independence (the 1880s to the 1960s); then suffered epic civil wars and/or the extended rule of vicious kleptocrats; and have now mostly fallen into states of disrepair, degradation, police states, autocracies, characterised by epic corruption, horrible everyday violence, and the regular occurrence of coups or civil wars.
The one constant through all 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 my way 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…as crude as the underlying assumption: that African nations are doomed to victim status.
By the time I started working in Africa as a journalist in 2000, its patina of despair had thickened to impenetrability… (p.4)
Certainly, when it comes to Congo, Butcher regards it as a country which has comprehensively gone to ruin, a place which has not only ceased developing but is actively undeveloping, moving at speed back into pre-20th century, pre-industrial times.
The failure of the Congo is so complete that its silent majority – tens of millions of people with no connections to the gangster government or the corrupt state machinery – are trapped in a fight to stay where they are and not become worse off. Thoughts of development, advancement or improvement are irrelevant when the fabric of your country is slipping backwards around you. (p.289)
Butcher has a map from 1961 which shows all the railways, roads, airports, mines and towns built by the Belgians. Now almost all of them are abandoned and have faded back into the jungle. The Great War has left the huge territory divided between regional powers, armies and militias or just local bandits, any of whom might stop and shoot you for no reason.
Butcher is continually, vehemently rude about the white man, about colonialists, about outsiders who came into Congo, and is much consumed by the white supremacist, racist, arrogance which thought it knew what was best for the Congolese. Again and again he makes the same point.
And yet very often, in the very next paragraph, he goes on to describe at great length, and very upsettingly, just how completely Congo was devastated by its kleptocratic rulers, by Mobutu and his clique in faraway Kinshasa, who developed the cult of the leader of the nation while all the while stealing every last dollar from their people, building grotesquely luxurious palaces and villas, buying scores of properties around the world, while the infrastructure of entire provinces such as Katanga collapsed and disappeared back into the jungle.
And then he goes on to describe the work of the United Nations which strives hard to bring the warring sides in Congo’s endless conflicts to the negotiating table, which expends a small fortune trying to police the ceasefire at locations all across this country as large as a continent. For example, the story of Kisangani which saw horrific levels of violence in various civil conflicts, whose infrastructure and economy collapsed, and is nowadays only just about propped up by the UN and western NGOs, when the local population aren’t ransacking them.
The point being that, no matter how woke, anti-colonial and politically correct Butcher tries to be in his editorialising, the blindingly clear conclusion from his long, gripping narrative is that the Congolese simply cannot rule themselves. (p.319).
As soon as they tried to (June 1960) the place collapsed into a series of civil wars along with tribal massacres on a hair-raising scale, and now, as he writes (2004), 43 years after independence, Butcher’s journey amounts to an odyssey through a country which has not only failed to develop but is, to use his powerful neologism, undeveloping, with communities all across the country deprived of the clean water, electricity, communications, industry, travel infrastructure, even minimal education, even the most basic medical facilities, all things they took for granted under the Belgians.
Now it’s all gone, decayed, corroded, overgrown, crumbled to dust, and the country has reverted to its African origins: impenetrably difficult to travel across, riddled with disease (cholera from the water, malaria from the ubiquitous mosquitos) and infested with blood-thirsty, savage warrior bands, who arrive out of nowhere, kill all the men, rape all the women, burn the village to the ground, then disappear back into the jungle.
It’s a tropical hell. It’s Hieronymus Bosch in the jungle.
Summary
As I’ve probably stated at too great a length, I was unhappy with Butcher’s journalistic and rather superficial descriptions of many key aspects of Congo’s modern history. And I am gently mocking of the contradiction that, despite his insistent criticism of colonialism and white racism and imperial exploitation etc, it is only because he is a white westerner and (relatively) rich that he can pay the locals to ferry him wherever he wants, waltz into UN offices anywhere in the country and not only get their attention but persuade them to help him out (by boat, by bike, by helicopter). He’s a white man. Of course they’ll help.
But what I haven’t emphasised enough is that Butcher is also a cracking writer, with a great eye for detail. His descriptions of the jungle, the ruined settlements, primitive villages or scary cities (like Kisangani) are vivid and compelling. It’s a gripping, exciting read.
And also, Butcher has a knack for interviewing people or getting them to tell him about themselves and stories about their trade, village, town, or local history. Obviously these stories are tidied up and made fit for western consumption, he’s a journalist, that’s what he does. But he talks to a wide range of people who begin to build up a sense of opinions and experiences from right across this vast country.
(There are obvious omissions: he never speaks to anyone from any of the armed militias which, according to his interviewees, roam so much of the jungle, emerging to carry out unspeakable atrocities, but then journalists rarely do. They’re not the kind of people who make for compliant and articulate interviewees and so their voices are consistently absent from most western accounts.)
So although there are better books to go to in order to to understand the recent political and military history of the Congo, Butcher’s sweaty, fearful, sleepless, buttock-bruising account gives you a really vivid feel for what the country and its actual population – thousands of miles from the slick government spokesmen and official narratives of downtown Kinshasa – are really like. And a vivid and almost overwhelming sense of the dreadful fate, almost complete social collapse back into the Stone Age, which so much of it has undergone.
On the long slow journey down the river aboard a UN patrol boat (more accurately, a primitive tug or ‘pusher’) Butcher finds himself audience to an impassioned diatribe by the Malaysian captain, Mohammed Yusoff Sazali, who explains that Malaysia, like Congo, was colonised for centuries; Malaysia like Congo was subject to a cruel racist colonial masters (the British); Malaysia gained independence about the same time as Congo (1957 and 1960); Malaysia like Congo was dragged into Cold War conflicts. And yet, 50 years later, Malaysia is part of the world, has achieved great things in education and health, has a booming economy, they even host a Grand Prix every year. While Congo is collapsing year by year into pre-industrial, Stone Age poverty. Why? Why has Malaysia stormed ahead and Congo fallen so far behind? The skipper:
had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa? (p.310)
Credit
Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher was first published by Chatto and Windus in 2007. References are to the 2008 Vintage paperback edition.
Books & Boots 