Part 2 : Blood River, A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart...Cobalt Town...The Pearl of Tanganyika

 Blood River,  A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart.

By Tim Butcher

3 

Cobart Town

The airline that was to fly me to the Democratic Republic of Congo in August 2004 was as rickety as the country's latest peace deal. Hewa Bora had been cobbled together from the remnants of various bankrupt versions of the national carrier - Congo Airlines and Zaire Airlines - and although the flight I was waiting for was a scheduled one from Johannesburg to Lubumbashi, the Congo's second city and capital of the south-eastern province of Katanga, there was something about the behaviour of the ground crew and my fellow passengers that suggested it was anything but routine. 

A middle-aged Congolese man, hoping to make it to Lubumbashi, spotted my concern as I winced at the check-in muddle. He tried to reassure me. 'I have family here in South Africa, but whenever I travel with Hewa Bora I never know for sure if the plane will take off, or even if there is a plane. It really is a Maybe Airline - Maybe You Get There, Maybe You Don't.' 

I waited patiently, watching the ebb and flow of the passengers' mood. One minute they seemed happy, as a female member of staff in Hewa Bora uniform - an elegant blue cotton wrap spotted with yellow teardrops - checked the name of the person at the front of the queue against the manifest. But then the same member of staff would get up from her chair and disappear from view, prompting groans of frustration from the crowd. The flight was not full, but my fellow passengers all seemed to be carrying unfeasibly large amounts of luggage, mostly electrical goods like televisions and CD players, wrapped in the woven plastic, tricolour bags of red, white and blue that you see all over the developing world. 

Against this bulky display, my own luggage seemed rather meagre. I had a green rucksack packed with clothing, bedding and a mosquito net, and two shoulder bags for my notebooks, camera, laptop computer and satellite telephone. I wanted to keep it as light as possible so that it could be carried on foot if need be, so the only book I brought with me was Stanley's account of his journey, Through the Dark Continent. I had read it several times, but if my journey was successful I wanted to be able to make a direct comparison between what he found in the late nineteenth century and what I found in the early twenty-first. 

My first problem was how to reach the spot where Stanley arrived in the Congo in September 1876. He had been following the established route of Arab slavers across what is now the east African country of Tanzania, before crossing Lake Tanganyika by boat and arriving in the Congo at the village of Mtowa on the lake's western shore. Under the Arabs, Mtowa developed into a large centre for the trans-shipment of slaves and ivory. Its name is not to be found on modern maps of the Congo, but I had been able to establish that it lies about thirty kilometres north of Kalemie, a once-prosperous port set up by the Belgians on the lake. Fifty years ago it was possible to reach Kalemie by rail, road and ferry, but today its only regular connection with the outside world is a weekly shuttle flight arranged by the United Nations peacekeeping mission, MONUC, to serve Kalemie's small garrison of peacekeepers. The shuttle flight leaves from Lubumbashi, capital of the Congo's Katanga province, and a UN administrator had promised that if I made it to Lubumbashi, I could take my place on a waiting list for the trip to Kalemie. 

The chaos at the check-in desk in Johannesburg took hours to sort out, but I was in the wonderful position of being under no time pressure. Whenever my journalism has taken me overseas, time has always been of crucial importance, a situation made worse by twitchy foreign editors, deadlines and competitive colleagues. But this time I faced no such constraints. For my attempt to cross the Congo I was entirely on my own. It was pleasantly liberating and as time passed at the airport I was happy to people watch, trying to guess the nationality of the one other white person on the flight, or why an Asian lady was travelling solo to the Congo. 

Johannesburg International Airport is one of the great hubs of modern African travel, a first-world airport offering flights to some of the rougher third-world destinations. As I headed to the gate for the Lubumbashi flight, I looked at the well-stocked boutiques and felt the downwash from the powerful air conditioning, and wondered when I would next experience the same. 

The Hewa Bora cabin crew had laid out copies of a Kinshasa newspaper, L'Avenir, on the seats in business class and I snaffled one as I shoulder-barged my way to my economy seat. It was more of a samizdat newsletter than a newspaper, comprising four pages amateurishly printed on a single folded sheet of very cheap, coarse paper. The ink came off on my fingers and there were no decipherable photographs. But I could decipher the paper's tone, a tone that was rabidly anti-Rwandan. There were various articles claiming that the paper had seen documentary evidence proving Rwanda was about to attack the Congo and there were vicious denunciations of various pro-Rwandan Congolese rebels, such as my old contact, Adolphe Onusumba. Under the terms of the 2002 peace deal that was meant to have ended the Congo's war, all the major rebel groups, including the pro-Rwandan ones, had taken their place in a transitional, power-sharing government in Kinshasa. The arrangement was fragile and, as I could see from the deeply xenophobic tone of L'Avenir, the fault line separating Rwandans from Congolese remained explosive. 

Since the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has been regarded by many outsiders as a tiny, frail country bullied by its larger neighbours. This is a grossly inaccurate generalisation. With a government now dominated by Tutsis, Rwanda punches way above its weight in regional affairs. There are clear parallels with Israel, another small country of people driven by the memory of mass murder committed against them to dominate its neighbours militarily, and the neighbour that Rwanda bosses most is the Democratic Republic of Congo. On a map, tiny Rwanda is overshadowed by the vastness of the DRC, but for the past ten years it has been Rwanda that has loomed over the DRC. In 1996 Rwanda's Tutsi dominated forces invaded the country and orchestrated the ousting of Mobutu the following year, and in 1998 the same forces turned on Laurent Kabila, the man they had installed as Mobutu's replacement, starting the conflict that has so far cost four million lives. 

For many Congolese, the Tutsis who now rule Rwanda play the role of bogeymen. Tutsis are taller and thinner than their ethnic neighbours, with finer features, and I heard many Congolese cursing them for 'not looking like us'. There were plenty of less polite insults. The Tutsi/non-Tutsi divide is one of central Africa's great social divisions and it was to have enormous impact on my attempt to cross the Congo. 

Eight weeks before I flew to Lubumbashi, an ethnic Tutsi Congolese warlord broke the terms of the 2002 peace treaty when he mobilised a force and launched an attack on the Congolese town of Bukavu that sits on the border between DRC and Rwanda. His motives were unclear, but the result fitted into the depressing pattern of central African turmoil. After thirty-six hours of savagery, scores of people lay dead, thousands had fled their homes and the entire eastern sector of the country was pushed to a state close to war. The Congolese authorities were quick to blame the Tutsi-led regime across the border in Rwanda, accusing them of arming and protecting the rebels. The accusations were soon followed by retaliatory attacks from Congolese troops on groups linked to Rwanda's Tutsis. I knew that the relationship between the DRC and Rwanda was tense, but the racist bile I read in L'Avenir revealed the depth of enmity between the two sides. All I could do as the plane made the three-hour crossing from South Africa over Zimbabwe and Zambia en route to Lubumbashi was pray that some sort of calm would he reestablished before I reached eastern Congo. 

If you look at a map of the Congo, you see that the country appears to have grown a vestigial tail around its bottom right-hand corner, known as the Katanga Panhandle. On the surface there seems no clear reason for this outcrop of Congolese territory surrounded on three sides by its southern neighbour, Zambia. It is below the soil that you find the reason why the early Belgian colonialists in the late nineteenth century staked the territory so obstinately, in defiance of British pioneers probing northwards from what was then Rhodesia. The panhandle includes some of the richest deposits of copper, cobalt and uranium on the planet, a geological quirk that the early Belgian colonialists identified more smartly than their British counterparts. 

While Congo's other provinces have large diamond and gold deposits, it was mainly on Katanga's mineral wealth that the Belgian colony grew rich in the mid-twentieth century. The uranium for the atom bombs dropped by America on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from a mine in Katanga, and it was Katanga's vast copper deposits that really powered the colony's growth when the reconstruction of Europe and Japan after the Second World War drove a surge in demand for copper. Most of the mineral profits from Katanga were taken by the Belgians, repatriated to Brussels and divided among shareholders from various private corporations, or Societes, created by the colonial authorities. But some of the profits were reinvested in Katanga, to build a number of mines, processing plants and factories, serviced by new towns built out of the virgin bush and connected by a web of roads and railways. By the mid-twentieth century Katanga was the most developed province in all of the Congo. 

The blessing of Katanga's mineral wealth became its curse when Belgium granted independence to the Congo on 30 June 1960. While maintaining the illusion of handing over a single country to the black Congolese, the authorities in Brussels secretly backed the secession of Katanga from the Congo, financing, arming and protecting the pro-Belgian Katangan leader, Moise Tshombe, in return for a promise that the Belgian mining interests in Katanga would be protected. It was one of the most blatant acts of foreign manipulation in Africa's chaotic independence period, and it culminated in one of the cruellest acts of twentieth-century political assassination, when Patrice Lumumba, the first Congolese national figure to win an election, was handed over by Belgian stooges to be murdered by Tshombe's regime. 50s

Lumumba's mistake was to hint at pro-Soviet sympathies. The mere possibility of the Congo, with its huge deposits of copper, uranium and diamonds, falling into the Soviet sphere of influence during the Cold War was too much for the Western powers. Several African nations were already moving into the Communist camp but the Congo was, in the eyes of the West, simply too important to lose so Brussels, with the connivance of Washington, engineered Lumumba's arrest, torture and transfer to the capital of Katanga, then known by its Belgian name of Elisabethville, today's Lubumbashi. 

It was at the city's airport in the middle of January 1961 that Lumumba was last seen in public. Members of the UN, already deployed to Katanga to try to deal with the secession crisis, watched Lumumba being bundled out of a cargo plane by soldiers loyal to Tshombe. They said he had been so badly beaten on the flight that he barely moved when he was pushed into a waiting vehicle that whisked him away to a nearby villa owned by a Belgian colonialist. For a long time, what happened next was one of the great mysteries of modern African history, mainly because Lumumba's body was never found. There were rumours that it was cut up and fed to pigs, or even thrown into the headwaters of the Congo River that rises in mountains to the north-west of Lubumbashi. Tshombe's regime initially refused to admit he was dead, but when they finally did, they lied, claiming he had been shot dead by villagers after he escaped on foot from police custody. 

It took almost forty years before the mystery was eventually solved by a Belgian academic, Ludo De Witte, piecing the history together from official documents released by Brussels in the 1990s. He discovered that various Belgian policemen and security officers - nominally under the command of Tshombe but, in reality, following orders from Brussels - had, on the night of 17 January 1961, driven Lumumba from the villa where he had been taken to rendezvous with a firing squad of local Katangan soldiers about forty-five minutes' drive from the airport. Lumumba, his face battered almost beyond recognition and his clothes spattered with blood, was made to stand against a large anthill illuminated by the headlights of two cars. He was then executed by firing squad and his body buried in a shallow grave. Fearful the grave might be discovered and turned into a shrine, the Belgians and their Katangan stooges later moved to erase all traces of the Congo's elected leader. The day after the execution, the corpse was exhumed and driven deeper into the Katangan bush, where it was reburied in another shallow grave until arrangements could be made to get rid of it once and for all. 

Under cover of darkness on 22 January 1961 two Belgian brothers, with connections to the Belgian security forces, returned and exhumed the body for a second time. They used a hacksaw and an axe to dismember the decomposing corpse, before dissolving the remains in a 200-litre petrol drum filled with sulphuric acid taken from a nearby copper-processing plant. One of the brothers later admitted he used pliers to remove two of Lumumba's teeth as souvenirs. 

Thoughts of assassination, acid baths and dismembered bodies were not the only dark images in my mind as the plane descended towards the tarmac at Lubumbashi. In 1997 a close friend of mine had come closer to death at this airport than at any time in his long career covering international crises as a journalist. It was during the last chaotic days of Mobutu's rule when Laurent Kabila's Rwandan-backed insurgency was about to topple the ageing dictator. Troops loyal to Mobutu were becoming increasingly desperate and had gathered at the country's few functioning airports hoping to escape. It was at Lubumbashi airport that my friend was seized by some of the Special Presidential Guard, a notoriously brutal cadre of Mobutu supporters who could expect no leniency when his regime's end came. He was stripped to his underpants and threatened at gunpoint for several terrifying hours. It did not help that he was with a fellow journalist who had a video shot some time earlier of Rwandan troops on the march towards Kinshasa. When the guards discovered the tape, they said they were going to execute the reporters as Rwandan spies. It took them hours of desperate pleading to convince the guards they were simply journalists. 

Looking out of my window as the plane descended towards Lubumbashi, just before the moment when the ground blurrily rushes into one's field of vision, I caught sight of a single figure, a Congolese woman standing right on the edge of the tarmac runway. She was barefoot, dressed in rags, with a pile of firewood balanced on her head and a cold, wide-eyed expression on her face. No matter that this was one of the Congo's major international airports of considerable military importance, for her it was a place to gather firewood. From my earlier visits to the Congo, I knew what to expect when the fuselage door finally opened. At the bottom of a set of stairs, manually wheeled into position, a crowd of people had gathered, all claiming to be an official of some sort and all demanding payment. I watched as the Asian lady I had spotted at Johannesburg airport stepped gingerly into the melee, only to be tossed and spun like a piece of flotsam, blasted by loud demands for payment. The last I saw of her was an unedifying spectacle. She was fighting back tears, bidding for her own luggage that was being auctioned back to her.

Before boarding the flight, I had played the first of my Congolese jokers. I had contacted Clive, the Zimbabwean businessman who had good connections with the Kabila regime, and asked for his help. The Kabila family originally came from Katanga and, while the regime's control of much of the country was nominal, they made sure their home capital remained in their hands. Clive's cobalt-mining operation was based in Lubumbashi and although he was not going to be in town when I arrived, he warned me the only way I would get through the airport in one piece was if his people smoothed the way. It was with relief that in the crowd down on the tarmac I spotted a man holding up a piece of paper with the name `Kim Butcher' written across it. I caught his eye and he threw himself bravely into the muddle, before grabbing me reassuringly by the shoulders and leading me through the scrum.

'Welcome to Lubumbashi. My name is Yav,' he said in French from behind imitation Ray-Ban sunglasses. He had to shout to make himself heard above the din of jet engines and grasping officials, but there was a steadying calm about him. Turning to a large man standing next to him, he spoke again. `Let me introduce you to the director of immigration at the airport. This is the man who helps us, when our visitors come through the airport.' 

The director looked at me coldly and nodded a silent acknowledgement. I knew enough about Congolese officialdom to keep my mouth shut. Yav was clearly happy that the nod represented all the necessary formalities and he nudged me firmly past the director and up the path to the 1950s-built terminal, where some of the noisier luggage-auctioning was going on. 

'There is just one fee you need to pay, an entry fee of ten dollars,' he said. I handed him a twenty-dollar note, which he then passed to an underling, who disappeared into a side-room with my passport. The man came back two minutes later and gave Yav change of a ten dollar note. Yav immediately rubbed the note between his fingers and frowned. `This is not a real dollar note. This is counterfeit. Get me a good one,' he said, raising his voice at the underling and sending him back inside. 

It took a few minutes for my rucksack to appear. I stood in the crowd trying to look inconspicuous, yet confident. The Congo is a police state maintained by numerous security services, military units and gendarmerie, all of whom take a close interest in any outsider daring to venture into the country. I knew from my earlier visits that roving journalists in the Congo are subject to particularly close scrutiny, and I was anxious to get through the airport as quickly as possible. Journalists were routinely expected to go to Kinshasa and pay officials large amounts in bribes for `accreditation' that took weeks to complete, before they could even think about trying to move around the country. I wanted to avoid this lengthy detour to Kinshasa and was hoping to slip into the Congo through Lubumbashi and then use the UN flight to reach the east of the country, where Kinshasa's authority did not hold. If I made it up there, I had in my rucksack a `To Whom It May Concern' letter signed by the Congolese Ambassador to South Africa, introducing me as a writer trying to follow Stanley's historical route. This, I gambled, would at least allow me to open negotiations with what passes as officialdom in the east of the Congo before they detained me on suspicion of being a spy. 

Without Yav, I would not have made it through Lubumbashi airport. I could see by the way he breezed past soldiers guarding the entrance to the baggage hall that he was a man of standing, something that I exploited unashamedly as we waited for the luggage to appear. I edged closer to him, trying to look at ease and not catch the eye of various officials whom I could see closely questioning the other white man from my flight. There was a bullet hole in the glass partition above the door leading into the baggage hall, and a rusty fan, mounted on the ceiling, hung motionless. Apart from brightly painted signs advertising mobile phone companies, nothing seemed to have changed from the time when the airport staged the brutal finale of Lumumba's life. Eventually I pointed to my bag and Yav barked at an official to take it outside to his waiting car.

Rather unexpectedly, he began to quiz the baggage handlers about a set of golf clubs that had been due in on the flight for one of the senior mine employees. Years earlier I had met some wealthy Zimbabweans who told me an amazing story about how the wealthy live in Lubumbashi. The city is only a few kilometres from the border with Zambia, connected by one of the Congo's few functioning roads. One of the wealthy white mine owners is so keen on show-jumping that each winter in Lubumbashi he hosts his own event, inviting Zambian, Zimbabwean and South African show-jumpers to drive their horses all the way to the Congo. Border guards are bribed and special supplies flown into Lubumbashi. No matter that the Congo is ravaged by war, poverty and corruption, this man is wealthy and eccentric enough to convene his own Horse of the Year Show in the Congo. If it is possible for Lubumbashi to have its own showjumping competition, I suppose I should not have been that surprised that it has a golf course.

For almost a hundred years Katanga's growth had been based almost completely on copper. For a long time the province was known as Shaba, the local Swahili word for the metal. But the problem with copper is that the production process is relatively complex. Expensive mining equipment is needed, as well as skilled labour and large amounts of chemicals for processing and other supplies that have to be imported. This was all possible during the Belgian colonial era when law and order existed, but through the chaos of Mobutu's rule during the 1970s and 1980s, foreign investors saw their copper mines repeatedly flooded, supplies plundered and attempts to bring in replacement equipment blocked by corrupt and incompetent local officials.

By the time I reached Lubumbashi, copper was in decline, but the town was in the grip of a new boom, one driven by cobalt. Cobalt had suddenly become commercially attractive because the world price had been driven upwards by a surge in demand from China's fast-growing economy. The cobalt price had grown by 300 per cent in less than year, from $8 to $24 per pound, a dramatic change that had had a dramatic effect in Katanga, home to some of the world's greatest and most accessible cobalt deposits.

Cobalt mining in Katanga does not require massive investment or expensive processing. Here, a man with a shovel can become a cobalt miner, simply by digging away the topsoil and looking for the darker, greyish or purplish rock that is rich with cobalt salts. The rock is then purified in the most primitive way, using a hammer to chip away the non-cobalt-rich rock, a process that the Congolese miners call `cobbing', a word imported from Britain where it was first used by seventeenth-century Cornish tin miners. The demand from China is so great that middlemen in Lubumbashi, often Lebanese or Indian, are willing to pay cash for sacks of the grey rock. The sacks are then collected, packed on trucks and driven on a long and tortuous journey past grasping officials on the Congolese border with Zambia and then 2,000 kilometres south to the closest functioning port, Durban, in South Africa, before finally being shipped to China.

The whole procedure is relatively straightforward, and for a while I almost bought into the sentiment expressed on a road sign I spotted as Yav drove me into Lubumbashi. The sign said, `Lubumbashi - City of Hope'. There were plenty of cars in the town centre, a few shops were open, and I was told a hotel near the main square had just started taking guests again for the first time in years. 

But during the four days I spent in the city, staying at the guest house in the compound used by Clive's cobalt-mining operation, I learned how this sense of normality was an illusion and how regular rules of commerce simply do not apply in the Congo. For those who think Africa's problems can simply be solved by the injection of money, I would recommend a crash course in cobalt economics in the Congo.

In 2004 the cobalt boom meant there was plenty of money in Lubumbashi, but the presence of money did not guarantee that the local economy grew or even stabilised. In the town's Belgian Club, I saw Chinese traders and Lebanese middlemen splashing money around on $20 pizzas and expensive imported beer. They had plenty of cash and they wanted to spend it on raw cobalt ore. But in spite of this substantial income, the pernicious reality of Congolese commerce meant that norms of economic development did not apply.

In order for the investor to make any money he needed the necessary paperwork to drive the cobalt out of the country, and in order to arrange the necessary paperwork he needed to pay off the Ministry of Mines, not just locally in Lubumbashi, but also at the national level in Kinshasa; and if the Minister of Mines changed, which happened regularly, a whole new matrix of payments and bribes had to be put in place for the new man in the job. And once you finished with the Ministry of Mines, you would have to repeat the whole process at the Immigration Department, the Department of Customs, the local Governor's Office, and so on. So gross were the profits to be made on the cobalt that some investors were prepared to pay the web of bribes and unofficial 'taxes' demanded by the authorities, and to tolerate this commercial chaos.

At the Belgian Club I drank Simba beer and ate chips doused with mayonnaise, in the Belgian style, with one of the few Europeans bold enough to risk involvement in Lubumbashi's cobalt boom. Belgium's links remain closer with Katanga than with any other province of their old colony and a photograph of the Belgian royal family looked down on us from the wall as I listened to his mind-boggling stories about local business anarchy. On numerous occasions trucks had been loaded in Lubumbashi with sacks of cobalt ore worth $50,000, but when they arrived in South Africa the sacks were found to contain nothing but worthless soil.

'Between here and South Africa you don't just have thousands of kilometres of tarmac road,' he said. `You have three international borders, from the Congo into Zambia, from Zambia into Zimbabwe and from Zimbabwe into South Africa. At each one, you have officials demanding handouts. Each one of them can be bribed by a rival cobalt shipper to cause you delays and other problems. And the drivers can be bought off by rivals, so when they stop to sleep at night, God knows what happens to the bags of ore on the back. Some of the buyers who come here to Lubumbashi decide it's cheaper just to set themselves up on the main road south through Zambia, say, and wait there with a gang of gunmen armed with AK-47s to help themselves to whatever comes down the road. The truck drivers are so badly paid that they are not going to risk their lives to protect the load. If you offered them a hundred-dollar bill, most drivers would pull over and let you pinch some or all of what's on the back.'

There was nothing funny about some of his other stories. The cobalt mining was, for the large part, unlicensed and chaotic, as artisanal miners - men with shovels - dug deeper and deeper pits to get at the grey, cobalt-rich rock. The stories of miners being killed by landfalls were so routine the authorities did not bother responding to them. And an attempt to restart one of the old processing plants near Lubumbashi had raised other health hazards. The processing uses local ores known to be rich in uranium. Without any meaningful local environmental standards, there were concerns that radioactive isotopes of uranium were being released by the process into the atmosphere as smoke particles. 

What made it so galling to me, the outsider, was that of the large sums paid by the various mining companies, brokers and traders, only a tiny fraction ever reached the local economy. The vast bulk was lost in bribes demanded by corrupt officials at all levels. Lubumbashi's cobalt bonanza brought home to me how money alone will not solve Africa's problems. Until the Congo's economy is underpinned by the rule of law and transparency, it will remain stagnant, chaotic and unproductive.

Those days in Lubumbashi spent waiting for the UN shuttle flight northwards to Kalemie felt rather surreal. I rarely ventured from the sanctuary of the compound, which lay behind a high perimeter wall in a relatively smart area of Lubumbashi, near the governor's residence. The view I got from there was entirely skewed. For those, like Clive, with good enough connections, it was possible to live comfortably in the Congo's second city. It was hugely expensive, as everything - from cartons of milk to the satellite television dish - had to be imported, mostly by plane from South Africa. When I got there a large box of umbrellas had just arrived in anticipation of the next rainy season. But it was clear the potential profits from cobalt were so enormous that as long as the mine kept producing and the trucks managed to get past the corrupt customs officials into Zambia, then the whole operation was cost-effective. 

The problem with Lubumbashi's cobalt boom was that it was too inefficient to be of genuine economic benefit to the million or so Katangans living in the city. A mining expert I met explained one of the main inefficiencies.

`The cobalt-rich rock is simply bagged and driven out of the country,' he explained. 'That way ensures the smallest amount of benefit to the local economy - just the few dollars a day paid to each miner. If the local authorities were interested in helping the local economy, then they would have a processing plant here in Lubumbashi that converts the cobalt-rich rock into concentrated cobalt salts. It is not a complex procedure, but it multiplies the value of the cobalt product by fifty times, maybe a hundred times. It is much more efficient to transport the concentrate than the untreated rock and the profit margin is much greater. Under the system we have now, some plant in South Africa or China makes the profit on the treatment of the rock, a profit that is lost to the Congo.

`But the reality is this. The authorities in the Congo are not interested in how cobalt mining benefits the local economy. They are only interested in what they can take in bribes. And it is easier to count sacks of rock at the border and work out how many dollars you can cream off per bag. Until that fundamental attitude changes, then the cobalt boom driven by China will not benefit more than a few members of the Congo elite.' 

There was one entirely personal and self-indulgent thing I needed to do while I was in Lubumbashi. I wanted to go to the town's railway station and see where my mother had caught the train that took her across the Congo in 1958.

Simon, a factotum from the mine office, agreed to take me there on a Sunday morning when, I gambled, there would be fewer police and gendarmerie in the town centre demanding to see my papers. As we drove into town, I was struck by Lubumbashi's resemblance to other southern African cities. In my mind the Congo belonged to the continent's sweaty, tropical centre, but Lubumbashi's topography and climate were much closer to those of Johannesburg or Harare. The air was dry and the land was covered not by dense rainforest, but open scrub. It was more highfield plateau than steamy equatorial river basin. The streets were even lined with the same fast-growing jacaranda trees that I recognised from the garden at my Johannesburg home, although Lubumbashi's position closer to the Equator meant they were already putting on their bright-purple display of springtime blossom two months earlier than those in chillier South Africa.

We passed the Cathedral of St Paul and St Peter, a large red brick structure in the centre of Lubumbashi, built in 1919, and I could see it was full of worshippers. Some of the older, wider boulevards were paved with hexagonal cobbles made from some sort of dark, possibly volcanic, rock. The work that went into laying these roads must have been enormous, but they were in much better condition than the potholed modern roads.

Apart from being tatty, Lubumbashi's town centre is largely unchanged since the Belgian colonial period. There is a 1950s post office fronting a main square from which various roads radiate between some fine Art Deco buildings. There are a few modest general stores selling imported goods, although fresh bread is available from a Greek-owned patisserie. We walked the last few hundred metres to the railway station. I had heard that a two-year work programme by foreign aid groups had recently enabled the station to reopen for the first time since the war, connecting Lubumbashi with Kindu, a port on the upper Congo, and I wanted to see if this was really true. 

Simon and I approached a man in dark glasses standing guard at the gate that led onto the platform. 

'Please can you tell me about the train to Kindu.'

`Who are you? What is your business here at the station? This is a military installation, who gave you permission to come here?' 

The man was not just drunk, he was aggressively drunk. I recoiled and let Simon deal with him. Simon edged forward, took the guard's hand in his hand and started speaking in Swahili, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. I made to look away as Simon slipped the guard a folded-up bank note. The gate opened. 

I walked out onto an open platform. Unlike British railways where the platform stands much higher than the track level, this station was of a more continental European design, the tracks only a few centimetres below the platform. I looked around and saw a blackboard with a message chalked across it referring to the train to Kindu. It said that it leaves every first of the month. Simon assured me this was nonsense as no train had left in the first two weeks of August. But the thing that was oddest about Lubumbashi station was the complete lack of trains. There was no rolling stock, no carriages, nothing. The whole place was silent and empty.

The longer I spent in Lubumbashi, the more nervous and sick I felt. The powerful anti-malaria tablets I was taking caused the nausea, but the nervousness came from the growing sense that my whole trip now depended on the next few days. I knew my attempt to cross the Congo would have to begin in Kalemie, but I also knew it might end there. During my months of research at home in Johannesburg, I had trawled the small number of aid workers and missionaries based in the town, but none of them had ever heard of an outsider travelling overland from Kalemie deeper into the Congo. 

My most positive lead had come from Michel Bonnardeaux, a civilian UN employee from Canada who had been based in Kalemie, on and off, for more than two years. When he arrived, the war was raging in the eastern Congo and Kalemie was filled with refugees, but since the 2002 peace treaty Michel had seen a small but steady improvement in the security situation. While most of my e-correspondents had dismissed my plan to follow Stanley's route as being either impossible or insane, Michel was one of the few who did not reject it out of hand. It might have been his contagious enthusiasm for local Congolese history or just his upbeat positive nature, but like a drowning man to a piece of flotsam, I latched firmly onto Michel and his advice.

According to Michel, the 500-kilometre route overland from Kalemie to the upper Congo passed through the land belonging to the Banga-Banga tribe. From the many Banga-Banga refugees living in Kalemie, he knew the security situation in the area had improved enough to allow a trickle of people to arrive in town by foot. Many came pushing old bicycles laden with produce, which was then traded at the port for salt, soap and other commodities. The distances were immense and the tracks tiny, but if you could get a bicycle along them, Michel reckoned, you could also get a small motorbike along them. 

The security situation remained the great unknown. The peace treaty had technically ended the war, but gangs of armed militia still roamed the forest and savannah west of Kalemie. Many of the bicycle bearers arrived in town with stories of atrocities in the anarchic region between Lake Tanganyika and the upper Congo. Cannibalism was common, and rape was a ghastly routine for villagers populating this vast swathe of territory.

The one thing I had going for me was the scale of the place. After Kalemie, the next UN base was 700 kilometres away on the upper Congo River, at the town of Kindu. The distances were so enormous that if I could move quickly by motorbike, and not advertise my plans in advance to anyone minded to arrange an ambush, I gambled that I could get through safely. But whether I would manage to find a lift on a motorbike, let alone someone prepared to act as guide and interpreter, were great unknowns. Language would definitely be a problem, as my French would only be of use in the Congo's larger settlements, where I could be sure to find village elders with the remnants of a school education. In the rural areas I would need someone who spoke Swahili to ask for help and directions from villagers we met. There were no reliable maps of the area I wanted to cross, so I would have to rely on local directions.

Peacekeepers from MONUC would not be able to help because they had a policy of only going to places that could be reached by jeep - in the case of Kalemie, this meant that they operated within a few kilometres of the town centre. The MONUC bases at Kalemie and Kindu were linked only by air, so I turned my attention to the few aid groups operating in the eastern Congo to beg for help. The problem was not one of expense - I could afford the few thousand dollars cost of a bike and wages for a guide. The problem was more simple - finding anyone who was prepared to travel overland through such hazardous terrain. One by one the aid groups turned me down. They had, after all, their own important work to do, and helping out an adventurous hack did not fit readily into their schedules.

In the months leading tip to my trip I had finally made contact with a group that offered me a glimmer of hope. Care International had been developing its network of contacts around Kindu and I heard that its country director, Brian Larson, had personally organised a convoy of motorbikes that ventured 200 kilometres south of Kindu, to see how viable it was to move supplies down jungle tracks to people who had received no humanitarian aid for years. For me, this was precisely what I was looking for: someone who was prepared to take a calculated risk to open up areas viewed for a generation as impassable. 

We exchanged emails. Brian jokingly dismissed his motorbike adventure as an 'interesting way to get a sore backside' and I eventually summoned the courage to ask him directly if I could borrow a motorbike and a guide from his Care International staff. The fact that he did not turn me down flat meant I was in with a chance. He promised to mention my idea to his staff around Kindu and urge them to see if they could coincide one of their reconnaissance trips with part of my itinerary.

These half-chances suggested by Michel and Brian had been the grounds for my decision to fly to Kalemie but they were not enough to convince Jean-Claude ('Call me J-C') - a third generation Belgian colonialist who worked for Clive's mine operations. He seemed to take a mawkish pleasure in telling me my trip was doomed. 

When I told him that all I had with me was my 'To Whom It May Concern' letter introducing me as a writer following Stanley's route, he snorted dismissively. 'That won't be enough. You will need written authorisation from the local intelligence service. They are very strict here and without their permission you won't get anywhere,' he said. And when I told him I had a satellite telephone, he snorted even more loudly. 'You won't get far with that unless you get permission from the military police. They will take it away from you the moment they find it. 

It will cost you a lot of money if you try to get it back.' 

I was beginning to take against J-C. 

'I've got a map here. Come and show me where you want to go,' J-C said on my first day in Lubumbashi, unfolding an out-of-date map of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I stood over it and pointed to Kalemie, the port on Lake Tanganyika. Technically it is in the same province as Lubumbashi, Katanga, but it lies 1,000 kilometres to the north. As I described the major sections of the trip, overland from the lake to the headwaters of the Congo River, J-C rather irritatingly sucked in his breath and shook his head, uttering something like ,not possible' or 'cannot be done'. 

After I finished he launched into a hugely pessimistic declamation. 

'I know all this area really well from when I was younger. This area is not a cobalt area like down here in the south of Katanga, but a gold area. Not big-scale stuff, but artisanal, small-scale gold mines. So with the presence of these mines, you are going to get people with guns wanting the gold action. And I am sure you know what happened up here recently.' He was pointing at Bukavu, the scene of the attack by pro Rwandan rebels just a few months earlier. 

'Well, all the government troops have now gone into the town to punish the rebels. And so those rebels have fled into the bush about here.' He was now pointing to an area close to Kalemie. 

'And that means the militia who were already living in the bush have been pushed further south, to where you want to go.' 

He shook his head and, with a final flourish, pronounced his judgement. 'You don't stand a chance.'

I had had enough of J-C and took solace in the house's South African satellite television. I turned on the news and could not believe what I heard. The anchorman told me that 156 ethnic Tutsis from the Congo had just been murdered at a refugee camp across the border in Burundi where they had sought sanctuary from the turmoil caused by June's events in Bukavu. I tried to follow what the anchor was saying about who might be responsible. His version was muddled and confusing, but one thing was perfectly clear to me. My journey had just got a whole lot more complicated.

4. 

The Pearl of Tanganyika

The Belgians called the port of Kalemie the 'Pearl of Tanganyika' and I was hoping it would gleam for me as I approached on the UN flight from Lubumbashi. The light aircraft bucked and yawed as the pilots slalomed between skyscraper storm clouds, but my face stayed firmly glued to the tiny porthole, anxious for my first glimpse.

Lake Tanganyika is a scientific oddity. Scientists believe it to be the oldest and deepest lake in Africa, with many of its own unique species of water microorganisms and creatures. And unlike the other Great Lakes of Africa, it is drained not by a large, permanent river but by a more modest stream, the Lukuga, which acts like an overflow in a bath. For much of the year the river is stagnant and silted up, only surging into life during the rainy season when the lake level rises.

Folklore among the tribes who live on the lake's edge says it was created as a punishment. The tradition goes that a family, living on the sweltering savannah of central Africa, had enjoyed their own private spring for generations, drawing from an unlimited supply of cool, fresh water and feasting on the sweettasting fish that lived in the pond formed where the water issued from the ground. The family was sworn to secrecy about the source of the water and the fish, and was issued with a dire warning that all would be lost if the secret was betrayed. One day, the family's matriarch began an affair while her husband was away. The lover was treated to a feast of fish, his thirst slaked with the cool, fresh spring water. He became so enraptured with the sweet taste of the water and fish that he insisted on knowing where they came from. The woman was initially reluctant, but finally gave in to temptation and the spell was broken. At that moment the earth was rent and a great flood welled up from below, drowning the lovers and creating the lake we see today.

When I first read this fable, I was struck by how good an analogy it is for the entire Congo. Local tribesmen had survived in peace for generations before outsiders - Arab slavers and white colonials - turned up and beguiled them into giving up first slaves, then ivory, then rubber and mineral wealth, before the traditional Congolese way of life was overwhelmed by the outsiders.

Five hundred kilometres or so east of my flight path, on the other side of Lake Tanganyika, was the air space of Tanzania. Light aircraft would be a common sight there, ferrying tourists between Africa's biggest mountain, Kilimanjaro, and the country's world-famous safari parks. But on my side of the lake, visitors to the Congo were rare and light aircraft rarer still. It had taken a month to negotiate my way onto the plane, but I had no other option. Like all UN missions, MONUC can be criticised for being bureaucratic and inefficient, but in the absence of any meaningful government in the Democratic Republic of Congo, MONUC was the closest the country came to a genuinely national organisation and, for me, it provided the only way to reach Kalemie.

Sadly, the `Pearl of Tanganyika' did not glimmer for me that day. The cloud cover was too thick and all I saw of the lake was a slab of grey in the distance as the aircraft made its final, frantic lunge for Kalemie before bouncing to a halt on the bumpy strip.

The airstrip might technically be described as a UN military installation, but such a term would be an overstatement. The runway was unfenced, crowded on all sides by unkempt scrub, and the old grey tarmac of the strip was pitted with divots and splodged with dark repair patches. The only military structure was a white, wooden watch tower, with a platform just three metres off the ground, where I could see a UN infantryman. His tin helmet was painted UN blue, crammed low on his head, while his shoulders were bulked up by a flak jacket, also blue. The gap between helmet and body armour was tiny and his anxious, beady eyes looked like those behind the prickles of a balled-up hedgehog summoning forlorn defiance at an approaching lorry.

Our plane was the sort in which the pilot has to inch his way, bent double, back through the tiny cabin to free the passengers. I followed, slowly unfolding myself from my boxed-in sitting position, relieved to be able to stretch, as I went down the three step ladder onto the ground. I might not have been able to see the lake but I could smell it now - a rich, sedgy aroma in the still, steamy atmosphere. Although Kalemie is in Katanga, the same province as Lubumbashi, the ecosystem is radically different. The city lies on a dry plateau or veld, but the lakeside port is surrounded by lusher, more tropical forest. By the time I finished stretching, I could feel the first drops of sweat pasting my long sleeved shirt to my back.

There was not a single building in sight, although the MONUC soldiers had set up a bunch of prefabricated containers to act as an arrivals hall. These white, box-like units are a common feature of any UN operation around the world. If connected to an electrical generator and a water tank, they can provide an anodyne, air-conditioned living space, no matter whether you are up a snowy mountain in Afghanistan or in the deserts of the western Sahara. They ensure each UN mission operates in its own little bubble. There might be a war going on outside, but UN peacekeepers can expect to have one of these little white boxes in which to work, sleep, eat or even connect to the Internet .

`Please follow me,' said a white girl wearing a crisp uniform of blue and grey. Her English had a Slavic accent and her name tag bore the flag of her homeland, Croatia. The outside atmosphere was hot and cloying, but she was wearing several layers of clothing - her workspace was heavily air-conditioned. After following her inside to have my name ticked off the passenger manifest, I shivered. I hurried hack outside to wait for Michel Bonnardeaux, the UN worker whose optimism had brought me here in the first place. He had promised to meet me off the plane, but as I stood there with the sedgy smell of Lake Tanganyika in my nostrils and my shirt increasingly sodden with sweat, there was no sign of him.

Kalemie was one of the first settlements developed by Belgian colonial agents in the Congo after Stanley's journey of discovery. When the explorer finally reached Britain in 1878 with proof the Congo River was navigable for thousands of kilometres halfway across Africa, he first tried to persuade London to claim the territory as a British colony. He failed. At the time the British colonial authorities were not impressed with the returns offered by Britain's relatively modest African holdings. Vast fortunes were being made in India and the Far East, but Africa, in the age before its large gold and diamond deposits had been discovered, was not nearly as attractive. Maintaining the Cape Colony around Cape Town at the foot of Africa was costing Britain a great deal. British troops were being lost in a series of frontier wars with the Xhosa and battles with the Zulu that would lead, within a year, to the disaster of Isandlwana and the defence of Rorke's Drift. The timing of Stanley's approach was not good and his suggestion that Britain should colonise the Congo River basin was firmly rejected by Whitehall.

In Brussels, Leopold proved more receptive. He had been dreaming for years of establishing his own colonial empire, but he had failed to locate the right piece of territory. When he learned of Stanley's success in charting the river, he invited the explorer to his palace in Brussels and made sure Stanley was treated lavishly. Within a few weeks the pair had hatched an ambitious plot. The ruler of one of Europe's smallest and youngest nations (Belgium was founded in 1830) commissioned the Welsh-born, naturalised American to stake the entire Congo River basin as the private property of the king. Stanley would be paid handsomely and Leopold would have the foundation for his empire.

Just two years after he crossed the Congo as an explorer, Stanley returned as a coloniser. This time he came by ship to the mouth of the river, before heading inland with a party of roadbuilders, determined to construct an access route through the Crystal Mountains that guard the impassable lower reaches of the river. It took two years and cost the lives of hundreds of African labourers, who were literally worked to death, but slowly some of the most inhospitable terrain in Africa was tamed. It was this display of indefatigability, as much as any of his other actions during his African expeditions, that earned Stanley the Swahili sobriquet Bula Matari, or Breaker of Rocks.

In keeping with the prevailing attitude of racial superiority assumed by almost all white visitors to Africa, Stanley paid little heed to the millions of native Congolese. There were times where he went through the motions of arranging 'treaties' with local chiefs, drawing up documents that effectively ceded the rights over the land to the 'king over the water'. It was hardly a negotiation between two equals, as the chiefs knew perfectly well what would happen if they did not sign. They would be overrun by the motley gang of well-armed colonial pioneers and camp followers accompanying Stanley. And just like the European slave traders of 400 years earlier. Stanley was adept at playing the tribes off against each other, providing arms, clothing and alcohol to one group so that it could conquer its local rival. Like dominoes the Congolese tribes fell, one after the other, to Stanley and the early colonial agents of the Belgian king as the white man's influence crept steadily inland across the immense river basin.

Leopold's colonising coup in the Congo led the other European powers to reconsider Africa. France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Britain had largely ignored the African interior until now, but the acquisitiveness of the Belgian king forced them to think again and in the early winter of 1884 the great European powers gathered at a grand conference convened in Berlin to carve up what remained unclaimed in Africa. Leopold was able to present his colonial claim over the Congo as a fait accompli and, when the conference ended in February 1885, the Act of Berlin gave its legal recognition to the Congo Free State. With a surface area of more than three million square kilometres, it was claimed not by Belgium, but by the king himself. Never in history, neither before nor since, has a single person claimed ownership of a larger tract of land.

The territory was mostly virgin rainforest and savannah, crisscrossed by the Congo River and its countless tributaries, inhabited by millions of Congolese, but in those first years of colonial rule it was not the natives who posed the greatest threat to Leopold's interests. Arab slavers in the east of the country - the ones whose stories of a mighty river in the centre of Africa first attracted Livingstone and Stanley in the 1860s and 1870s - were a much greater concern for Leopold. Many of these Arabs had already lived for decades in the east of the country, organising raiding parties to plunder slaves and ivory, which would then be transported by caravan back to the large Arab trading centres around Zanzibar. But the Berlin Conference had been a white man's meeting. The Arabs of east Africa had not been invited.

Various half-hearted attempts were made to forge peace treaties between the early Belgian colonists and the Arab slavers, but an increase in tension was inevitable as the Europeans grew steadily more avaricious. The rising tension culminated in a brief but bloody war that began in 1892. Both sides used Congolese tribesmen as foot soldiers and both sides committed atrocities, but modern European weapons meant that the Belgians prevailed, mopping up Arab resistance in a series of battles and skirmishes, as the white colonialists sought to purge the Congo of its Arab population and to draw up a clear frontier once and for all for the territory claimed solely by Leopold.

Lake Tanganyika was a convenient boundary marker. It is only seventy kilometres across at its widest point, but from north to south it runs for 650 kilometres, and the Belgian pioneers quickly focused on it as a natural border for the easternmost limit of the Congo Free State. First, they had to deal with the large local Arab population on the lake's shore. Ever since they first reached the Congo in the early nineteenth century, the Arab slavers had arrived on boats crossing the lake. A large settlement had grown at their principal landing site on the western shore of the lake, Mtowa, a short distance north of the mouth of the only river that drains the lake, the Lukuga.

On 5 April 1892 a Belgian sergeant called Alexis Vrithoff clashed with an Arab raiding party on high ground next to the river mouth. He was killed, but after the Belgians eventually crushed the Arabs, the site around the estuary was developed into the Congo's most important inland port, serviced by a railway, completed in 1915, that brought goods from the Congolese interior, and by ferries and steamers that crossed the lake to ports in what is now Zambia, Tanzania and Burundi. In honour of Albert I, the Belgian king who succeeded Leopold, the town was named Albertville - its name was changed to Kalemie in the late 1960s - and, according to my 1951 Travel Guide to the Belgian Congo, the construction of this great transport hub meant the port was `destined to have a great future'.

I saw little evidence of this 'great future' once Michel finally picked me up at the airstrip. From a distance Kalemie looked regular enough, and as we approached, bumping along on a sandy track contouring round the edge of Lake Tanganyika, I could see the town's main church, a white building with a rather elegant bell-tower standing proud on a headland, against a knobbly horizon of tree-covered hills, commanding a fine view over the lake. In the foreground, among the green of coconut palms and banana trees, there were two distinct columns of rust-red, corrugated-iron roofs flanking what appeared to be a main thoroughfare. And in the distance there was a small harbour tucked in the lee of a graceful breakwater, next to a railway terminus and marshalling yard.

But as the jeep laboured around the lake and we got closer to Kalemie, the most extraordinary thing happened. The fabric of the town grew flimsier until it seemed to vanish altogether.

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, although the logos dated not from the 1990s or the 1980s, but from half a century ago. Grass grew long and untroubled through the railway sleepers on the approaches to the disused station, and the sandy soil on either side of the tracks was drummed hard by generations of feet that had turned the old carriageway into a simple, arrow-straight footpath, walled on both sides by reedy grass swaying way above head height. An old railway carriage - built decades ago in South Africa and still bearing instructions in Afrikaans forbidding smoking - stood rusting in the tropical heat. In one of its compartments someone had made a small cooking fire on the floor, now surrounded by various dirty pots, and the carriage had the smell and stains of a doss-house.

Instead of it functioning high street, what I found was a dusty space filled by gaggles of meandering locals. A few hawkers sat behind small piles of stale biscuits or flat bottles of orange soda smuggled into Kalemie by boat from Tanzania on the other side of the lake. The more ambitious traders offered things like batteries and radios, but while the names on the Chinese-made packets sounded familiar, the misspellings of Philipps or Pannasonic suggested that nothing was genuine. Pedestrians could peruse at their leisure. They had no reason to worry about being run over as in the entire town there was only a handful of vehicles, mainly UN jeeps and one venerable Land Rover owned by some missionaries. And even when I saw one of these vehicles actually moving, they could only manage a walking pace, to avoid bucking and rearing uncontrollably over various potholes, uncovered drainage ditches and other obstacles in the town centre.

There were bicycles, old-fashioned things with solid frames painted black and primitive lever brakes, manufactured in China, propped up in the shade of the roadside trees, as their owners waited to offer them as taxis for customers willing to pay twenty Congolese francs, or four pence, to be taken from one end of the dusty strip to the other. I watched as women, wrapped in printed cotton cloth, some clutching salted fish bundled up in banana leaves, took up genteel side-saddle positions on the padded cushions attached to the racks above the bicycles' rear wheel, while the taxi boys heaved in the heat against the pedals. I could hear the soft chiming of Swahili as two women passengers chatted to each other while they were being slowly pedalled in parallel along the roadway.

Of the buildings themselves, there was little left 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. Damp, seasonal flooding from the nearby lake and collapsed foundations meant the interior rooms were mostly empty. Pipes that once brought mains water to each building lay broken and there was not one working light bulb. The town's main terrace of shops looked like one of those Hollywood film sets, which from the front has the appearance of solidity, but from the back is nothing but a few beams propping up a facade. 

Without cobalt or diamonds or gold to draw outsiders' interest here, Kalemie had been hollowed out by the years. Where once there had been a substantial settlement, nothing but the husk remained. 

As we drove into Kalemie, Michel quizzed me on my motives. He was extremely knowledgeable about the local history, and seemed delighted to have found in me someone to share his interest.

'So you are the man crazy enough to want to follow Stanley's route. The history of this place is extraordinary - the slavers and their ivory, the Belgians who fought battles right here where the town now stands, and the wars since independence - but I have never met anyone who comes here just for history's sake. History is a luxury people cannot afford around here, where the more pressing things are where the next meal is coming from or the next drink of clean water.' 

He spoke slowly, concentrating hard on steering the jeep along the bouncy road into town, sitting forward in the driver's seat, anxiously trying to see over the bonnet to anticipate the next pothole. 

'It's not the worst town in the country I have been to, but things are pretty basic here. The town is meant to get its electricity from a hydroelectric plant in the mountains north of here, built back in the 1950s - it's the one that Che Guevara attacked - but it's pretty intermittent these days. Some places are lucky enough to get a day of power, now and then, but we've had nothing for weeks now.'

I had read Guevara's diary about his time in the Congo. It was 1965 and he arrived here fired with revolutionary zeal, willing to risk his life in the fight against the Mobutu regime that America was in the process of installing. It was an era when the Cold War was being fought in numerous proxy wars all over Africa, and Guevara flew from Cuba to communist-controlled Tanzania to stage his insurgency across Lake Tanganyika. During a brief stopover in Tanzania he spent time with Laurent Kabila, then a young Congolese dissident and opponent of Mobutu. It would be more than thirty years before Kabila eventually replaced Mobutu, but at his first meeting Guevara was not overly impressed with Kabila's revolutionary credentials. He described him as a drunken womaniser rather than a true freedom fighter.

With heavy historic irony Guevara, the anti-colonialist par excellence, arrived in the Congo just as Stanley, the colonial pioneer, had done - by small boat. Guevara came under cover of darkness with a raiding party made up of trusted Cuban revolutionaries and a few anti-Mobutu Congolese rebels. Their landing place could only have been a short distance from the spot where Stanley made landfall in his British-built, collapsible boat, the Lady Alice, and after landing Guevara's team slipped into the heavily forested hills to the west of Lake Tanganyika, where they spent a few weeks trying to strike a blow against the Mobutu regime. Guevara sounds increasingly miserable in his diaries. His zeal for revolution steadily diminished as his fellow African revolutionaries proved incapable of organising basic supplies or communications.

It all ended in a chaotic attack on the hydroelectric plant at Bendera, about 150 kilometres north of Kalemie. The plant was one of the last construction projects completed by the Belgians, in the late 1950s, and involved an ambitious plan to dam a river in a steep-sided gorge halfway up a mountain, before piping the water through turbines. The terrain meant the project was difficult to complete, but it also meant it was difficult for Guevara to attack. When the assault failed, he blamed poor communication among his fellow fighters and the tone of his diary suggests the fiasco made him lose faith in his Congolese collaborators. He simply thought they were not up to the task of running a revolution. Within a few days Guevara was back on Lake Tanganyika, this time heading to Tanzania under cover of darkness. He never returned to the Congo.

Michel asked me in detail about the route I hoped to follow, from Kalemie all the way to the upper Congo River. 

'I would love to go through that area. I have read about it and flown over it, but I would love to see what is happening there, on the ground, after all this chaos.' 

'So why don't you come with me?' I asked. 'It would be great to have some company.'

Michel shook his head. 'My bosses would never let me. Our security rules would never allow it. Especially now, after the latest news from Burundi. I assume you have heard what happened?' 

I nodded. 

'Well, the very latest is that the leadership of the pro-Rwandan rebels have left Kinshasa in protest at the killings. And one of the rebel leaders has been quoted as saying the whole peace treaty is off and the transitional government suspended. If that is true, then I guess we can expect the war to be back on in a couple of days.'

For two years Michel had worked at the UN mission in Kalemie as a sort of combat disc jockey, learning Swahili and immersing himself in the traditions and lore of the local Congolese tribes. He ran the local office of Radio Okapi, a UN hearts-and-minds operation broadcasting to the 200,000 Congolese crowded into the town. Kalemie might be one of the biggest towns in the Congo, but it has no state radio or television, no newspapers, no landline telephones and no Internet access. I arrived the day after the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympics in Athens but, were it not for Michel's radio station, the event would have passed unnoticed in Kalemie.

We passed the ruins of the old airport, a single-storey 1950s building perforated with bullet holes and surrounded, on all sides, by puddles of shattered, red roof tiles. It had been shot up so many times that I was sure even the bullet holes had bullet holes. On top of one of the piles of broken masonry sat a Congolese militiaman, who seemed to scowl directly at me, idly waving his assault rifle, as our jeep crawled past. 

Michel noticed me wince and tried to sound reassuring. 'In town itself, things have been pretty quiet since the peace treaty. As you probably know there was some pretty had fighting hack here during the war and air raids by pro-government war planes, but the rebels, the mai-mai, and the government troops now seem to he getting on.

I was only half-listening as I watched a group of charcoal burners struggling to bring the produce of their day's work into town. Large chunks of charcoal had been crammed into floppy cages woven from thin strips of brown bark. The cages were then flung across the handlebars and frame of old bicycles, with more cages piled on top. The crazy, tottering loads were on the final leg of their journey, heaved through the sand into town by the bare chested men, whose already dark bodies were streaked with smears of sweat-congealed, jet-black charcoal powder. 

But then Michel said something that brought my attention straight back to him. 

As you probably know, like all of the eastern DRC, we had a bit of a wobble a few months back. If you look over there you will see what I mean.'

Kalemie was just a few hundred kilometres south of Bukavu, the scene of the June attack by pro-Rwandan rebels. It had prompted a backlash by the Congolese authorities against anyone linked with Rwanda, especially the Banyamulenge, a tribal group from eastern Congo who trace their ancestry back a few hundred years to the Tutsi tribes of Rwanda. No matter that the Banyamulenge have been in the Congo for generations, their association with Rwanda was enough to see them murdered and persecuted today by the Congolese. 

'There you can see our local Banyamulenge,' Michel said as we passed in through the gate of the UN base in Kalemie. He was pointing at a 200-strong crowd, mainly of children, gathered around a standpipe where they were messily filling bright yellow, plastic water containers. 'They arrived at the gate one day in one big group and said they feared for their lives. They have been here, living right there under plastic sheets out in the open for the last few months. We don't know quite what to do with them, but for the moment we are happy for them to camp at our gate.'

*

Evelyn Waugh was not overly impressed with Albertville when he passed through here in 1930. He arrived by ferry, spent two nights in the town and then headed west into the Congo proper by train. He wrote a travel book about his journey called Remote People, in which the Congolese section of the trip was described in unflattering terms. The relevant chapter is entitled 'Second Nightmare' and in it Waugh grizzles at length about the petty bureaucrats responsible for immigration at the port and the lack of anything for the visitor to do in Albertville, although he is fairly complimentary about the service he enjoyed at the port's principal hotel. He describes how he took out his portable typewriter and wrote some of the early chapters of the travel book as he was dive-bombed by mosquitoes, before he got into a steaming row with an irksome ferry-boat captain, who marooned him on the Congo River.

Michel told me it was not possible for me to stay at the UN base, so we went in search of the hotel Waugh described as offering `fairly good food'. What we found was a two-storey ruin on the main street with flaking paint and broken windows. A spacious first-floor balcony was supported by a number of elegant, fluted columns, but they were all pock-marked with what appeared to be bullet holes, and when I looked further up the front wall I could see why. The hotel had been converted, years after Waugh passed through, into an officers' club for the Congolese army, and the name still painted on the front wall, Mess Des Officiers, made it suitable for target practice during any of the town's subsequent periods of instability. 

`Try the Hotel Du Lac along the road,' a man shouted from the balcony when I asked if I could have a look around. `This is a military building now. You cannot come in.'

A larger three-storey structure, a short distance away, bore the hotel's name. Its construction in the 1950s came during Albertville's belle epoque, the period when the town was booming, and at the time it must have been an impressive place, the largest hotel for hundreds of kilometres. I stood back on the other side of the road and tried to picture it with cars parked outside, music coming out of the dining room, fans spinning in the rooms to keep down the heat and the mosquitoes. It took quite a leap of imagination. Fifty years after it was built, the hotel had no electricity or water and the rooms were mostly empty shells. Some people sat on chairs on what was once a terrace in front of the hotel, but when I asked about rooms they shook their heads.

I cursed silently. The American journalist who had tried to follow Stanley's route in the mid-1960s had passed through Albertville. The civil war was already five years old when he arrived in Albertville, and he described his euphoria at making it safely to the port. After all my own troubles reaching this spot, I recognised the same sense of euphoria in myself, but what I did not recognise was the town he portrayed, with its comfortable, functioning hotel offering hot water in every room. 

I had one other option for accommodation. During my research I had made contact with the International Rescue Committee, an American aid group, which kept an office in Kalemie during the war. I had tried to contact the office manager, Tommy Lee, by email, but he was using a fairly intermittent system that relied on a satellite telex that only worked a few hours each week, so I was not entirely sure if my messages had got through. 

`The IRC house is just down the road, but before I take you there, I want to show you something you might find interesting.' Michel was really getting into his role of Kalemie Tour Guide.

He drove me back along the main road, past the bicycle taxis and the derelict terrace. The awful road surface meant we only managed a walking pace and Michel was forever greeting people in Swahili, joshing and waving out of the jeep window, before he steered the vehicle up a steep hill, bouncing violently over some exposed tree roots and parked in front of what looked like a pair of giant, brown beetles. 

'What on earth are those?' I asked. 

'Go see for yourself,' answered Michel. 

It was as I got out of the car that I spotted the gun barrels emerging from under the scarab-like metal covers that looked like overturned, oversized woks. 

'First World War naval guns,' said Michel. 'The Belgians brought them here when Albertville was worth defending. I guess they remind you that once upon a time Europe thought this town worth fighting over.'

In 1915 Kalemie was strategically important enough to stage one of Africa's most peculiar episodes from the First World War. Two British motor launches were smuggled here by the Royal Navy for a surprise attack on a flotilla of German warships, which was enjoying unchallenged control over Africa's deepest lake. The railway might be a ruin today, but almost a century ago it was so well established that British naval planners used it to bring their attack boats here by train, after an overland journey from Cape Town, almost 5,000 kilometres to the south. The subsequent successful raid on the German ships became part of British naval lore, and a bowdlerised version of the story formed the basis for C.S. Forester's novel The African Queen, which was made into a 1951 Hollywood film starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.

Michel dropped me outside the IRC house in Kalemie, a rather sinister-looking building built from dark, volcanic stone, made even more imposing by its formidable iron gate. As his jeep pulled away, I heaved my rucksack onto my back and knocked loudly. A small shutter, the size of a letterbox, clunked open in the gate at eye level and a pair of eyes looked me up and down. Before I said anything, the gate swung open. Being white was clearly enough to gain entry.

`Please come in, we were expecting you, Mr Tim.' 

It took me it moment to work out what had happened. My emails must have got through and my name must have been passed to a gatekeeper who was not exactly overwhelmed with white visitors. 

'Please go inside the house. You will find Monsieur Tommy there.' 

I put my luggage down on the steps leading up to the house and made my way inside. In the front room, a black man lay dozing on a tired-looking sofa, and so, treading gingerly, I entered a large, dusty sitting room with a television at one end and a dining table at the other. The room was crammed with the furniture and kit I associated with itinerant aid workers - piles of food sacks, rucksacks and an array of electrical equipment like computers, satellite phones and cables - all covered in a filigree of dust and all connected to the same overworked power point. 

'Mr Lee, Mr Lee,' I called faintly. Kalemie's position just south of the Equator meant twilight would last only a few minutes. Darkness was already gathering, so I flicked a light switch. Nothing happened, so back outside I went, trying not to wake the man I assumed to be the housekeeper. 

I failed, and in a blather of blinking and yawning, the figure sat upright and spoke to me in the strongest American accent I had ever heard.

'Hi. You must be Tim. Welcome to Kalemie. I am Tommy Lee, a pleasure to meet you.' 

I sat with him for a while on the sagging sofa as he came round. Night had fallen and, without any lights in the town, the darkness was complete. Tommy stirred, saying something about this being the worst time for mosquitoes, and he checked that all the screened doors and windows were fully closed. He asked me about my plans and raised two heavy, querulous eyebrows when I said that I had come to Kalemie to try to travel to the river. 

'Folks don't move around much overland here.' He spoke slowly and deliberately. 'Some of our staff use our motorbikes to visit our projects out in the bush, but they don't go far.' 

I could not let the mention of motorbikes pass, so I plunged in. 

'Would there be any chance I could pay you to use two of your bikes?

'Son, I would love to be able to help you. But those bikes are about the most valuable thing we have around here, and my bosses would never let me give them to you.You are talking about a long distance to the river, seven hundred kilometers or more. I could not be sure the bikes would ever make it back.

I was disappointed, but at least I now knew that it was possible to get motorbikes along some of the bush tracks. 

It was now very dark, but inside the main room I could make out a shadowy figure moving around, skilfully managing to avoid bumping into the furniture. I peered harder and Tommy spotted my curiosity. 

'That's our cook. We eat early round here and that's dinner she is laying out. We have a generator, but we don't have much fuel so we don't turn it on until we really need it. Come on in, it's time to eat.' 

He shouted over his shoulder for one of the security guards to turn on the generator and, after a distant mechanical roar, the house lights flickered into life and for the first time I could have a good look around. On the simple (lining table two places had been set and between them sat a large, battered cooking pot and I could see the red blinking lights of various pieces of valuable communication equipment as they greedily took their nightly recharge. 

Tommy saw me staring at the plug. Keeping the batteries of my camera, satellite phone and laptop topped up required careful husbandry and I did not know when I would next have it chance to recharge.

'I am lucky because we are just about the only house in town with power right now, but it takes a lot of effort to get the right fuel, make sure it's clean and keep the generator running. Sure, you can recharge, but we only run it for a few hours so you better sort it out now.' 

The tour of the house continued as we turned down a single, dark corridor. 

'At the end there, that's the bathroom. It's not much, but the water is clean enough to wash with, and here is your room.' 

The room was more passed through than lived in. Without many alternatives for accommodation in Kalemie, this house would have been visited not just by the IRC staff, but by all sorts of hangers-on like me, and the room reflected this. A large bed, as saggy as the sofa outside, filled the middle of the room, boxed in by a cavernous mosquito net, and around the edge of the room were various old bits of luggage and clothing abandoned by previous visitors.

Back at the dinner table, Tommy was already serving me rice and chicken, before offering me a glass of water. A few hours earlier Michel had pointed at a crowd of women washing in the stagnant water of the Lukuga River and told me about Kalemie's recent cholera outbreak, so I paused before accepting the offer. Tommy tried to reassure me. 'We boil all our water and then we filter it - it's routine.' 

After dinner, the generator was turned off and I sat in the darkness listening as Tommy told me about himself. I could make out the shadows of his hands tweaking the whiskers on his chin as he described a career spent largely doing aid work in Africa. He had served most of his time in francophone west Africa, which explained his excellent French and Nigerian wife, and had only arrived in the Congo relatively recently. But in the short time he had been here, he had already had a grim experience.

'I was in Bukavu in June, when those rebel soldiers came into town. It was a bad scene, man, a really bad scene.' 

I asked him to explain. 

'As you may know, Bukavu is like the capital for the aid community working in that region of the eastern Congo. Every group is there. And for the sake of security, all the groups are on the same radio net, so we all know what is going on. When the rebels arrived, we all just hit the deck, staying in our houses and listening in on the radio to try and work out what was happening. Well, there was this small aid group with a compound, where a young Irish girl was working with an older woman - from Denmark or Sweden, I think. Anyway, the rebels got in there somehow and we all lay there on the ground, listening on the radio, as this young woman was raped.

`It was horrible. But the older woman, who had been shot but was still alive, kept telling us what was happening. She was a nurse and somehow she kept her voice under control the whole way through, describing things clearly and factually. It was awful, man. We had a running commentary. She hoped the message would get out to the UN troops up there from South Africa, but they were fucking hopeless, man - it took them more than a day before they eventually came into town. 

`That was my welcome to the Congo. Scary, eh?

With that Tommy got up and left me, muttering something about needing to check his messages from the United States. I sat in silence, thinking about the story he had just told, before heading to the sanctuary of my net-shrouded bed. The last I saw of Tommy that night was through the window of his small office. It was dark apart from the glow of his laptop reflected on his whiskery face, as he tapped out messages for relay via satellite phone and swatted insects attracted to the only light source for kilometres around. It made me think of the mosquito-plagued Evelyn Waugh, tapping away on his portable typewriter as he worked on his first draft of Remote People, in this same town seventy years earlier. 

The following morning I was woken by a voice asking, insistently, for Monsieur Tim. Dawn had broken, but it was still early and there was no sign of Tommy. I hauled on my trousers and shirt and emerged blinking to find a smartly dressed Congolese man sitting on my favourite Baggy sofa. 

`Good morning. My name is Benoit Bangana. I work for Care International and have been told you need help with motorbike.

`Yes, that's right.' I was not yet fully awake and was struggling to take this in. Brian Larson, the boss of Care International based thousands of kilometres away on the other side of the country, had delivered on his half-promise of help. 

`Well, I am here with one other colleague. We have two motorbikes and, if you are prepared to take the risk, we will take you some of the way.' 

Still half-asleep, I was not sure I could believe what I was hearing. It just did not compute with everything I had been told about this place. A series of questions came blathering out from me, as my sleepy head cleared. Where had this man come from? How had he got here? Was he serious about heading overland to the Congo River?

`I am based in the town of Kasongo, a little over halfway between here and Kindu on the river. Kasongo is about five hundred kilometres from here, and Care International is the only aid group based there. Normally we come and go by plane, but recently we have been trying to extend our area of operation and for the past few months we have been preparing to go overland from Kasongo to the town of Kabambarre, about three hundred kilometres from here. Motorbikes are the only way to travel. When we got the message that you needed help, I was already planning a trip to Kabambarre, so my boss asked me if I would come all the way here and take you back.' 

I was thrilled. 

`How far can you take me? Do you know the way?' 

Benoit smiled and tried to sound reassuring. 

`I reckon I can get you to Kasongo. Our bikes are good and I think we can buy enough petrol here in Kalemie. Out there, there is nothing, so we will have to take everything we need for the journey from here, all the food, all the water, everything.' 

That was progress, but my main concern was the security situation. `Is it safe? What about the rebels and the mai-mai?'

At this Benoit stopped smiling and looked more sombre. 

`For the security situation, well, that would be your own risk - I cannot guarantee your security. You can meet mai-mai anywhere out there and if you are lucky, and they are not drunk, then you can get through. I am not so sure about a white man, though. I have never travelled here with a white man. I am sorry, but I cannot guarantee anything out there.' 

Those words stayed with me long after he stopped speaking. 'I cannot guarantee anything out there.' They tempered the excitement I felt about securing a motorbike. When I conceived this trip, I hoped to slip round the rebel soldiers, but Benoit seemed adamant this was not possible. 

We took two cups of black tea from the cook, who had returned to her cooking station - a charcoal burner on the back step of the house - and discussed options. I wanted to know more about Benoit and why he was prepared to risk his life in the badlands of Katanga.

`I am an engineer by training, but there is no work in the Congo apart from with aid groups like Care International. Now the war has ended we can hope again for an improvement in our lives, but the improvement will only come if there is normality, and there will only be normality if you can, once again, travel safely across our country. Someone has to be the first to go along these roads after the war, and as long as I make all the right preparations, then I am happy to be the first person.' 

'But aren't you scared when you travel in these sorts of areas?' 

`I am afraid a little, but then I think about the good that will come to the people of Katanga if the roads are made safe again and life can go back to normal. Every village we reach, every stream we cross, is another small movement towards normality again in the Congo.' 

`What about travelling with a white man? Won't that be even more risky for you?

'I always ride with my colleague, Odimba, and we have developed our own little strategy when we think it looks dangerous - we try not to stop. Out in the forest the rebels are not expecting bikes, so if we are lucky we hurry past them and the first they see of us is our backs, disappearing into the forest. If we keep going they have no idea if we are black, white, Congolese or foreign.' 

I looked at Benoit very closely. I was not just asking him to risk his life on my behalf. I was considering trusting him with my own. It was a big call, but the thing that swung it was the way he answered my question about how much I should pay him for his help. 

'I am paid by Care International, who have asked me to extend our range around Kasongo. Travelling with you is part of my job, so you don't have to pay me anything. If we get to Kasongo, you can talk to the senior man there about the cost of hiring the bikes. But as for me, I don't expect any payment.' 

That was the moment I decided Benoit Bangana was a man I could trust, but before I made any more decisions about the security situation, I thought it wise to ask Michel's advice.

I found Michel at work in his radio station, a standard-issue UN container at the garrison headquarters built in the ruin of a Belgian-era cotton factory on the outskirts of town. Thousands of workers had once processed raw cotton grown in the sweaty Congolese interior and shipped here by lorry and train. Terraces of brick houses had been erected for hundreds of workers, but most of them lay in ruins now outside the razor-wire perimeter of the UN base. 

Michel was deep in thought, trying to work out how the local UN commander should deal with an imminent public-relations crisis. Peacekeepers in Kalemie and elsewhere across the Congo had been caught paying local girls, under the age of consent, for sex. Almost all UN missions suffer from the same problem, with bored, well-paid young men deployed to places where poverty is so acute that girls are willing to sell themselves. Michel had just come from a meeting where the large scale of the problem in Kalemie had been revealed. He seemed happy for the distraction I provided when I introduced Benoit and explained about the motorbikes. Michel was impressed. 

'You move fast. Having a motorbike is great news. Well done.'

`But I am still worried about security. Benoit says there are maimai all along these tracks. Do you know anyone local they might listen to, who could help me get through?' 

`There is one person I know about from Kalemie who dares to travel regularly through the bush. He is a pygmy and he runs a small aid group here in town that tries to protect the rights of pygmies. The group's name is La Voix des Minorites, Minorities' Voice, and the man's name is Georges Mbuyu. I have interviewed him many times.' 

The name sounded familiar. I looked back at my research notes and saw that an Anglican missionary from Uganda had once told me of Georges Mbuyu and his pygmy rights group. I had read a report about the role Georges played in negotiating the release of four local villagers arrested during the war by the pro-Rwandan rebels, who were then in control of Kalemie, but the missionary had told me that getting in touch with Georges was impossible from outside the Congo. Now that I was in Kalemie, Michel assured me that finding Georges could not be simpler.

Benoit and I piled into Michel's jeep and drove back through town, past the bicycle taxis and the hawkers. We followed the road up past the church on the headland and, just as we came level with a derelict Belgian villa, Michel stopped. The facade was cracked, standing on half-collapsed foundations left exposed by numerous seasonal rains. A small man, a tad under five foot in height, wearing a T-shirt, dark trousers and plastic flip-flops, emerged from inside. When he saw Michel, he grinned. 

The pair greeted each other warmly in Swahili and then Michel broke into French, introducing me as a writer. Georges raised his eyebrows in astonishment and then seemed to remember his manners. 

'Please come into my office,' he said, leading me over the broken verandah and into a bare room where most of the plaster had either fallen off the wall or was about to. He proffered me a rickety chair and asked me my business. 

'I want to go overland from here all the way to the Congo River. I want to follow the same route used by the explorer, Stanley, when he became the first white man to cross the Congo. But I am worried about security. Can you help?' 

He thought for a moment.

'I cannot remember the last time a white man went through that area. It has been many, many years. But I know some of the maimai near town. It is not just the pygmies that my group represents. We represent all minorities, and sometimes that includes mai-mai. Some of the mai-mai are not rebels, they are just villagers who want to protect themselves. These are good people and I can talk to them. The problem is the outsiders who come down here into our province of Katanga - they are the ones who are out of control.' 

'Would you be prepared to accompany me, by motorbike, towards the river?' I tried not to sound too desperate as I asked the question. 

For a moment, Georges was quiet. He looked at his colleague, a much taller man, Mutombo Nganga; they had a brief exchange in Swahili and then he turned to me. 

'I cannot go with you all the way, but I am prepared to take the risk along the roads close to Kalemie. I think you will be safe if I go with you. I know these mai-mai well. I grew up in the bush and I know their families and their villages, so I could try to help you.' 

There was something reassuringly trustworthy about Georges. Like Benoit, he did not mention money, but when I asked him if I could pay him, he mumbled something about me making a donation to La Voix des Minorites.

`But have you been there recently, along the road between here and Kindu?' 

`No-one has been all the way along that road recently. It is a long way, more than seven hundred kilometres. But in our province, Katanga, closer to here, I have walked along some of the roads in recent years. The mai-mai are not all out of control, you know. I have been with many of them and they will listen to me. But once you leave Katanga and enter into the next province of Maniema, then that will he different. I do not know that place at all.' 

When Stanley passed through here, the name Maniema itself was enough to cause many of his bearers to run away. It had terrible associations with cannibalism and sorcery. I was more sanguine about it. Maniema was a problem for another day some time in the future. For the moment, I had a much bigger problem to deal with. If Georges was going to come with us, I needed to find another motorbike. 

It was Benoit who immediately spotted the problem. 

'We have only two bikes. You will ride with Odimba on one bike and I will ride on the other with all our luggage. There is no space for Georges, and how would he get back here to Kalemie? I have been in this town for a few days now and I have not seen any other suitable bikes we could use.'

I asked Michel and he was more optimistic. He took us into the centre of town and stopped near a small office run by the World Food Programme, the UN agency responsible for feeding refugees, left us in the jeep and walked over to the security guard. After two minutes' conversation he came back. 

'My friend here knows a man with a motorbike, who might be prepared to rent it for Georges as long as he only goes a short distance out of town. He will try to find the man, but it will take half an hour or so.' 

Michel had to leave, so Benoit, Georges and I all jumped out of the jeep and killed time in the centre of Kalemie until the guard came back. The heat was getting to me and I needed to drink something. Some bottles of sugary orangeade were the only thing available, so I bought three from a hawker and we all stood in the shade of a coconut tree drinking them. On the other side of the road was the relic of a building that looked like a restaurant or cafe. There was a fenced-in garden and an old sign that said `Cercle des Cheminots' or 'Railwaymen's Club'. I remembered seeing photographs of this place from the 1940s and 1950s when it was full of Belgian railway employees, seated at small wooden tables draped with chequered table cloths and laden with plates of food and bottles of wine. For years the railway company - La Compagnie des Chemins de Fer des Grands Lacs, or CFL - had been the biggest employer in the town, and this was where the employees drank, ate and socialised.

I walked inside to find a wreck. A wooden bar ran along one wall and a tall Congolese lady stood behind it. 

'Do you have anything I could drink?' 

`No.' 

'Do you have anything I could eat? 

'No.' 

Before I left, I spotted a pile of crockery on a table. The top one caught my eye. It was marked with the livery of CFL, a swirling red-and-white pennant, a relic of an age when customers and staff would have eaten off company crockery. 

Back on the main street, we returned to our rendezvous to find a grubby-looking man talking to Michel's security guard. 

His eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled of alcohol. ,if you want a motorbike, I am your man.' He could barely stand he was so drunk. 

My response was a bit tetchy and impatient. `If I am going to allow my guide to ride with you on your bike, I need to see it.' 

`I have thought of that. Follow me.' 

The man, Fiston Kasongo, then led us down a track away from Kalemie's high street to the abandoned railway, where he had hidden his bike in some long grass. 

`There is my bike. It is a great bike.' 

I could see Benoit was not convinced. Benoit had a pair of Yamaha off-road hikes. They were only 100cc, much smaller than the 900cc bike I used to ride in London, but Benoit assured me they were the best hikes for Congolese tracks; light enough to lift over obstacles and strong enough to cope with the huge distances and awful trails. The hike Fiston was offering had a brand name - TVS Max - that I did not recognise, and was much less sturdy. 

Benoit tapped me on the shoulder and took me off to a safe distance so that he could raise his concerns. 

'I have never seen that make of bike before. It does not look good enough to me.' 

I was beginning to feel sceptical, but Georges then joined in. The bike looks okay for me. I am only going to come with you for a day or so, not the whole journey. In the past I have walked this same distance, so if we have any problems I can always walk.'

If 'Georges was game, that was enough for me. Benoit nodded slowly and I returned to the swaying Fiston. A price was then settled upon. I asked Fiston how much he wanted per day. He hesitated for a moment and said $125. Benoit's eyes flickered disapprovingly, so I offered $50. Fiston did not hesitate for a second, agreeing enthusiastically to the price. He shook my hand, promised to meet me at the IRC house and, before leaving on his bike, asked for a down payment to allow him to buy some fuel. I gave him $20 and he disappeared, weaving along a footpath through the high grass in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke that spoke of an engine in distress.

I spent the next three days preparing for the journey. First, I had to get permission from both the local district commissioner and military commander. Even in a large town like Kalemie where the state fails to provide any teachers, doctors or policemen, it still insists on pieces of paper to authorise the toings and froings of foreigners. I was wary about making too many introductions as I feared the authorities would whip up greater problems, but Michel assured me that the commissioner, Pierre Kamulete, would not cause trouble. Michel volunteered to make the introductions, so on my second morning in Kalemie he drove me and my team - Benoit the biker, and Georges the pygmy - up past the main church and along to the ruins of the old colonial governor's house, which now served as the commissioner's office.

We sat on an old school bench in the hall outside the commissioner's office, along with a few other supplicants waiting for an audience with the commissioner. When our turn came we all trooped into a large room, at the end of which stood a big desk with M. Kamulete sitting behind it. The desk was bare apart from a piece of paper torn from a school textbook, covered in handwriting. At the other end of the room sat two military men, one a large man in khaki fatigues and the other smaller, also wearing uniform, but with naval insignia on his epaulettes.

`Look at this, Michel, what do you make of this'?' The commissioner knew Michel well and wanted his opinion on the handwritten page. He handed it to Michel, who read it slowly. It was a public attack on the commissioner, an anonymous Swahili denunciation of the inefficiency and corruption of his administration. Written in capital letters using a blue biro, it had been discovered that morning pinned to a coconut tree in the town centre. It accused the commissioner and his staff of deliberately cutting the power line connecting the town with the Bendera hydroelectric power station for sinister, political reasons. The pair of them discussed it earnestly for a few minutes and I quietly shook my head. While the rest of the world drowned in information provided by broadband Internet connections and live satellite television, the political debate here in Kalemie revolved around a rude message, written on a child's notepad and nailed to a tree. 

Once the issue had been dealt with to the satisfaction of the commissioner, Michel thought it was time to introduce me. He emphasised my interest in the explorer Stanley and my historical connection through the Telegraph, before I was allowed to thank the commissioner for his time and ask if he would grant me the necessary authority to head on my way though Katanga.

The trouble I was expecting did not materialise. The commissioner listened to my plans and made a few remarks about how difficult it was to travel safely through the Congo. He gave the impression of finding my plan trifling, not suspicious, humouring me like someone on a fool's errand, confident I would be back in Kalemie in a few days after failing to get through Katanga. At no stage did he ask for money. He simply checked my passport, looked at the identity documents of Georges and Benoit, and barked an instruction at his secretary to prepare the necessary stamps. It was then that he pointed to the larger of the two military men in the room, telling me I would also need the permission of the local commander, Lieutenant Colonel Albert Abiti Mamulay. The colonel squirmed in his seat as the commissioner pointed at him and said we must come up to his headquarters for the relevant stamp.

We followed the colonel outside to his waiting staff car. It was an old Peugeot, which looked too fragile to take any more crashes or bumps. I was wrong. As we watched, the colonel's driver jammed the car into reverse and rammed it firmly into a rocky bank, before over-revving and charging off up the hill towards the barracks, bumping over exposed tree roots and rivulets scoured into the roadway by rain. 

I remembered the description by the American journalist Blaine Littell of the same military barracks in the 1960s. He had reached Albertville just after the town had been recaptured by government troops, and when he got to the barracks he was given his own display of torture tactics. A hapless rebel, accused by the government troops of involvement in Albertville's uprising, was paraded and humiliated for Mr Littell at gunpoint.

There were no rebels to torture when I arrived at the same building forty years after Mr Littell. I saw the colonel disappear into a tatty old house and we tried to follow. A squat man, a pygmy the same size as Georges but without his charm, barred our way and told us firmly to wait outside. I handed over the piece of paper already stamped by the commissioner and stood under a mango tree with another group of men. Some of their clothing was khaki, so I assumed they were soldiers. The oldest then did something peculiar. From the lower branches of the tree he plucked a silver bugle. It was buckled and pitted, but he solemnly set about polishing with his sleeve. 

I walked across and asked him who he was. 

`I am the bugler. It is my job to sound the bugle at dawn, midday and sunset.' 

`Have you always been in the army?' 

`No, I was only just brought into the army this year. I was a musician in the railway band before the Belgians left and I am the only person left in Kalemie with any musical knowledge.'

With the necessary stamps on my travel pass, all that was left was to arrange the fuel, food and water for our trip. But before that I wanted to test the bikes, so I suggested a run to Mtowa, the lakeside village at the spot where Stanley first reached the Congo. 

Georges said he knew Mtowa well and would guide me, so off we headed for my first taste of Congolese motorbiking. Benoit rode his bike with Georges riding pillion, and I rode Benoit's second bike. The route took us out over the bridge across the Lukuga River, a cast-iron structure built by the Belgians with a single carriageway. It was swarming with pedestrians and cyclists as Benoit led the way, tooting on the bike's horn to clear a path, before we headed north from the town past the UN base. When Michel had picked me up from the airport the road had felt sandy, and on the bike it was downright dangerous. The sand made the tyres slew extravagantly from side to side and one particularly deep trough pitched me heavily down on my side. Breaking an ankle now would not be a good idea, I thought, as I dusted myself down and set off more cautiously.

The road took us round the back of the UN base and for the first time I could see the scale of the old cotton factory that the Belgians had built here. As well as the large warehouses for processing the cotton, there were dozens of houses for the employees, covering a huge campus. The cotton was not grown here on the lakeside as the climate was not quite right. To grow, the cotton plants needed the greater heat and humidity of the Congo River valley, and under the Belgians the raw material was then transported hundreds of kilometres by rail and road to this factory, where it was spun into fibre and then woven into cloth. By its size alone, I could tell the plant must have been an impressive sight when operational, but all lay in ruins as we buzzed by on the bikes. 

The going was slow. We were following what had once been a road, but we were forever slowing to pick our route over streams that had carved their way across the carriageway, or patches of mud that had dried in wavy ridges. For several kilometres the terrain was low and flat before the track started to climb a series of hills. Just as the road began to rise, we passed through several villages, where the sound of the bikes was enough to draw crowds of children. In one village I saw Georges tapping Benoit on the shoulder, asking him to stop. He hopped off the bike and began to talk with a group of villagers. There was something slightly odd about the scene, but it took me a few moments to work out what I found curious - Georges no longer appeared short.

`This is a village of pygmies,' he explained. `I come here from time to time to hear about what is happening to these people. Throughout the history of the Congo the pygmies have suffered, and it continues today. That is one of the largest parts of our job, to fight for the rights of these people.' 

A lopsided sign was tied to a tree. It was a piece of bark that had been flattened and a name had been written using ash in crude, uneven letters on its pale underside. It reminded me of illustrations from A.A. Milne books and it read 'La Voix des Minorites', the name of the group run by Georges. The village was composed of tiny grass huts arranged around an area of dirt beaten flat by shoeless feet. As Georges spoke to the village elder, a group of children wearing rags played a rather hazardous game, which involved the player trying to pick up as many sticks as possible that had been scattered on the ground while dodging a coconut thrown at her by rival players. 

Back on the bikes, the road climbed and the bush got thinner until finally I got the view of the lake I had been hoping for. I stopped my bike and climbed up a bank. The lake stretched away to the east as far as I could see, but just below me was the village of Mtowa and a headland, the first piece of Congolese land Stanley touched when he arrived here by boat across the lake in September 1876.

`I know everything about Stanley.' The words of the village chief, Idi Kavunja, grabbed my attention. It had taken me a week to get here from Johannesburg, but I was finally on the trail of the explorer. Hearing his name, pronounced in the French style of 'Stan-lay', threw me. I was talking to a chief whose forebears could have met the explorer, but the magic of the moment was lost when it became clear he was talking rubbish. 

'He is buried here. If you pay me money, I will show you the grave.' I looked into a pair of eyes that had an oily, unfocused sheen. The chief was now craning forward, the sinews on his scrawny neck as tight as guitar-strings, and his breath was pungently high. `You are a white man, you have a phone. I am a chief, I need a phone. You must give me your phone.'

There was nothing threatening about the chief. He was a slight man, wearing the remnants of a pinstriped suit that was several sizes too big for him. Inside a wide and grubby shirt collar, his neck rattled around like a turtle's, giving him the impression of a child dressed up in his parents' clothes. But there was nothing child-like about his next outburst. 

'You white men only ever come here to profit from the Congo. Stanley was the first. Then came the Belgians. How do I know you have not come here to profit?'

Georges looked embarrassed and I made a polite but firm apology and returned to our bikes. We rode down to the water's edge, following a track through the reed beds that was used by fishermen. When it got too muddy for the bikes, I parked and walked down to a break in the reeds where the fishermen had pulled up their dugouts. A boy was standing ankle-deep in the jetblack mud, hunting for worms. I shouted a question, asking if he knew the name of this place. 

He nodded and shouted back. 'Mtowa.' 

I wanted to see if any of Mtowa's history still lingered about the place, asking, 'Do you know the old name? It used to be called Arab's Crossing. This was where the slavers used to arrive from the other side of the lake.' 

The boy thought for a moment, shook his head blankly and continued worming. Suddenly he shouted something in Swahili, something that made Georges become visibly more tense.

'He said there are land mines all around here, left by Ugandan troops when they occupied this area during the war.' Georges was now peering into the reedy undergrowth. 

'Look there,' he shouted, pointing at a red warning sign. In large black letters it said: 'Beware! Mines!' 

Very slowly, we followed our footprints back to the bikes for the return trip to Kalemie. 

As a trial run, the trip to Mtowa was a success. The bikes stood up well to the shocking conditions of the track and we had managed about ten kilometres an hour. I had not hurt myself, and both Benoit and Georges had been helpful companions. But the words of the chief stayed with me, as my first hint of the residual bitterness felt by Congolese for centuries of suffering at the hands of outsiders. 

The old man might have been drunk, but he was right. Outsiders have robbed and exploited the people of the Congo ever since the days of the first European and Arab slavers. The territory that Stanley staked in the name of Leopold witnessed what many regard as the first genocide of the modern era, when millions of Congolese were effectively worked to death trying to meet the colonialists' almost insatiable demand for resources, most notably rubber. And since independence, foreign powers have toyed with the Congo, stripping its mineral assets and exploiting its strategic position, never mindful of the suffering inflicted on its people. And that really was the point. At every stage of its bloody history, outsiders have tended to treat Congolese as somehow sub-human, not worthy of the consideration they would expect for themselves. For progress to be made, outsiders must treat Congolese as equals and they could do worse than follow the example of an amazing white woman I discovered after we got back to Kalemie.

It took some time to track down the town's last white, Belgian resident. Michel had lived there for two years, but he had only ever heard mention of the mysterious woman, who kept herself to herself, living in an old villa on the hill behind the main church.

Genevieve Nagant's house was tucked some way off the main road. It took some finding, and I had to clamber through rough bush before I finally found the front door and knocked. From inside, I could hear various locks being undone before it was opened by the smiling seventy-seven-year-old. The door opened into a hall and ground-floor room that were musty and full of books. The humidity had caused most to swell and lose their bindings. Many had been rewrapped in unmarked, brown-paper wrappers. It looked like the study of an eccentric Oxford don, an image Mlle Nagant reinforced as she fussed about, apologising for the mess, thrusting books and pamphlets at me, before shooing me upstairs to a much fresher, first-floor living room, which opened out onto a balcony. 

On entering the room, something immediately caught my eye. On the wall there were two pictures. They were crayon drawings of tribal figures, paddling a canoe against a backdrop of thatched huts and bush. It was a hot afternoon, but the pictures gave me goosebumps. They were exactly the same as the ones my mother bought when she passed through this town in 1958. 

'Do you like these pictures?' Miss Nagant had noticed my reaction. 

'They remind me of my home in England. My mother bought some pictures just like these when she travelled through the Congo before I was born. Seeing them makes me think of the stories she told about her journey.' 

Miss Nagant smiled and for a moment we looked at the pictures together. 'In the late 1950s, Albertville was the best it ever got. The trains would arrive at the station and the passengers could connect with the liners. I remember you could hear the whistles of the ships as they left the port, and sometimes you could even hear the band playing on the top deck in first class.' 

We went to sit outside on her balcony. The house stood on the headland near the church and from tip there I got a fine view of the lake. The sky was clear and the bright sun made the water sparkle for the first time during my visit to Kalemie. At last I could see why the Belgians knew it as the `Pearl of Tanganyika'.

'I was horn near Liege, but arrived here in 1951. I was in my twenties and my job was as a teacher of social science. My duties were to teach Congolese ladies who came from villages about life in towns such as this one. We had classes in water hygiene, cooking, baby care and that sort of thing. People remember the Belgian colonial rule as a time for cruelty, but towards the end progress was being made across all of society. I used to live with a nurse who worked on a health programme that was successful in ending leprosy in the area and much of the malaria. Can you imagine that? Today, leprosy and malaria are killing thousands of people all over the Congo.' 

In 1960, within days of independence being granted to the Congo, the first violence broke out. In Albertville, almost the entire Belgian community left within a matter of weeks. Why had Mlle Nagant stayed?

Her elegant reply revealed that she was a rare breed of Belgian colonial, one who genuinely cared for the local Congolese people. 'Because when you plant a seed you must tend it before it will blossom.'

Since independence, she had lived through four decades of chaos. Her tiny Belgian civil-service pension used to be sent here through the post office, but when the postal service collapsed in the 1970s she began relying on the kindness of Belgian missionaries, who would courier the small amount of money back when returning from leave. 

And how does the situation today compare with what Mlle Nagant has witnessed since 1951? 

'I am sorry to say that today is worse than ever before. I have got used to the lack of water. I have got used to the lack of power. I have got used to the lack of supplies in town. But the thing that makes today so bad is the lack of the rule of law. There was a time when at least there were some police who could keep some sort of order, or even soldiers you could go to, but today there is nothing. Everything is upside down. Today, a driver for the UN here is paid ten times more than the provincial governor from the government. How can you run a government in circumstances like that? As I said, everything is upside down.'

She went inside and emerged a few moments later with a clinking tray. On it was a recycled wine bottle and two glasses. We watched as the blue of the lake steadily darkened with the dipping of the sun, and she toasted my health with her homemade white wine. 

I asked her how she filled her days and she explained that she was writing an anthropological thesis on the early Congolese tribes discovered by the first Albertville residents in the last years of the nineteenth century. She was particularly interested in a local man, Stephano Kaoze, a priest who became the first black abbot of the Congo. It had become her life's work to record the thoughts and writings of Abbot Kaoze. 

When I told her about my plan to travel overland to the river, she thought for it moment and went to get something from the chaos of her study downstairs.

'Here it is - this is one of the sayings of Abbot Kaoze, which might be of value to you.' 

I took the flimsy notebook she offered me and read what she was pointing at. In the late 1890s Abbot Kaoze had this to say about travel. When going on a journey it is not just the strength of a man's legs, but the provisions he prepares for the trip.' 

I walked back through the derelict ruin of Kalemie thinking about my own provisions and preparations. My mind was working as I tried to decide what I should do in the aftermath of the killings in Burundi and the resulting threat by the pro-Rwandan rebel group to rip up the peace treaty. 

If the war restarted, there was no way I would take the risk of trying to cross the Congo. Michel said the UN alert state had already been raised as a result of the killing, but the UN was waiting to see the next move by the various rebel groups before it began the subsequent stage of its security plan - withdrawing all civilian staff, like Michel, from the Congo.

I had until 5 a.m. the following day to make up my mind. Benoit and Odimba had been away from their Care International base for more than a week and, with the security situation deteriorating, they were anxious to get themselves and their precious motorbikes back to base as soon as possible. They told me they would be leaving at 5 a.m., with or without me.

The sun had set and the town was deathly quiet as I walked down the hill past the empty plinth, where a statue of the Belgian king, Albert I, had once stood before an angry crowd had ripped it down in the aftermath of independence. I continued past the silent railway station, where my mother had arrived in the 1950s, and the ruins of the hotel, where Evelyn Waugh stayed in the 1930s.

It had taken me four years of research and patience to get to this point. If I did not take my chance tomorrow, there was a risk it would be years before the next opportunity would come round.

next

Walked to Death

PART 3

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/part-3-blood-river-journey-to-africas.html

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a journalist, I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of artistic, cultural, historic, religious and political issues. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Copyrighted material can be removed on the request of the owner.