Part 3 : Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart...Walked to Death...The Jungle Books

Blood River : A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

5. 

Walked to Death

As I emerged from the house on the morning we were to leave Kalemie, Benoit appeared to be wrestling with eels. It was still dark, and with my head torch all I could make out was his shape, leaning over the back of one of the motorbikes, struggling with various long, black things with a springy and clearly disobedient life of their own. The eel image was reinforced by Benoit's outfit. He was wearing a bright yellow plastic raincoat, with heavy gloves, knee pads, goggles and black, shiny wellington boots. He looked like a ninja North Sea trawlerman. 

'Can I help?' I asked without much conviction. 

He ignored me and, in between the grunts and curses, I worked out what was going on. He was using old bicycle inner tubes as luggage straps to attach my kit to the back of his motorbike. Knowing the balance of his bike and how it depended on the loading, he insisted on doing it by himself. Eventually, after much stretching, snapping, knotting and restretching, he stood back, let out a sigh and pronounced himself satisfied everything was secure. To me, it looked anything but. The 100cc motorbike was now sitting heavily on its rear wheel, with my rucksack, a jerrycan and various other pieces of gear bulkily taking up most of the rider's seat. Above the handlebars was another hulking arrangement of fuel bottles, water canisters and other bundles, trapped in its own web of straining inner tubes. And on top of it all, Benoit was wriggling into two rucksacks - one on his back, the other slung in reverse across his chest. 

He could see I was sceptical. 'It's okay; these bikes are amazingly strong.' 

I found him reassuring. The same cannot be said for Fiston. My `local hire' motorbike-man had turned up stinking of booze, swaying extravagantly and mumbling something about needing more petrol. The day before I had impressed upon him the importance of having a full tank when we set out, and had paid him part of his fee in advance so that he could make sure it was full. In retrospect, this was a stupid thing to have done. He had clearly spent the cash on getting wasted. I grimaced, but, yet again, Benoit was the one who dealt with the problem. 

'I thought this might happen,' he said. 'Last night I bought another few litres of petrol for emergencies.' 

In a town like Kalemie where there are no petrol stations, fuel is sold on an ad hoc basis. It is of dodgy provenance, having been smuggled here by boat from Tanzania, and of even dodgier quality, `watered down' with palm oil or any other suitable solvent. It is sold in old bottles, jars or cans and nobody cares too much about making sure they are clean. By torchlight I watched Benoit filling Fiston's tank from a plastic bottle. Instead of throwing it away, once he finished pouring he carefully crushed it flat, screwed the top back on and tucked it under one of his tame eels. 

`Never know when you might need that,' he said quietly. 

A frantic footfall announced the arrival of Georges. He barged through the gate, panting an apology for being late. As he caught his breath, there was a brief conflab about who would ride where. Benoit would ride alone with his unfeasibly large luggage load; Odimba, Benoit's colleague from Care International, also dressed like a ninja trawlerman, would follow with Georges as a passenger; and I would sit behind the sozzled Fiston and pray for him to sober up. 

The engines of the three bikes stirred into life. It would be an exaggeration to say they roared. But in silent Kalemie even these puny machines sounded pretty impressive and we made quite a din as we swept out of town. In eastern Congo, a land of pedestrians and bicycles, the 100cc motorbike is king. 

In our headlights I could see we were approaching the iron bridge across the Lukuga River on the northern edge of town. A Royal Navy officer, Commander Verney Lovett Cameron, had been the first European to explore the river. Cameron was one of the great `what if' figures of African exploration, an adventurer of no less ambition than Stanley, but who somehow never quite staked his own place in the public's imagination. He never came up with a soundbite as memorable as `Dr Livingstone, I presume?' Cameron actually beat Stanley to this spot by two years. He, too, had heard tales from the Arab slavers about an immense river somewhere out there to the west. And he, too, was willing to trek through the bush for week after week to check if it were true. 

But, unlike Stanley, he failed to make the river descent. Once he reached the upper Congo River he tried to persuade local villagers to take him downriver in their canoes, but they refused. He spent several weeks camped on the swampy river banks becoming more and more frustrated with the intransigence of the river tribes, and more and more sick from malaria. Eventually he abandoned the plan to follow the river, setting off overland due west instead, ending up on the coast of what is now Angola. Cameron's journey was an amazing achievement, one of the earliest and most significant trans-African treks, but his failure to solve the riddle of the river has seen history pass him by. What if Cameron had descended the Congo River? What if Cameron, more of a British establishment figure than his parvenu rival (Cameron dedicated his book, Across Africa, to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, while Stanley dedicated his to the newspapermen who commissioned him), had returned to London having charted a navigable river reaching across Africa and had successfully persuaded Britain to stake the land as a colony? How different would African history be, had a British Congo, not a Belgian Congo, dominated the centre of the continent? 

Not so different, is my conclusion. I have met British colonial types in Africa who scorn what Belgium did in the Congo and try to draw a distinction between the colonial system imposed by Brussels and that imposed by London. So much crueler than any British colony, they say', so much more brutal towards the local Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa, from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and elsewhere, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the pro independence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder, torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside world's tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee stability and an end to civil strife. 

Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it, but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent's colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but colonialism in its purest, basest form. 

I thought of Cameron as our bikes clattered over the loose planks on the river bridge, because his first attempt to reach the Congo River had begun right beneath us, on the Lukuga. It is the only river that drains Lake Tanganyika and the young naval officer was convinced he could descend it by boat, all the way to its confluence with the much bigger, then-unknown river somewhere out there to the west of Lake Tanganyika. What he had not understood is that the Lukuga is impassable by boat because of the odd geographical feature that it only moves when the lake level rises during the rainy season. Cameron managed to get his small boat just a short distance down the Lukuga before he hit an immense and impenetrable barrier of silt and reed beds. He struggled for days, trying to hack his way through. He described how his heart sank as the channels he cut were immediately filled by matter floating up from below. It must have been wretched work - sweaty, insect-plagued and, ultimately, doomed. 

Within minutes of crossing the bridge we left behind the sticky atmosphere that tormented Cameron. The air began to cool nicely as we followed a track climbing up and away from the lakeside still. Nightjars roosted on the path. I would pick them up in our headlights and watch as they sat frozen to the spot, exploding at the last second from underneath the lead motorbike, peeling up and away into the darkness. Although Kalemie had appeared asleep as we left, for the first few kilometres I kept spotting ghostly figures on the roadside. They were women, with baskets and tools perched on their heads, making their way out to the bush to tend plots of cassava and other crops. From a distance I would make out their dark shapes against the lightening sky and then, for an instant, they would be caught in the headlights, the colours of their cotton wraps bright and their wide eyes frozen in surprise. 

I love starting a journey very early in the day. It offers the comforting sense that if something goes wrong, there is still the whole day to sort it out. As we left Kalemie before dawn that August morning, I felt a strong sense of well-being. The track was overhung with dew-drenched branches and twigs, and within a few minutes my wet clothes showed why Benoit and Odimba were wearing waterproofs. But the fact that I was soaked did not dim my spirits. After all the planning and worry, I was finally on the track of Stanley in the Congo, picking my way from Lake Tanganyika across ridges and through valleys that he had traversed in 1876. 1 can remember feeling excitement. And I can remember just how the euphoria began to ebb a few kilometres down the track when we had our first flat tire. 

I was bouncing happily along the track, tucked up behind Fiston. The fresh air had sobered him up and although the track was appalling, he was riding well, anticipating the divots, holes and obstacles, slowing down with his gears and using just the right amount of power to manoeuvre round them. For the first hour or so everything seemed perfect. August was the last month of the dry season and the rising sun had quickly dried the dew from my clothes. In spite of the track, we were skipping along at a healthy speed, peaking sometimes as high as 30 kph. But all of a sudden I saw Odimba, the rider ahead of us, slowing, peering down at his rear wheel and stopping. 

The tiny form of Georges slipped off the back of Odimba's hike. Within a few minutes Odimba had undone the wheel, slipped off the tire and begun searching for the leak in the inner tube. It reminded me of repairing punctures on my bicycle as a child. 

Dawn had now broken and the low sun lit the feathery heads of the long grass on either side of the track. Without the sound of the bike engines, it was a scene of still beauty. We were within a few degrees of the Equator, but the early morning temperature was comfortable and the hush was still relatively open savannah, not the dark, claustrophobic hothouse of true rainforest. With good rivers, heavy dew and rich soil, no wonder the early Belgian colonialists here believed they had found an Eden. 

Behind me I heard murmuring. I turned to see Odimba hand Benoit something. It was a rusty, bent nail about three centimetres long. Since we had left Kalemie an hour back we had seen nothing modern or man-made and yet we had managed to find an old nail. 

Benoit and Odimba were clearly a team. While Odimba dried and prepared the inner-tube hole, Benoit cut an appropriately sized patch from his store of old, recycled tubes, the same ones he used as luggage straps. Having cut the right shape, he used a file to scour the surface of the patch so that it would grip glue. 

'It will take twelve minutes for the glue to be ready,' Benoit announced with typical exactness. 

I turned back to the feathery grasslands and listened for the sound of any birdlife. There was almost none. Georges explained that hunger drove local villagers to trap and kill birds as a source of meat. Exactly on cue, twelve minutes after administering the glue, Benoit and Odimba replaced the tyre and we were off again. And exactly twenty minutes later we had our first encounter with the mai-mai. 

The track had narrowed to a thin file between dense undergrowth and I saw Benoit slow to negotiate a tricky bit of ground. All of a sudden he braked and flung his weight to the left, desperate to avoid something. Slowly from the bush on the right side of the track emerged two gun barrels - rusting Kalashnikovs - held in the bony, dirty hands of two anxious-looking people, a teenage girl and a man old enough to be her grandfather. 

I swallowed drily. Meekly dropping my gaze to the ground, all I could see were Georges's feet as he slipped off his bike and walked forward, talking all the time in a reassuring tone. He spoke in a blend of Swahili and a tribal language. Calmly, Georges turned back towards me and asked me quietly for cigarettes. I had a couple of packets on me, but they were crushed in the pocket of my trousers. This did not bother the mai-mai. I handed over two particularly mangled-looking specimens and watched as they delicately stroked them back into shape, licked one side to slow the burn rate and lit them. I had stolen a better look as I handed them over. What I saw were the modern descendants of the African tribesmen met by both Stanley and Cameron. They were wearing the same necklaces of feathers, bones, and fetishes described by the two nineteenth-century explorers, but their clothes were more modern - unmatching khaki trousers and ragged T-shirts - and they had nothing on their feet. 

I watched Georges rummage in his shoulder bag and produce a wad of pamphlets. I recognised them as publications from the MONUC base back in Kalemie, a sort of local newsletter with photographs of UNsponsored events and good-news stories about the peacekeeping mission. These seemed to have a magical effect on our two armed interrogators and they immediately lowered their weapons and began to laugh and relax. With colour photographs and print, these magazines were evidence of a modern world and here in the Congolese bush they clearly had some status.

Through Georges's smiles, he calmly told me what was going on. `They are guarding their village. It's just a few hundred metres over there in the hush, but they know that if trouble comes, it comes along this track. They told me there is a bigger mai-mai group in the area, and they have heard of villages being attacked and people killed. But as far as they know, this other mai-mai group is around the village of Mulolwa up ahead on this track. There is no problem with these guys, but we must be aware of the other group. They will definitely give us more trouble.' 

Growing in confidence, I asked the old man his name. `Mikejo,' he said, pulling heavily on a second cigarette I had given him. He had red-rimmed eyes from a night's guard duty and his skin was pale from the thinnest coating of dust and fissured with age. He was the same small, pygmy build as Georges. Mixing between pygmies, central Africa's oldest indigenous people, who lived in the central region's forests as hunter-gatherers for thousands of years, and Bantu tribes, who arrived here about 1,000 years ago before persecuting and subjugating the pygmies, blurred what had once been a clear distinction. I could not tell if Mikejo was a pygmy proper, or the offspring of some ancient merging of central Africa's oldest and newest bloodlines. 

The mai-mai of eastern Congo are known for their cruelty, violence, even cannibalism, but in this old man defending his village I saw something less threatening. With his venerable gun - it was highly unlikely he actually had any live rounds - he was simply defending his bush home. He belonged to maimai who act like a Congolese version of Dad's Army, trying to protect their villages from armed attack by the many outsiders who have run amok here for the last forty years. These local mai-mai do not cause major problems because they rarely move far from their home villages. It is the ones who wander who cause the chaos. The nomads survive by plundering whatever they can find. It is these mai-mai marauders who are responsible for the lawless cycle of murder and reprisal that has paralysed this region for so long. 

Benoit was anxious to get on and, with a nod from Georges that indicated the danger had passed, he restarted his bike and careered off down the track. We followed, but we had not got far when we had our second flat tyre, this time on Fiston's bike where I was riding pillion. I felt the rear go soggy, causing us to slew to one side, and then we were down to the hard rim, bumping to a halt. 

After the calm of the first repair, this second one was much more tense. Fiston showed no knowledge about how to repair his bike and had no tools or repair kit. Benoit and Odimba took control. But when they opened up the rear wheel of Fiston's bike, they lost their cool. 

'Look at this inner tube, Fiston,' Benoit said sharply. 

`There are more patches on this tube than the original tube. It must have been mended twenty times. And look here at the side of the tyre. It is worn away from being pulled on and off the wheel. It's almost useless.' 

As Benoit tried to work out how to stick a patch on an existing patch, Fiston stood in glum silence. It was clear he did not really care. All he wanted to do was get back safely to Kalemie, and a flat tyre was no bad thing as it would bring about his return journey quicker. 

I found the whole situation bewildering. I had been planning this journey in my head for years, trying to anticipate and deal with every conceivable problem. I had never thought that the success of the whole trip might turn on a perforated inner tube. 

It was the first time I had heard a tone of anger in Benoit's voice. It was contagious and I began to fret. My early morning excitement had long gone and I was trying to calculate the impact of these delays on our journey. After Kalemie, my next safe haven was in the town of Kasongo, where Benoit's Care International colleagues were based, but that was still almost 500 kilometres away. With marauding maimai in the area, Benoit knew that to dawdle was dangerous. He had hoped that if we got away early enough we could possibly reach a ruined mining town called Kabambarre, 300 kilometres from Kalemie, tonight. Benoit was confident he could find somewhere safe there to spend the night. With these breakdowns, it was looking increasingly likely we would have to overnight in the bush. 

There was now one other thing to consider. Georges said the news about the mai-mai group at Mulolwa chimed with what he had already heard on the rumour mill back in Kalemie. This group had some ruthless, godless gunmen and he was anxious that if we were to get through safely, it would be important to catch them at the right time of day. 

`These guys get drunk and stoned by the afternoon, and you don't want to he negotiating with them in that state. We must get there as early in the morning as possible for the best chance of getting through,' was his advice.

Staring at Odimba as he mended the second puncture, I started doing the mental calculation. We could only make Kabambarre in one day if we averaged 20-25 kph and so far we had covered about thirty kilometres in more than two hours. And the precious protection of morning from the mai-mai of Mulolwa was fast disappearing. 

By the time we got going for the third time, my stomach was knotted and my knees were beginning to ache again. 

Five kilometres later we had our third flat tyre. The rear on Fiston's bike had gone down again. 

Benoit was getting agitated. He discussed options with Odimba and decided what we needed was some water to check out exactly how bad Fiston's troublesome inner tube was. After botching an emergency repair and pumping up Fiston's rear, we scooted on a kilometre or so until we reached a village, where Benoit stopped and started talking to a group of children. Like the pygmy community I had seen on the track up to Mtowa a few days earlier, this village was a collection of small huts, made with materials from the bush - frames of branches covered with grass. The only remotely modern thing in the entire village was an old, rusting wheel hub, a relic of the days when normal road traffic passed this way. Benoit decided this was a suitable receptacle to carry out the repair and while he filled it with dirty stream water and began working on Fiston's lacerated inner tube, Georges beckoned me over to a small boy wearing rags. 

'He says this village is called Ngenzeka and that there was fighting here a few years back. He asked if you want to see the bones.' 

The boy had the expression of an old man on his ten-year-old face. It was care-worn, cold and unsmiling. The arrival of our small convoy must have been the most interesting thing to happen in Ngenzeka for months, but there was no sparkle of excitement in his expression. I soon found out why. 

He took me a few paces off the track. The bush was thick, but he skilfully slipped through the branches. He was wearing nothing but some grubby brown shorts, several sizes too big for him, but he twisted and shimmied without getting snagged on thorns that teased out my hair and scratched my skin. After a few minutes I emerged from a thicket to find him standing over a human skull, bleached on the ground. There was no lower jaw, the front teeth were missing and I could see a web of cracks in the cranium. The boy spoke quietly. 

`There was fighting here one day. We do not know who was fighting who. We just ran away into the bush. But when we came back there were too many bodies for us to bury. Some of them were left out in the sun like this.' The boy's description was as matter-of-fact as a news reporter. As we walked back to the track he pointed to other human bones lying white among the green undergrowth. 

Benoit was not interested in old bones. Shaking his head he announced that the inner tube on Fiston's rear wheel was, basically, ruined. He said he had repaired it properly for the second time, but could not guarantee it would work and suggested that as we were already way behind our safe schedule, Georges should set off back towards Kalemie with Fiston, leaving Odimba and him to carry on with me. 

This prompted an animated discussion with Georges. Georges insisted that we all continue together, as he could walk back to Kalemie if necessary. It boiled down to this: Georges felt as if he had not done his job; he had not talked us past the Mulolwa rebels; and he was reluctant to head home before he had earned his fee. It was an astonishing display of duty. 

Benoit finally issued an ultimatum. `Okay, we will carry on, but if the tire goes down again, that will be it.'

We did not have to wait long to face the ultimatum. Less then five kilometres from skull village, Fiston's rear wheel was flat again. The morning had been wasted and we were not even halfway to Mulolwa, the village rumoured to be a mai-mai stronghold. 

Benoit was angry, I was jumpy and Georges was apologetic. 

`I want to help you, but I know you have a long way to go and you cannot keep stopping like this.' Georges tried to sound positive. 

I was sad to say goodbye, but I gave him the donation I had promised for his pygmy group and posed for a photograph. It shows me lowering over his tiny form. I am wearing grubby trousers and a polo shirt with a faded sunhat crammed on my head. Georges is much smarter with a fresh-looking long-sleeved shirt, belt and pleated trousers. Pygmies have been stigmatised over the centuries for being primitive and backward. I know who looks more backward in that photograph. 

`The parting of good friends,' Georges said shaking my hand and smiling, after Benoit had fixed Fiston's wheel for a final time. Georges jumped up behind Fiston and the pair set off back in the direction we had just come from. I feared they would have a grim trip home. The tyre on Fiston's bike would most probably go down again, and they had no tools to repair it. 

Georges had behaved impeccably towards me. He had been willing to risk his life for a stranger, and there was genuine regret that we could not complete our journey together. His behaviour contrasted with Stanley's account of the unreliability of his expedition members during his trip through this same territory in September 1876: 

Unless the traveller in Africa exerts himself to keep his force intact, he cannot hope to perform satisfactory service. If he relaxes his watchfulness, it is instantly taken advantage of by the weak minded and the indolent ... their general infidelity and instability arises, in great part, from their weak minds becoming prey to terror of imaginary dangers . . . my runaways fled from the danger of being eaten. 

I did not have to worry about Benoit and Odimba's `infidelity and instability'. After the departure of Georges, they were desperate to get on with the journey. Benoit did not waste another second. He rejigged the luggage, ordered me to ride pillion behind Odimba and jumped back on his bike. 

Without Fiston and his faulty bike, our progress improved and my spirits picked up. The kilometres began to slip by and within an hour we had covered as much ground as in the first five hours of the day. Benoit seemed to be almost enjoying himself, attacking the track with his bike, flicking branches out of the way and jumping over divots. Behind him the emotionless Odimba just quietly got on with the task in hand. 

Since leaving Kalemie, we had been running due west, following a ridge line above the north hank of the Lukuga River. I had been told we would turn due north near the village of Niemba, a tiny place memorable only because it was the site of an important bridge on the old railway - the one used, at various times through the twentieth century, by my mother, Evelyn Waugh and the swashbuckling gunboat crews from the Royal Navy. Come the twenty-first century and the railway has been forgotten as a means of travel, mainly because the bridge at Niemba had been washed away by floods. But it was still strategic enough to attract the attention of warring factions and for two years, around 2001, there had been a great deal of fighting in the area. 

This explained why, when we arrived at a fork in the track - the first junction we had seen in eighty kilometres since Kalemie - we found a soldier in the uniform of the Congolese army sitting under a tree. I have no idea how long he had been there, how he was resupplied or how he protected himself. The Congolese army has no aircraft or helicopters, and so he must have made his way there on foot along the same awful track we had used. I did not get the chance to find out, because Benoit clearly saw in the uniformed soldier the potential for problems. Gunning the engine on his bike, he swept past the soldier before he could gather his wits and try to stop us. Benoit was sticking to the tactic of only stopping to explain yourself if you really have to. He chose the right-hand, northward track and accelerated. Odimba stuck close enough behind to be whipped in the face by branches dislodged by Benoit. I looked over my shoulder just as the bush enveloped us once more, to see the soldier hopping up and down shouting and waving his gun. 

Grinning like a naughty schoolchild who has got away with a prank, I began to feel more comfortable. Bumping along on the back of Odimba's bike, I noticed the landscape begin to change. After the ups and downs of the earlier ridge track, we were now crossing flatter savannah. The track was just wide enough for people to walk single file, but the ground was beaten hard and flat, so we scooted along faster than at any stage during the journey so far. 

For tens of kilometres we saw no villages or signs of life, slowing only when the track crossed a stream or river. These crossings became the curse of the journey because no sooner had we picked up speed than we had to slow, stop and pick our route over the waterway. There were scores of them. In some places branches had been felled to form a primitive bridge, but each crossing was hazardous, and countless times I had to jump off the back of the bike and help drag the two bikes across. I saw why any bike bigger than 100cc would be too cumbersome and heavy to manhandle through the eastern Congo. 

The journey settled into this routine, allowing me to think about the next hazard, Mulolwa and its maimai. I kept looking over Odimba's shoulder to anticipate the moment when we reached the village and had to start negotiations. 

Suddenly, I saw Benoit slow as he rode into a clearing in the bush. His helmeted head swung from side to side as he took in the scene. We were up alongside him in an instant and I could see what he was looking at. There were the burned remains of dozens and dozens of huts. The outline of each dwelling was marked in a ring of black ash and charred thatch around soil beaten hard and flat. In between the ruins there was nothing - no furniture, no pots, no possessions, nothing. 

It would be an exaggeration to say the ruins were still smouldering, but the air still had a tang of acrid smoke. Whatever happened here had not happened a very long time ago. I looked at Benoit and saw his eyes stretched wide-open behind his goggles. He was in shock. 

`Let's not wait around here. Let's go,' he said. 

The village was huge, running alongside the track for at least a kilometre. Stanley had described villages in this area as big as British towns, made up of scores of simple huts arranged around the brown, beaten-earth version of an English town square. Mulolwa was one of the largest bush settlements I had seen, but there was not a soul around. We hurried past as fast as we could, through a forest void now occupied by nothing but ash circles. Finally we plunged back into the bush on the far side of the village. It felt like sanctuary. 

For several hours we continued to make good time. The bush level was steadily being raised by taller and taller trees as we approached the northern edge of Katanga province and prepared to enter Maniema province. Maniema's reputation for cannibalism, which Stanley noted repeatedly in his writings, continued to the modern era. In the 1960s it was in Maniema that thirteen Italian airmen of the United Nations were killed and eaten, their body parts smoked and made available at local markets for weeks after the slaughter. Benoit assured me that we would be safe, if we made it in one piece to Maniema. It was Katanga that scared Benoit. 

I was watching the slowly changing forest when Odimba's bike suddenly coughed and died on us. There was something horrible and ominous about the sudden silence. Out here in remotest Katanga, silence meant no engine, no bike, no chance of getting out. 

Odimba remained unperturbed. Together we heaved the bike to a flat section of track and by the time Benoit had come back to find out what the problem was, Odimba had unpacked an oily rag wrapped around his tool collection. It might not have passed muster in an engineering support vehicle on the Paris-Dakar rally, but his battered pliers and rusty spanners were up to our needs. He undid the fuel line running out of the petrol tank, skilfully placing the empty plastic bottle, which Benoit had been so careful to keep this morning, underneath to catch the sprinkle of petrol as it leaked from the bottom. He handed it to Benoit, who delicately poured the teaspoonful back into the tank. With no chance of any fuel supplies until Kasongo, 400 kilometres away, we could not afford to lose a drop. 

Odimba continued to fiddle with the guts of the bike. I heard him say something about the carburettor and the fuel line, but in essence the problem was this: the petrol sellers in Kalemie had given us dirty fuel. At one point Odimba put his lips to a pipe and blew. Chunks of grit flew out the other end. Benoit smiled. 

The fuel line was blocked. That will have cleared it,' he said. 

As the pair put away their tools I felt a sense of being watched. Turning round, I was shocked to see that we were not alone. A man in rags was watching us, leaning heavily on an old bicycle laden with large plastic containers. He asked if I had any water. I handed over my bottle and he raised his lean face upwards. The sun gleamed on cheeks taut from hunger. He skilfully poured in a mouthful without actually touching the bottle to his lips. He thanked me and prepared to continue on his way, but I asked him where he was heading. 

`I am walking to Kalemie. I am a palm-oil trader. My name is Muke Nguy.' 

I was stunned. He still had well over 100 kilometres to walk before reaching Kalemie. 

`I have already walked two hundred kilometres. It has taken me sixteen days.' I found his words difficult to take in. He was on a 600-kilometre round trip through heavy bush in the equatorial heat, with no food and no water. His bicycle was so heavily laden with palm oil that it had long stopped functioning as a means of personal travel. He could not even get to the seat and, even if he had, I noticed the pedals were missing. His bicycle was a beast of burden, a way to haul goods through the jungle. If the thin, snaking bush tracks were the veins of the Congo's failed economy, Muke and his heavy burden were just one, solitary blood vessel. He could not afford to bring along food or water when every possible corner of carrying space was used to maximise the load. The only things on the bike I could see that were not tradable were a battered silver bicycle pump, a roll of woven grass matting and a coil of ivy. 

`I drink when the path crosses streams, and at night I eat what I can find in the bush. I have my mat to sleep on, but sometimes the insects are very strong and they eat me at night. If I get sick, I have no medicine.' 

He smiled when I asked him what the loop of ivy was for. 'That is from a rubber tree. If I have a flat, I break the ivy and a glue comes out that will mend the puncture. It is the repair kit of the forest.' For the first time his gaunt face softened to a smile. 

I have always fancied myself as a long-distance athlete. I am large and slow, but at least I have stamina. After that conversation with Muke, I no longer have any illusions about the extent of my stamina. I could not conceive of the strength - physical and mental - needed on a forty- or fifty-day round trip through disease-ridden tropical forest. And it was not as if the rewards were huge. 

`I carry eighty, maybe a hundred litres of oil. Maybe I can make ten or fifteen dollars profit when I get to Kalemie. So I spend my money there on things we do not have at home, like salt or lakefish. When I get home, I will see my family for the first time in months and sell some of the salt for another ten or fifteen dollars profit.' 

All this effort for $30 and a fish supper. I was stunned. Congolese like Muke are out there now, as I write this, sleeping in the bush, swatting insects, kneading blisters on unshod feet, toiling along a Ho Chi Minh trail of survival that shows just how willing many Africans are to work their way out of poverty. 

Muke then asked me something. 

`Did you see any soldiers? Any gunmen on the road from Kalemie? Because if they see me they will take what they call "tax". Maybe a litre of oil, or maybe what is in my pockets, or maybe even more. Sometimes I can lose all of my profit in a second because in the Congo there is no law.' 

Muke was only one of many bicycle hauliers that I saw. Some carried canisters of palm oil, a few carried meat - antelope or monkey, sometimes still bloody, but often smoked - and there was even one with thirty or so African grey parrots in home-made cages. The haulier proudly said he was going to make the long and perilous journey from eastern Congo all the way to Zanzibar, more than 1,000 kilometres to the east, where he might get $50 a bird from tourists. It echoed the slave era, when Stanley saw Arab slavers in this region driving chain gangs of prisoners for the same long march to Zanzibar to be sold. 

By late afternoon we were making much better progress. Benoit had given up on making Kabambarre by nightfall, but he was confident we could get out of Katanga and deep into Maniema before stopping. His confidence untied the knot in my stomach and for the first time all day I began to feel hungry. Since 4.30 a.m. none of us had eaten anything, although I had been nursing on my precious bottles of filtered water, gulping every so often and sharing with Odimba.

The track continued across flat ground, but the savannah began to blend with greater numbers of high canopy trees. Stanley noted that while Swahili had just one word for forest, the tribal language of Maniema had four special words - Mohuru, Mwitu, Mtambani and Msitu - for jungle of increasing impenetrability. I had brought a pocket-sized Global Positioning System machine to record my exact route. Every so often I took it out and read the display. It told me were tracking almost due north, but were still a few degrees south of the Equator and the true rainforest. 

My backside was beginning to ache and I began to daydream of a comfortable car seat, instead of the sliver of hard plastic I was perched on, bracing my buttocks each and every time Odimba swerved. I thought of Talatala, a raunchy short story published about the Congo in the 1940s by Georges Simenon, the Belgian author and creator of Maigret. Simenon's contempt for the Congolese colonialists was clear. He satirised the small-minded bureaucrats, who insisted on wearing a stiff collar and tie at remote stations deep in the bush, and the double standards of colonials who slept with their Congolese maids, but expected their European wives to remain faithful. The thing that came back to me as we made our way through the bush was Simenon's description of road travel. In Talatala an eccentric retired British army officer keeps a racing car at his elephant-training farm in eastern Congo, driving at high speeds down jungle roads. And the other characters all move freely around the place, driving long distances between coffee plantations and border posts and colonial offices. That part of Simenon's work was entirely plausible half a century ago, but today it would be pure fiction. 

When Kalemie's cotton factory was working, it was supplied with raw cotton from the area I was now entering. Warmer and wetter than the lakeside, this region was perfect for cotton growing. The raw material would be collected by lorry and driven from here to Kalernie. The tracks I travelled along were about as lorry-unfriendly as it is possible to be. During the colonial era, the Belgian administration set up an army of cantonniers or workmen, who were responsible for every kilometre of the colony's road network. Paid a small monthly retainer, thousands of cantonniers across the country would keep the roads free from the advancing jungle, the culverts clear of debris and the bridges in sound working order. By 1949 the colonial authorities boasted 111,971 kilometres of road across the Congo. By 2004 I doubt if there were more than 1,000 kilometres left in the entire country. 

The hours dragged. My backside got more and more numb, and adrenalin struggled to contain my hunger. After darkness fell, Benoit started to look for somewhere to spend the night. He turned on his bike's headlight and I watched it sweep the dark forest, searching for a friendly village. After a couple of false leads, where he announced the village was too big or too spread out, he pronounced himself satisfied with a settlement called Mukumbo. I checked the distance on the bike's odometer and my GPS. After sixteen hours of travel we had covered just 211 kilometres from Kalemie, and were not yet halfway to Kasongo. 

I will never know what Mukumbo looks like because we arrived there after sunset and left before dawn. As I got off the bike and regained my land legs, Benoit said he must show the correct courtesy to the village headman by asking permission to stay. He disappeared into a thicket, following a small child wearing rags who offered to lead the way. With no moon, it took some minutes for my eyes to get used to the dark, but when they did I found that Odimba and I were now surrounded by a crowd of silent children. They led us past a hut and there on the ground I could see the faintest glow of a wood fire. It was arranged in exactly the same way I had seen used by the Bushmen of southern Africa, with four or five long branches radiating out from a small, hot core. Only the tips of the branch actually burned and once the tips had fallen into the fire and turned into embers, the fire appeared to have gone out. But a prod of one of the branches, sliding the tinder-dry unburned tip over the embers, had the effect of turning the knob on a gas stove. Almost instantly flames began to dance and the fire was ready for cooking. After a few words from Odimba, someone slid one of the spokes over the embers and within minutes a pot of water was beginning to simmer. 

As the flames grew, light caught the eyes of the children, who were all staring at me with the same cheerless expression of the boy at the skull village. Like most bush children in the Congo, they have learned that outsiders rarely bring anything but trouble. 

By the time Benoit returned with the chief, an old man by the name of Luamba Mukumbo, a large pan of sweet tea had been prepared by Odimba. I poured some into my mug and sipped slowly. After a day of gulping tepid water from plastic bottles, it tasted like ambrosia. I could almost feel the sugar leaching into my drained system. The interaction between Benoit and the chief was intriguing. The old man wore rags and had no signs of authority or wealth, but the young outsider was polite and deferential. I heard a few references to muzungu, Swahili for 'white man', and a small boy was sent running off into the dark with some whispered instructions from the chief. 

'The chief welcomes us and is sorry, but there is no food to offer,' Benoit was now acting as translator. 'He said the mai-mai passed through here a few days ago and they took all the food before they left in the direction of an old gold mine, the Lunga mine, down the track. He said his village is still nervous and all his people have been gathered in for the night, but he said there is a hut you can sleep in. I will go and check everything is okay.' 

I returned to the puddle of firelight and began a piecemeal conversation with the chief. He said he thought he was sixty years old, but he could not be sure. I asked him what he remembered about his country's history. 

'When I was a child I went to school in Kalemie. It was a great honour for one from our village to go to the big town and I was chosen because I was the son of the chief. My family walked with me through the forest to the place not far from here where the bus passed. I will never forget that first bus journey.' He fell silent for a moment, staring into the fire. 

'I was still at school when independence came in 1960, and in Kalemie I remember almost all the white families fled across the lake because they were scared. I came home and since then I think I have been to Kalemie maybe two times.

'Our village here, the one you are sitting in, used to have cars come through it every few days. Just a few kilometres away is one of those guest houses the Belgians built. They called them gites and they were always open for travellers coming through by car. But all of that went with the fighting. 

Now when we hear the fighting coming our way, my people and I just flee into the bush. We have learned it is the safest place for us. We know how to survive there. And when we come back, our village is almost always destroyed and we have to build it again. 

'Over the years, things have got worse and worse. We have lost the things we once had. Apart from what we can carry into the bush, we have nothing. I think the last time I saw a vehicle near here was 1985, but I cannot be sure. All these children you see around you now are staring because I have told them about cars and motorbikes that I saw as a child, but they have never seen one before you arrived.' 

He carried on talking, but I was still computing what he had just said. The normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true. 

Benoit returned to lead me to the hut that the chief had had prepared for me. It had walls of dried mud on wattle, a roof of heavy thatch and a door panel made of reeds woven across a wooden frame. Without a hinge, it worked by being heaved across the doorway, which I soon found had been cut for people quite a bit shorter than me. There was nothing modern in the room whatsoever. On the beaten-earth floor stood a bed - a frame of branches, still in their bark, lashed together with some sort of vine. The springs of the bed were made of lengths of split bamboo anchored at only one point halfway along the bed, so that when I put my hand down on them they bent horribly and appeared close to collapse. But the design was ingenious because, when my weight was spread across the entire structure, the bamboo screen supported it easily, giving and moving with the contour of my shoulders and hips. It was a Fred Flintstone orthopaedic bed and I found it amazingly comfortable. 

I slipped outside to see Odimba and Benoit heaving the bikes through the small doorway into their hut next door. `We don't want to leave anything outside to say we are here,' Benoit explained. `The sort of people who move around after dark are the sort we don't want to meet.' 

As I walked to the village latrine I stumbled over something soft on the ground. I turned on my torch and there, below me, lying on the earth wrapped in a tattered piece of cotton, was a baby. As the beam of the torch moved I spotted another child, and another, and then another. The soil was still warm from the day's sun and the mothers had left their children outside to enjoy the last traces of heat. 

Back on my reedy bed, I struggled to hang up my mosquito net. Predictably enough, the picture on the bag of the elegant square shape, airily and comfortably arranged over a sleeping figure, was beyond me. After much vain wafting of the delicate cloth and careful spreading around the four corners of the bed, I ended up tightly bundled in it like a shroud. To be honest, I had stopped caring. I was done in and after one last sweep of the room with the head torch, when I spotted a russet antelope skin with white spots, creased up in the corner covered in congealed blood, I fell asleep to the buzz of mosquitoes in my ear and the scrunch of much bigger insects apparently ransacking my rucksack. 

My watch said 3 a.m. when I heard Benoit's voice. `Let's go, our journey is a long one today.' 

I escaped from my mosquito-net-cum-sleeping-bag-cum shroud and shivered. Even though the heat soars during the day in this region, a temperature inversion at night means that the small hours get amazingly cold. Most of the outsiders who have written about travelling here remark on the unexpected chill. Che Guevara described how he needed extra blankets while plotting his attacks in the hills of eastern Congo, and Stanley often referred to the additional clothing he donned at night even though he spent the day bathed in sweat. 

I wrapped myself in my fleece, packed my gear and heaved everything outside. Again, Benoit used his eel-taming trick to load the bikes, and again he and Odimba dressed themselves like combat trawlermen. The noise of the bike engines starting sounded loud enough to wake the gods. I noticed that the babies who had been left outside to sleep had been gathered in. Nothing stirred as we left Mukumbo and rejoined the track. 

In the pitch dark there was little for me to look at and so, after a few minutes of bumping and grinding behind Odimba, my mind started to work. We were about 100 kilometres from Kabambarre and needed to travel another 200 kilometres beyond to reach Kasongo. I had planned to be able to refill my water bottles with boiled, clean water overnight, but we had got there too late and left too early. I was sure I could get clean water in Kasongo, so that meant I had to eke out the remaining three bottles of water for 300 kilometres. Okay, I thought, that meant one bottle per 100 kilometres, and I can always ration further myself if things are getting tighter later on. 

Those 100 kilometres to Kabambarre felt painfully long. I was by then aching with hunger. The only food I had with me were energy sweets, given to me as a bit of a joke by an old running partner in Johannesburg. `In case of emergencies,' he said when handing them over. He will never know how important they turned out to be. To keep my luggage down I had gambled that the villages we passed through would provide food, but I had not taken the pillaging habits of the mai-mai into consideration. The sweets were the only things I had to eat. I devoured them greedily, but they were still not enough. 

Maybe it was my empty stomach that got to me. Or maybe it was because the first few hours were in complete darkness and I had nothing to focus my mind on. Either way, I felt increasingly irritated and ratty. The river stops felt more irksome. I burned my hand badly on the exhaust as we dragged the bikes over one of the stream beds. Then we started to reach some hilly sections too steep for the heavily laden bikes to cope with, so I kept having to jump off the bike and heave myself and various pieces of luggage to the top of the slope. And then an overhanging branch caught me on the forehead, drawing blood and leaving a painful sore. As I got weaker, Benoit and Odimba carried on as if this was quite normal. They had drunk and eaten just as little as I, but they coped much better. 

We had been going for two hours before the sun finally rose. Where the track opened out into less overgrown sections, I watched the long shadow of the bike, Odimba and me dancing across the red earth. The heat began to grow, so I shed my fleece, but not the feeling of torpor. 

I knew what the problem was - dehydration. The bottles I had drunk the day before were simply not enough, and I had not had a drop of water overnight, leaving me with a whopping headache and a pain behind my eyes. In this failing mental half-light, Kabambarre had become the focus of all my faculties. I clung on to the bike, looking over Odimba's shoulder counting down on the odometer the 100 kilometres until we reached the old mining town. As I stared, the track seemed to get ever more difficult, the rotation of the meter numbers slowing as if in glue. 

The sudden appearance of Kabambarre took me by surprise. I got no sense that I was approaching a place of human habitation until we actually reached it. It was the same with all the other settlements in the eastern Congo: the bush was just as thick, the track just as frail, yet all of a sudden you turn a corner and there is a place where large numbers of people live. In Kabambarre the population is measured in thousands, but still there was nothing to indicate we were approaching a town until, at the top of a particularly steep valley up which I had plodded behind the two bikes, Benoit pointed to something next to a tree. It was an old road sign, indicating the way we had just come and describing it as the National Highway. I could not even manage a wry smile. The sign was rotten and lopsided, much like the entire town. 

Kabambarre was a major crossroads of nineteenth-century exploration. David Livingstone stayed here for months in early 1871, recovering from a fever caught on the upper Congo River. He was the first white man to discover its headwaters, although the achievement was slightly diminished because he got his rivers muddled up. He thought he was looking at a tributary of the upper Nile and did not make the connection with the Congo River that the Portuguese had discovered 400 years earlier, flowing into the Atlantic 1,000 or so kilometres to the west. Livingstone failed to persuade the locals to let him descend the river, so he began trekking eastwards, towards Lake Tanganyika, before collapsing from illness here in Kabambarre. 

The Scotsman had been left frail and weak after twenty years of tramping across southern and central Africa, but it was not just the fever that troubled him in Kabambarre. His soul was wounded by what he had seen of the Arab slaving methods. He watched them descend mercilessly on Congolese villages, shooting anyone who put up resistance, pillaging anything that could be carried and pinning able-bodied Africans together with vast wooden collars for the slow, often fatal, route march all the way to the Indian Ocean and the slave markets of Zanzibar. It was around Kabambarre that Livingstone's loathing of slavery hardened into his life's work and led to this plea against slavery inscribed on his tomb in London's Westminster Abbey: 

All I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven's rich blessing come down on every one, American, English or Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world. 

When Cameron passed through here in 1874 he met village elders who spoke warmly of the Scottish explorer. I doubt if they said the same of Cameron. In his writings he shows little of the humanity that was Livingstone's hallmark. The two appeared to belong to totally different exploring worlds. While Livingstone travelled armed only with his Bible, Cameron insisted on more elaborate luxuries: 

And it was also needful for me to keep in rear of the caravan in order to prevent my men from straggling. With all my care they often eluded me and lay hidden in the jungle till I had passed in order to indulge in skulking. The men carrying my tent and bath were especially prone to this habit although their loads were light, and I frequently waited long after camp was reached for these necessary appliances to come to the front. 

When Cameron reached Kabambarre, he was, like Livingstone and me, feeling terrible. He was exhausted by the sudden gain in altitude and the endless series of ridges and dips that had to be negotiated. And when he arrived, the villagers of Maniema did not let him down, providing him with an image that fits snugly into the Victorian era's patronising view of Africa. He was serenaded by village minstrels on the delights of eating human flesh: 

I was entertained with a song setting forth the delights of cannibalism, in which the flesh of the men was said to be good but that of women was had and only eaten in time of scarcity; nevertheless, it was not to be despised when man meat was unobtainable. 

When Stanley passed through Kabambarre, he too met locals who spoke highly of the `old white man', Livingstone. This was the tribute to Livingstone from the village chief recorded by Stanley: 

He was good to me, and he saved me from Arabs many a time. The Arabs are hard men, and often he would step between them and me when they were hard on me. He was a good man, and my children were fond of him. 

The Kabambarre I discovered was an eerie place. For 300 kilometres since Kalemie I had seen nothing but grass-roofed mud huts, but here, at last, were some traces of a more modern world - buildings of cement and brick. But even more so than in Kalemie, they were in ruins. All of the sharp edges associated with modern towns had been eaten away by corrosion or smudged by layers of vegetation. The entire roofline of a terrace of buildings was askew, with tiles dislodged by thigh-thick ivy and gaping holes caused by collapsed beams. In front of the terrace I could just make out the trace of an old road junction, around a triangle on which had once stood a memorial to Belgian colonialists. The bronze plaque had been ripped off the concrete plinth and the roads had been reduced to footpaths meandering through thick undergrowth. 

At least in Kalemie there was the UN presence and the occasional vehicle to keep the main roads open. Here in Kabambarre there were pedestrians and a few bicycles that had made it here only after being pushed through the bush for hundreds of kilometres. 

My 1951 travel guide to the Congo records Kabambarre as one of the oldest Belgian settlements from the 'heroic period', meaning it was one of the places secured by Belgian gunmen in their war for supremacy against Arab slavers in the 1890s. They built a fortified storehouse and, while my travel book has a photograph of the old stockade, I saw no trace of it. Benoit was not interested in looking. He was much more focused on retrieving a plastic jerrycan of petrol that he had  the foresight to leave here on his trip to Kalemie and on getting back on the road. He drove straight into the overgrown garden of an old house and parked under a large mango tree. Odimba followed, but when I got off the bike I struggled to find my land legs. I lurched up against the tree's trunk, panted loudly and began to lose all peripheral vision. 

Benoit could see something was wrong. Behind me I heard scurrying as he barked orders at someone. 

'Bring a chair, bring a chair.' 

Slowly I turned round and, instead of just Benoit and Odimba, there was now a forty-strong crowd of villagers who must have come running after hearing the sound of our bike engines. I was too weak to have heard them approach. From within the group a wooden chair - home-made with a woven grass seat - appeared not a moment too soon. I collapsed into it. Benoit did not stop. I watched him retrieve the jerrycan, fill both fuel tanks, rearrange the luggage and check over an engine problem spotted by Odimba. It was all a blur and I don't remember very much about Kabambarre, apart from stuffing myself on bananas that appeared out of the crowd, and the moment when the villagers insisted we take it photograph. The result is one of my most haunting images from the Congo, showing me crumpled and empty-eyed from dehydration, surrounded by a mass of earnest, unsmiling faces. Strip away my watch and the threadbare Chelsea soccer top worn by the man sitting on the arm of my chair, and the image could be straight out of the nineteenth century - the white man, offered the best seat in the house, surrounded by curious but watchful natives. 

Time and again during my journey with Benoit and Odimba, I was struck by just how much tougher and more resilient than me they were. Travelling so close together, I had watched how rarely they drank and ate, but somehow they had a strength and stamina that were lacking in me. It gave me an enormous respect for them. I was lucky to have them on my side. 

There was little time to talk or take notes. Benoit knew we still had 200 kilometres to go to Kasongo and we had spent almost half the day reaching Kabambarre. He was fretting to leave, but I did take down the name of one English speaker, a man who described himself as an English teacher, Kabinga Sabiti, and a few notes. 

`Thank you for coming. Since the war came we have not seen many outsiders. The UN came here once, but only by helicopter and they touched down and left in just a few minutes. Please help us find peace.' 

His plea was almost lost in the sound of Benoit gunning his engine. There was nothing I could do to help Kabinga. I felt ashamed. 

We mounted up and sped through town. I could see Kabambarre had been a big settlement, built on top of a plateau with views over tree-covered countryside. A line of single-storey buildings faced onto what must have been a common back in the Belgian era, but the open ground was now badly overgrown. There were no market traders or hawkers. The only people I saw were standing around the ruins of the buildings staring at us. In the tropics concrete can actually rot. It goes black and begins to flake. I have seen it in a number of places, but here in Kabambarre on the facade of one of the blackest, darkest, most manky looking ruins I could just make out the outline of some words painted in metre-high letters: Post Office. 

The next 200-kilometre-long stretch was grim. It began well enough with a relatively fast track out of Kabambarre along a well-forested ridge. This was the main access road into the town and I spotted a group of soldiers guarding the entrance to the town. They were gathered around a cooking fire in the ruins of a building, but Benoit repeated his old trick of speeding up, and though the soldiers jumped up, grabbed their weapons and shouted after us, we had already slipped by. 

The track then became strikingly beautiful. It was following what had clearly once been a carriageway wide enough for cars, lined on both sides by high banks. Huge trees grew on these raised earthworks and their canopies spread and met, creating a shady, green tunnel effect. Some of the trees were giant palms with huge, elegant fronds, plaited by the breeze into a natural roof of thatch. 

Our next landmark was the Luama River. All the nineteenth century explorers referred to wading and paddling across the Luama, one of the Congo's larger tributaries, although Benoit assured me that an old Belgian road bridge was still standing and we had no need to look for canoes. Again, the bridge did not announce itself in any way. After several hours of bouncing down an earthy track, through villages identical to those we had seen in Katanga with not a single trace of modernity, we emerged from a thicket onto a huge, iron girder bridge, spanning the brown waters of the Luama. 

Benoit shouted to take care as he picked his way past holes in the planking on the bridge, but I wanted to stop and walk around. The girders were brown with rust but, to my layman's eye, they seemed sound and functional. The bridge stood ten metres above the water, so was clear of the threat of being washed away by floodwaters. But what struck me was the folly it represented. A solid bridge capable of carrying heavy trucks and traffic had been designed, built, brought here and eventually assembled on the assumption that heavy trucks and traffic would be able to reach it. Since the Belgians left the Congo, that assumption had collapsed, so there the bridge stands, a memorial deep in the jungle to the folly of planners who never dreamed that the Congo would spiral backwards as much as it has. 

The rest of that day was pure purgatory. My backside had stopped being numb and had moved into a painful phase, each buttock screaming to be relieved of the pressure of being squashed against the plastic of Odimba's motorbike seat. I learned to lean on one side and then the other to alleviate the pressure, but it was agony. 

Much worse was my thirst. With only two bottles of drinking water left, I rationed myself to a gulp every fifteen minutes, so, instead of watching the landscape, I started to examine my watch, urging the hands to sweep round to the quarter-hour so that I could take the next gulp. I thought of one of the nastier episodes of the early Belgian colonial period that took place around here. The Belgians may like to refer to the early years of their Congolese colony as the 'heroic period', but there was not much heroism in the way they treated Gustav Maria Rabinek, an Austrian adventurer who set himself up as an African explorer and trader in these eastern forests of the new colony towards the end of the 1890s. 

The early years of the Congo's colonisation were all about control. Leopold's agents fought the Arabs of eastern Congo for control in the mid-1890s. After they defeated the Arabs, they turned their attention to monopolising all trade emanating from the territory, setting up agencies and companies claiming exclusive rights on all merchandise. Rabinek bought all the necessary licences needed to trade in eastern Congo, but the Belgian authorities took against him. He was arrested early in 1901 on trumped-up charges alleging smuggling and was sentenced by a military tribunal in Kalemie to a year in jail. When Rabinek demanded the right to appeal, he was told his appeal would indeed be heard, but that the only court senior enough to deal with the case was in Boma, the trading post at the mouth of the Congo River, then the capital of Leopold's colony. The problem for Rabinek was that Boma lies 3,000 kilometres west of Kalemie and he was told that he would have to walk all the way.

It must have been around June 1901 when Rabinek passed through the area where I now found myself. The Scottish skipper of a steamer on Lake Tanganyika had described the parlous state of the prisoner when he set out from Kalemie. By the time he got here he was close to death. He made it to the Congo River, but died on board a steamer heading downstream on 1 September 1901. The Belgians had walked him to death. 

Images of Rahinek staggering through the jungle, starving, riddled with disease as he slogged his way to the Congo River, filled my muddled mind as the journey went on. My trip from Kalemie had started out exciting and become exhausting, but now it was a mess. If we ran into trouble, I no longer had the wits to deal with anything. By the time darkness came I was slumped half-asleep against Odimba's back. Every so often, I would lean over and stare at the odometer trying to count down the kilometres until Kasongo. There were times when, as I stared at the little numbers on the meter, my mind played tricks, convincing myself they were going backwards. 

Night fell. We had been on the go since before dawn, but our journey was not over. The darkness was complete apart from the headlights of our two bikes. Every so often I saw huts on either side of the track and knew we were passing through villages, but the only light I saw was the occasional glow of a cooking fire. 

I had lost all sense of time when I suddenly spotted a much brighter light up ahead. We were still moving, and it kept disappearing and reappearing between trees and bushes. Finally, I convinced myself it was something other than a cooking flame. It was an electric light, the first for 535 kilometres. We had reached Kasongo and the modest house maintained by Benoit's aid worker colleagues from Care International. I remember little about the arrival, apart from the vast jug of filtered water that I gulped down and the smell of the previous night's hut on my mosquito net, in which I wrapped myself before collapsing.

6

The Jungle Books

The sound of singing woke me on my first morning in Kasongo. There was not a breath of wind, but the toffee-thick drone of the male voices seemed to stir the tropical air as I slowly came round. Dawn had broken and I could see my surroundings fully for the first time. I was in a room of a cement and brick building, maybe fifty years old, lying on a sagging mattress surrounded by old bits of clothing and luggage. The room was modern enough to have a window complete with glass pane, and a door, although this was kept shut by a bent nail. A patina of dust and grime covered everything. It was a replica of the room where I stayed in Kalemie, a staging post for itinerant aid workers.

Walking out onto the front porch I found Tom Nyamwaya, the head of the Care International operation in Kasongo, sitting on a home-made wooden chair. The success of my trip so far was entirely down to Tom and his willingness to risk two of his staff and two motorbikes. I started to thank him, but he silenced me with his hand and I could see he was straining to listen to the singing. He only spoke after the voices finally fell silent. 

'Those voices you hear are the voices of soldiers. I don't like it when they start singing. The last time they did that was in June after the Bukavu crisis. I have sent someone to try to find out what is going on.' Tom's English was clear with a heavy accent from east Africa. He was Kenyan, employed by Care International to run this outpost deep in francophone Africa, and he was clearly happy to have someone to speak to in English. 

'It's a problem when I have to speak French. I only just started lessons and I am not finding it that easy.' 

Over breakfast I explained more about my trip. Tom and I had only had a brief email exchange and he seemed interested to learn he was living in a place that once played a central part in the colonial history of the region. But what he wanted to know, more than anything else, was how I had managed to dodge the mai-mai. 

'We were lucky,' I said stuffing my mouth with a hunk of sticky, browning banana. 'The only ones we saw were friendly enough and we somehow avoided all the others.' 

Tom shook his head. 

'Well, you must be as crazy as Stanley. God knows what they would have done to you if they caught you. What makes you do this sort of thing? I would not travel anywhere in this country except by plane. You would have to be mad to go out there into the bush. This place is like nowhere else I have ever worked. You never know when trouble is going to start. At the time of the Bukavu crisis, we were under pressure from our head office to evacuate. I was in two minds, because we are the only aid group in Kasongo. Hundreds of thousands of people rely on us - and only us. So when we went to the airstrip, the guys who call themselves the authorities and police, the same ones we have been working with for months, turned on us. One of my staff was pistol-whipped. We were all threatened. It blew up in a second and all of a sudden things were out of control.' 

I was curious. `How do you feel about living out here? There are no UN peacekeepers here, no other aid groups. You are as exposed as the first Belgians slaughtered here in the 1890s.' 

'Well, it's not the best feeling. The uncertainty. The instability. The volatility. I don't think I can stand more than a few months and I will leave as soon as I can. There are some jobs like this in the aid world, which you have to do to get on. It's just the way it is. 

He explained more about the conditions he lived in. His was the only home in the old 'white' suburb of Kasongo that was still inhabited, and this was because his aid-group employer was able to maintain supplies using aircraft. But the air bridge was fragile, with irregular flights made haphazard by tropical weather conditions and non-existent facilities at Kasongo's airstrip. Across that rickety bridge came everything for his work and home life: food, fuel, communications equipment and work supplies. Everything had to be flown in. 

I wanted to know how I could reach Kindu, the port on the upper reach of the Congo river, 200 kilometres further north. 

`You look tired and ill, so maybe you should rest for a while here. The journey to Kindu is a tough track, which takes a few days by motorbike. Two of our bikes are due to head that way some time next week, but first you must drink more water. You look terrible.' 

It was only three days since I had left Kalemie, but already I was feeling groggy and feverish. I began to worry. I still had thousands of kilometres ahead of me. Maybe I was not strong enough to cope physically with a Congo crossing. My anti-malaria pills did not help. They made me feel even more nauseous after I took them each morning. 

But after a day of rest in Tom's house, I began to feel stronger and convince myself the sickness was down to my stupid miscalculation over water. I had made a huge mistake assuming we would have time to boil water as we travelled through Katanga and had not anticipated the urgent need to move as quickly as possible. Next time I would prepare adequate water supplies before I set out. I would not make the same mistake again. 

The town of Kasongo is an Atlantis of central Africa, a once major city now swamped by the advancing jungle. The scale of its decay was breathtaking, but what made it so intriguing for me was how it reeked of the worst excesses of Belgium's involvement with the Congo. 

Kasongo was the epicentre for the 1892 war between Belgium and Arab slavers. The Arabs had developed it into the capital of their slave state. It was near here that Livingstone witnessed the raids that made him such an ardent opponent of slavery. In Kasongo the Arabs built slave markets where tribesmen, caught by raiding parties, were traded; prisons where slaves had their necks wedged into timber yokes, so heavy and cumbersome they made escape impossible; storehouses where elephant tusks and other booty pillaged from the local villages were collected before being hauled back to Zanzibar by chain-gangs of slaves. These early Aral) invaders of the Congo were not bootleggers looking for a quick profit. They took the long view, happily staying `up country' for years, taking native girls as wives, merging and mixing bloodlines to create a complex social structure of Arabic overlords, Arabic-African mulatto foremen and African vassals. 

The most notorious of them all was Tippu-Tip, a bear of a man described by Stanley as `tall, black bearded, of negroid complexion, in the prime of life, straight and quick in his movements, a picture of energy and strength'. Tippu-Tip moved his base a great deal, but he lived in Kasongo for many years. It was his son, Sefu, who was involved in the incident that gave the town its notoriety. 

What the Indian Mutiny was to Britain, the 1892 Kasongo incident was to Belgium, a moment of anti-foreigner brutality used to justify decades of colonial control. It took place during the war between Leopold's colonial agents and the Arabs. Ever since Stanley came back to the Congo in the early 1880s to set up Leopold's colony, Belgian officers and agents had spread across the Congo River basin staking the land exclusively for the Belgian monarch. The size and importance of Kasongo made it an obvious target, so two Belgian soldiers, Lieutenant Lippens and Sergeant de Bruyne, arrived here as early ambassadors to Sefu in the early 1890s. By the time they reached Kasongo they were riddled with fever and exhausted, but the Arabs began by looking after them well, offering them a comfortable villa next to Sefu's. 

But when the first skirmishes of the Belgian-Arab war broke out, the position of the two men became precarious. There is some dispute about whether Sefu was directly involved in what happened next. What is without dispute is that both men were murdered by a mob. One version has it that de Bruyne was dragged from his writing desk by the killers. Both were disembowell and had their hands and feet cut off and sent to a nearby Arab leader as proof of their murder. 

The Belgian response was ruthless. After coercing as allies one of central Congo's fiercest tribes, the Batetele, who enjoyed a bloody and entirely justified reputation for cannibalism, a Belgian-led expeditionary force descended on Kasongo. With modern European weapons they routed the Arabs, storming the city on 22 April 1893, plundering the villas abandoned by the Arabs and allowing the Batetele to indulge in some gruesome revictualling. 

Kasongo's association with blood did not end there. It was in remote centres like Kasongo that early Belgian colonialists committed unspeakable cruelty at the end of the nineteenth century on behalf of Leopold. When he persuaded the European powers at the Berlin Conference to recognise his claim to the Congo Free State, he presented it as an exercise in using free trade to bring civilisation to backward African tribes. This was a sham. From the very beginning, the Congo Free State was an exercise not in trade, but in plunder. It began with ivory in the 1880s, then the most valuable commodity found in the Congo, but moved on to rubber in the 1890s as demand for tires surged with the mass production of cars. One of Congo's many natural resources is a thick, fast-growing ivy that occurs naturally in the rainforest and produces a sap from which top-quality rubber can be produced. 

Belgian colonial officers in backwaters like Kasongo were told to do whatever it took to maintain the flow of ivory and rubber. They did not pay for what they took, devising ever more violent ways to acquire it. Playing tribe off against tribe, they gave guns to some of the people and unleashed them on their neighbours, uninterested in what methods were used to bring in the ivory and rubber. Pour encourager les autres, whole villages would be slaughtered, women raped and children taken as slaves. The Belgians developed their own particular way of spreading fear among tribesmen by ordering their henchmen to cut off the hands of their victims, spreading terror across a wide area and ensuring obedience. This did not just happen once or twice. It became such common practice that early human-rights campaigners travelled all the way to the Congolese jungle to gather evidence of these atrocities. A black-and-white photograph taken by one such campaigner around the end of the nineteenth century shows Congolese tribesmen staring impassively at the camera. Only at second glance do you notice they are holding human hands, trophies from one of these raids. 

The Congolese forest is so impenetrable, so laden with hazards, that even today places like Kasongo have a terrifying sense of isolation, a feeling that the normal rules of human decency might break down here. I felt it strongly as I explored the decaying ruins of the once-sizeable town, troubled by images in my mind of African villagers fleeing from wanton violence unleashed by Belgian colonials, smug in the knowledge that places like Kasongo were too remote for them ever to he held to account. 

These images played on my mind as I followed footpaths snaking through the undergrowth, deviating round large trees that had grown in the middle of what had once been wide boulevards, occasionally tripping over an old fence post, broken pipe or other remnant of the old order. I was trying to picture what it must have been like back in the days of white rule. I could tell where the colonial properties had stood because through the native undergrowth pushed huge flamboyants, a tree with a distinctive red blossom, originating in Madagascar and nonindigenous to central Africa. It was a standard ornament for colonial gardens across all parts of Africa, a botanical calling card left by white outsiders. 

In Kasongo, I saw many flamboyants. They would once have stood in the front gardens of the city's smarter houses but, while the trees remained, the buildings had rotted to nothing. 

Walking through a section of open grassland, next to what might once have been an avenue, I was amazed to find the mayor's office still standing. I was even more amazed to find there was a mayor inside. 

Verond Ali Matongo was born two years after the Belgians gave Congo independence in 1960. His story summed up perfectly what had gone wrong in Kasongo ever since. 

`I was two _years old when the uprising against white rule came to Kasongo. It was started by Pierre Mulele, a leader from northeast Congo, whom no-one in the town had ever heard of before. All of a sudden we were told his followers, the Mulele Mai, were coming and we must leave. They attacked anything they associated with the outside world, they killed white people or anyone they believed to be with Belgium. It was chaos. Of course, I was too small to remember anything, but I have been told the reason my life was saved was because I was lucky - the deputy commander of the rebel force took pity on me and made me his godson and I was taken to the bush. It was years before I came back here again, when Mobutu had taken control of the country. I have no idea what happened to my real family.' 

He was speaking in the old chief administrator's office. Outside I could just make out a decaying sign carrying the old slogan from the 1970s Mobutu period. It said `Peace, Justice, Work' - three of the things one would least associate with Mobutu's bloody, criminal, indolent dictatorship. 

Mayor Matongo's office looked as if it had not been touched since the 1970s. There was a desk, a table, some chairs and an old bookshelf, teetering under the weight of some large, dusty books. His entire authority resided in a circular, plastic stamp and well stamped ink pad, the sort of thing that can be purchased at a stationery shop in Britain for a pound or two, which sat on his desk. He wielded it on the rare occasions when he actually had pieces of paper to deal with. 

`What do you actually do now?' I asked looking around. `What powers do you have?T 

`I am the mayor, appointed by the transitional government in Kinshasa. But I have no contact with them because we have no phone, and I can pay no civil servants because I have no money and there is no bank or post office where money could be received, and we have no civil servants because all the schools and hospitals and everything do not work. I would say I am just waiting, waiting for things to get back to normal.' 

'And when was the last time things were normal?' His smiling face suggested he did not find my question overly rude. 

`The 1950s. From what I hear, that is when this town was last normal.' 

I walked across to the bookshelf and picked up one of the thick books. The spine was bound with canvas and all the pages had a line printed down the middle, with Flemish text on one side and French on the other. I picked up another and found it was arranged in exactly the same way. They were an almost complete set of official gazettes from the Belgian colonial period, one for each year from the early twentieth century right up to the late 1950s. 

Some were in an advanced state of decomposition, flaking to my touch as I thumbed the pages. Others were more solid and the print was clearly legible, listing that year's inventory of ordinances, regulations and bylaws imposed by the colonial authorities in Leopoldville, the colonial name for today's Kinshasa. They covered topics as arcane as traffic-light distribution and the construction of what were euphemistically called cites, but were in fact the slums occupied by black Congolese. There were long lists of how much each province, city, town and village produced in terms of agriculture or mining. And there were detailed accounts of tax revenue and income. Like so many other colonial powers, Belgium clearly believed in bookkeeping. Handling the tomes made me think of the petti fogging Belgian bureaucrats so savagely satirised by Evelyn Waugh and Georges Simenon, the pompous buffoons who lived deep in the African bush, thousands of miles from Belgium, nitpicking over bylaws. 

`Why to do you keep these?' I asked. 

`For reference. One day we will need these jungle books for reference' was the reply. 

The first I saw of Jumaine Mungereza was his fez bobbing through the shoulder-high grass in the centre of town. He had heard there was a person passing through Kasongo who was interested in the nineteenth century period of Arab slavery and British explorers, and he identified in me a clear commercial opportunity. 

`I am the expert on all these matters of slavery and Mr Stanley,' he said. 

His appearance was not entirely convincing. Seventy-two years old with grubby spectacles and a wrinkled face covered in a whiskery fuzz, Mr Mungereza did not appear at first glance to be an expert on anything. He was also dressed up like a pantomime Arab, complete with fez and a one-piece cotton gown. I later saw him wearing tattered trousers and T-shirt, so I reckoned his Arab costume had been donned solely for my benefit. 

`I used to be an author of books. In 1979 I wrote the best book on Islam in Kasongo, with the help of one of the local missionaries, Father Luigi Lazzarato. If you want to, I can sell you a copy.' This sounded intriguing. This was the first person I had met in the eastern Congo with an interest in nineteenth-century history, so I asked him to show me his work. It turned out to be a booklet of crudely photocopied pages, stapled together inside a green card cover. I flicked through to see references to Stanley, Livingstone and Cameron. 

He wanted $50 for a copy, a huge sum in a place as backward as Kasongo. When I hesitated for a second, he dropped the price to $10. He was delighted when I bought his only copy, but before he disappeared I wanted to know more. 

'My tribe, the Mamba, were one of the first to be fully Arabised at the beginning of the period of slavery. It was a case of survival. If we had not taken on the Arab customs, we would have been taken with the other tribes as slaves. We adopted Islam, spoke Swahili as fluently as our mother language, KinyaMamba, and for a long time we were the elite of this community. Then the Belgians came and the Muslims were pushed down.' 

He was speaking as we walked through the site of Kasongo, the crowded African community a world apart from the abandoned cement buildings of the `white' suburb. The site was a place of subsistence living, but it was still densely populated, with shoals of children swirling between terraces of thatched mud huts, pointing and giggling at me, the stranger. I asked Jumaine if he would show me a mosque. 

Rounding the corner of a thatched hut, we came to an open space of beaten brown earth and Jumaine announced with clear pride in his voice, 'There it is. The Grand Mosque of Kasongo.' 

Less imposing than the town's Catholic cathedral of Saint Charles, it was impressive all the same. A rectangular structure, the roof must have reached ten metres from the ground, and the windows and door frames were finished in rather delicate brickwork. The whole thing was the same brown tone as the earth, but as I peered through one of the windows I expected to see a splash of colour - an old Arab carpet, perhaps, or a prayer niche. There was nothing. The floor was beaten earth and the walls were muddy brown. 

`There used to be many thousands of Muslims in Kasongo who worshipped every day,' Jumaine was reminiscing as we walked back through the site. 'But something happened and the numbers became less. I don't know what it was. Maybe the old religions of the forest came back.' 

With that, Jumaine, a living relic of the Arab slaving empire of Kasongo, wandered off, his fez the last thing I saw disappearing behind the thatch of a hut's roof. 

The next piece of headgear I saw made me laugh out loud and feel homesick, all at the same time. It was a cap made of Scottish tweed, the sort of thing I would expect my father to be wearing, black with rain on the banks of a salmon river. It did not look like the most appropriate hat for the sweaty tropical African bush, but that did not seem to bother its owner, an energetic eighty-two year-old called Vermond Makungu. 

He was one of many elderly characters I met in the Congo who conveyed to me such a vivid picture of a country in decline, a backward community that was not just undeveloped, but undeveloping. They all had stories about how life used to be relatively normal, sophisticated even, but how the modern reality was so much worse.

'I used to work for the big tropical hospital here in Kasongo back in the 1960s and 1970s.' Vermond seemed happy to have someone with whom to discuss what he called the Good Old Days. 'I was responsible for buying equipment for the hospital, so I would fly all over the world to buy X-ray machines, respirators and that sort of thing. I went to Kinshasa often. It was there that I bought this hat, from a trade fair. You can see it was exported to the francophone world, because the label here has the French for "Made in Scotland". But I flew to Japan, to Rome, to Brussels, all over Europe. Now look what has happened. Look at where I live.' 

We were standing in an old shop in what one day had been a terrace close to the Belgian monument in Kasongo. Part of the roof was missing and the damp floor was cluttered with rather second rate bric-a-brac - broken furniture, stained clothing, dirty cooking pots. Vermond clearly had a thing about hats because among his possessions I spotted a classic icon of Belgian colonial rule, a cream-coloured sun helmet, the sort of topi Tintin wore through out his Tintin Ali Congo adventures. Seeing it made me think of all the black-and-white photographs I had seen during my research of Congolese colonials carrying out the business of colonialism - stalking past railway stations or peering from road bridges or surveying copper mines - and always doing it while wearing one of these topi's. 

When I explained my ambition to follow Stanley's original route across the Congo and my interest in the local history, Vermond listened carefully and then started thinking. He turned out to be very dynamic for his age. 

'When we were children in the 1930s and 1940s tourists used to come to Kasongo to see the old sites from the days of the Arab wars. Would you like to see?' 

As he led me past the cathedral, I heard something that threw me for a second. It was the sound of a motorbike, the first engine noise I had heard since arriving in Kasongo several days back with Benoit and Odimba. Round the corner came an odd-looking priest. He looked odd not just because he was wearing a trilby and ski gloves in spite of the sweaty heat of the day. He looked odd because, although he was black, he did not look even remotely African. But after introducing himself as Simone Ngogo, he explained that he was very much a local, born just after the Second World War in a nearby village. I could not stop looking at his very Caucasian features and yet African skin. It was intriguing. Perhaps he was proof that Simenon had been right when he described, in his short stories, the colonialists' sexual domination of native Africans. 

I asked him if he remembered when things were better in Kasongo and he nodded enthusiastically. He said after the shock of the Mulele Mai uprising in the early 1960s, Kasongo enjoyed a brief boom period in the early years of Mobutu's rule. High copper prices meant the country's working copper mines generated substantial earnings and Les Grosses Legumes, the fat cats of the Mobutu regime, had not yet plundered everything. Towns like Kasongo were comfortably off, he said, and the tropical disease hospital - the one for which Vermond used to procure equipment - was a centre of excellence for the region. 

`But things went wrong when Mobutu became interested only in clinging to power in the late 1970s and 1980s, to putting people in jobs just to win their support. These were people who took everything, but did nothing. The decline began when he created the cult of the personality and self-divination, describing himself as Man-God sent to help Congo, and when he nationalised everything - businesses, schools, shops, everything - and it all went down from there.' 

I asked him how he kept in touch with his congregation. He pointed at his motorbike and explained it was how he completed his parish rounds, but only if he could buy fuel flown into Kasongo from time to time. Revving the engine, he raised his voice as the bike belched blue exhaust smoke that spoke of fuel filthy with impurity. 

`This area around Kasongo has known all of the Congo's wars, one after the other, and the people use Christianity to survive. It's a struggle, but somehow they survive.' 

Vermond led me down the slope at the back of the cathedral. It was badly overgrown, but gradually I made out symmetry in the trees on either side of us as we walked. We were following what had been laid out as an avenue of mango trees. 

`This was the site of the big Arab villas during the slaving period, the main centre of the city,' Vermond said. I was sweating heavily, but he somehow retained his cool, even with the tweed hat on. 

After a few hundred metres he stepped off the track into a particularly thick tangle of nettle, grass and reed, straining his neck. He was looking for something. I heard occasional words as he used his hands to clear a path. `It's somewhere around here ... I am sure of it . . . It's been such a long time. Cannot quite remember.' And then it cry of triumph. 'Come over here. I have found something to show you.' 

I joined him, ripping through tendrils of ivy and thorn that snagged my clothes, before reaching an open section. Vermond was standing triumphantly looking at the ground, his right foot resting on a straining bunch of grass stems that he had pushed out of the way to reveal a sign that read 'Slave Market'. 

'This was the place where the tourists used to come. These signs were made so they could see the old sites, like the slave market. Just over there is another sign marking the site of Sefu's villa, and beyond it the house where the two Belgians were staying when they were killed. Kasongo played a big part in the history of this place and people were interested enough to come all the way here to see. You must be the first visitor for decades.' 

We wrestled our way back to the track, but I could make out nothing of the old villas, long since consumed by the jungle. I was finding the heat intense and we walked slowly back up the hill, talking about decay and decline. He told me about the grim days of the Mulele Mai rebellion. There was genuine terror in his voice as he described the feeling in town when rumours emerged from the bush that the rebels were coming. 

'Some fled into the forest, others stayed to defend their homes. It was terrifying. There were still some white people here then, and I remember two of them decided to try to flee to the river and find a boat. They never made it. The rebels caught them on the road between here and the river.' 

We were walking so slowly that I spotted something I had missed on the way down, a stone cross standing proud of the undergrowth, off to one side of the track. 

'That's the old Belgian graveyard,' Vermond explained. 'I think the two men who tried to flee are in there.' 

The graveyard had surrendered to the advancing undergrowth years ago, but several of the gravestones were so large they had not yet quite been swamped. The entrance was marked by two mango trees that had grown enormous in Kasongo's hot, humid climate. Their canopies were so thick that little grew underneath them and we scrunched through piles of dry, dead leaves as we made our way into the old cemetery. 

Vermond performed the same trick as before, mumbling to himself as he searched. The first grave he came to had a metal plaque and I heard him scraping away dead leaves and reading out the details of a Belgian missionary who died here in 1953, before shaking his head and moving on to the next one, a Belgian woman who died in 1933. Finally he shouted out. 

'Here they are.' 

I climbed through the undergrowth and there were the graves of two men, Leon Fransen and Jean Matz. They were both in their thirties when they died and the inscription described them as agents of the Cotonou, the cotton company that used to be such a large employer here in Kasongo. Their gravestones confirmed that they died on the same day, 11 November 1964. 

Tom took me to Kasongo's weekly market to show me what was available locally. It was pretty meagre. The market consisted of a group of women sitting in front of piles of leaves, or fruit or smoked river fish - tiny things the size of minnows - or white cassava flour, while gaggles of other women milled around, inspecting the wares. Some of the women had teased their hair into long, elegant tendrils. In his diary, Stanley had drawn just such hairstyles. I called the style 'antenna hair'. But the striking thing was just how painfully thin everyone was. There were no tubby faces. Everyone, seller and buyer alike, had the same haggard appearance, with faces so wan they appeared more grey than black. 

'It's the cassava,' explained Tom. 'It is the only staple for millions and millions of people across the Congo because it is the easiest thing to grow, but in terms of nutrition it is not really any good because it lacks many basic nutrients. And without any large-scale farming or animal husbandry, the main source of protein is the meat of animals from the forest - monkeys, deer, that sort of thing. They call it bushmeat. But the animals have long since been shot out from densely populated areas like Kasongo, so really the only thing left is cassava with the occasional fish. We are seeing malnutrition levels here as if this place was suffering from a full famine.' 

During my motorbike journey I had already seen just how pervasive cassava is, in spite of various attempts that have been made to encourage Congolese to adopt more nutritious crops, like maize. An American aid-worker friend spent two years in the province of Katanga during the 1980s working as a volunteer with village communities, on an ambitious national programme trying to wean people off cassava. It failed. The reality is that the ease with which cassava grows makes it the default crop in a country like the Congo where economic chaos makes it not viable to farm anything but the easiest plants. 

After planting, cassava grows quickly into a small tree with edible leaves. You don't need to prepare a field for cassava. A burned patch of forest will do. The leaves are moderately tasty and palatable, but it is the tubers on its roots that are its most valuable asset. Without maize or corn or any other source of starch, the cassava root fills the empty belly of central Africa. The tubers are vast, bulbous things, with coarse, leathery skin stained the colour of the soil in which they grow. They have to be scraped and then soaked in water to leach away harmful toxins that occur naturally under the skin. As we biked over streams, I had often seen spots in the river beds that had been hollowed out and filled with soaking cassava tubers, pale without their skins. After it has been washed for a couple of days, the tuber is cut into fragments and dried. Again, most villages that I had passed through had piles of drying cassava fragments balanced on banana leaves drying on the thatched roofs of huts. By that time it is as white and brittle as chalk, so the next stage is simply to pound it with a pestle and mortar into cassava flour. This can then be made into a bread, known as fufu. I was not surprised to hear about its meagre nutritional value. It looked like wallpaper paste, smelled of cheese and tasted of a nasty blend of both. In the absence of any alternative, I ate a lot of cassava in the Congo and I was left feeling sorry for anyone whose daily diet never varies from the stuff. 

Tom sounded downhearted as we continued walking around the market. `I come from east Africa, Kenya, where people die of starvation because of drought. There is never enough rain for the crops or the animals. But here in the Congo, they have all the rain they need, rivers full of fish, and soil that is unbelievably rich. If you stand still here in the bush you can actually see plants growing around you, the growth is that powerful, that strong. And yet somehow people still manage to go hungry here because of the chaos, the bad management. It breaks my heart to see all this agricultural potential going to waste.' 

We continued through the market. Under a tree a young boy was selling water pots made from red, earthy clay. And against the ruins of a building a woman had hung out some coloured cotton cloth for sale as wraps for women. I asked her where the cloth came from and she told me a story showing that even in a weak economy like the Congo's, the power of globalisation can still be felt. 

`The best cloth used to come from Britain and Holland, a long time ago, maybe even a hundred years ago, but it became too expensive. Material from China is the cheapest now. It is not the same quality as the old material, but people buy what they can afford and that means the cheapest is best. So this material you see today has come to Africa by God only knows what route. It arrives in Kalemie somehow and from there people bring it all the way here by bicycle.' 

I remembered the bike traders I had seen all along the 500 kilometre motorbike route I had just completed from Kalemie. It might beat feebly here in the Congo, but the free market is still strong enough to motivate people to drag bicycles laden with Chinese cloth for vast distances through the tropical bush, to earn a living. 

The colours of her display made for a strong photograph, but as I was fiddling with my camera I heard someone shouting. 

'Stop there, stop there.' The voice came from a big man bustling towards us. 'This is a security zone, show me your permission to take photographs. Come on, show me.' 

He was tall, well-built and clearly obnoxious. He jostled my arm and started to raise his voice again before Tom stepped in. In English, Tom told me firmly to put my camera away and in rudimentary French he charmed the stranger, before nudging me out of the crowd and back to his house. 

'You see that is all that is left of the state. People who have no jobs or income, trying to make money by creating problems for outsiders.' Again, he sounded very forlorn about the Congo. Back at Tom's house, I slowly got my strength back. Living conditions were bleak and I could not stop thinking about the contrast with the luxurious villas the Belgian soldiers found when they conquered Kasongo. Tom's house was the smartest in town, but even so its comforts were modest. A barrel of rainwater had been set up over a grimy old bath; in the sitting room a collection of old car batteries was connected to a generator that ran only when there was enough fuel; and the kitchen had basically been relocated outside to where Yvonne Apendeki, Tom's maid, cooked over a charcoal burner. She kept an African grey parrot for company, and most mornings I heard him whistling along with the kettle as she boiled water and fiddled around with the few pans and plates that Care International had shipped in for Tom. 

She was only twenty-five but had lost count of the number of times rebels and mai-mai had come to Kasongo, forcing her to flee to the forest. 

'I have one son and one daughter, and I carry them with me when we have to run away. I don't know who is fighting who here any more. Everyone says they are against the government or for the government. It is not important. We all know it is not safe to stay here, so we just flee.' 

As we spoke the parrot started to jump on his perch and become more animated as a man walked around the back of the house and sat down with the air of someone very familiar with the set-up. I introduced myself and asked him his story. 

'My name is Pierre Matata. I was a garden boy when Belgians still lived in Kasongo and I have worked in this house since 1976. Back then the person who lived here was an Italian doctor working in the hospital.' Like the other denizens of Kasongo he was skeletally thin. `When do you think the problems began here?' 'It was the first rebellion, the Mulele Mai revolt in 1964. It was anarchy, complete chaos. These guys came from the bush and they basically settled grievances that reached back years and years against the outsiders, the Belgians, the Arabs, everyone who was not what they regarded as a real Congolese. But it was not just the whites they targeted. Any Congolese like us who lived in the town were an object for their hatred. They saw us as collaborators with the whites and they were cruel with us. They killed absolutely anyone connected with the white world, the modern world. You see that flask there on the floor?' 

He was pointing at an old vacuum flask Yvonne used to keep boiling water hot. 'If they saw you with that, they would kill you. That would be enough for them to think you belonged to the modern world.' 

It was a gruesome story. I thought of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and their attempt to drag their people back to the Year Zero, to rid themselves of external, colonial, foreign influences. 

'And since then we have rebels come through the town every so often. We flee into the forest, they steal everything and we come back and survive on what little is left. That is the cycle of our existence.' 

After I had been in Kasongo for three days I noticed Tom becoming more nervous. His satellite message system kept bringing him news from Kinshasa about problems in the transitional government, in the aftermath of the recent killings in Burundi. Various rebel commanders, whose presence was essential to the long-term success of the government, had flown out of Kinshasa to return to their bush headquarters in the east of the country. Tom said he had been ordered to prepare to withdraw his ex-pat staff and close his operation in Kasongo. 

`What happened back in June was bad. We are not going to go through that again. The safest place for you right now is to get to Kindu. At least they have a UN base there. So if you are feeling strong enough, I will send you there by motorbike. Is there anything else you would like to do here?' 

The one thing I had to do was give my thanks to Benoit. I found him at the Care International office. It was a short walk from Tom's house, in an abandoned school building in the old `white' suburb of Kasongo. Care International was the only aid group functioning in Kasongo, but working conditions were grim. They relied on air deliveries for all their supplies, so they could only attempt relatively modest projects such as track clearing or well digging. This was primary-level aid work. More complicated work, like running a clinic, was a far-off dream for Kasongo. Benoit was wearing crisp, clean clothes and looked totally recovered from his 1,000-kilometre round trip to collect me from Kalemie. I owed him a great deal, but all I could offer was my thanks and a few hundred dollars. He had not asked for a penny, but I felt I owed him a huge debt for his skill, stamina and efficiency. 

'What happens if they have to evacuate this office?' I asked before we parted. 

'Well, I will have to make my way home. I am not ex-pat staff, so there will not be a place for me on any plane that comes. I will have to go home by myself. I am not from Kasongo originally. I come from the town of Bukavu itself', the one which had the problems in June. I guess I will have to make my way there. I don't know how. It will be difficult, but I will find a way.' 

I leaned forward to shake Benoit by the hand, but could not stop myself feeling guilty as if I was abandoning him to an awful fate. I found it heartbreaking that a man as decent and talented as Benoit was trapped in a Congolese life lurching from crisis to crisis. I tried to sound positive. 

'If anyone can find a way, you can, Benoit. Thank you for everything.' 

Benoit could not be spared by Tom, but Odimba was available. I set off from Kasongo once again riding as his passenger, surrounded by numerous plastic bottles of specially cleaned water. Careering along the track, my head clattering every so often against Odimba's motorbike helmet, I thought more about Kasongo. During the slavery period it had peaked as a capital city, and during the colonial era its strong agriculture and tropical medicine hospital had kept it alive. But in the chaos since the first Mulele Mai uprising it had been slipping backwards. 

As I approached the Congo River I found myself on the same track that the two Belgian cotton agents had used when they tried to flee that first rebellion in 1964. I thought of their graves back in the overgrown cemetery in Kasongo and shuddered. There is something about the violence of Congo's post independence period that is seared into the minds of those whites who call themselves African - secondand third-generation colonials whose ancestors took part in the Scramble for Africa that Stanley's Congo trip precipitated. They remember dark fragments of what happened in the Congo after independence in 1960 - killing, rape. anarchy. The two cotton traders of Kasongo were just a small part of a much larger number of victims whose deaths still cast a sinister shadow through the older white tribes of Africa. 

I tried to imagine the panic of their flight that day. How they felt as the worst nightmare of living deep in the African bush became a reality; the rumours in town of the rebel advance; the terrible understanding that nobody was coming to the rescue; the desperate hope that if they made it from Kasongo to the Congo River they might find a boat to safety; venturing out of the ordered precincts of the town only to be swallowed up by the vengeful rage of Congolese tribesmen settling decades-old scores.

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Up a River Without a Paddle 127s

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