Part 4:Blood River : A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart...Up a River Without a Paddle...Pirogue Progress

Blood River : A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

by Tim Butcher

Chapter 7

Up a River Without a Paddle

I wish I could say my first glimpse of the upper reaches of the Congo River was a moment of dramatic revelation. For days spent clinging to the back of various motorbikes and plodding up hills through Katanga and Maniema, I had tried to picture the scene when I reached the river. In my imagination I hoped for an instant when the rainforest would fall away from a craggy hilltop to reveal, spread out before me, Africa's mightiest river churning through rapids, cloudy with spray, as it gathered itself for a 2,500- kilometre descent to the Atlantic.

I was disappointed. The moment came during another long day of motorbiking as we picked our way along a section of track not noticeably different from the 600 kilometres that went before. We simply turned a corner and there, unheralded, in front of me, lay one of the natural wonders of the world. The object of so much mystery for generations of outsiders, and the thing that had fired my imagination through years of research, oozed lazily downstream between two thickly forested banks almost a kilometre apart. The midday sun was directly overhead, my least favourite time of day in the Congo when all the colours of the trees are washed out and the heat is at its most suffocating. In the flat light, the river appeared viscous and still. Conrad likened the river to a serpent uncoiling right across Africa. In these upper reaches, the snake was fat and lifeless.

I struggled to recognise Stanley's lyrical description of his first sight of the river:

A secret rapture filled my soul as I gazed upon the majestic stream. The great mystery that for all these centuries Nature had kept hidden away from the world of science was waiting to be solved. For two hundred and twenty miles I had followed one of the sources to the confluence and now before me lay the superb river itself! My task was to follow it to the Ocean.

I was vainly searching for the rapture in my soul when our track petered out on the river bank. My first encounter with the Congo River and it was already an obstacle. Our track continued over on the other bank and there were no boats in sight.

I watched as Odimba propped the bike on its stand and went off to negotiate with a group of men sitting in the shade of some nearby trees. Odimba was quiet, even shy, in comparison with Benoit, but over the days we spent biking together I found him utterly reliable. To be entrusted with one of Care International's precious motorbikes was a matter of prestige and Odimba responded with pride. He looked after the bike meticulously, insisted on not sharing the riding with me, and rode with great skill in spite of appalling conditions. Sometimes I would notice that his eyes were rheumy and sore. The concentration needed to avoid obstacles was intense and all day long his straining eyes were bombarded with dust and tiny insects. When I tried to offer him water to wash his eyes, he shrugged me away almost as if it was too much to take help from a white man. He played the role of the stoical sergeant to Benoit's commissioned officer. I detected that he was a little self-conscious that Benoit spoke much better French than he could, and throughout our time together Odimba appeared comfortable with a dignified silence. He was one of the many Congolese without whom I would not have been able even to attempt my trip so I owed him a great deal, but he did not attempt to exploit this position. For those white doomsters who grumble that corruption is in some way a natural African trait, I would hold up Odimba as evidence that they are talking rubbish.

As he went in search of a way to cross the river, I walked to the water's edge. The red soil of the jungle turned to a paler, sticky mud, which I could feel gumming up the soles of my boots. I walked slowly along the high-water line for a few hundred metres trying to picture the old port of Kasongo Rive that the Belgians built here. In its day it was a large enough town to support a church, shops, and warehouses for various steamboats and paddle boats that worked this section of the river. I had email exchanges with a Belgian who was born here in the 1940s and who remembers the neat quadrangle of brick buildings that formed the town centre, and the endless coming and going of river traffic.

All of that had long gone. There was not a single riverside building left and all the port facilities had vanished, spirited away over the years by a combination of looters and floodwaters. Areas of hard standing and numerous cranes and moles had all disappeared, leaving nothing but a rusting engine block from a car - too heavy to wash away and too valueless to steal.

Suddenly a man's voice disturbed the midday torpor. He was one of the men with whom Odimba had negotiated and he was summoning help from way over on the other side of the river. His shouted message was a single Swahili word, repeated and repeated. The river was much wider than I expected, broader than the Thames in central London. We were still 2,500 kilometres from the sea and the river was yet to be joined by any of its major tributaries, but it was already a huge body of water.

Way over in the distance I saw movement. A brown shape slowly flaked off the opposite river bank and began edging silently towards us. It was a pirogue, or dugout canoe. It was slender and elegant, and seeing it gave me a feeling of connection with Stanley. It was no different in design from those he would have seen on 17 October 1876 when he first reached the Congo River at a spot not far from where I was standing.

It took twenty minutes for the boat to make its way across. Pirogues come in a range of sizes, but this one was on the large side, a dreadnought made from the hollowed-out trunk of a large tree. It looked like the husk of a gargantuan seed, streamlined against the river current and without a single join or blemish along the hull. It was at least fifteen metres long and deep enough for its passengers to sit concealed by its sides, with only their faces peeking over the gunwales. It had no engine and was moved by three paddlers, two standing at the bow for power and one at the stern, in charge of steering.

Eventually its bow slid onto our bank with the lightest of kisses. The dreadnought was heavy and the river too inert to make it swing downstream, so it just sat there like a compass needle pointing in the direction I needed to go, straight across the Congo River. A dozen or so passengers disembarked, carrying bundles of fruit wrapped in banana leaves trussed up with cords made from vines. One man had with him a type of home-made bicycle where part of the frame, the front forks, were made of rough branches of wood still in their bark. There was a brief moment of negotiation between Odimba and the oldest paddler, before a tariff was agreed and our motorbike, still laden with luggage, was picked up bodily by four men and dropped into the canoe. The hull was deep enough for one of the paddlers to sit on the bike and freewheel it down to the lowest and most stable point.

We were not the only passengers. A woman carrying a very sickly child squashed in next to me. The baby was wide-eyed with fever and clammy to the touch.

`Malaria,' she said.

'Do you have any medicine?' I asked. She shook her head. Shortly after we pushed off one of the paddlers caught a crab, causing the canoe to lurch, but while everyone else onboard reacted in reflex, the mother and baby did not stir.

Most of the lives still claimed by the turmoil in the Congo are not the direct result of fighting. Only a tiny fraction of the 1,000- plus lives lost each day are ever caused by military action. It became clear to me that the vast majority of deaths are the result not of combat, but of the Congo's decay - children dying of avoidable diseases because field clinics have been abandoned; cholera epidemics among communities of refugees driven out of their homes into squalid camps by the threat of violence; malnutrition because of the failure of modern agriculture, and so on. I looked at the sickly child and tried to think of another country in the world where a baby born in 2004 was more at risk than one born in the same place half a century earlier.

That moment when I left the east bank of the river was special for me. I had achieved something that many people had thought impossible by crossing overland from Lake Tanganyika all the way to the Congo River, through some of the most dangerous terrain on the planet. With my own eyes I had peered into a hidden African world where human bones too numerous to bury were left lying on the ground and where the life of villagers pulsed between grim subsistence in mud huts, unchanged from those seen by nineteenth-century explorers, and panicked flight into the forest at the approach of marauding militia.

But I found the Congo a relentlessly punishing place to travel. It never let up, never allowed me to fully relax, feel comfortable or at ease. My thrill at having made the overland crossing was more than outweighed by thoughts about where I would next find clean water, food and safe shelter. It had basically taken me two weeks to cover 500 kilometres, but I still had five times that distance to go to the Atlantic, down a river that had not been safe enough to travel along for years. Sitting in that canoe on the Congo River for the first time was a moment for only modest celebration.

The pirogue deposited us on the west bank of the Congo River, but it took another two days of hard biking to reach the port of Kindu. The terrain was flat, but as the rainforest became thicker the humidity and climate grew more uncomfortable. Our track followed the line of a railway that the Belgians built at the start of the twentieth century to connect Kindu, their largest port on the upper Congo River, to Lubumbashi 1,600 kilometres to the south. We kept criss-crossing the old rails as the bike track picked its own erratic course past thickets of giant bamboo, elephant grass and jungle undergrowth. The rails sat on cast-iron sleepers and on some it was possible to make out their year of manufacture, 1913, and the location of their foundry, Antwerp. The railway ran almost parallel with the river, although it was so far away I never caught a glimpse of the water. In the town of Kibombo we passed an old station, where I stopped to find that the stationmaster diligently turned up for work even though only one train had been through in the last six years.

It was a sadly common feature of my journey through the Congo, the desperate willingness of people to cling to the old vestiges of order as an anchor against the anarchy of today. Here was a man who had not seen a train for years, yet he still kept his station house in a state of readiness, passing his time in an armchair on the platform next to the tracks that lay redundant and silent in the baking heat. On occasion he would even don the old stationmaster's cap, in the blue and red of the old national railway-company livery. We got talking about the old days and he showed me how he would inform the townspeople of Kibombo that a train was coming. He walked onto the platform, reached up and heaved an old bell that still hung over the platform. The clapper swung violently, but the bell let out the ugliest clang. I could see it was almost cleaved in two by a rust-rimmed crack.

Kibombo had once been a large town, large enough to support a substantial Catholic church and seminary that I had seen as we motorbiked in on the southern approach road. The sun was low in the sky, bronzing the seminary's unplastered brick facade, and after another long, dusty day it was a pleasure to pause a moment to enjoy the tranquillity. Shaggy-headed palm trees nodded deferentially towards the straight lines and angles of the abandoned building. It was long and thin, stretching for more than a hundred metres, and in some places it had two storeys. It looked like the front of a military academy rather than a religious training establishment, but spreading religion was a tough business in the Congo, so maybe the hundreds of novitiates who studied were drilled into shape, not just spiritually, but physically, here in Kibombo, before being unleashed to carry their pastoral message deeper into the African bush.

The church was impressive, but the thing I will not forget from Kibombo is the spectre of the town centre after dark, when it was lit entirely by slow-dancing flames from palm-oil lamps. I had been offered a floor to sleep on in an abandoned building where I had set up my stinking mosquito net before eating another grim meal of cassava. After dark I walked through the relic of a town centre where the lamps cast shadows on the few fragments of wall still standing. Palm oil burns with a low, fat flame and this seemed to make the shadows all the more slow, macabre and sinister. I knew that during one of the 1960s rebellions three Europeans were slaughtered here in Kibombo just hours before a rescue party reached the town. I wrapped myself tight in my mosquito net that night.

Again, we saw no other traffic on the track apart from pedestrians near villages of thatched huts and the occasional trader with a bicycle laden with goods. I stopped to look at one particularly gruesome bicycle payload - five black monkeys destined to be sold at market for eating, their hands and feet bound with vine, their black fingernails oily with some sort of bodily fluid excreted when they had been killed by hunters earlier that day.

We crossed one astonishing bridge near a village called Difuma Deux. The village had seen some recent fighting between government troops from Kindu and rebels attacking from the south. The original bridge had been blown a number of times and what was left was an amazing feat of ingenuity. Various branches, planks and pieces of timber had been lain across the few remaining piles of the bridge, but they were not anchored. As I put my weight on the first plank, the whole disjointed structure sagged dangerously. I felt as if I was playing it life-and-death version of that children's game where you have to pick up sticks from a pile without moving others. It took me ages to summon the courage to trust the bridge. I need not have worried. When I turned round I saw this higgledy-piggledy construction was strong enough to take the weight as Odimba skilfully wheeled our heavily laden motorbike across.

After so long on the back of a bike watching the forest reel by, I was thrown when suddenly I saw something metallic and manmade next to our track out in the jungle. It was dark with rust and almost submerged in the undergrowth, but there was something about the straight lines and sharp edges that caught my eye. I dug Odimba in the ribs and he stopped.

I had found the remains of an armoured car, a very primitive 1950s military vehicle, but an armoured car nonetheless. The track I was travelling along had been unfit for regular road traffic for decades and it took me some minutes to work out what this once-modern and sophisticated war machine was doing out here, quietly rotting in the forest. It was a relic of one of the Congo's more chaotic periods - the age of the mercenaries.

In the early 1960s, during the chaos after the end of Belgian colonial rule, the Congo was the world's epicentre for mercenary activity. Soldiers of fortune came here to fight, at different times, for the government, against the government, against the United Nations, alongside the United Nations. Some of the mercenaries liked fighting so much they fought among themselves. There were those, like Che Guevara, who dressed up their involvement in ideological terms, arguing that it was part of an effort to spread socialist revolution, but many others (mostly, but not exclusively, white) had more venal motives - a passion for violence and loyalty that was transferable to whoever paid most.

As the Mulele Mai rebellion worsened in 1964, huge numbers of mercenaries arrived in the Congo, many of them under the command of Mike Hoare, a former major in the British Army dubbed `Mad Mike'. He sought to justify mercenary activity in Africa as a necessary bulwark against the spread of communism. For some time this earned him a good press in the West and nowhere better than in my paper, the Telegraph, due to his close relationship with my 1960s predecessor in Africa, John Bulloch. Today, Hoare prefers not to talk about what went on. I tried to contact him at his last-known address in Switzerland but failed, and John has not heard from him in years.

In those early days of the post-independence period, the Congo government had enough money from mining to promise the mercenaries extravagant pay packages, but they often ended up paying themselves. It became routine on operations when entering a Congolese town for the mercenary forces to hurry to the local bank, blow open the safe with dynamite and take whatever was inside. This was not small-scale stuff, or the work of just a few psychos and hotheads. Without a functioning army of its own, the government of the Congo came to rely on men like Hoare and a huge mercenary militia that grew to hundreds of men, spread across three battalions with their own cap badges, unit names and structure. For several years the Congo's combat troops were all foreign mercenaries.

Their activities peaked in 1964 when they were unleashed on the east of the country with carte blanche to deal with the rebels. The vehicle I had found was the relic of a skirmish during the combat assault on Kindu by Hoare's mercenary column. In a 1967 book, Congo Mercenary, he described what happened:

Our leading armoured car was face to face with three enemy armoured cars, evil-looking mock-up affairs, and the gunners were slugging it out toe to toe ...

'Bazooka, sir?' enquired a soft voice behind me in the dark. It was Captain Gordon ...

'OK,' I said reluctantly `give it a bash. Watch yourself.'

Wham! A brilliant flash of yellow light lit up the tunnel of the track as an almighty bang reverberated down the length of the column and the front of the leading enemy armoured car flew into a thousand pieces ...

The crews of the other two cars, panic-stricken, tried to bale out, but all were caught in merciless machine-gun fire...

The bodies of the dead were strewn on the track ahead of us, but nobody got out to remove them and the column continued after its fright, each vehicle bumping over the bodies in turn until they were reduced to a squashy pulp.

I was standing at the exact spot described by Hoare. In the 1960s this was a major thoroughfare down which a mercenary column comprising jeeps, trucks, armoured cars and command vehicles could easily pass and where their enemies could plan and execute an ambush. Today it is pristine forest crossed by a single-file track with only a war-damaged armoured car to hint at its bloody past. As I walked back to the motorbike to continue on to Kindu, I wondered if I was stepping where those bodies had been crushed to a pulp.

I knew Kindu had a large UN base and I was looking forward to feeling truly safe for the first time in two weeks. I had great hopes for the place. Maybe I could even have a wash and a decent meal. I should have known better. A good rule of thumb for my Congo journey was that the more I anticipated arriving somewhere, the more disappointed I was. By that formula, Kindu did not let me down.

`You came from where?' Marie-France Heliere, who ran the UN operation in Kindu, was astonished when I turned up in her office. She had never heard of any foreigner reaching her town overland and was amazed when I explained the route I had used. In her experience, outsiders only ever flew to Kindu, using the UN-controlled airport, and she seemed initially a little sceptical about my claim to have arrived by motorbike.

Only my filthy state seemed to convince her I was telling the truth.

`Well, at least you look like a real traveller,' she said slowly, her gaze creeping from my dirty boots up to my dust-frosted hair. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable, as if I was spoiling the air conditioned perfection of Marie-France's office. It was spotless, although she complained she was still retrieving shards of glass from her riot-damaged computer keyboard. Like all other UN bases around the Congo, the one in Kindu had been attacked by mobs angered by the failure of peacekeepers to protect civilians two months earlier. Near the door in her office I noticed a small overnight snatch-bag with her UN livery-blue body armour and helmet. She followed my gaze and explained, 'We have to be able to leave quickly if we need to.'

Her door opened and she welcomed two Italian aid workers. I felt slightly embarrassed when she introduced me as an `adventurer'. I squirmed, but the two Italians were not that interested. One of them was thin and haggard, and the other fresh faced and eager. The healthy-looking one was taking over from the ill-looking one, who had just finished a year of service in Kindu.

`What was it like?' I asked the older hand.

`The Congo is like nowhere else. After a year here, I cannot wait to leave.'

I thought of the thirteen Italian airmen who died here in Kindu in November 1961. They were flying routine shuttle flights for the original UN mission in the Congo, the predecessor by forty years of the mission that Marie-France worked for. They arrived in two planes at Kindu's small airport to deliver equipment to the local detachment of Malaysian troops, but for some reason they left the secure confines of the airstrip and headed into town, where they fell into the hands of an angry mob of government soldiers. They were dragged through the streets to the town centre just a short distance from where we were sitting and beaten to death. They were then butchered and eaten. Body parts were seen for sale days later at local markets. I don't even know if the exhausted, disease-ravaged aid worker I met was even aware of the story.

I was trapped there for days, struggling to find a way to travel downriver. In 2004 the river was viewed more as a hindrance than as a transport asset, a completely different reality from the town's heyday in the first half of the twentieth century when Kindu was a principal component of a carefully constructed Belgian transport network. Kindu was a major junction on the route between Kisangani (the colonial river town of Stanleyville) and Lubumbashi (colonial Elisabethville). River boats would arrive here from Kisangani in the north, to connect with trains that would head south to Lubumbashi.

I have a book by a Belgian hunter, Andre Pilette, about a safari he went on, just before the First World War, across this part of Africa. Most of the book is standard Great White Hunter stuff - descriptions of how he shot his way through hundreds and hundreds of game animals, dodging death from various wounded beasts - and it contains a fantastic photograph of him looking completely shameless in a suit, shoes and topi, being carried through the Congo on a hammock strung along a pole between two African bearers. But by the time M. Pilette reached Kindu in August 1913, he basically viewed his adventure as over, describing a modern town fully connected to the outside world. His journey home to Belgium began here with a routine ferry downstream:

All day long you could hear the whistles from railway locomotives or the sirens of riverboats; the sound of cargo being loaded and unloaded. On a Sunday or any weekday, you could see endless industry in the town and you could think yourself transported to one of Belgium's most important industrial centres.

By the time I reached Kindu ninety years later, it was a squalid imitation of a Belgian industrial centre. There were some buildings that once belonged to railway officials and built, just as M. Pilette described, on the crest of the hill behind the station, now decrepit and tatty. And I saw my first motor traffic since Kalemie, 700 kilometres to the south and east. The vehicles were almost all UN-owned or jeeps belonging to aid agencies, and at the junction outside the repainted rice warehouse where the UN had its headquarters, a Congolese traffic policeman diligently stood in the middle of the road all day long, whistling and signalling with gloved hands, peering out from beneath a bright yellow helmet. I found the heat in Kindu grim, but every time I passed that junction I never saw the policeman without those delicate white gloves.

They were deeply incongruous in this otherwise filthy town. Roads that had once been smooth with tarmac are now potholed and uneven. There are a few shops in the town centre, but they sell nothing but the samizdat tat of low-end trading - cheap, Chinese goods that are brought here on the back of bicycles or on the occasional unregistered flight to Kindu's small airport. The town had grown up on the west bank of the Congo River, but over on the east bank and about 100 kilometres into the bush there were large deposits of cassiterite, the ore from which tin is made. If Lubumbashi is a cobalt town, Kindu is a tin town, although the relatively low profit margins on mining cassiterite make the whole operation more low-key than the more sexy diamond, gold and cobalt mines elsewhere in the Congo. Along the main drag in town, you can see a few buildings where cassiterite traders do business, buying sacks of ore from artisanal miners who drag it here by bicycle through the bush.

But without mains water or power, Kindu is a dismal place. Among the UN and aid community Kindu has one of the highest attrition rates for disease out of all towns in the Congo. The Italian aid worker who had looked so eager and healthy in Marie France's office at the UN base fell sick almost immediately and, when I next saw him just a few days later, he was pale with a plaster on his arm where a drip had been attached. Without mains water, people use the Congo River as a giant sluice, to rid themselves of all types of waste. During recent fighting, war dead had been tipped into the river, continuing a tradition from the mercenary days of the 1960s when the mercenary commander, Mike Hoare, described the river waters turning red with blood when a boatload of rebels was hit by machine-gun fire.

Most frustrating for me was the utter collapse of the ferry system. There was not a single working Congolese motorboat left on the entire upper reach of the Congo River. I walked down to the old port to find the carcasses of various boats from the mid-twentieth century lying rusting on the river bank. I encountered the same suspicious, money-grabbing hostility that I had experienced many times over in the Congo, as my curiosity was met with demands from self-styled `policemen' for money and threats that I must pay or get into trouble for violating a `security zone'.

I was beginning to feel lonely and depressed, but I still could not avoid being impressed by the scale of the decay in Kindu. Some of the abandoned boats were enormous, with chimney stacks that reached up through four rotten decks. I struggled to imagine the planning, effort and expense involved in bringing the ships' components all the way here for assembly in the early twentieth century. But all of that effort lay in ruins, flotsam from a forgotten age.

`You must not give up hope. God will provide.' The optimism of Masimango Katanda perked me up a little bit. He was the local Anglican bishop and my host during my time in Kindu. I had arrived unannounced at his house and yet he immediately offered to put me up. I was curious about what a Church of England representative was doing in the predominantly Catholic Congo.

'It was the British missionaries in Uganda who are to blame. They crossed the border into the Congo and brought with them their message into the east of the country. We do not have the biggest congregation, but I am still responsible for 20,000 church members in Maniema province alone.'

After a grace delivered in French, which the bishop tailored specially for me by asking that travellers receive God's protection, we ate a meal of cassava bread garnished with cassava leaves, before moving outside to talk in the evening cool of his courtyard. The town of Kindu had no power, although I could see a distant glow from the UN base, lit up by its own generators.

'We have had so many rebellions and wars it is difficult to remember them all, but I remember exactly where I was when the latest one started in 1998. I was at the summer Lambeth Conference in London when I heard of the fighting here, so I flew to Uganda thinking I could come overland like those early missionaries.'

I fidgeted on my plastic chair, trying not to break the bishop's flow. After the fierce heat of the day the temperature had dipped nicely outside, but I was anxious not to be bitten by mosquitoes swarming in the gloom. I kept moving to make sure my ankles and wrists were not exposed. The bishop's house was perhaps the finest in town, but it was still basic, without running water or power. As a treat I had bought a plastic bottle of petrol to run his small generator and I could hear the delighted screams of his children gathered around a television inside, watching a low budget Nigerian-made film about adult women falling in love with a magical eight-year-old boy.

'We stayed in Uganda a month or so before it became clear the fighting was too bad to make it back that way, so we had to come up with another plan. We flew all the way to Zambia and headed north until we crossed into the Congo and reached Lubumbashi. There we took the last train that ran from Lubumbashi to Kindu before the war. It was September 1998 and a journey that used to take thirty-six hours or so lasted nine days. It was grim. No food, no water, no bathroom. But at least we got home to Kindu.'

During the war the two banks of the river were held by rival militia.

'The town was completely cut off for years. No trains. No bicycle traders. Nothing. You could not even go down to the river because of the shooting sometimes. Our church had land for an educational centre over there on the east bank, but it was in no man's-land. It was very dangerous, but now things are better.'

'Do you think it would be safe for me to travel downriver by canoe?'

'It will be very risky. If it was safe there would be regular river traffic, but, even today, there is nothing.'

One afternoon I crossed the river and went in search of the last English missionary still working in eastern Congo. Louise Wright was sixty-one when I met her, living in a mud hut, speaking Swahili fluently and claiming to miss nothing from home except for a daily cryptic crossword. A former English teacher at a girls' high school in Norfolk, she had turned her back on a comfortable Western life and spent the last fifteen years in the eastern Congo working as a teacher for the Church Mission Society.

Clearly loved by her congregation, she had committed herself to one of the least comfortable and most dangerous places on the planet. Even though she was much too modest to accept the comparison, to my eye she was living the life captured so powerfully in The Poisonwood Bible, an award-winning novel by an American author, Barbara Kingsolver, which tells the story of an evangelical Baptist and his family working as missionaries in the Congo around the time Belgium granted independence in 1960.

'I was working in my school as head of the English department in the late 1980s when I saw an advert from the Church Mission Society which read: "Is God calling you to stay where you are?" I don't know quite why it had such a powerful effect on me, but it made me think that perhaps I could be doing something more constructive to help the work of God.'

We were speaking inside the educational centre described by the bishop, set up by the Anglican Church on the east bank of the Congo River near Kindu. Outside I had seen a grim feature of local life as militiamen beat up bicyclists and stole their bicycles - there were no cars or trucks to speak of on this side of the river. But inside the compound, things were more peaceful. There were no modern buildings, just traditional mud huts and a large clearing in the bush where women were tending a crop of cassava. I could hear the murmur of voices from an open-sided thatched hall where trainee priests were being taught about the Bible. Louise gave me a tour.

`We have to be self-sufficient,' she explained as we passed a group of Congolese women clearing the forest so that more cassava could be planted, and another threesome who were milling cassava roots in a large wooden tub. Inside the tub there was a blur of motion as the three women skilfully wielded a thick timber pole each, pounding them like synchronised pistons so that the brittle cassava crumbled into flour. Another woman was sorting the ripe fruit of a palm tree so it could be crushed for oil. I had seen palm oil used in candles, but this woman had another use for it - washing her infant son, who beamed at me naked, but glowing with a fresh sheen of oil. Louise spotted my interest. `Pretty impressive stuff, palm oil,' she said. `You can cook with it, eat it, wash with it or light your house with it.'

Returning to a thatched boma in the centre of the compound, she said something that later I could not stop thinking about.

`The thing about the east of the Congo is that even during the Belgian colonial period, it really was not that developed. Today things are very basic, but the important thing to remember is that things have always been like this here - a very tough, rural self sufficient lifestyle.'

This did not fit snugly with my image of the Congo as a once functioning country that has slipped backwards. I responded, `But surely the war and the chaos have made a difference. At least there was some sort of society before, an exploitative and cruel society, but one that was peaceful. Now people are dying in an anarchic free-for-all from things that would not have killed them before - starvation and avoidable disease.'

Louise thought for a second before answering.

'The war has had one major effect in that there are only two real ways left for Congolese people to get on. Before, there was at least a system of schools to go to paid for by the state, a transport system so that people could reach other parts of the country, a health system so that if you were ill you could stand a chance of recovery. But today all of that has gone, so that you only have two real options - you join a church, the only organisation that provides an education, a way for someone to develop, or you join one of the militias and profit from the war.'

I found her analysis depressing. The collapse of the state in this large swathe of Africa meant that its people either relied on the charity of outsiders or took to violence. I must have looked bit dejected because Louise tried to lighten my mood.

'From my point of view as church worker, it's great,' she said. 'When I go on leave back to the UK and I go into a church on Sunday, I am the youngest person there by a long way. But here in the Congo, I am always the oldest.'

As our discussion continued, she made one other important point about how the Belgian colonial way of doing things in the Congo lasted long after independence in 1960.

'The Belgians ran their colony almost on military lines. Black Congolese were only allowed to travel if they had passes from the Belgian authorities, and nothing could be done without the blessing of what was effectively the local Belgian commander. By the time I got here in the 1980s, the colonial era had long gone, but I found that under Mobutu everything was run along exactly the same lines. Nothing had really changed.

'I remember going to see the head of a big mine in the east of the country to ask if one of the congregation could be treated at the mine's clinic. Well, when I turned up at the director's office, it was as if the Belgians were still running things. The director, a white man, an old colonial type, was treated like royalty. I remember sitting outside his office for hours waiting for him to grant me an audience. It was as if the Mobutu regime had taken over and decided to use exactly the same methods of control and military discipline that the Belgians had used.'

Her story reminded me of something written by Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Irish author and politician, about his time serving with the UN in the Congo back in the early 1960s. He served as point man in Katanga for the UN Secretary General, when the province tried to secede, and in his subsequent book To Katanga and Back he writes scathingly about the attitude of Belgian colonialists to the Congolese:

If the attitude of the Belgian administration and the industrialists and missionaries had been genuinely paternal .. . there would have been much to be said for it. A good parent, after all, wants his children to grow up. He does not want to stunt their intellectual growth; he encourages them to take on responsibilities progressively; he steps aside, and stays aside, as soon as he reasonably can. There is little evidence that Belgians in the Congo generally were paternalist in this good sense. The priest who, in the presence of a Congolese colleague, emphasised not only the gravity but also the ineradicable nature of Congolese defects, was `paternalist' in the manner of a father who enjoys sneering at a son's awkwardness, and keeps impressing on him that he is congenitally and incurably defective. I found this form to be, on the whole, the prevalent type of paternalism in Katanga.

As I prepared to say goodbye to Louise, outside the thatched hut where she lived in the Kindu training centre, I thought how her attitude of warmth and respect for Africans differed from that shown by so many outsiders over the decades in the Congo. Just as O'Brien had suggested, this dominant, negative attitude had left the Congo stunted.

I lay under my mosquito net that night in the bishop's house being kept awake by a terrible sound. Like all other Congolese towns I visited, Kindu fell silent at night as if people were too scared to move around after dark. But outside my room I could hear the deranged ramblings of the bishop's father, an elderly man suffering from acute dementia. At night he would stumble round the yard, crashing into things, wailing incoherently. It added to my distress as I thrashed around on my sweat-sodden mattress, feeling trapped by history. When Stanley reached the Congo River in October 1876, he too had struggled to find a way to descend the river. Of the 355 expedition members who set out with him from Zanzibar in November 1874, only 147 were left by the time he got here. The rest had either deserted or died. Frederick Barker and Edward Pocock had both been killed by disease, leaving Francis Pocock as Stanley's last white companion.

In terms of nineteenth-century exploration, his party had already achieved great things, using his collapsible boat, the Lady Alice, for the first full circumnavigation of Lake Victoria and mapping other major features of the Great Lakes region. But the overall success or failure of Stanley's mission depended on him finding a way down the Congo River.

With good reason, the Arab slavers were unwilling to help. They were reluctant to let any outsider into territory they claimed for themselves, fearing - quite rightly as it turned out - that they might lose control of the land. They dressed up their explanations with warnings about hostile tribes and dangerous cataracts on the river, but it seems obvious they were reluctant to risk losing their exclusive control of the upper Congo River. Stanley was the third white man to reach the river after Livingstone and Cameron, but they had both failed to persuade the local Arabs to let them proceed downstream. Livingstone had turned back towards Lake Tanganyika, while Cameron had abandoned the river and struck out overland towards the west coast of Africa.

By the light of my head torch that night, I reread Stanley's account of the colourful warnings issued by the Arabs to dissuade him from heading downstream:

There are monstrous large boa-constrictors, suspended by their tails to the branches waiting for the passer-by or a stray antelope. The ants in the forest are not to be despised. You cannot travel without your body being covered with them, when they sting you like wasps. The leopards are so numerous that you cannot go very far without seeing one. Almost every native wears a leopard-skin cap. The gorillas are in the woods, and woe befall the man or woman met alone by them; for they run up to you and seize your hands, and bite the fingers off one by one, and as fast as they bite one off, they spit it out.

I felt a strange empathy when I read how Stanley had seen this as a crisis point for his journey. Amid warnings from the Arabs and demands from his Zanzibari porters that they turn round and go home, Stanley describes in his book how he and Francis Pocock turned to the toss of a coin to decide whether or not they should head downriver. Heads would be for the river, and tails for retreat. Six times a rupee coin was tossed and six times it came down tails. In Stanley's book this moment of great drama is captured in a black-and-white etching that shows a pipe-smoking Pocock preparing to flick the coin with his thumb while Stanley, in full tunic and knickerbockers, stands poised for the result.

Somewhat strangely, the pair decided to completely ignore this six-toss omen, badgering, cajoling, threatening and bribing the Arabs until they eventually agreed - for a price - to provide protection for Stanley's party for sixty days' march downstream.

The expedition initially set off on foot, slogging through the forest on the east bank of the river. There is no explanation as to why Stanley wasted effort going overland when he was right next to a perfectly navigable stretch of river. It is most likely that he could not find enough local canoes for his expedition - with his Arab protectors, the expedition had swollen to around 700 souls. Having experienced the climate myself and seen the thickness of the rainforest, I realised that Stanley's description of the rigours of the overland trek rang horribly true:

We have had a fearful time of it today in these woods and those who visited this region before declare with superior pride that what we have experienced as yet is only a poor beginning to the weeks upon weeks which we shall have to endure. Such crawling, scrambling, tearing through the woods! ... It was so dark sometimes in the woods that I could not see the words, recording notes of the track, which I pencilled in my note-book . . . We arrived in camp, quite worn out with the struggle through the intermeshed bush, and almost suffocated with the heavy atmosphere ... Our Expedition is no longer the compact column which was my pride. It is utterly demoralised. Every man scrambles as he best may through the woods; the path, being over a clayey soil, is so slippery that every muscle is employed to assist our progress. The toes grasp the path, the head bears the load, the hand clears the obstructing bush, the elbow puts aside the sapling.

It was in this section of forest that Stanley came across village after village decorated with skulls, often arranged in two rows sunk into the soil running the entire length of the village. The inhabitants told him, through translators, that they belonged to apes trapped in the forest and eaten, although Stanley smuggled two samples home to Britain, where a medical expert studied them and concluded they were definitely human. The same image was used by Conrad twenty years later in Heart of Darkness when his narrator arrives after a long and terrible river journey in central Africa in search of a white colonial agent, Mr Kurtz, to find his bush house decorated with human skulls.

Eventually Stanley abandoned the land route, sent his Arab guides back towards Kasongo and committed his expedition to the river. Behind the Lady Alice came a flotilla of twenty-two pirogues - one he named the Telegraph after our employer - that he had stolen at gunpoint from riverside villages. He saw them as spoils of war after a series of skirmishes with the Wagenia, the tribe living along the river. The only contact the Wagenia had ever had with outsiders had been raids by Arab slaving parties, and it is no surprise that they treated Stanley's arrival with hostility, attacking with bows and arrows and suffering heavy casualties from the modern weaponry fired by Stanley's Zanzibaris. By late December 1876 Stanley's entire expedition was floating down the Congo River, anxiously peering out over the barrels of their Snider rifles, percussion-lock muskets and double-barrelled shotguns at a forest that concealed dangers both real and imagined.

When I eventually left Kindu, I did so in circumstances very similar to Stanley. I was on a boat crewed by non-Congolese outsiders, heading nervously downriver and looking out from behind a phalanx of rifles and machine-guns.

I had hitched a ride on a UN river patrol boat, a swanky, sleek looking thing with powerful engines and comfy padded white seats more suited to the French Riviera than combat riverine operations. It was the property of a tiny detachment from the navy of Uruguay. They were MONUC's sole military presence on the 800 navigable kilometres of the upper Congo River. I was lucky to have been given a place on their downriver patrol and I owed my good fortune to Lieutenant Commander Jorge Wilson, an impressively bulky Uruguayan naval officer who commanded the Kindu unit.

I don't know whether it was because, as a descendant of nineteenth-century British immigrants to the Americas - Scottish miners who mined salt in Uruguay - he felt an affinity with Stanley, another British nineteenth-century immigrant to the Americas, but Cdr Wilson was very knowledgeable about Stanley's journey and happy to play a small part in helping me recreate it. My target was Ubuntu, a town 350 kilometres downstream from Kindu at the head of a series of rapids that make the river impassable. The cataracts make river travel downstream from Ubuntu impossible, so I would have to travel overland to the next major town, Kisangani. That would be dangerous enough, but for now my main concern was getting to Ubuntu.

`There's no way we can get you all the way to Ubundu. We don't have the fuel to make it even halfway. But on our next downstream patrol we can at least give you a head start.' He was shouting above the sound of the Village People's `In the Navy' being played at full volume during a Saturday night booze-up at his unit's base next to Kindu's old railway station.

Sailors from his unit were wearing the Uruguayan national soccer strip and comedy sombreros, jiving drunkenly, pausing every so often to gulp down more beer and steak - all imported on UN flights. While the rest of Kindu was in darkness, the Uruguayan naval-unit compound fizzed with bright lights and loud music. As I left to walk through the silent streets to the bishop's blacked-out house, I saw a large halo effect around the compound perimeter lights. Walking closer, I saw thousands of tiny flying insects attracted from the nearby river by the light, shimmying backwards and forwards in a thick cloud. And on the ground beneath the light, millions more lay dead in drifts.

Cdr Wilson's offer was the best I could hope for. My plan was simply to go as far downriver with the Uruguayans as possible and then try to find some villagers to paddle me the rest of the way to Ubuntu by pirogue. I would face another raft of problems when I reached Ubuntu, as the war had cut links with Kisangani, the next major port 100 kilometres downstream. Marie-France and the bishop both thought my pirogue plan risky, but I was desperate to get moving again.

The next time I saw Cdr Wilson was the morning we were due to leave. As he climbed down from the river bank to the boats, the gangway sagged and so did my spirits. There was something in his expression that was not quite right and, after dumping his webbing on the pontoon, he led me out of earshot of his crew.

'We have big problems today. I have just heard the rebel commander here in Kindu is angry about the way some of his men have not been given well-paid promotions, and he is threatening to pull out of the peace process and to take all his fighters with him. Unfortunately for you, he comes from the area you want to travel through and that is where his men are assembling. Are you sure you want to carry on?'

It was one of those moments in the Congo when fear threatened to overwhelm me. Throughout my journey fear had been a constant, nagging away like a ringing in the ears. After hearing from Cdr Wilson, it welled up and threatened to deafen me.

I looked out over the Congo River. The sun had risen, but was yet to lift the layers of sweaty mist blanketing the water. In the half-light the river looked like a motionless slick frozen by torpor - the same torpor threatening my entire journey. The Uruguayan crew was busy preparing the two patrol boats for departure as I mulled over what to do. A broom scratched noisily on the foredeck, while three machine guns were mounted in their firing positions on each boat, making a deep metallic clunk as they were bolted home. I noticed that by some wonderful quirk of historical circularity, their guns were Belgian made. Brussels might have been forced to cede its Congo colony in 1960, but its guns were still master here in 2004.

A Congolese woman paddled calmly by in a small dugout. She looked up disinterestedly at the activity before disappearing out of view behind an old tugboat, abandoned, rotten and motionless, next to our pontoon on the river bank. Motorboats come and go on the Congo River, I thought, but the pirogue remains.

'Come on,' I said to myself. 'You can always make a decision when the moment comes to be dropped off. If it doesn't look safe, you just come back to Kindu with the Uruguayans.'

I shouted for help from one of the sailors already on board the patrol boat and passed him my luggage, including a grubby yellow plastic jerrycan. I was not going to make the same mistake from my dehydrated motorbiking days. The can contained enough drinking water for four days, carefully boiled and filtered by the bishop's wife.

Our flotilla of two pushed off as the sun finally folded back the morning mist. I felt the traveller's surge of satisfaction as the propellers whipped up a wake. I was on my way again after five frustrating, uncomfortable days in Kindu.

The river might be more than 1,000 metres wide on this upper stretch, but it is not deep. We were at the end of the region's dry season and I noticed fishermen wading thigh-deep hundreds of metres out from either bank. The Uruguayan navy helmsmen had also noticed, and the engines barely ticked over as they nosed their way through sand banks in search of a navigable channel.

It gave me time to look at the rusting wrecks of the old boats that used to ply this reach, but which now lined the left bank for well over a kilometre. Some were huge, others more modest, but all were in ruins. One ship had been completely overrun by a reed bank and its old smokestack could just be seen poking from the vegetation with ivy, not smoke, spewing out of the top. Another hulk was lying on its side clear out of the water, the panels eaten away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass. But my favourite was an old stern-paddler, a rust-red X-ray image of the Mississippi steamboats of my imagination. The panels were all gone, but the superstructure remained in skeletal form. At the stern was the octagonal tubular frame on which the wooden blades of the paddle once stood.

`It was the biggest boat on this section of the river.' I looked over my shoulder to see the Congolese pilot employed by the Uruguayans following my gaze. 'The Belgians brought it here in the 1940s and called it the Chevalier, or something like that, but after independence it was renamed the Ulindi. I started work here on the river in 1977, but that boat has not moved since long before I arrived.'

The voice of Kungwa Mwamba was flat and free of emotion. There was no sadness, no sense of anger at the waste, no hint of shame. He was fifty-two years old and came from Kabambarre, the town that I passed through en route from Lake Tanganyika to the river. Stanley had spent time there, so I asked him about the explorer Stanley, but he shook his head. He knew nothing about that period. He did, however, know a lot about boats.

`They bought it all the way here from Belgium, piece by piece, by ship and train, and assembled it here on the upper Congo. And they did not stop there. It was one of a pair, with a sister ship, the Prince Charles, I think, but that was sunk downriver from here in the 1964 rebellion. If the river is low, you might even be able to see the remains.'

A single, enormous transport company was created by the Belgians during the colonial period, covering its vast interests in the Congo River basin. The Great Lakes Railway Company laid thousands of kilometres of track, but it was much more than just a railway. Its emblem was a swirling white-and-red ship's pennant, which somehow conveyed the importance of boats to the company along the Congo's long river system and on the lakes that form the territory's eastern frontier.

'After I left school I joined the company. By then it had changed its name to the Congolese Railway Company, but it did the same job and after I was trained they moved me onto the boats on the upper river. But the money to maintain the engines was all stolen, there was no fuel and the system just fell apart.'

There was something terribly matter-of-fact about Kungwa's delivery. He said he had not been paid a penny in wages since 1998, but was still supposedly on the books of the company. No wonder he was moonlighting as a pilot for the UN.

'I have seen the river die here. Without the boats, life closes in for everyone, they just go back to their villages and have no contact with the outside world.'

He was right. Just a few river bends downstream from Kindu and life did indeed close in abruptly. Every so often a chink would open in the jungle to reveal a few thatched huts and some shadowy figures, but they were as cut off and remote as they had been when Stanley passed this spot in late 1876.

The sun was now cruelly strong and I retired under the shade behind the cockpit leaving Kungwa uncovered up on the foredeck of the patrol boat. As a trained river pilot, he was meant to know the lie of the deep water and spent the whole day concentrating intently on the river in front of him, pointing left and right to the Uruguayan at the helm just behind him.

Looking over the shoulder of the helmsman, I watched as he slowly turned the pages of an old river chart. Printed in 1975, its marked channel had long since been shifted by underwater currents and for the purposes of river navigation it was pretty useless. But I was impressed to see the number of towns, plantations and settlements it identified. According to the map we were passing through a busy river thoroughfare full of navigation buoys and buildings once maintained by the Great Lakes Railway Company.

I did see one navigation bollard. It was made of rocks set in concrete, but half of it had been washed away by flood water. It was bestrewn with rotting flotsam and capped with a bright white dollop of dry guano. Kungwa told me the bollards used to carry working navigation lights. Not for decades, I thought, as a black, long-necked diving bird prepared to leave its latest mark.

As the heat grew, I began to dwell on Cdr Wilson's warning. He advised me it would be suicidal to venture alone into such a remote part of the Congo at a time of increased tension. But I kept thinking of how awful it would be to abandon Stanley's route so early in my journey.

As the day's heat built up, I began to doze. Images in my mind began to blur. I thought of Stanley coming down this same stretch of the river, his boat bristling with guns pointing at the river bank. And here I was, almost 130 years later, with a Uruguayan sailor peering down the sights of a General Purpose Machine Gun trained on the same river bank. And the gun he was using came from Belgium, the country that had colonised the Congo on the back of Stanley's discovery. It all seemed a rather strange amalgam of history folding in on itself. I fell asleep to the throbbing of the diesel engines.

`Cocodrilo' was the word that roused me. I did not have to understand Spanish to understand what they were talking about. The engines had stopped on both patrol boats and the crews had gathered on the port side pointing at a distant sand bank.

'We have not seen a crocodile before on the river, so we will go to investigate,' Cdr Wilson was grinning broadly as he spoke. He then looked over my shoulder and ordered a rubber dinghy to be made ready for a river safari.

It was the highlight of the day for the five or so sailors chosen to come along. They joshed and giggled like Girl Guides on a field trip as we headed towards the basking crocodile, a large specimen at least three metres in length. Commander Wilson let out a sigh as he peered at it through his binoculars. `It is so big, so big,' he whispered and ordered the engines to be cut.

Crocodiles, hippos and other river wildlife were once a common sight along the Congo River. My mother told me of large pods of hippos she saw from her river boat in 1958, sending up jets of water as they shifted their bulk out of the way of the boat. But the Congo's collapse has led to nearly all river life being shot out by starving riverside villagers desperate for protein. Our crocodile sighting was a rare treat.

As the day wore on, I grew increasingly anxious. I would soon have to make a decision: stay with the Uruguayans and head back to Kindu, or leave the sanctuary of their boat and risk everything on a river descent by pirogue.

By the time Cdr Wilson summoned me shortly before sunset, a wonderful sense of confidence had settled on me.

`This is as far as I can take you, I am afraid. We are still a long way from Ubundu. Are you sure you want to go?' he asked.

I nodded.

Barking orders to his men, he gestured to the side of the patrol boat, where a small, black rubber dinghy with an outboard was being readied by a crew member. As I clambered down into the dinghy with the commander, all the other Uruguayan crew members gathered on the side of the larger boat. They had obviously been told I was planning to go it alone. Several of them silently shook their heads as we peeled away and headed towards the shore.

The commander said nothing as the river bank approached. We were heading to where some pirogues had been drawn up on a beach beneath a high river bank. The sound of the little outboard engine had stirred some villagers into life and I could see them hurrying down to the water's edge.

Cdr Wilson raised his eyebrows, said nothing and nodded. The dinghy slid up onto the west bank of the Congo River and I jumped out with my gear. He shook me by the hand and told me that, according to his map, we were near the village of Lowa. He wished me luck and pushed off. The sound of the dinghy's engine slowly fading into silence as the boat disappeared in the twilight is a memory that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Chapter 8.

Pirogue Progress

The Congo had already taught me one clear lesson: towns bad, open spaces good. It is a country where gatherings of people promise not sanctuary and support, but threats and coercion. As I stood lonely and terrified on the river's edge that evening, I knew the safest place for me was out on the river, away from Lowa and its potential for trouble.

My legs ached with fear, but I tried to stride up the river bank with confidence, approaching a group of men sitting silently on the ground next to a quiver of beached pirogues.

'I need to reach Ubuntu by the river. Who can take me?' I asked in French.

My question stirred an immediate flurry of discussion and after a few minutes a tall, wide-faced man in his twenties signalled for me to join him a few paces away from the group. For negotiations, he wanted privacy.

'It is more than one hundred and fifty kilometres to Ubuntu. That will take four days if I come with you alone. It will be quicker if we take more than one paddler.'

'How many dollars will it cost?'

He paused and tried to look away, but my fixed gaze held his attention.

'The maximum number of paddlers on our pirogue is four. That will cost one hundred dollars for everything.'

Now it was time for me to pause. I did not want to seem gullible by accepting his first offer, so I countered. 'I will pay fifty dollars if you get me there in four days, and double if you get me there in two. But I want to leave now - right now.'

My offer met with immediate approval. He span on his heel, shouted back that his name was Malike Bade, ordered me not to speak to any other paddler and ran over towards the others, snapping instructions. Three of them immediately jumped up. All four of them jogged up a steep muddy ramp cut into the river bank and disappeared out of sight. Darkness was gathering quickly and I wanted to be on my way. I did not like the look of an armed man who had just arrived on the beach wearing the tatty remnants of a uniform and clutching a firearm. He started to approach me. Remembering the trick used by my pygmy friend, Georges, back in Katanga, I rummaged in my bag and offered him a UN pamphlet. It had the desired effect. He grabbed it and walked away triumphantly as a gaggle of children mobbed him to demand a peek.

My crew of four reappeared, each carrying nothing but a paddle and something small bundled up in banana leaves. In the failing light I could not quite make out what it was until they formed a circle, dropped onto their haunches and unwrapped what was effectively a fast-food meal. Inside the leaves was a wedge of cassava bread and some small, bony fish. The men were fuelling up for the journey. Apart from their paddles they brought nothing - no change of clothes, no cooking pots, nothing to eat or drink. The journey back upstream from Ubuntu, against the current, would take at least twice as long as the descent, so they could be leaving their home for more than a week, but they were empty handed.

They wolfed down their meal, still managing to sift and spit the fish bones from each pulpy mouthful. Within a few minutes they stood up and walked together to the river's edge. They had a cocky swagger, like a gang of urban punks in a city. Strange, given that on the muddy bank of the upper Congo River we were about as far away from an urban environment as it is possible to be. They approached the pirogues drawn up on the water's edge. There seemed nothing special about the one they chose. Like the others it was just a bare, hollowed-out tree trunk containing a puddle of water from a rainstorm earlier that day. One of the paddlers used his hand to bail it dry, before I lugged my gear on board and prepared to settle myself in the middle of the boat.

'Wait,' Malike shouted and hopped back onto the river bank before looking for something among the grass. It was almost pitchblack, but he grunted with satisfaction and came back to the pirogue offering me a low, home-made wicker tripod seat. I thanked him and sat on it. It made me feel a little self-conscious. Did this special treatment make me no different from the Belgian hunter from 1913 with his hammock borne by porters?

With two paddlers taking up their station at the helm and two at the stern, we pushed off. There was no current to speak of, but within a few strokes the pirogue was far enough away from the beach for the militiaman to be lost from sight in the failing light.

After a day of looming anxiety over whether to leave the safety of the Uruguayan patrol boat, that moment of slipping out onto the river provided a blissful release. I arranged myself on my little stool. The low wicker seat was smaller than my backside, but it was surprisingly comfortable and as the paddlers began to find their rhythm, I let my fingertips trail in the river water. It was as warm and soothing as a bath.

I ran my wet fingers across the coarse hull of the pirogue, tracing gouges left by the boatmaker's adze. They felt like a rough hewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed and cursed by this great natural phenomenon. It is a waterway that offers much, but which has run with blood from the moment Stanley paddled past here aboard the Lady Alice at the head of a flotilla of stolen pirogues. At every stage of the Congo's history, the river had sluiced away its dead - natives shot on their war canoes by Stanley's people in the 1870s; agents of Leopold drowned during clashes with Arab slavers in the 1890s; Belgian officers killed by disease as they toiled to build a modern colony high up an African river in the 1930s; Congolese rebels mown down by white mercenaries in the 1960s; civilians slaughtered in 2000 by African armies sent to the Congo by its greedy neighbours.

The modern world had used this river for its toehold in central Africa. Towns had been built along its banks. Motorboats had been assembled here. But while the towns were now abandoned and the boats left to rust, the one constant was the pirogue. It gave the river its pulse, moving people and goods across a swathe of central Africa that was all but abandoned by the outside world.

I sat in the darkness, thinking of my journey so far and how remote this area had become. A yachtsman on the southern seas or a climber in the Himalayas had more chance of rescue than I did. The Uruguayans were long gone and would not be back to this stretch of water until their fuel supplies were replenished in another month or so; anyway, I had no way of communicating with them. High on the Congo there were no helicopters to summon, no rescue teams to call on. I felt very alone.

But instead of being overwhelmed by helplessness, I found it liberating. My journey through the Congo had its own unique category. It did not quite do it justice to call it adventure travel, and it certainly was not pleasure travel. My Congo journey deserved its own category: ordeal travel. At every turn I faced challenges, difficulties and threats when in the Congo. The challenge was to assess and choose the option best suited to making progress. But there were moments when there were no alternatives, or shortcuts or clever ideas. At these times, ordeal travel became really no ordeal at all.

That evening on my pirogue was one such moment. I felt I had no alternative other than to commit myself utterly to the river. There was nothing left other than, quite literally, to go with the flow. I felt horribly alone, but more than at any moment on my trip I also felt relaxed and content.

My sense of well-being grew as a full moon rose brightly in the east, its beam perfectly reflected in the broad, still waters of the river. I pushed the stool out of my way and stretched out on the gritty bottom of the boat and, to the gentle sound of scraping as the paddles rattled down the side of the pirogue, I fell into a deep sleep.

A clap of thunder woke me. I opened my eyes and at first I could see nothing. The moon was long gone, but a flicker of lightning gave a nasty snapshot of busy, angry-looking clouds overhead. Pulling myself upright, I could no longer hear the scraping sound of the paddles on the hull. They were drowned out by the pounding of freshly whipped waves that made the hull of the pirogue shudder and vibrate.

There was an urgency in the strokes of the four paddlers that I had not noticed when we set off from Lowa.

'We must find shelter, or the rain will fill the pirogue and we will capsize,' shouted Malike, struggling to make himself heard above the noise of the wind and waves. I thought of the crocodile I had seen the day before. Capsizing would not be good.

As the paddlers made for the shore, we raced a curtain of rain that I could hear, but not see, approaching from behind. We lost the race by only a short distance, but it was still enough to see me soaked through, struggling to keep my camera bag clear of the water welling in the bottom of the boat. I had felt sorry for the paddlers when I saw how little they brought with them, but now I was the one with the problem of having to deal with wet equipment.

The paddlers had spotted a break in the riverside forest and some tied-up pirogues being clattered by the waves, so I knew we were near a village. Slithering up a muddy bank, we found ourselves at a thatched hut shuddering in the wind. There was nobody to ask permission from, so we just bundled in through the small door and collapsed on the floor. By the time I had retrieved my soggy head torch and cast a light around the room, my four companions were asleep, their limbs all folded together for warmth like the blades on a Swiss Army knife. I turned off the torch and settled myself on the ground, watching as every so often the mud-hut walls glowed to the flicker of lightning outside.

A very watery dawn broke over the village of Mutshaliko. We were on the west bank of the upper Congo River and by the time I emerged from the thatched hut, where we had gained sanctuary, the sun was clear of the horizon, but struggling to break through the remnants of the storm clouds. I sat down outside on a large log and tried to spread out some of my wet gear so that it would dry.

Three of the paddlers slept on, but Malike was already awake.

'I must go speak with the village chief, to pay our respects,' he said before disappearing down a track leading away from the river bank.

There was nobody around. From the top of the river bank I had a perfect view out over the full breadth of the river. With the sun so low in the sky, the greens of the forest on my side were picked out perfectly. There was the bright emerald green from banana leaves, all ribbed and symmetrical with a bright waxy sheen; a lighter peridot green from reeds swaying in the muddy water's edge; and a green so dark it was almost black on menacing looking palm fronds, the same shape and sharpness as a broadsword. Eating biscuits given to me for the journey by the bishop's family back in Kindu, I watched a pied kingfisher, its black body flecked with white, as it darted along the river's edge before it picked a suitable overhanging branch from which to spy. For minutes it sat motionless, before plunging into the storm-churned water and emerging with a silver morsel in its beak.

The bird flew away when Malik returned. He was not alone. Behind him trouped a group of children and an elderly, grey haired man wearing a baseball cap. I turned round and stood up to shake the man's hand.

`My name is Liye Oloba,' he said. `I am the administrative secretary for the village.'

He joined me at my jumble sale of drying clothes and I asked him about the village and how it had fared during the war.

`When I was young, the ferry boats used to come by here almost every day, up and down, but they never stopped in our village. Our place is too small. So even though I have not seen a boat for years, I don't think there is any great difference. The only difference is that gunmen come from time to time and take everything. They came through here a few times in the last few years, but we don't know where they come from or who they are fighting for. They just take our chickens and our goats and our cassava and then leave.'

His baseball cap bore a message in English: `Not Perfect But Damn Close'. It came from the busy trade in donated clothes that has grown up between the developed world and Africa. Clothes given in the West to charity shops are sold for peppercorn sums to traders more interested in quantity than quality. The traders bale them up and ship them here in bulk for sale in street markets. No matter that they are so tatty or unfashionable in Western eyes as to have no value, here in Africa people are willing to pay good money for them, and the bizarre clothing I saw all over the Congo suggested it was big business. My favourite was a T-shirt that had obviously been given to contestants in a 1994 pistol-shooting competition in Dallas, Texas, only to end up, more than a decade later, as the main component of a Congolese villager's wardrobe. I wondered by what meandering path Liye's baseball cap ended up on the banks of the Congo River.

I asked him about the houses.

`The river floods every year, so we must be able to rebuild our houses,' explained Liye. `The waters sometimes carry everything away, so we must start again using what we find in the forest. Those modern houses built during the colonial period do not last. They are not suitable for our conditions.'

He explained that flooding was regarded as an occupational hazard for the subsistence farmers of his village. The village had to be built close to the river because it was here that the best soils were found, washed down by seasonal floods. But those same floods meant the houses were threatened with destruction. It was a classic development trap - to survive, these villagers lived somewhere that any attempt to build bigger, better homes was wasted because of the flood threat.

Liye had been friendly enough, but suddenly he changed. Leaning forward he started to whisper, 'I have a lot of work to do as the administrative secretary here and I need money to pay for our work.' His face was almost touching mine, and this first request was made sotto voce. He almost seemed embarrassed to be asking. But when I hesitated he started to threaten me, demanding to see written permission from the local militia commander for my presence in the village. In the face of these threats I caved in, slipping a ten-dollar note into his hand, but I was not happy until Malik and the crew returned to the pirogue and whisked me back out into the safe anonymity of the river.

The daylight hours passed very slowly on my pirogue. The paddlers chatted and sung in Swahili. The sun was as strong as I have ever known. We were just a short distance from the Equator and the storm had washed the sky clean of any screening clouds. While the crew were impervious to the sun's force, it had me cringing in a puddle of shade under my wide-brimmed hat, pathetically splashing my face and arms with river water the same colour and warmth as tea, praying for the evening shadows to reach us.

The paddlers would josh and cajole each other, sure-footed as they danced up and down the delicate pirogue working their long-handled wooden paddles. About three metres long, they were shape of spades from a deck of cards, only stretched out to mansize, with shafts that were thin and shiny, polished by years of being slid through calloused hands. The leaf-shaped blade spread broad and fat before tapering gracefully to a point. It was no surprise when later on the journey I saw them being used both as trays for food and as weapons for fighting.

The foursome worked in harmony, with just the faintest of deliberate lags between the actions of the two up front and the two behind. Standing upright they would lean forward to plunge the blade into the water, before heaving it backwards with a dip of the shoulders and a shimmy of the hips. The deft, feathering flick at the end of the stroke to clear the blade from the water would have impressed the most skilful Oxbridge oarsman and each time they did it I felt a faint surge in the pirogue as it inched forward.

My pirogue was about ten metres long and was nothing but a tree trunk, halved and hollowed out, completely bare, without shelving, seats or compartments. Someone had scratched the name `Sandoka' at the stern, but when I asked the four paddlers what it meant, they shrugged their shoulders and said it was not normal for pirogues to have a name. Many different types of tree are used to make pirogues, but some have wood that is so heavy the pirogues sink if they are overturned. I did not want to put the Sandoka to the test, so every time I clambered aboard I squatted as low as possible and mentally rehearsed how I would grab my small camera bag if the boat tipped.

I did not have many other possessions to worry about. Apart from the camera bag, all I had was my rucksack and the yellow, plastic jerrycan of boiled water. Someone had stolen the can's stopper, so I had made a botched repair with a piece of plastic and an elastic band. I could not afford to fall ill out here. The paddlers watched me in polite silence as I drank from the jerry can only after wiping the spout with one of my sterile baby-wipes.

At twenty-seven, Malik was the oldest of the four paddlers and clearly the leader of the group. He had enough French to communicate with me as the three others looked on unknowingly, and it was through him that requests for cigarettes and food were channelled.

I had so much time to myself that I actually measured their stroke rate. Every thirty seconds they averaged twelve to fourteen strokes. They kept this up for hours at a time, but when the rate began to fall Malik would suddenly declaim, `We must stop, we must eat.'

And with that they would head to the next village for a fuel stop.

To drink they would squat down while we were out in midstream, lower their faces over the edge of the pirogue until their lips were suspended maybe ten centimetres above the river and literally throw the water into their mouths with their hands. They peed over the edge of the boat and were as sure-footed as if they were standing on terra firma. I was more ungainly, so when I tried, the effort of standing up and keeping my balance made me way too tense. Only after hours of discomfort could I build up the pressure required to overcome my nerves, and then only if I kneeled on my rucksack. Standing on the wobbly pirogue was much too nerve-racking ever to enable me to pee.

As the stern paddler, Malike could control the pirogue's steering and at one point he veered us towards the river bank where I could see nothing but dense jungle. He must have spotted something because, as we approached the shore, the trees opened up and there was the village of Babundu.

Tying up alongside one of the village pirogues, Malik disappeared with his three mates up a four metre-high sandy bank, leaving me to get my breath back in the shade of a tree. I was finding the heat and humidity difficult to bear, and the suddenness of standing up after so long made me giddy. I panted heavily as my breathing settled back down again and plucked the sweat-sodden clothes from my skin.

Venturing out of the shade, I faced the same dilemma that I encountered in every place I visited in the Congo. I wanted to nose around, ask questions and take photographs, but I did not want to catch the attention of the local authorities with all the attendant hassle of having to explain who I was, pay bribes and beg not to be arrested as a spy. Also, I was feeling so enervated that I was happy to skulk into the same hut where the crew were restoking and simply avoid the midday heat.

They ate in silence. Without cutlery, they skilfully set about a lump of cassava bread the size of a rugby ball delivered on a broad, glossy banana leaf. In turn they would pinch enough for a mouthful and roll it into a ball, which they would then dimple with their thumbs. Into the cavity they popped the garnish - fried river fish, no bigger than a stickleback, coloured red by hot palm oil - before eating it eagerly.

'Are you hungry?' Malik offered me the remains of the lump. I toyed with a marble-sized piece, struggling to overcome a gag reflex brought on by the rotting cheese smell and wallpaper-paste texture.

There is something primordial about Congolese villages. The villagers themselves wear modern clothes, often in tatters, but modern nevertheless in that they are factory-made and delivered by the occasional trader who ventures along the river. But the houses are at the base level of simplicity. There is not a single pane of glass, metal hinge, cement plinth or fitting that connects this place with the modern era. There is no litter, no plastic bags, empty cans or cigarette butts. Without any painted signs, it is a place of browns, greens and duns, a settlement built in the jungle and out of the jungle, utterly separate from the modern world.

The doors are made of split cane, held together by a rope of woven vines and kept in place by wooden sticks. The walls are mud thrown against a cane trellis, baked hard by the sun and fissured with a crazy paving of cracks so intricate it looks almost man-made. And the roofs consist of layers of wide, dry banana leaves held down by lengths of split bamboo.

This region is one of the rare places in the world that fails what I called the Coca-Cola test. The test is simple: can you buy a Coke? I have been to many remote places where Coke is an expensive and rare luxury, but it is still almost always possible to find a trader who, for a price, can procure me a Coke. Out here on the upper Congo River, where a hundred years ago a Belgian hunter could buy ferry tickets, I could no more buy a Coke in 2004 than fly to the moon.

Back on the river I tried in vain to spot the remnants of the paddle steamer that the river pilot had told me about back in Kindu, the one that had been sunk during early post-independence fighting. His story echoed a terrifying account of the 1964 rebellion written by an American teenager, Murray Taylor, whose father had lived his own Poison wood Bible existence, working for twenty years as a missionary near this section of the upper Congo. In his account of the incident, Murray described how the local tribe that his father had sought to convert to Christianity, the Mitkus, tried to defend his family when the Mulele Mai rebels approached and how scared his family had been when the rebels chugged into view on the river on a boat stolen just before Mike Hoare's mercenary force reached Kindu:

Soon a rebel steamer came up the river from Kindu and began shelling the main river settlements. I was really scared. This was the first time in my life I'd heard big guns. Besides, we weren't sure who the rebels were firing at. We prayed that God would protect us. Later we learned that the guns were aimed at the Mitkus on the other bank of the river.

Murray went on to describe how he saw two warplanes as they flew over the mission station searching for the rebels' boat:

I heard what I thought was thunder. Suddenly it dawned on me that it wasn't thunder; it was the explosion of bombs hitting their target! Little did I realise then what effect those bombs would have on our family. But that air attack proved to be the beginning of our trouble with the rebels, for they suspected that my parents had called the planes!

That afternoon, some rebels arrived at our mission station. They told us that the planes had sunk one of their riverboats. Soon more rebels came and confiscated our two ordinary radios. Later, more rebels returned to the mission. Their faces were ghastly and frightening and they were very hostile. Again they searched our house for the transmitter they were sure we had. They threatened to kill us if we didn't reveal it.

The Taylor family was eventually moved by the rebels to Kisangani, the large port downstream, where the Mulele Mai rebellion reached a bloody conclusion in late November 1964. Murray was lined up against a wall with his father and various other male prisoners. A guard opened fire with a machine-gun, killing Murray's father. The boy described how he survived by ducking behind an arch. When the rebels came to remove the bodies, one took pity on the fourteen-year-old boy and he was ordered downstairs to join his mother and sisters.

I must have passed the spot where the boat was sunk, but I had missed seeing any remains.

After their fuel stops, my crew would return to the water at full power and full voice. Their Swahili harmonies reached from bank to bank as Malike led his colleagues in song. He would begin and then the refrain would be picked up in turn by the others, with choruses and verses lasting hours.

As my pirogue journey went on, my sense of unease began to build as I neared my next ordeal. The river was navigable only as far as Ubuntu, at which point I would have to continue overland for 100 kilometres around a series of rapids and cataracts, still commonly referred to as the Stanley Falls, until I reached Kisangani, the large port city built at the bottom of the seventh and final set of rapids and the model for Conrad's Inner Station in the Heart of Darkness. In the early twentieth century the Belgians had built a railway around this unnavigable reach, although when I researched my trip I discovered it had not run in years. Worse still, the road between Ubuntu and Kisangani had disappeared into the equatorial forest, and peacekeepers from the large UN base in Kisangani never ventured this way. [right here would have been it for me, but how does one get out? Am I the only one that thinks the author has the biggest set of brass balls ever, or is crazy, I thank him though for taking us with him in spirit...wow dude, no way to go but forward DC]

I knew Ubuntu had witnessed some of the worst fighting in the region during the war. In the forest between Ubuntu and Kisangani, there had been clashes between Hutu refugees, who had made their way here for sanctuary in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and Congolese militia backed by the now Tutsi-dominated regime in Rwanda, seeking revenge against the Hutus. And its local mai-mai home guard had then clashed with Ugandan troops sent to secure Kisangani and its lucrative diamond trade. All in all, I knew Ubuntu was always going to be one of the major trouble spots on my journey, far removed from its more genteel days during Belgian rule when it was known as Ponthierville.

In 1951 Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and a forty strong Hollywood film crew arrived in Ponthierville by train. They were on their way to the jungle, riverine set for the filming of The African Queen, the story of two colonial misfits taking an old boat down a river to attack a German warship. In the actress's diary she describes a charming railway town where the local missionaries enthusiastically helped in the filming, showing the crew the best spots along the nearby cataracts from where to capture shots of models of the African Queen being pounded and battered by the white water. The book, written by the pre-First World War Belgian hunter, described the town as a pretty colonial outpost.

My main hope for getting through Ubuntu lay with a team of motorcyclists from an American aid group based in Kisangani, whom I had contacted by satellite phone from Kindu. They told me they would be making a rare visit to deliver vaccines to a field clinic in the town. Towards my second evening on the pirogue I began to fret, because I knew that if we did not make Ubuntu that night I would miss the bikers, when they headed back to Kisangani early the following morning.

Malike could tell I was becoming more worried and kept reassuring me: 'Don't worry, we will get to Ubuntu by nightfall.'

He was utterly unfazed when one of the other paddlers quietly lay down at my feet and went to sleep. Kago Arubu was the thinnest of the team, but had given no sign of being unwell before he stopped paddling, let his paddle clatter to the floor of the pirogue and collapsed.

I looked round anxiously at Malike. 'He has fever. He will be all right.' There was no shade for Kago to lie under. He did not drink any water. He just lay down out in the baking sun and within seconds was fast asleep. Malik would not even let me try to paddle as I would mess up the balance and the rhythm. So effectively we had now lost an engine and with it, I believed, all hope of making Ubuntu that night.

As the sun began to sink, the river bank came alive with other river travellers. I started to make out dozens of pirogues making their way back upstream, clinging to the bank where the current was weakest and the shadows longest. Our progress downstream was slow - I reckoned we were making only ten kilometres an hour - but at least we had the current with us. The pirogues heading upstream could not have been going faster then five kilometres an hour, and in many places the paddlers were using their paddles in the shallow water to punt the pirogues.

One pirogue passed us going upstream and I saw a small dog asleep on the bow. `Hunters,' whispered Malik. I looked further down the river bank and the other members of the hunting pack were running along the foreshore yapping and frolicking. Their muzzles were covered with blood and then I could see why. In the pirogue behind the sleeping dog was a butchered antelope with soft Bambi-style white spots on its russet coat.

The hunter saw me reach for my camera and then put on his own danse macabre, enacting the hunt that had taken place earlier that afternoon. In his tattered clothes he jigged about on the water's edge, barking like a dog to show how his pack had chased the animal clown before he had dispatched it with a spear. As a grand finale he posed dramatically with his spear and the antelope's head.

I don't know if it was the smell of the recently killed meat that stirred him, but the feverish Kago suddenly arose. A discussion between the paddlers then ensued, followed by negotiations with the hunter. Within minutes one of the blood-soaked quarters was onboard the Sandoka wrapped in leaves and ready for cooking once we reached Ubuntu.

The presence of the meat seemed to energise all four paddlers. They worked their blades with added vigour, churning up the river water into small mocha whirls, inching us closer and closer to Ubuntu. For the first time in days, I started to look at my watch, anxiously calculating and recalculating how long it might take, but Malik kept on reassuring me we would make it.

Almost astride the Equator, night fell like a portcullis. The sun dropped below the horizon and suddenly all was dark. My arms and face had been cruelly sunburned out on the river and I convinced myself I could actually see my skin glowing, as I peered into the gloom, anxious to spot the first sign of the town.

Ubuntu is a large town and a strategic port, so I was expecting to see at least a few lights from the shoreline. I was wrong. The first evidence I had that we had reached Ubuntu was the sound of the rapids. For hundreds of kilometres the Congo River had been mute and yet suddenly, as we rounded a headland, I could make out the sound of rushing water. It was terrifying'

'There is Ubundu,' Malike pointed over to the left bank. 

'I see nothing. Are you sure?' My voice quavered. 

`You cannot see anything at night, but it is there.' With that he spun the head of the pirogue towards the right bank and prepared to tie up for the night. 

'It is too dangerous to cross above the rapids during the dark and there are soldiers over there too. We will stay the night here.' 

`Wait a minute,' I said. 'I must get there tonight. The motorbikes leave early in the morning, we have to cross now.' 

I heard Malike negotiating with his three colleagues in Swahili. In the darkness I could not read their faces, but I could tell the other three were not happy with the idea of the night-time crossing. The debate continued for minutes and then I thought of the dollars hidden in my boots. 

`If you get me there tonight, I will double the pay.' My offer was desperate, but effective. 

Malike translated and suddenly the pirogue was spinning round through 180 degrees and darting out into the open river. 

The noise of the cataracts grew. Somewhere out there to our right was the start of the Stanley Falls. When Stanley encountered these rapids for the first time he tried to shoot them. Various members of his expedition drowned and he ended up dragging his canoes around each dangerous section of water. The sound had a dramatic effect on the paddlers. They dug their blades in the water with studied effort and I sensed that on each stroke they looked out right, peering for the first signs of white water. 

We surged across the river. In the darkness I could not tell how quickly we were being washed downstream, but my legs were tense, my heart racing, anticipating what I would do if the pirogue toppled. Peering forward, I was desperate to make out the first signs of the opposite bank and suddenly, as an almost full moon emerged from behind the clouds, I started to make out some dark shapes up ahead. 

'This is the harbour of Ubuntu,' Malike whispered. All I could make out was a jumble of broken concrete from an old slipway. 'And that ... is a soldier,' he added in a voice trailing into silence. 

I looked up. A dark figure was moving towards us and the gunmetal grey of his rifle had a pale moonlit sheen. 

He was small, only a boy to be honest, and I did something completely unplanned. I jumped onto the broken jetty and began to bark orders. 

`Who are you? Where is your commanding officer?' My voice was firm. It was meant to camouflage my terror and could have backfired horribly. No white man had arrived here for years, let alone by pirogue in the middle of the night, and the soldier had every reason to treat me with suspicion. I could not believe what happened then. 

The gunman shuffled respectfully to attention and saluted me.

next

The Equator Express

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