Travel spells danger. I’ve seen a turbaned Sikh cracked on the nut by an aircraft baggage compartment, the moorings loosened, no doubt, by a lifetime of dodgy landings and equally dodgy budgeting. I’ve helped a Japanese tourist to retrieve his specs; me and him, on all fours, fumbling myopically across the deck of a lurching ferry off the Thailand coast; a situation made more taxing by the surging bile from a too nauseous – and way too near – German hippy. On one occasion I even spat out the sad amalgam of turbulence, air meal fork, and twelve hundred dollars of bridge-work, twenty thousand metres above the Pacific Ocean (Air travel these days is much safer…fears of fork-effected Fetwahs have largely been assuaged, post 9/11, by plastic cutlery…and it’s easier on dentistry than steel!). Yep, travel has afforded me proof that any abrupt renegotiation of the spatial relationship between body and object can result in suffering – but I’ve yet to experience anything like this;
‘The only other vehicles on the road were trucks…Along with their regular loads, almost all of them had a miserable human cargo…The driving compartments would be crammed with people begging a ride, but they were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were forced to risk their lives, clinging to the bare roof of the containers or perching precariously between the back of the cabin and the container…We came across a grizzly scene. A truck was jack-knifed across the road with a trail of blood, gore and body parts smeared across the tarmac in a line leading to its back axle. The truck had been forced to break suddenly, some of the passengers had fallen off and the rear wheels had gone straight over them.’
Welcome to travel, Congolese-style, as detailed by Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher in Blood River: a Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart. If you want an adventure to set your teeth on edge, just shy of dislodging them, then this is it. With only a pen-knife and a pack of baby wipes for protection, Butcher stuffs four thousand dollars in his boots and embarks on a journey to retrace Henry Morton Stanley’s 1874 expedition to map the Congo River. What is vicariously revealed through the eyes of the author is a land rent by privation, fear and regression; it’s the year 2000, but the calendar could just as easily be flipped back to a page well before Stanley, or even Livingstone, set foot upon the African continent. This is apparent the instant Butcher alights from his plane onto the tarmac of Lubumbashi Airport,
‘From my earlier visits to the Congo, I knew what to expect when the fuselage door finally opened. At the bottom of a set of stairs, manually wheeled into position, a crowd of people had gathered, all claiming to be an official of some sort and all demanding payment. I watched as the Asian lady I had spotted at Johannesberg airport stepped gingerly into the melee, only to be tossed and spun like a piece of flotsam, blasted by loud demands for payment. The last I saw of her was an unedifying spectacle. She was fighting back tears, bidding for her own luggage that was being auctioned back to her.’
While the barbarity of the events is unsettling, it is the audacity of the scammers that really jars me, which possibly says more about my naïve Western sensibility than it does about their brazenness. Who would have thought that the illicit designs of a bunch of crooks could be so manifest, particularly within the perimeter fence of an international airport? Struth, even in South East Asia you need to wait for your taxi-driver to exit the terminal and say “Meter no working sir” to get ripped off! True horror indeed lies beyond seven nights in Kuta with complimentary transfers and a sanitised dunny seat – it’s there in that sinking feeling you get when, so far from home, that hapless woman is separated from her luggage by artless thugs. And therein lies the strength of Butcher’s prose; it leaves room for the reader to imagine – to empathise with those who share the author’s journey – while rendering tangible the immediacy of his travel experience.
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart, ‘yomps’ along at a fair clip (‘yomps’ is the term used by Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland, to describe the pace of Butcher’s tale… I can’t think of a more apt description*). One moment you’re riding pillion on a clapped out motorbike with Butcher and some local pisshead (oh, and yes, the pisshead is pissed and he is driving), the next you’re ferreting through the economic and moral decay of a country that, not so long ago, held appeal enough to draw a surfeit of cashed up Westerners. Luminaries like Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad all toured here, even Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn arrived to film ‘The African Queen’. The country even played host to the author’s mother in 1958;
‘Mum described her steamboat journey through virgin rainforest and how she would lean over the rail to point at sparring hippos…She remembered how the boat dropped her off…only for her to scramble up the muddy river bank and find, half-hidden by towering elephant grass, a steamboat waiting to take its passengers on the next leg of their journey, with a steward, clad in a peaked cap of rail-company livery, anxious to keep to the timetable’
Civilised eh? Well, consider this,
‘Her door opened and she welcomed two Italian aid workers…One of them was thin and haggard, and the other fresh-faced and eager…
‘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 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.’
Grim subject matter aside, it is Butcher’s deft touch as a writer that is most striking – nothing is clunky – the Congo’s sordid past, in this instance, invoked by a single, jaded remark from a burnt out aid worker. A segue such as this can often seem ham-fisted in the hands of a lesser writer.
‘Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart’ is sure to suit those looking for a rattling good read. It moves at a frantic pace, yet leaves pause enough for a smattering – nay, splattering – of the Congo’s bloody history; from the cruelty of the Belgian colonialists to the evils of Mobutu. Don’t expect an exhaustive appraisal of the ills of the wider African continent and you won’t be disappointed – I wasn’t, flying, again, over the Pacific Ocean, en route to my second honeymoon destination in The Philippines. Though this time nothing tore free from the roof, my fork was reassuringly plastic, and there wasn’t a pissed hippy or Koran-toting Jihadist within Cooee. Everything was ordered; hermetically sealed; calming and - ultimately - as dull as all Hell.
*yomp (Royal Marines slang) A long-distance march carrying full kit
