In 1915 Kalemie was strategically important enough to stage one of Africa’s most peculiar episodes from the First World War. Two British motor launches were smuggled here by the Royal Navy for a surprise attack on a flotilla of German warships, which was enjoying unchallenged control over Africa’s deepest lake. The railway might be a ruin today, but almost a century ago it was so well established that British naval planners used it to bring their attack boats here by train, after an overland journey from Cape Town, almost 5,000 kilometres to the south. The subsequent successful raid on the German ships became part of British naval lore, and a bowdlerised version of the story formed the basis for C.S. Forester’s novel The African Queen, which was made into a 1951 Hollywood film starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.
Michel dropped me outside the IRC house in Kalemie, a rather sinister-looking building built from dark, volcanic stone, made even more imposing by its formidable iron gate. As his jeep pulled away, I heaved my rucksack onto my back and knocked loudly. A small shutter, the size of a letterbox, clunked open in the gate at eye level and a pair of eyes looked me up and down. Before I said anything, the gate swung open. Being white was clearly enough to gain entry.
‘Please come in, we were expecting you, Mr Tim.’
It took me a moment to work out what had happened. My emails must have got through and my name must have been passed to a gatekeeper who was not exactly overwhelmed with white visitors.
‘Please go inside the house. You will find Monsieur Tommy there.’
I put my luggage down on the steps leading up to the house and made my way inside. In the front room, a black man lay dozing on a tired-looking sofa, and so, treading gingerly, I entered a large, dusty sitting room with a television at one end and a dining table at the other. The room was crammed with the furniture and kit I associated with itinerant aid workers – piles of food sacks, rucksacks and an array of electrical equipment like computers, satellite phones and cables – all covered in a filigree of dust and all connected to the same overworked power point.
‘Mr Lee, Mr Lee,’ I called faintly. Kalemie’s position just south of the Equator meant twilight would last only a few minutes. Darkness was already gathering, so I flicked a light switch. Nothing happened, so back outside I went, trying not to wake the man I assumed to be the housekeeper.
I failed, and in a blather of blinking and yawning, the figure sat upright and spoke to me in the strongest American accent I had ever heard.
‘Hi. You must be Tim. Welcome to Kalemie. I am Tommy Lee, a pleasure to meet you.’
I sat with him for a while on the sagging sofa as he came round. Night had fallen and, without any lights in the town, the darkness was complete. Tommy stirred, saying something about this being the worst time for mosquitoes, and he checked that all the screened doors and windows were fully closed. He asked me about my plans and raised two heavy, querulous eyebrows when I said that I had come to Kalemie to try to travel to the river.
‘Folks don’t move around much overland here.’ He spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘Some of our staff use our motorbikes to visit our projects out in the bush, but they don’t go far.’
I could not let the mention of motorbikes pass, so I plunged in.
‘Would there be any chance I could pay you to use two of your bikes?’
‘Son, I would love to be able to help you. But those bikes are about the most valuable thing we have around here, and my bosses would never let me give them up to you. You are talking about a long distance to the river, seven hundred kilometres or more. I could not be sure the bikes would ever make it back.’
I was disappointed, but at least I now knew that it was possible to get motorbikes along some of the bush tracks.
It was now very dark, but inside the main room I could make out a shadowy figure moving around, skilfully managing to avoid bumping into the furniture. I peered harder and Tommy spotted my curiosity.
‘That’s our cook. We eat early round here and that’s dinner she is laying out. We have a generator, but we don’t have much fuel so we don’t turn it on until we really need it. Come on in, it’s time to eat.’
He shouted over his shoulder for one of the security guards to turn on the generator and, after a distant mechanical roar, the house lights flickered into life and for the first time I could have a good look around. On the simple dining table two places had been set and between them sat a large, battered cooking pot and I could see the red blinking lights of various pieces of valuable communication equipment as they greedily took their nightly recharge of power.
Tommy saw me staring at the plug. Keeping the batteries of my camera, satellite phone and laptop topped up required careful husbandry and I did not know when I would next have a chance to recharge.
‘I am lucky because we are just about the only house in town with power right now, but it takes a lot of effort to get the right fuel, make sure it’s clean and keep the generator running. Sure, you can recharge, but we only run it for a few hours so you better sort it out now.’
The tour of the house continued as we turned down a single, dark corridor.
‘At the end there, that’s the bathroom. It’s not much, but the water is clean enough to wash with, and here is your room.’
The room was more passed through than lived in. Without many alternatives for accommodation in Kalemie, this house would have been visited not just by the IRC staff, but by all sorts of hangers-on like me, and the room reflected this. A large bed, as saggy as the sofa outside, filled the middle of the room, boxed in by a cavernous mosquito net, and around the edge of the room were various old bits of luggage and clothing abandoned by previous visitors.
Back at the dinner table, Tommy was already serving me rice and chicken, before offering me a glass of water. A few hours earlier Michel had pointed at a crowd of women washing in the stagnant water of the Lukuga River and told me about Kalemie’s recent cholera outbreak, so I paused before accepting the offer. Tommy tried to reassure me. ‘We boil all our water and then we filter it – it’s routine.’
After dinner, the generator was turned off and I sat in the darkness listening as Tommy told me about himself. I could make out the shadows of his hands tweaking the whiskers on his chin as he described a career spent largely doing aid work in Africa. He had served most of his time in francophone west Africa, which explained his excellent French and Nigerian wife, and had only arrived in the Congo relatively recently. But in the short time he had been here, he had already had a grim experience.
‘I was in Bukavu in June, when those rebel soldiers came into town. It was a bad scene, man, a really bad scene.’
I asked him to explain.
‘As you may know, Bukavu is like the capital for the aid community working in that region of the eastern Congo. Every group is there. And for the sake of security, all the groups are on the same radio net, so we all know what is going on. When the rebels arrived, we all just hit the deck, staying in our houses and listening in on the radio to try and work out what was happening. Well, there was this small aid group with a compound, where a young Irish girl was working with an older woman – from Denmark or Sweden, I think. Anyway, the rebels got in there somehow and we all lay there on the ground, listening on the radio, as this young woman was raped.
‘It was horrible. But the older woman, who had been shot but was still alive, kept telling us what was happening. She was a nurse and somehow she kept her voice under control the whole way through, describing things clearly and factually. It was awful, man. We had a running commentary. She hoped the message would get out to the UN troops up there from South Africa, but they were fucking hopeless, man – it took them more than a day before they eventually came into town.
‘That was my welcome to the Congo. Scary, eh?’
With that Tommy got up and left me, muttering something about needing to check his messages from the United States. I sat in silence, thinking about the story he had just told, before heading to the sanctuary of my net
-shrouded bed. The last I saw of Tommy that night was through the window of his small office. It was dark apart from the glow of his laptop reflected on his whiskery face, as he tapped out messages for relay via satellite phone and swatted insects attracted to the only light source for kilometres around. It made me think of the mosquito-plagued Evelyn Waugh, tapping away on his portable typewriter as he worked on his first draft of Remote People, in this same town seventy years earlier.
The following morning I was woken by a voice asking, insistently, for Monsieur Tim. Dawn had broken, but it was still early and there was no sign of Tommy. I hauled on my trousers and shirt and emerged blinking to find a smartly dressed Congolese man sitting on my favourite saggy sofa.
‘Good morning. My name is Benoit Bangana. I work for Care International and have been told you need help with motorbikes.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ I was not yet fully awake and was struggling to take this in. Brian Larson, the boss of Care International based thousands of kilometres away on the other side of the country, had delivered on his half-promise of help.
‘Well, I am here with one other colleague. We have two motorbikes and, if you are prepared to take the risk, we will take you some of the way.’
Still half-asleep, I was not sure I could believe what I was hearing. It just did not compute with everything I had been told about this place. A series of questions came blathering out from me, as my sleepy head cleared. Where had this man come from? How had he got here? Was he serious about heading overland to the Congo River?
‘I am based in the town of Kasongo, a little over halfway between here and Kindu on the river. Kasongo is about five hundred kilometres from here, and Care International is the only aid group based there. Normally we come and go by plane, but recently we have been trying to extend our area of operation and for the past few months we have been preparing to go overland from Kasongo to the town of Kabambarre, about three hundred kilometres from here. Motorbikes are the only way to travel. When we got the message that you needed help, I was already planning a trip to Kabambarre, so my boss asked me if I would come all the way here and take you back.’
I was thrilled.
‘How far can you take me? Do you know the way?’
Benoit smiled and tried to sound reassuring.
‘I reckon I can get you to Kasongo. Our bikes are good and I think we can buy enough petrol here in Kalemie. Out there, there is nothing, so we will have to take everything we need for the journey from here, all the food, all the water, everything.’
That was progress, but my main concern was the security situation. ‘Is it safe? What about the rebels and the mai-mai?’
At this Benoit stopped smiling and looked more sombre.
‘For the security situation, well, that would be your own risk – I cannot guarantee your security. You can meet mai-mai anywhere out there and if you are lucky, and they are not drunk, then you can get through. I am not so sure about a white man, though. I have never travelled here with a white man. I am sorry, but I cannot guarantee anything out there.’
Those words stayed with me long after he stopped speaking. ‘I cannot guarantee anything out there.’ They tempered the excitement I felt about securing a motorbike. When I conceived this trip, I hoped to slip round the rebel soldiers, but Benoit seemed adamant this was not possible.
We took two cups of black tea from the cook, who had returned to her cooking station – a charcoal burner on the back step of the house – and discussed options. I wanted to know more about Benoit and why he was prepared to risk his life in the badlands of Katanga.
‘I am an engineer by training, but there is no work in the Congo apart from with aid groups like Care International. Now the war has ended we can hope again for an improvement in our lives, but the improvement will only come if there is normality, and there will only be normality if you can, once again, travel safely across our country. Someone has to be the first to go along these roads after the war, and as long as I make all the right preparations, then I am happy to be the first person.’
‘But aren’t you scared when you travel in these sorts of areas?’
‘I am afraid a little, but then I think about the good that will come to the people of Katanga if the roads are made safe again and life can go back to normal. Every village we reach, every stream we cross, is another small movement towards normality again in the Congo.’
‘What about travelling with a white man? Won’t that be even more risky for you?’
‘I always ride with my colleague, Odimba, and we have developed our own little strategy when we think it looks dangerous – we try not to stop. Out in the forest the rebels are not expecting bikes, so if we are lucky we hurry past them and the first they see of us is our backs, disappearing into the forest. If we keep going they have no idea if we are black, white, Congolese or foreign.’
I looked at Benoit very closely. I was not just asking him to risk his life on my behalf. I was considering trusting him with my own. It was a big call, but the thing that swung it was the way he answered my question about how much I should pay him for his help.
‘I am paid by Care International, who have asked me to extend our range around Kasongo. Travelling with you is part of my job, so you don’t have to pay me anything. If we get to Kasongo, you can talk to the senior man there about the cost of hiring the bikes. But as for me, I don’t expect any payment.’
That was the moment I decided Benoit Bangana was a man I could trust, but before I made any more decisions about the security situation, I thought it wise to ask Michel’s advice.
I found Michel at work in his radio station, a standard-issue UN container at the garrison headquarters built in the ruin of a Belgian-era cotton factory on the outskirts of town. Thousands of workers had once processed raw cotton grown in the sweaty Congolese interior and shipped here by lorry and train. Terraces of brick houses had been erected for hundreds of workers, but most of them lay in ruins now outside the razor-wire perimeter of the UN base.
Michel was deep in thought, trying to work out how the local UN commander should deal with an imminent public-relations crisis. Peacekeepers in Kalemie and elsewhere across the Congo had been caught paying local girls, under the age of consent, for sex. Almost all UN missions suffer from the same problem, with bored, well-paid young men deployed to places where poverty is so acute that girls are willing to sell themselves. Michel had just come from a meeting where the large scale of the problem in Kalemie had been revealed. He seemed happy for the distraction I provided when I introduced Benoit and explained about the motorbikes. Michel was impressed.
‘You move fast. Having a motorbike is great news. Well done.’
‘But I am still worried about security. Benoit says there are mai-mai all along these tracks. Do you know anyone local they might listen to, who could help me get through?’
‘There is one person I know about from Kalemie who dares to travel regularly through the bush. He is a pygmy and he runs a small aid group here in town that tries to protect the rights of pygmies. The group’s name is La Voix des Minorités, Minorities’ Voice, and the man’s name is Georges Mbuyu. I have interviewed him many times.’
The name sounded familiar. I looked back at my research notes and saw that an Anglican missionary from Uganda had once told me of Georges Mbuyu and his pygmy rights group. I had read a report about the role Georges played in negotiating the release of four local villagers arrested during the war by the pro-Rwandan rebels, who were then in control of Kalemie, but the missionary had told me that getting in touch with Georges was impossible from outside the Congo. Now that I was in Kalemie, Michel assured me that finding Georges could not be simpler.
Benoit and I piled into Michel’s jeep and drove back through town, past the bicycle taxis and the hawkers. We followed the road up past the church on the headland and, just as we came level with a derelict Belgian villa, Michel stopped. The façade was cracked, standing on half-collapsed foundations left exposed by numerous seas
onal rains. A small man, a tad under five foot in height, wearing a T-shirt, dark trousers and plastic flip-flops, emerged from inside. When he saw Michel, he grinned.
The pair greeted each other warmly in Swahili and then Michel broke into French, introducing me as a writer. Georges raised his eyebrows in astonishment and then seemed to remember his manners.
‘Please come into my office,’ he said, leading me over the broken verandah and into a bare room where most of the plaster had either fallen off the wall or was about to. He proffered me a rickety chair and asked me my business.
‘I want to go overland from here all the way to the Congo River. I want to follow the same route used by the explorer, Stanley, when he became the first white man to cross the Congo. But I am worried about security. Can you help?’
He thought for a moment.
‘I cannot remember the last time a white man went through that area. It has been many, many years. But I know some of the mai-mai near town. It is not just the pygmies that my group represents. We represent all minorities, and sometimes that includes mai-mai. Some of the mai-mai are not rebels, they are just villagers who want to protect themselves. These are good people and I can talk to them. The problem is the outsiders who come down here into our province of Katanga – they are the ones who are out of control.’
‘Would you be prepared to accompany me, by motorbike, towards the river?’ I tried not to sound too desperate as I asked the question.
For a moment, Georges was quiet. He looked at his colleague, a much taller man, Mutombo Nganga; they had a brief exchange in Swahili and then he turned to me.
‘I cannot go with you all the way, but I am prepared to take the risk along the roads close to Kalemie. I think you will be safe if I go with you. I know these mai-mai well. I grew up in the bush and I know their families and their villages, so I could try to help you.’
There was something reassuringly trustworthy about Georges. Like Benoit, he did not mention money, but when I asked him if I could pay him, he mumbled something about me making a donation to La Voix des Minorités.