As
a journalist Tim Butcher had covered stories from all over war torn Africa, but
it was the system of corruption and secrecy veiling the Congo that sent him on
an adventure quite unlike anything he had done before in his book Blood River.
Following in the trail of the explorer H. M. Stanley, who was the first to map
out the interior of the Congo in 1874, Butcher traded the comfort of hotels and
aeroplanes for the back seat of a motorbike and the traditional pirogue, a
canoe hollowed out of the trunk of a tree.
Starting on the Congo’s eastern border in a small ghost town that reeked
of colonial decay, the author set out on
what many declared an impossible task: to follow the Congo River from its source
all the way to Boma in the west, just short of the river’s mouth.
In
the wake of a 2003 peace agreement thought to put an end to one of Africa’s
bloodiest wars, the country Butcher explored showed no signs of the stability
the outside world may have expected. Throughout his journey he was warned off
by UN workers and government officials, but somehow still managed to find
people brave enough to risk their lives to help him on his way. Benoit and
Georges, two such figures, accompanied the author through the dangerous bush of
the Katanga province, where the mai mai, one of the most feared tribes of the
eastern Congo, are traceable only through word-of-mouth and the destruction
they leave behind them.
Walking
a thin line between adventure tourism and something more substantial, it is the
author’s great knowledge of the country’s history, his ability to convey scenes
and characters in crisp prose, and his interpretation of the complex situation
of the Congo today that saves this story from becoming another outsider’s
account.
There
are the poor who struggle beneath their loads of palm oil for hundreds of
kilometres living only off of fresh water and food that they can forage in the
bush, for pay that translates into almost nothing. There are the tribes whose day-to-day
existence revolves around fleeing from armed rebel forces, only to return to
villages that have been plundered and destroyed. And then there are the
foreigners, the traces of a colonial system of greed still in place, taking the
country’s mineral wealth with little more than small payments made to corrupt
officials going back to its people.
Butcher
had not only the courage, but the insight to tell a great story of a country
struggling to emerge from a history of colonial rule, bearing the brunt of the
modern world in all its indecency.
The
current situation of the Congo can be summed up well in the words of a mayor
Butcher encountered in a small town in eastern Congo: “I am the mayor,
appointed by the transitional government in Kinshasa. But I have no contact
with them because we have no phone, and I can pay no civil servants because
there is no town or post office where money could be received, and we have no
civil servants because all the schools and hospitals and everything do not
work. I would say I am just waiting, waiting for things to get back to normal.”
Available
at Timbooktoo, tel 4494345.
