Drums Along the Congo Read online

  Ambroise and I hook up after dinner near his home just off Independence Avenue, a kilometer-long strip of government housing, small markets, fruit stands, and social clubs. On my first visit to his local boîte, the Palm Club, the other patrons filed out, scowling and muttering unpleasantries about mundélés as they passed. Now my presence is tolerated, and sometimes a barfly will even ask me an innocuous question—invariably something to do with American pop culture. The Congolese are big fans of Hollywood, rock-and-roll, and prime-time television.

  Tonight I have promising news to share with Ambroise. The deputy minister I’ve been trying to meet for weeks called my hotel and left a message. He wants to see me at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Eager to tell Ambroise, I arrive a bit early at the Palm Club. The bartender, who is also the owner, digs deep into the plaid cooler and pulls out an icy Primus beer. He makes change from his pocket, with the large bills disappearing into his left boot. His name is Reuben: it says so eight times on his belt. “A souvenir,” he told me, “from my first trip to Paris. I couldn’t make money playing the drums there, and I didn’t want to sell umbrellas, so I came back and started this place.”

  As usual the boom box, ensconced high on a shelf beyond the reach of meddling fingers, is blasting a conga. Live music will start later, depending on which bus the musicians are able to catch. Reuben jumps up on a chair and slips on a Tito Puente tape.

  “He’s almost an American,” Reuben observes, tossing me the empty cassette box. Like most tapes sold in West Africa, it’s a black-market product from Lagos, Nigeria.

  I have my pick of tables; most of Reuben’s patrons stand at the bar made from two-by-fours or lean against the whitewashed walls, swaying to the music. Ambroise saunters in after a while, and I announce my news. He immediately demands a celebration, positive that my travel permit has been signed.

  “He wouldn’t meet with you to say no, that’s what assistants are for… Big shots think of themselves as nice guys who get things done.”

  His optimism is contagious, and we start toasting our imminent departure in search of Mokele-Mbembe. Congo dinosaur. Jungle god-beast. Supreme forest deity. Here we come! After our fourth drink, Ambroise informs me that his per diem doubles if he leaves Brazzaville.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, noting the furrows on my brow. For his work as my official escort, I already pay him a hefty salary established by the state.

  “Encore, s’il vous plaît,” I tell Reuben after tallying the cost of six weeks in the jungle with Ambroise.

  For the first time, Ambroise pays for the drinks. “Cheer up,” he consoles. “You will see Lake Télé, I will buy a new refrigerator.”

  Mildly soused, we decide to head over to the February Fifth Club, a hot spot with the best music in town. The date marks the inauguration of the present regime, when Colonel Sassou-Nguesso exchanged his jungle fatigues for the tailored suits befitting a president. Uncharacteristically, I decide to splurge on a cab, and as we climb into the battered Renault, the Palm Club empties. Everyone, including Reuben, has decided to join us. The cab driver choreographs the seating, while Reuben closes up the bar and leaves a note for the musicians. Eight of us manage to squeeze inside the cab, and four others cram into the open trunk. Riding dangerously low to the ground, we slowly wend our way along the dark streets, zigzagging around potholes.

  “Do you know Lucy?” Reuben asks as the cab veers, missing a bicyclist by inches.

  “Who?”

  “Lucy—you know, Lucy on Kinshasa TV.”

  “Ah, that Lucy … sure.” I watched an episode on the television in the hotel lobby.

  “The band playing tonight at the club is very good, like Desi’s, only better.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, watching the sparks fly as we bounce across a rut.

  “Do you remember when Fred and Ethel…?” Reuben and the cabbie are soon arguing about which episode is the funniest.

  I tune them out and try to make some sense of our route. It’s impossible, however, and I give up after the moon crosses the windshield for the fifth time. There are no street lights, and the driver seems phobic about paved roads.

  We make our fourth U-turn. “Does anyone know where we are going?” I ask.

  “No problem,” Ambroise answers blithely. “We’ll get there. Everybody makes wrong turns around here.”

  Brazzaville is a city without street signs. The mail is delivered to post office boxes, and only a few long-time civil servants in the Water Department know the official name of each byway. People living along small dead-end alleys often give the name of the nearest boulevard when asked their street address. The secret to navigating the city is to memorize landmarks, but at night without street lights, they are hard to spot.

  We eventually arrive at the February Fifth Club to find dozens of cars and bicycles already parked in front. A giant neon palm tree with pulsing leaves is potted above the arched gateway. Glowing cigarette lighters reveal clusters of people in the shadows of a high wall enclosing the club grounds.

  “It used to belong to a foreign government, I think, or maybe it was a mansion,” Ambroise remarks, trying to explain the broken glass and barbed wire topping the wall.

  “Back in sixty-three, we had all the French scared and sent the richest ones packing,” Reuben says, referring to the Communist Party demonstrations that rocked the country and toppled the moderate government of Fulbert Youlou, a defrocked priest who rose to power with the blessings of the French. Reuben employed his skills as a bartender in the name of the revolution, claiming that nobody made a better Molotov cocktail than he.

  “A shot of vermouth was the trick… Add that to gasoline and you have a knockout mix.”

  Two turbaned women on a moped wave at us as they zip in front of the cab’s headlights. Their wave arouses the cabbie, who decides to join us for the evening. Once we disentangle our legs and get out of the cab, I hear a deep rumbling sound reminiscent of artillery fire in an old film.

  “The rapids?”

  “Oui, les rapides,” four men chorus.

  The sound of the water stirs me. As the others move toward the club, I stand alone, listening to the tumult.

  The Fangs, a large tribe living downriver and along the coast, believe the gods all have individual voices. The sky gods have the snap of lightning and the boom of thunder; the earth gods issue tremors and groans; the wind gods whisper and howl; the fire gods crackle and snap; the various river gods rumble, sing, and sometimes purl.

  What voice, I wonder, does Mokele-Mbembe have? A few Ubangi tribes say the god-beast hisses like a dragon; the Sanghas say it roars; others insist the deity murmurs like a slow-moving stream. Perhaps the river gods will tell me.

  “Hey.” Ambroise wraps an arm around my shoulder. “Les femmes are this way. Venez.”

  “I want to look at the river first.”

  Ambroise groans. “The river will always be there, the girls are only here tonight.” I tell Ambroise to go ahead; I’ll catch up with him and the girls later.

  “Okay, but don’t get into trouble,” he says.

  The moon is nearly full, rising above the twin stars in Gemini. Slender black clouds jet inland on the prevailing southwesterly breeze. A stand of sugar palms bends to the wind, their leaves pointing upriver to the heart of the continent. Several feet away a candle bush droops into the path, its clusters of bright yellow flowers flickering.

  As I approach the river, I can feel the earth shudder, a warning from the river gods perhaps. Clouds suddenly blanket the moon, and in the darkness I nearly trip over something; it’s a bowl of fruit, most likely left by some earlier visitor seeking favor. I rearrange the fruit and add a chocolate bar of my own. The clouds come and go, and I slow my pace as a heavy mist envelops me. Ahead in the fickle light the pale Congo River emerges. The air is vaporous—each breath leaves droplets in my nostrils; there’s no doubt that I’ve crossed into the domain of the river god. The sounds of rushing waves swirl into my head. All solid matter seems t
o have been distilled, rendered liquid, even the ground squishes underfoot. Pulling me to its edge is the resonating basso profundo of the Congo, moaning, dipping, and plunging. Preternatural ribbons of spume rise out of the water to greet me.

  I grope in the darkness for a perch atop a boulder. A shaft of moonlight pierces the clouds and reveals a tableau vivant: the river’s surface is a giant stage, its players diaphanous forms locked in a whirling dance. The moon blinks, but the riotous sounds echo the vanished image. The moonlight freezes a curtain of pearl droplets in space, then lingers on this vignette of ghostly water beings spinning skyward, corkscrewing up to the stars.

  For centuries these rapids protected the African interior from inquisitive Westerners. Phoenicians were the first to sight the river, according to Herodotus, who told their story and dated their journey to the time of Pharaoh Necho (circa 600 B.C.). Later Xerxes was said to have sent ships around the Cape of Good Hope, but evidence is lacking; indeed, it’s doubtful that any European investigated the river until 1482, when Diogo Cão and his Portuguese crew sailed a caravel to the first cataract, nearly fifty miles from the ocean. The granite marker he erected there, claiming the river in the name of Lisbon’s King John II, is still on the left bank. Subsequent Portuguese expeditions rarely ventured upstream more than a few miles. It was thought that only disease and death awaited the white man who went beyond the reach of the ocean breezes. Besides, the early settlers had come for slaves, and there were plenty to be bought along the coast from warring tribes eager to sell their prisoners. It has been estimated that seventeen million Africans were boarded on boats bound for the slave markets.

  The British were next on the scene, but Her Majesty’s government waited more than three centuries before charging James Kingston Tuckey with exploring the river. At the time (1816), royal geographers were positive that the Congo River was an inconsequential stream, but they hoped it would lead Tuckey to the Niger River. Though well financed and equipped, the expedition seemed jinxed from the start. Storms dogged them across the Atlantic, and three men were lost at sea; eighteen more died later, including the Irish-born Tuckey, after the ship anchored below the rapids.

  Finally, in the 1870s Savorgnan de Brazza and Henry Stanley, leading separate expeditions, cracked open the dark interior and explored the river above the rapids, initiating the world’s most obdurate land grab. De Brazza pushed south toward the river from Gabon and laid claim to a huge region, several times the size of France, which was later incorporated into French Equatorial Africa. Stanley rode the Congo from its headwaters, and his patron, King Leopold of Belgium, sought title to all the interior territory bounded by the left bank.

  Thoughts of the past vanish as a spray of water drenches my clothing. Below me the river drums as waves crest, curl, and atomize, rudely slapping against ancient rocks, barreling forward in ceaseless turmoil. Off to my left, about ten yards away, columns of water shoot up the sides of two boulders. A tree trunk crashes by, tumbling end over end, a toothpick in the mouth of the god. I watch it plunge and then vault into the air, spat into the night. No doubt it will wedge somewhere else and be smashed to bits before reaching the Atlantic two hundred miles away. Its volume exceeding two Mississippis, the Congo seethes and rasps as it funnels into the narrow cataract below me.

  A daredevil French team tried to shoot these rapids several months ago. A confident bunch with sophisticated equipment, they brazenly forwarded a celebratory case of champagne by land to the Cauldron of Hell, the last of the Congo’s thirty-two cataracts. However, a few hours after embarking, the first boat capsized, and not long afterward the other craft also flipped. Several bodies were found near this spot, but the other crewmen disappeared. Similar fates have been dealt to hydroelectric surveyors attempting to tame the rapids, which, it has been estimated, could generate power for one third of the world’s electrical needs.

  I’m in no hurry to join Ambroise back at the club. The sound of the river is soothing, and the spray is a tangible realization of my adolescent dreams. When I unpacked bananas in a supermarket, I imagined myself cutting them down deep in the rain forest and loading the fruit on a steamer; later, while pumping gas in the Berkshire Hills, I invented grand expeditions up this river buying rubber and ivory; and when I was weeding lawns on Cape Cod, I conjured images of searching for rare jungle plants.

  Staring into the rushing water, I recall a few eyewitness accounts of Mokele-Mbembe. The Pygmies who live near Lake Télé agree that the god-beast has blood-red eyes and rust-colored skin covered with a short, napped fur. It has a long, slender neck and an equally long tail. Inside its giant mouth is one lone tooth, a jumbo tusk that can easily puncture a crocodile squama. The Pygmies have told outsiders that the god-beast is as long as a row of elephants and taller than two elephants stacked up. A professional hunter based in Djéké, a village not far from Lake Télé, told officials that Mokele-Mbembe is only a little larger than a hippopotamus, with a neck as long as its body. Its tracks, according to Alfred A. Smith, better known as Trader Horn, are the size of cheese wheels.

  It’s possible that these reports have been exaggerated. The paleontologists I sought out in preparation for this search dismissed the notion of a living sauropod, but with a wink one admitted that the experts have been wrong in the past. Much of the land around Lake Télé is unexplored, and as Harvard professor Deane Bowers told me, “Who knows what’s out there? We have models that tell us what’s probable, but surprising discoveries are made every day.”

  I’m distracted from my musings by a light bobbing along the opposite shore, nearly a half-mile away in Zaire. Someone appears to be jumping from rock to rock with a lantern in hand. During the daylight hours, people prowl the shores of the rapids, scavenging for fish and useful debris marooned by the surging waters, but even then it’s risky business. The light vanishes abruptly. Instinctively I press myself tight against the rock.

  Four miles upstream the wharf lamps of central Brazzaville illumine the right bank, and those of Kinshasa spill out from the left bank. The upper floors of the deluxe hotels are easy to spot, as are the ferry port lights, which cast a pinkish glow onto Stanley Pool. From where I sit, high above the torrent, it’s hardly imaginable that beyond the rapids a mile from here, the Congo River meanders peacefully, entirely navigable for a thousand miles.

  Charged with the power of the river, I turn back to the nightclub. The band is on a break, and scores of people are milling about the parking area. Cars with sound systems are surrounded by finger-snapping revelers; couples pair off and stroll hand in hand into the night; groups of men flirt with women walking by. As I emerge from the darkness, people stare and whisper. Perhaps I do look a bit odd, lumbering out of the bush, a sodden apparition, with squeaking shoes and a bare head reflecting the green neon. Someone kindly asks if I need a doctor.

  Surely Ambroise is still here somewhere, I think, spotting the taxi and working my way toward the club entrance. Two soldiers snap to attention as I pass their jeep. Their Chinese-made AK-47s swing into a ready position.

  “Halte-là!” one of them orders as his partner flips on the headlights. The taller of the two men directs me into the high beams, indicating a spot with his rifle.

  “Quel est le problème?” I ask.

  The lanky corporal starts talking in a mixture of French, Lingala, and some other dialect. I ask him to slow down, explaining that I’m an American tourist. This only initiates him, and he speaks faster.

  “Caporal, s’il vous plaît, plus lentement?”

  He grunts, resumes speed, and speaks louder, as if that will help drive home his words. Since Americans have until recently been barred from visiting the People’s Republic of the Congo, this may be his first opportunity to lecture one. He clearly regards me as part of a menacing culture. Americans, he says, are devils in the service of Henry Kissinger, Satan himself. I fish out my passport and visas, which are damp but not ruined; he passes them to his sidekick and presses on. His many hours with the Red Book ar
e evident as he peppers his lecture with many of the Great Helmsman’s flowery phrases. The thoughtful Beijing embassy stocks bookstores with copies free of charge.

  “Trouble?” a voice asks to my left. It’s Ambroise. He flashes his identification, takes my passport, and asks the soldiers what I’ve done wrong. Assured that they are only checking my papers, Ambroise takes charge and tells them, “Don’t worry. I know how to handle him.”

  Ambroise motions for me to back off while he confers with the soldiers. He jots something on a piece of paper, hands it to the corporal, and with a laugh whisks me along to the taxi.

  “I gave the soldier the name of your hotel. You should expect to see him one of these days. He wants to discuss the revolution with you.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  “De rien.”

  The four doors of the taxi are swung wide open. The cabbie is stretched across the back seat looking for coins. Up front, Reuben spins the dial of the tinny radio, cursing with the flair of a longshoreman. He can’t locate his favorite station. The crew from the Palm Club is also there, and Ambroise tells how he has just rescued me from a night in jail, referring to himself as my “hero.”

  The hack decides to go back to work, and I grab a ride, content with my night and anxious to have a pillow under my head while the river images are fresh.

  “Did you fall in?” the cabbie asks, eyeing my wet shirt.

  “In a way I suppose I did.”

  “They told me you were looking for a dinosaur.”

  “Yes… Mokele-Mbembe.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Not really.”

  “When I was young, my mother told me about Mokele-Mbembe, but I never believed her.”

  “C’est dommage!” I say, confident that Saint George missed a few dragons, and grateful for all my dinosaur dreams.