Drums Along the Congo Read online

  “That, my friend, is a lie … French whitewash,” the stationmaster said. “At least 30,000 died building the railroad.”

  That would be 93 bodies for every mile of track, making this the bloodiest railroad ever built.

  “My great-uncle died with his feet off the ground,” the stationmaster said, showing me pictures of nearly naked chain gangs. Somewhere in each picture was a gallows with a hangman’s noose suspended from a crosstree, and a white man holding a gun. In this humidity the guillotine couldn’t operate smoothly, so the managers set up a gallows in each work camp, cynically charging construction and maintenance costs to the Colonial Education Department. After all, the gallows were teaching devices built for the edification of the workers. “It was a mean-spirited time.” the stationmaster mused, putting the photographs away and closing the drawer on a benighted colonial period.

  Thoughts about my morning with the stationmaster fade after a mile of walking down the tracks toward the Palm Club. It’s a beautiful night, with a waning moon sneaking above the horizon and moving slowly toward Sirius in the constellation of the Big Dog. Curlews punctuate the night air with their signature call: “Coo-loo … coo-loo.” I call back softly, but the curlews fall silent.

  My mood darkens as I see, just off to the left of the tracks, a mangled, rusted structure that looks frighteningly like a man hanging by the neck. I start sprinting to escape the image, but specters seem to line the rails: every signal post a gallows, each mile marker a whipping post. I make it to the station in record time, bedraggled and willing to pay a cabbie whatever he wants to take me away.

  “What happened to you? See a ghost or something?” Ambroise says as I enter the Palm Club. “Do yourself a favor and order a drink.”

  “You buying?” I turn my pockets inside out.

  “Start a tab,” Ambroise responds generously.

  CHAPTER 6

  IT’S SUNDAY and I’m going fishing. While Robert gets his boat from the marina, I wait at the ferry landing, guarding our cooler, three rods, and a bucket of live bait. The marina is no place for strangers, he told me. It’s protected by snarling Dobermans caged between three rows of chain-link fencing. In the Congo more boats than cars are stolen, and one glance at the map explains why. The country has thousands of miles of navigable waterways and only 530 miles of paved roadway. There’s a seven-month waiting list at the local Suzuki outboard-motor dealership, a frustration that causes many people to turn to the black market. Marin, the old moonshiner and fence, and my contact for illegal goods, says there are five maritime chop shops in the area for every one dealing in car parts. The Congolese navy is a barebones operation, with only two hundred men and officers, and Marin has never heard of them boarding a boat to inspect ownership papers.

  As the rising sun bakes off the river fog, I slip into the shade of a giant kapok tree and wonder if the guard dogs mistook Robert for a snack. Travelers have used this particular tree as a landmark since long before Savorgnan de Brazza slept under it in 1879. Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement both refer to it in their logs; Trader Horn and Henry Stanley took compass bearings off its massive trunk; Andre Gide, Mary Kingsley, and Ivan Sanderson all noted it in their books.

  From where I stand, there’s an unobstructed view across Stanley Pool to the Kinshasa skyline, a wall of vertical geometric shapes. Above the tallest buildings, corporate logos seem to hover unsupported in the hot air. Skybooms hold aloft huge bundles of shimmering glass. They reflect not only the sun but Zaire’s determination, no matter what the social and monetary cost, to be the cosmopolitan center of Africa. The cool glass and concrete high-rises offer a sharp backdrop to the lush, inviting serenity of the Pool.

  Millions of years ago there was no river here; the entire Congo Basin, like the Amazon, was an arm of the ocean. Over time, as Africa collided with Eurasia, all outlets to the sea were dammed behind a mountainous rim of crystalline rock. A brackish lake formed, but eventually the water level rose and began spilling over the mountaintops. That original spillway is now the rapids, and Mokele-Mbembe may be the lone survivor of the prehistoric animal kingdom that once lapped the lake water.

  Little more than a hundred years ago Kinshasa and Brazzaville were nothing more than the dreams of two men: Savorgnan de Brazza, who was hailed as the “Conscience of France,” and Henry Stanley, a man who not only wrote his own press releases but believed them as well. It was near this kapok tree that Stanley envisioned the city King Leopold had charged him with establishing. He was infuriated to learn of de Brazza’s treaty with King Makoko, chief of the Batekes, ceding to France all land north of the lower Congo. Stanley swore he would found a city that would surpass anything the French could build. Today Kinshasa, the former Leopoldville, is a vast metropolis of three million, while Brazzaville has fewer than a half million residents.

  For some reason the ferry linking the two cities isn’t running today. Except for the two workmen cleaning windows at the terminal building, the staging area is empty. Pushcarts are chained to trees; taxi stands are vacant; flies and beetles have taken over the fish stands.

  It’s almost ten o’clock, and the birds’ morning feeding frenzy is over; air traffic is reduced to the late-rising butterflies in search of brunch. A shoal of white Beleonois aurota fly by at knee level. These creamy beauties, with their three-inch wingspan, are among the largest members of the swallowtail family. They flit about excitedly, attracted by the urea-rich soil under the kapok tree; its historical significance hasn’t kept dogs or people from peeing on it. A host of small whites from the Pieridae clan join the parade feasting near the trunk.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see a flash of cobalt blue. Perhaps it’s a Papilio zalmaxis, which would be the showpiece of my collection. I creep toward it on tiptoes, trying not to make a sound, a field guide in one hand and a telescoping net in the other.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous faites là?” A voice calls out behind me. It’s one of the men who has been washing the windows.

  “Papillon … shh!” I say, pointing toward an empty spot on the ground. The big blue has gone.

  “Oh,” the workman sighs, shaking his head and walking away.

  “Hey, why isn’t the ferry running?”

  He keeps walking away.

  Glancing upstream, I spot a powerboat planing across the water. Its bow is riding high, and a mighty rooster tail is shooting up from the stem. Varoom! The boat is screaming along, yawing dangerously, on the thin line separating thrill from disaster. The craft skirts the tip of M’Bamou Island in the middle of the Pool and darts toward the ferry landing. The propeller whirrs as the boat hobbyhorses, the rails dipping with each untimely rudder movement. The man steering waves with both hands. It’s Robert. “She’s a beauty, eh?” he calls out.

  Staring at the muscle boat, all brawny engine in a deep-vee hull, I yearn for the sluggish safety of the ferry. The aft deck is an airfoil contoured to direct the wind through and around the engine. It resembles something Kookie would have drooled over on “77 Sunset Strip,” with plenty of chrome on a spaghetti of exhaust pipes and manifolds. In fact, the design, power plant, and flaming red hull are vintage Americana, circa 1962. Where, I wonder, do photographers from National Geographic find all those dugout canoes to illustrate articles invariably entitled “Emerging Africa”?

  “What took you so long?”

  “I tried to gas up in Zaire, but the border is closed for the day. The Congress of Central African States is meeting in Brazzaville. Angola stuff,” he says, referring to a five-nation summit called to mediate an end to the Angolan civil war.

  “Are the Portuguese there?” From what I’ve been told by diplomats, any talks are doomed to failure without the Portuguese acting as brokers. Having been kicked out of Angola years ago, they’re the only group without a hidden agenda.

  But Robert isn’t listening to me; he has fishing on the brain.

  “Get in,” he orders.

  The boat surges forward, leaping from wave to wave, our wake c
urling toward the shore. This is my first boat ride on the Congo River, and it’s not what I had imagined. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad described a voyage on the Congo as “like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on earth and big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.” In a few minutes we’ve covered a distance that might have taken Conrad half a day to steam.

  “Rewind your watch… It’s 1986, not 1896,” Robert sighs, decelerating and steering for Zaire.

  Kinshasa’s waterfront handles three times the tonnage of Brazzaville’s, but many of the ships at the docks are listing rust-buckets. Sandwiched between a mothballed fleet of barges are hogged steamers and cannibalized tugs. Two paddle wheelers sit on the bottom, their rails used to tie off modern freighters. Speedboats armed with machine guns surround a luxury yacht; Robert says it belongs to President Mobutu Sese Seko.

  We come abeam a wide boulevard, Trente Juin, that links downtown Kinshasa with the ritzy suburbs. To avoid seeing more of Africa than absolutely necessary, the Belgians built this avenue and lined it with European-style shops with quaint façades, invoking the architecture of old Brussels. Much of the strip was trashed during the riots of the sixties.

  Close behind the waterfront warehouses stretch blocks of one-story buildings assembled from cardboard, wood scrap, and tarpaper, their roofs topped with billboards advertising beer, hernia belts, and hair products. “Shine like a star with Spray Sheen,” says one sign depicting a couple with Milky Way hairdos.

  What might have been forest twenty years ago has been swallowed by the urban tangle, a seemingly endless sprawl of decaying structures sliced through by narrow streets. Between 1970 and 1985 Kinshasa’s population jumped eightfold, as two and a half million people left their farms for the city. Most are still waiting for the housing and jobs promised by President Mobutu.

  In comparison to Kinshasa, Brazzaville seems tidy and open. Glancing at the right bank, I recall what André Gide wrote: “Brazzaville seems asleep, too big for its small activities.”

  Robert points to the far shore, where, he tells me, the Kongo Kingdom was founded by Nimi a Lukeni. Nimi, the son of a Bantu chief, left his village and, with a few other men, set up the Congo’s first extortion racket, exacting tolls from anyone trying to cross the Pool. When his aunt refused to pay, Nimi killed her, breaking a most profound taboo. The tribe waited expectantly for the gods to strike him dead. When he was still alive several days later, Nimi informed the tribe that this was proof he was a god, because the gods don’t kill other gods. In the same breath he appointed himself chief of the chiefs, leader of all Bantu tribes. Ruthless to those opposing his ascendency, he consolidated tribes and went on to guide a flourishing kingdom.

  We reach Robert’s secret fishing spot and drop anchor. Forested hills rise up from either bank, the remnants of once great pinnacles that have been humbled by eons of pounding rain. This section of the river, called the Corridor, rarely exceeds two miles in width. Above Ngabé, though, at the debouchure of the Kwa, the Congo is up to twelve miles wide in places. River islands, formed from silt and shifting currents through a process known as “braiding,” dot the waterscape, though Ubangi folklore says they are actually stepping stones placed by the gods, who don’t like to get their feet wet.

  The Congo is the only major river in the world to flow on both sides of the equator, crossing it twice during its 2,710-mile run from Zambia to the Atlantic. Along its way, the river nearly boxes the compass, heading north from its headwaters and then west across the rain forest before angling south, through a series of twists and turns that confounded early geographers. On a map the river resembles a giant question mark.

  Robert offers me two fishing rods. I take only one, explaining that in all the thousands of miles I’ve sailed trailing a hook off the stern, I’ve never once caught a fish. One rod is more than enough for me to handle.

  Robert baits his line and casts. I peer into the bait bucket, which is filled with wriggling eels, eight inches long, with razorlike teeth.

  “Never been bitten,” Robert says, flashing all ten digits, and scoops an eel toward my feet.

  Whap! I slam down my ever-handy field guide and stun the eel.

  Robert heads aft with two poles; I move to the bow and lay out my notebook, field guides, and binoculars. With the engine off, I can hear the water lap the chine, sounding like so many wet kisses. There’s no sign of other humanity except for the occasional Styrofoam cup floating by. It seems the river belongs to us today.

  “Robert, where are we?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.” He will say only that the village of Maloukou-Tréchot is not far away. My map is about as informative as Robert. There are black location dots on either side of every name on the chart. Depending on which dot I use, Maloukou-Tréchot is either fifty-five or sixty-eight kilometers upriver from Brazzaville.

  An osprey cruises effortlessly above us, its shadow cutting the water and jumping inside the boat. Downstream a flock of gull-billed terns laugh noisily. A quick look through the binoculars reveals birds in all directions: drongos, sunbirds, babblers, parrots. Robert belches in appreciation of this news and grabs another beer.

  Off to port, about thirty yards away, kingfishers zip in and out of their nests in the soft mud bank. One is a shining blue kingfisher, the best diver of the Alcedinidae clan. Its hot colors—red and electric blue—pop in the sunlight as something upstream catches its eye. The bird makes a sudden turn, hovers, and dives, barely making a splash as it lances the water. It surfaces a few feet away, a river perch triumphantly clamped in its beak. Even Robert is impressed.

  “Nice catch!… And look at all the prairies! The fish will be here soon.”

  Tiny islands, most the size of doormats, are floating down on our boat. The Congolese call these bits of detached river-bank prairies. Stands of reeds, as well as colonies of ants, frogs, and beetles, cover them. Fish trail these microbiomes, eating the insects that slough off their fragile edges.

  “Bon!” Robert shouts.

  He reels in his line and recasts to starboard. Before I can ask what’s going on, the answer flies into the air. It’s a school of Pantodon buchholzi, or flying river fish, hundreds of them leaping above the surface. Some tribes believe these fish perform at the behest of the river gods, acting as offstage dancers cued by spasms of love. According to the folklore, each leap celebrates a celestial orgasm.

  “Cast your line,” Robert orders. A devoted piscatorial warrior, he’s eager for battle.

  But I’m entranced by the eurythmics of belly-flopping fish, their bodies silvered mirrors coughed up by the river. Considering the number of frenzied leaps, the gods are proving themselves truly superhuman today.

  Robert snatches my pole and casts with stunning accuracy, the hook landing inches ahead of the flying fish, which he says are feeding on minnows; large river perch should be chasing them as well.

  “We want the perch!” Robert bellows.

  A hornbill resounds somewhere in the emerald hills, and its raucous cry sets off an avalanche of sounds. Hundreds of jungle voices start shrieking and chattering. Robert works the lines while I try to identify each forest song.

  “Voilà… I can smell them now.”

  I catch a watermelon scent wafting over the myriad other jungle smells.

  “Oui. Parfum de melon… Delicious.” Robert sniffs the air.

  The flying fish head toward the middle of the river. Their leaps are subsiding; perhaps even the gods need a break. The smell of fresh watermelon intensifies. All the kingfishers are airborne and on the hunt, competing with gulls, pratincoles, terns, and skimmers.

  “Yahoo!” Robert trumpets.

  He has caught something. The rod flexes down to the water. Patiently Robert pays out some line, noting that he’s “smarter than the fish,” as if this might be a lingering question. Eventually, between guzzles of beer, he reels in a Nile perch, the largest species in the Serranidae family and
a favorite among fishermen for its good flavor and the high price it fetches at market.

  I decide to join the fray, but Robert lands three more fish before I manage to snag one. Mine must weigh twenty pounds. Robert leans over the rail, recoils, and grabs the wire cutters. Twang, he snips the leader.

  “Hey…”

  “I hope you know your dinosaurs better than your fish. That was a killer.”

  “Oh.” I open a field guide and find a picture of the fish, Malopterurus electricus. The stumpy black swimmer with small fins and a blunt tail packs an electric charge strong enough to pierce thick leather gloves.

  I’m watching Robert land another perch, when something grabs my line and nearly pulls the untended rod overboard. The fish doesn’t put up much of a fight and is soon flopping on the deck. This one I recognize instantly. It’s a Protopterus, an African lungfish, able to breathe on both land and water and, like Mokele-Mbembe, a carryover from the dinosaur age. They’re not very tasty, so I toss it back. Robert tells me that in all his years fishing, he has never seen a lungfish in the Congo River.

  “They’re common in lakes and swamps, but not here.”

  I take the lungfish as a good sign that of all places on earth, the Congo is the most likely to harbor a living dinosaur. The climate in this region has changed little over millions of years; neither the Ice Age nor shifts in polar magnetism have had much effect. The jungle from here to Lake Télé is relatively unexplored, and an animal the size of a school bus could be roaming undetected. In fact, much of what once lived in Europe millions of years ago has lingered in equatorial Africa.

  When the beer is gone, Robert weighs anchor and gooses the throttle. The engine roars angrily. Ring-ga-dindin-din. The hull pounds as the propeller whips the vessel up to nose-flattening speed. We fly down the Corridor, now stripped of features by our speed. Everything’s a greenish blur. For one brief moment I feel as if I’m aboard a time machine hurtling through warped space, unable to determine whether we’re racing into the future or into the past.