Drums Along the Congo Read online

  “Oh, no… You must do it now. Nothing leaves this office unless it’s signed,” says the older of the two men. He’s wearing a Congolese red star on one lapel, a pin of Lenin on the other, and a tie tack embossed with Chairman Mao’s chubby countenance. Gauging him the equivalent of a lawyer wearing both a belt and suspenders, I decide not to argue. His partner is wearing a Mao jacket, no doubt a leftover from the mid-sixties, when all Congolese workers were ordered to wear such outfits—an unpopular law that was rescinded within a year. At this point, I’ll sign anything in exchange for the permit, and my pen dances across the bottom of several pages.

  “What’s this?” I hold up a document entitled “Escort Services.”

  “You will be assigned a man…”

  I ask about Ambroise, knowing his heart is set on going; indeed, his home decorating plans depend on this assignment. However, they’ve never heard of Ambroise and don’t care to hear about him.

  “You go with our agent,” they insist.

  I sign the document.

  The secretary returns with my new escort, a friendly-looking man about my age dressed in the simple green uniform of a forestry agent. Unlike Ambroise, he looks quite fit and has a quick smile. A field guide sticks out of his back pocket.

  “Je m’appelle Innocent,” he says.

  CHAPTER 9

  “WHY ALL THE BOOZE?” the American consul asks, counting the cases of scotch and bourbon on the tarmac.

  “Law of the jungle,” Innocent replies.

  “Visas don’t mean much in the north country,” an air force colonel explains.

  The colonel, whose ancestral home is near Lake Télé, is flying with us on the mail plane to Epena. Thanks to him, we have learned of a few of the local customs, one of which obliges outsiders to offer liquor and salt to every village chieftain along the way. The traditional gesture calls for a calabash of palm wine and several handfuls of salt, but Innocent and I have cleaned out a liquor store.

  The mail plane is a twin-engine Cessna, once a six-seater that now accommodates only four plus extra gas tanks. Jean, our pilot, is decked out in a sky-blue uniform and a white ten-gallon hat.

  “I spent two months at Mitchum Field in Texas getting certified to fly this here dogie,” he says, trying to affect a Texas drawl.

  Like his grandfather and father before him, Jean left France after his military service to seek adventure and fortune in Africa. In a few years, he says, he’ll return to Paris, settle down, and raise a family. Until then he wants to fly as many miles as possible. Inclement weather has grounded him lately, though, and this morning’s flight with the mail and the army payroll is two weeks late.

  As Jean supervises the cargo loading, he takes special care with the cases of ammunition.

  “Can’t have loose shells rolling around, can we?” He uses duct tape to seal each carton before slipping them into a wing compartment.

  We taxi to the end of the runway, and Jean sticks his hand out the window.

  Kaboom! Kaboom! Two blasts cut through the engine noise. My fingers dig into the seat cushion.

  “What was that?”

  Jean points down the runway to a man holding a shotgun. “He’s clearing out the birds.” Before a plane lands or takes off, the airport warden rides his bicycle down the runway and fires his gun to scare off any birds or small animals. Once, Jean says, the man wasn’t paying attention and peppered his tail with buckshot. “Now he uses blanks.”

  Kaboom! Another round is fired, scattering a reluctant flock of Senegal bustards. The warden signals all clear. Jean touches the Saint Christopher medal taped to the control panel, revs the engines, and releases the brakes. We gather speed and take off.

  The plane loops around Brazzaville and flies low over Stanley Pool. The ferry docks on both shores are jammed with people; one boat is in mid-passage and the other blows a cloud of smoke as it chugs away from the dock. Off to port a munitions train rolls onto the docks at Pointe Hollandaise; to starboard a tug pulls a line of barges from Kinshasa, headed, it appears, for Pointe Hollandaise.

  “That train doesn’t exist,” the colonel announces, gesturing toward the flatcars loaded with field guns and tanks.

  “Angola bound?” I ask. The tanks look Russian built. The colonel remains silent. Is it possible that the United States and the Soviet Union share the same supply lines through Zaire?

  “The train is a mirage,” the colonel insists.

  “Mobutu is getting cash from both sides?”

  “Look, it’s not there!”

  “Right.”

  Epena is the administrative center of western Likouala Province, just fifty kilometers from Lake Télé. The colonel describes Epena as a town marking the boundary of the twentieth century.

  “It’s the last place with electricity for hundreds of kilometers. They even have televisions.”

  I suppose a television is as good a geographic marker for modem society as anything else; surely it’s a better indicator than a church bell. I wonder how many channels they receive.

  “When I was last there five years ago, they got ‘Kojak’!”

  Jean unfolds a chart that makes me uneasy. It’s the same one I have: out of scale, poorly marked, and badly printed.

  “We follow the rivers almost all the way,” he tells me. “First the Congo and then the Ubangi and finally the Likouala aux Herbes, which goes right to Epena.”

  Below us the Congo River is like a brown snake slithering through a green nest. The verdure stretches beyond the horizon, the crowns of thousands of trees swaying as one. Tall grass flanks most of the river, suggesting the breadth of the floodplain, but a few trees hang over the banks, their limbs scratching the snake’s back.

  Jean keeps the plane low, never ascending above a thousand feet. He’s a volunteer member of a conservation group studying the migratory patterns of hippos and jungle elephants.

  “Look for anything big that moves.”

  Within the hour, Innocent sights a horse-sized bongo, several pairs of duikers, and a herd of sitatungas or bushbucks. The colonel sees a wide swath through the grass that Jean says is an elephant trail. He places an X on the map to mark the spot.

  I’m little help to Jean’s cause. My thoughts are locked on Mokele-Mbembe, my eyes scanning for the god-beast’s cousins, the duckbills and boneheads that once prowled the area. I recall Professor Bowers’s words to me in Cambridge: “Who knows what’s out there?” It’s safe to say that below me are more species of flora and fauna than exist in all of North America, but no one knows exactly how many. Up until the early 1970s, scientists estimated that there were approximately one million species of insects in the world; since then, research has raised the estimate to somewhere between thirty and forty million, and more than half live in tropical rain forests. Among the multitude of undiscovered or uncataloged life forms, why shouldn’t there be a family of dinosaurs?

  As we near Liranga, a town across the river from Lake Tumba and near the mouth of the Ubangi, Jean sighs deeply. We’ve flown 180 miles without spotting a single elephant or hippo.

  “Four years ago there was wildlife all along this route. Always a few hippos and sometimes dozens of elephants.”

  I remind him that it’s almost noon, siesta time for the big animals. Hippos spend the hottest part of the day in the water, where they would be hard to spot from a plane, and elephants usually snooze in the shade.

  “I hope you’re right,” Jean says, and updates us on the bleak statistics for their declining populations. If the trends continue, Jean says, both hippos and pachyderms will all be gone forty years into the next century.

  For the past half-hour the river has been widening, and now it stretches eight miles across. The mountains have receded and given way to the fabled Congo Basin, the alluvial plain that is the heart of the African continent. It extends beyond the horizon in all directions.

  We fly close to Liranga, where a flotilla of boats lies offshore. Crafts of all sizes and shapes are here: canoes, speedb
oats, tugs, river freighters, and barges an acre in size. Jean dips down for a better look.

  One anchored tug is lashed to a pod of three barges unlike any I’ve ever seen before. They appear to be floating sections of city blocks, three stories high, with bustling street scenes atop their corrugated roofs. Laundry snaps in the breeze; children herd goats; chickens hunt and peck; people ride bicycles, crossing from barge to barge on planks. As we approach the craft, I see that the verandas ringing each deck are actually crowded marketplaces. Scores of canoes are tied alongside the barges, nuzzling the mother ship like hungry offspring. The water off Liranga, I learn, is a principal meeting place for river traders, fishermen, hunters, and farmers.

  “That’s an entire city down there. Five thousand people or more… It’s the floating capital of Central Africa.” As a teenager the colonel visited these barges frequently, and he says it’s not unusual to meet people aboard who have never lived on land. “You can buy anything down there… The gangways are one store after another. There are midwives and undertakers.”

  People come to barter fresh game, manioc, vegetables, salep, and fish for clothing, ammunition, and other manufactured goods. With the yearly inflation rate in Zaire exceeding 350 percent, people would rather have merchandise than cash.

  There are bakeries and restaurants aboard the barges, as well as machine shops and other businesses. Occasionally a Zairese police boat will visit, and officers will try to round up anyone without a ticket or traveling papers; otherwise, ship board life operates by its own laws. One long-term barge resident serves as mayor and arbitrator. If the mayor can’t settle a dispute, then the tugboat captain has the final say.

  A puff of smoke belches skyward from the tug’s bowels. Jean swings the plane around for another look. Crewmen head to the bow of the tug and start working the windlass to raise the anchor. Apparently, things haven’t changed much in the century since the first motorized craft chugged up the Congo. That boat, the En Avant, was built in Belgium and shipped piecemeal to the Pool. Like the En Avant, the tug and other big ships below us were all fabricated in foreign yards and the pieces crated for assembly above the rapids. Judging from all the timber stacked on the tug’s fantail, it looks as if she’s powered by the same kind of wood-fired steam engines that took Conrad upstream.

  The tug blows its whistle, and as we circle the barges and watch, swarms of people begin clambering over the rails into their canoes, their arms loaded with merchandise. Others run around grabbing their children or gesture wildly with their hands, making their final offers to merchants.

  As the tug pulls the barges upstream, a white-shirted crewman cuts loose any canoes still tied alongside. People start diving off the rail. One man is frantically waving from the roof. Jean tips the wings, and we head back on course up the river.

  We pass over a sailboat, a lone triangular shape among ovals, cigars, and rectangles. The boat is on a reach, and it easily outdistances a pirogue with eight paddlers. This is the first sailboat I’ve seen on the Congo, though I’ve been told there’s a yacht club near Boma, on the ocean side of the rapids.

  Jean strays into Zaire’s air space, agitating the colonel a bit. Jean wants to show me where the Congo becomes the Zaire, which I learn isn’t an African word, but a Portuguese mispronunciation of its ancient name: Nzere, or the river that swallows all rivers. Jean gestures toward the Ubangi River off the port wing, and indeed, it looks as if it’s being swallowed up by the Congo. Its mouth is impossible to locate among all the islands and sandbars scattered throughout the debouchure. As we pass over, I realize how easy it was for Stanley to mistake all these islands for an extension of the right bank. He never sighted the Ubangi during his various trips, and when natives later pointed to the area on maps and talked about the “Tékota,” or the Great River, Stanley is said to have had them flogged for lying to him. He was positive that the Congo was the only great river of Central Africa, and he considered himself far too expert a navigator to miss something as big as the Tékota. Like the Royal Geographic Society, Stanley believed that the Uele and Bomu rivers, which rise near Lake Albert in Uganda, flowed north and fed the Niger River system. Stanley left Africa before Captain Marchand, the French explorer, proved that the Uele and Bomu eventually merge to form the mighty Ubangi. Even so, the course of the Ubangi wasn’t accurately mapped until the Franco-Belgian Treaty of 1914, which established the river as an international frontier.

  At the time, the Ubangi was best known for what an irreverent British publication dubbed “a local predilection for Frenchman stew.” Parisians, too, were transfixed by reports describing cannibal attacks on French garrisons on the Ubangi. One French newspaper urged the army to dispatch troops “to discipline the heathens … and teach them proper table manners.”

  Thwack! Innocent slaps me below my left ear.

  “Merde!” A sharp pain drills into my neck.

  “Sorry, but it was ready to bite. Did it get you?” Innocent picks something off my shoulder and holds it up for me to inspect. “Damn,” I groan, spreading the legs of a squished spider. Its spinnerets are exceptionally long, and I don’t need a field guide to recognize this mottled species of the hersilid family. As with a bee sting, the pain from the bite recedes quickly, but not the itching.

  Jean speculates that the spider bite is an omen. “Maybe you’ve been cursed… Bad magic.”

  “Bah,” I say dismissively, clutching the juju bag Fortunado assembled for me.

  Ahead a silver-topped building reflects the sun like a signal mirror. Jean says it’s the center of Longo village, the turning point for our westward leg. He buzzes the area, scattering chickens and goats. A woman shakes her fist at us.

  “Ah, there he is.” Jean points out a man waving a white towel. He’s part of a team that monitors the planes carrying government payrolls.

  This overland segment of the trip is dangerous, and Jean doesn’t like flying it when the radio beacons aren’t working, as they aren’t today. He accelerates as we change course and head west-northwest, ever deeper into the rain forest. The rpm needles jump, the engines thunder, and a trickle of oil seeps out of the starboard engine housing. Every few minutes he wets his thumb to touch the Saint Christopher medal mounted on the instrument panel. “If we go down near a river,” Jean says, “we’ll be found, but the jungle will swallow every trace of us.”

  Thirty minutes later, a collective sigh of relief goes through the cockpit as we raise the Likouala aux Herbes River. The river is a crooked, muddy flow here, stumbling through the forest. Scattered along it are dozens of oxbows, stagnant landlocked sections of the old channel in various stages of eutrophication.

  There are three ages in the life of a river, and right now we’re looking at a granddaddy, a river far beyond its prime. Youthful rivers are characterized by steep gradients, rapids, and swift currents. This old-timer moves at a snail’s pace over relatively flat areas, having reached a state of equilibrium with the land; instead of downcutting or carving a bed, the water drifts lazily off onto the easiest path. A fish would have to swim three miles on this loopy river for each mile that a bird flew.

  Jean busily jots figures on a clipboard. He triple-checks his calculations and taps the fuel gauges with the eraser of his pencil.

  “Looks good,” he announces. “There’s enough gas for a short detour. Lake Télé, anyone?”

  CHAPTER 10

  IT’S 12:55 P.M., with the temperature and humidity matching in the high nineties. Up ahead, from ground zero to the heavens, is a wall of vapor. Seconds later we’re flying blind through a dense fog, and a clammy dampness envelops everything in the cockpit.

  “It clears up once we’re halfway through the great swamp,” Jean reassures us.

  “Swamp?”

  “Don’t you know about the swamp around Lake Télé?”

  I know little about the geography between Epena and the lake. Only four expeditions have made it to Lake Télé, and their reports, like Congolese maps, are colorful but poorly de
tailed. To prepare for this trip I consulted a variety of experts on things tropical and prehistoric, yet now that I think about it, none of them had ever been to the Congo.

  Jean points to the plane’s compass. Two years ago, he says, an international advisory instructed all pilots to steer clear of Lake Télé. A crew aboard a flight bound for the Central African Republic had recorded wild compass gyrations in the area, and a few months later an Air Congo crew experienced the same phenomenon.

  I pull out my pocket compass, but it’s not behaving unusually.

  The fog thins out, revealing a hellish landscape: a jumble of black, stunted trees rooted in a pool of charcoal muck.

  “I once went to the edge of the swamp, and I’ll never go back,” the colonel says. “Too much tsetse and malaria and snakes.”

  As if by magic, the green forest reappears.

  “Thar she blows!” I exclaim, sighting the leviathan shape of Lake Télé breaching the emerald forest.

  The elliptical body of water is dark and mirror smooth, about five miles long and four wide. Along its edges are numerous lagoons and coves, and acres of lily pads hug the eastern shore. The plane’s shadow, which was clearly visible on the treetops, is swallowed by the murky water. I imagine Lake Télé as a giant vat of primordial matter unchanged since a meteor gouged out its bed millions of years ago. Tree branches dip low, then spring upward, suggesting monkeys on the run. Many of the trees ringing the lake appear to be cycads and tree ferns, among the most primitive flora in the world.

  Jean circles and makes another pass. Along the northern shore, several cormorants perch with their wings stretched out to dry, bearing a striking resemblance to pterosaurs.

  “Perfect,” I muse out loud, anxious to descend. “Absolutely perfect.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “LOOKS GOOD,” Jean surmises, eyeing the lumpy clearing a half mile from Epena.