Links within story reveal video. Editing by Leon Ivangorodsky.
After spending several years reporting Congo’s death and violence, I chose to distance myself from those stories and go looking for signs of revival. With the exception of a few small pockets of eastern Congo and the capital Kinshasa, the war had ended inside the vast country, and I was determined to find those places that weren’t bleeding or blown to hell, to meet people whose lives were moving a little ways forward.
So in October 2006, I embarked on a five-week journey up the Congo River from the capital
Kinshasa to Kisangani,
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located 1,734 kilometers (1,077 miles) into the vine-choked heart of the land. It was the same journey taken by Joseph Conrad in 1890 while a captain’s assistant in King Leopold’s Congo Free State, a voyage that inspired Heart of Darkness.
Traveling with me were photographer Riccardo Gangale and Severin Mpiana, an unemployed electrical engineer from Kinshasa, whom I’d hired as my translator and fixer. Most video was shot by Riccardo, who’d actually taken the same journey alone six months earlier, and who’d become gravely ill from malaria and infection from fly bites that had turned septic. He couldn’t wait to do it again.
Riding high aboard the Ma’UnganoOur journey began on the Ma’Ungano, a commercial tugboat owned and operated by Frenchman Henri-Albert Buisine,
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who’d served nearly two decades as chief superintendent of the former dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Buisine had been thrown in prison after the rebel takeover of Kinshasa in 1997, and after years of war, now owned a transport company that pushed cargo up and down the Congo.
During the war, most of the river was occupied by gunmen and thieves and off limits to traders. The lack of commerce had a devastating effect on the economies along the river, and most had completely dried up. Landmark presidential elections the previous July had somewhat restored the confidence of boat captains, but not many. The Ma’Ungano was one of few commercial barges back on the river shuttling much-needed goods to towns and villages.
For a river tug, the Ma’Ungano was luxurious,
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with navigation software in the wheelhouse, comfortable cabins, and a chef who prepared two meals
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per day – usually fresh fish purchased along the river. In the days ahead, as we moved to other means of transport to get upriver, we would look back at the Ma’Ungano with longing.
After seven days and eight hundred kilometers, we pulled into Mbandaka
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and said goodbye
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to the comfort of the Ma’Ungano. We jumped aboard the Ndobo, a commercial barge traveling 578 kilometers (357 miles) upriver to its namesake town, where it would upload timber and return to the capital. Because there were few roads and no working passenger boats in Congo, and with airfare out of reach for most people, the only way to trade and travel across the vast country was atop a commercial river barge. The barges were cramped,
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vulnerable to weather and faulty equipment, and often sank from overcrowding and collisions with ever-shifting sandbanks. But since most Congolese were forced to travel this way, so would we.
The barges became instant floating supermarkets, with traders whipping out their myriad goods
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to sell to the isolated people in the interior, who paddled out from shore
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in handmade pirogues and tied to the moving steel. Dry goods were also traded for smoked fish, pigs, or other exotic game
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that fetched big money in cities such as Kinshasa or Kisangani. Monkeys were also quite popular, both as pets and as other things.
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Along with the traders, we’d build our own shelter
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atop the barge using wooden poles and tarps. We filtered and drank river water
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, endured battering storms
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that ripped over the jungle, never-ending soukous
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from battery-powered radios, and tropical heat that left us wilted (but through it all,
Severin’s optimism
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was unshaken). After six days, we finally made it to Ndobo, hoping to find a motorized pirogue to carry us to Kisangani.
The night before arriving, we toasted our journey
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with whiskey pouches, confident the toughest part was behind us.
After arriving in Ndobo, we caught a ride to the nearby town of Bumba, where to our disappointment, we found no boats traveling to Kisangani. We were stuck. So after weighing our options, we decided to continue overland: we’d travel by bicycle through the world’s second-largest rainforest.
We hired our initial four riders and six bikes
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through Bumba’s local bicycle taxi union – which oversaw the hundreds of bike taxis that had long replaced cars in town. The bikes were in horrible condition, and we experienced our first flat tire before even leaving town.
After the first six hours,
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the forest had nearly broken me in half. It continued to fight us every inch of the way. Deep sand pits
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stalled momentum and the sun was crippling. The bikes – made of heavy steel and leaden with gear – pitched in the sand and constantly crashed. As we pushed deeper in, we forded three rivers
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in dugout canoes, crossed ancient bridges
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washed away by rain, slogged through swamps that stretched for miles, pushed through mud up to our shins, and maneuvered around millennia-old trees
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blocking the trail.
We slept in villages we passed, and made constant pit stops in others to repair our ever-crumbling bikes.
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Most people had never seen white skin, and in every place we stopped, dozens gathered to gawk at the aliens
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amid their ranks. Some villages were so destitute they appeared starving, and worse, our convoy quickly ran out of food and became dependant on these people to survive. However, at one village “restaurant” we indulged in a forest delicacy.
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After seven days, the forest trail finally gave way to a logging road, a cause for celebration at finally being free from the forest’s grip. Wrong again.
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We finally entered Kisangani
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on the eighth day. After checking into a hotel, we paid our riders and raised our glasses. We’d traveled fifteen hundred miles through some of the hardest terrain on earth. It was the coldest drink I’d ever had.
