A Single Swallow (14 page)

 

SIX HUNDRED YEARS
ago there was one kingdom of Kongo; today there are two Congos, according to the maps and flags. The Democratic Republic of Congo covers a million square miles of the heart of Africa, while the Republic of the Congo, otherwise known as Congo-Brazzaville, is a much smaller curl of territory on the north-west side of the river basin. The former was the personal fiefdom of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, claimed and seized for him by Henry Morton Stanley, one of the more remarkable and terrifying Welshmen ever to walk the earth. Ten million people died for Leopold's profit in the Congo Free State, a giant sort of labour camp which the monarch himself never visited.

On the other bank, the British having failed to exploit it, Congo-Brazzaville was colonised by France. While Leopold employed a Welshman who changed his name and pretended to be an American, France's pioneer was born of Italian descent in Brazil and became a naturalised French citizen: Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. While Stanley deployed murder, coercion and torture, de Brazza loathed slavery and believed in the values of France: freedom, fraternity and equality. On behalf of his adopted country he used patience, dialogue and negotiation in his dealings with the people of Congo. Trade and development would enrich both France and Equatorial Africa, he believed; relations between their peoples could be humane and just. In 1880 he signed a treaty with King Iloy, and Congo west and north of
the river became a French colony. France and Belgium shook hands over their maps at the Berlin conference of 1884. The rights to the rubber, ivory, wood and minerals of the Congo were divided to European satisfaction.

The consequence for the peoples of the Belgian and French territories was the same: around half the population of rubber-growing French Equatorial Africa died under the bullets and whips of their colonisers. Having been dismissed from his post as governor in 1889, de Brazza was wheeled out of retirement and commissioned to compose a report on the condition of French Congo in 1905. A cover-up was prepared for him, but it was inadequate. Horrified by the nation-scale abuses he had discovered and weakened by dysentery, de Brazza died on the way home. He was given a grand funeral in Paris. The French parliament voted that his report should be buried too.

The plane descended over a rainy land of rivers and tributary streams, small hills, houses, shacks and green rolling ground. Long since cleared of forest, the area around Brazzaville was described in the ‘Lonely Planet'
Africa
guide as looking remarkably like Wales. I was not convinced: it was a yellower-grey. The centre of the city has one distinguishing feature from a distance, a round building like a length of pipe standing upright, slightly flared at each end. This is the Elf Tower, headquarters of what was the French state oil company, now subsumed in TotalFinaElf.

The three most striking travellers in the cabin were broad twenty-something Congolese in baseball caps, bright motorcycle jackets, gold chains and dark glasses. They chewed gum and lounged in their seats as we approached the runway. They were succeeding so thoroughly in looking like gangsters that they could only be Fashonistas, or Sapeurs, as they are called in Brazzaville, where style is very important. The rest of us were grey in comparison: African businessmen and Euro-American employees of one sort or another.

We landed in a rush past a Russian Anotov transport, old Boeings and smaller planes. The airport had a flaked, one-eyed look as though
it had been recently shot up. In fact, the last time it was bombarded was 2003, when the former ‘Cobra' (now government) forces of the former Marxist dictator (now president of the republic) Denis Sassou-Nguesso last defeated the ‘Ninjas', led by Pastor Ntumi, who believes himself sent by God to liberate the Lari people of the south. Before that the airport, Brazzaville and much of the country had been fought over in 2002, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1994 and 1993, the last five conflicts being partly sponsored by the Elf oil company on behalf of its interests and those of its beneficiaries and associates in the French government at the time.

Sassou-Nguesso, a French-trained paratrooper and a northerner who needed plenty of guns and money to take power from his elected predecessor, Pascal Lissouba, was France's man. With vast villas in Paris, an unknown sum in offshore accounts and an estimated $250 million leaking annually from the country's oil account (principally but not exclusively in the hands of Total) it seemed safe to assume he was still.

The human price for this status quo must seem very small by the historical standards of the Congo. In 1997 at least 10,000 people died and more than 800,000 were displaced. In 1998, during a Ninja counter-attack, a good proportion of Brazzaville's citizenry fled their homes. That year, on one notorious road, over a thousand women and girls were raped.

We had touched down, as far as I knew, into an uneasy peace. The Ninjas still held territory between Brazzaville and the sea, effectively cutting the capital off from the best deep-water port of the West African coast, the country's oil city, Pointe-Noire. They were said to be friendly now: you were supposed to be able to pass their roadblocks just as you would the government's – except, of course, anyone who could would surely fly.

As I walked across the tarmac, through dripping heat, I was sure of only two things about Congo. First, every account I had read promised I would meet the spirit world somewhere on my travels, Congo-Brazzaville being as much in thrall to ngangas (witch doctors), sorcerers and magic as it is to oil and guns. I was not looking forward
to this. Second, according to my visa I had twelve days to make it to the country's northern border and cross into Cameroon.

The queue for the booth in which a man was stamping passports dwindled as local fixers and resident ex-pats appeared from behind the booth to pick out their associates. These were waved rapidly through. My turn came, the passport was scrutinised, stamped and handed back with a smile. There was a small, churned crowd of hopeful faces offering help with carrying the rucksack, then customs.

‘Do you have anything for me to eat?'

The customs officer was a young woman in a brown uniform. Her gaze searched mine then flicked over my shoulder while her hand rifled the rucksack. She spoke urgently and furtively.

‘Do you have something for me?'

Each time she repeated the question something else was pulled out of the sack.

‘Do you have some money for something to eat?'

I surrendered two packets of duty-free cigarettes: the moment the first appeared, a second customs officer swooped with the same questions. They divided the cigarettes and let me go. In a
bureau-de-change
I changed euros to CFA francs: these are pegged to the euro at the rate of 655 CFA to 1, the exchange rate being guaranteed by France and underwritten by an agreement which puts 60 per cent of the CFA zone's reserves in a bank in Paris. Then a man with a small green Peugeot taxi whipped me into Brazzaville.

‘What's it like here at the moment?'

‘It's good.'

‘Really?'

‘
Oui!
We have security . . .'

‘What's it like in Kinshasa?'

‘Better! The son is better than the father!'

This referred to the presidency of Joseph Kabila, who took over from his father, Laurent-Desiré Kabila, in 2006. We laughed at the idea that the son could be better than the father:

‘So often it is not the way!' the taxi driver said.

I checked into the best hotel I could find, planning to get my
bearings and move downmarket tomorrow. A text message from London said an old friend had become a father. Messages from home came infrequently now. I toasted the baby, Oliver, in South African ‘Flight of the Fish Eagle' brandy and went out to explore.

Tall palms line the river, a slow-moving rink stretching across to the port and the towers of Kinshasa. Large rafts of weed, water hyacinth and torn branches sail down the current. Poto Poto is a dense nest of life adjoining the city centre; its streets are swamps of brown mud and spume puddles which conceal pits and shell-holes, some deep enough to swallow a car. Poto Poto is principally made from corrugated iron. Workshops, garages, table-football bars, private dwellings, scrap-metal merchants and furniture-makers are tacked together, loud with saws and music, hammering, shouts and laughter. Smells of smoke, cooking meat, rotting garbage and coffee eddy among clouds of exhaust. People are friendly, curious and polite. Another cap-and-shades boy stops me for a while-away chat. Where am I from – what, Portugal?

‘Non, Pays de Galles – un petit pays entre Irlande et Angleterre . . .'

To not be from somewhere simple is part trick, part blessing. By the time I have explained where Wales is, sometimes with a sketch map of the British Isles, the point of the question has been lost, the conversation has passed nationality and with it, perhaps, to a degree, preconception.

‘It is a little country of mountains and rain, and lots of sheep. We are farmers.'

I produce the same line again down by the river, in a shack in the last of a line of shacks at the port of Brazzaville Beach. Disused railway lines lead there, past the walls and thick greenery protecting the Russian Embassy. The port is edgy. The soldiers look suspicious, a drunk man in uniform starts to demand money before swaying and giving it up with a whoop. Women are cooking fish on lines of griddles, the dust at their feet covered in entrails and blood. Children are smoking ‘
tabac congolais
' – marijuana – and grinning through the
slats of the shack where we sit. On the water two ferries lashed together are docking: one threshes the river, carrying the other like a crippled sibling on its hip. Inside, flies crawl around the rims of the Primus bottles: the few of us who can afford to are drinking; the rest are sitting around, smoking. The men are arranged around the walls of the little room and our discussion is being followed with the earnestness of a court in session. My interlocutor is the biggest man in the room. His large head is minutely shaved and his brow is furrowed, his expression clouded with scepticism.

Pays de Galles does not satisfy him. He nails it to England, and England to America. Yes, I concede, politically we are Anglo-Saxons, but we are Europeans too, and Europeans are many tribes. Many Welsh, for example, say they are Celts, like the people of Brittany in France, or the Basques . . .

Anglophones, Francophones, vous êtes les mêmes
. . . You are the same, he says.

Well, I counter, are you the same as the other Africans?

‘
Non!
' He smiles slightly at last. ‘We are Congolese!'

The observers start to laugh. Conversations resume.

‘And what do you do?'

‘I am with the port police.'

‘You must be busy – there's a lot going on, isn't there?'

‘Oh yes.'

Wilfred was off duty now, he explained, and going home to his wife and children. If I would like to come again tomorrow morning he would show me around.

In the middle of town a line of restaurants clung together under a white colonnade. One served kebabs or cakes over a counter, the next breakfast and lunch. ‘They are all good,' I was told. ‘If it's good and it works it is normally run by the Lebanese.'

From behind a pillar came American voices: two men in shades were finishing their meal. They were both broad-shouldered and wide-framed. One was bald and moustached; the other had an impressive beard. Apologising for interrupting them I asked if they knew anywhere which had a pool table. A pool table is a wonderful
place to meet people, to find conversation and friends. Sure, they said, and gave me the address of a place, both restaurant and hotel. They were friendly and kind. They would be there later, they said – perhaps we would meet?

I moved out of my upmarket tower into the hotel they recommended, a long bungalow of rooms below a dining area, wound around the bottom of a tall building which was slowly being repaired. It was owned by Philippe, a laid-back young Frenchman who had cycled around the world, met his Vietnamese wife here, and settled. Members of her family worked in the kitchens, and the restaurant was deservedly popular, attracting the cast of a dozen novels. Among the regulars there was a Frenchman with a moustache so huge it looked like a disguise, and a Belgian with an impressive hat. They both looked as though they were in fancy dress, ‘disguised' as spies. Passing trade included aid workers, diplomats, oil people and UN staff, European and African nationalities I could only guess at. At any mixed-sex table the women were always younger than the men. Beyond the buffet my new friends were eating with four others of their kind: big, broad American men.

‘So what are you guys doing?'

‘We're building the new American Embassy.'

‘How's it going?'

‘Real good. No problem.'