The Pigeon Tunnel (23 page)

27

Hunting for warlords

The novel had everything, even a title:
The Mission Song.
It was set in London and the Eastern Congo, and had a central character called Salvo, short for Salvador, the son of an erring Irish missionary and a Congolese headman's daughter. Salvo had been brainwashed by zealous Christian missionaries from infancy, and punished as an outcast for his father's supposed sins, so it wasn't hard for me to cry in my beer and identify with him.

I had three Congolese warlords, each a standard-bearer of the tribe or social group that had spawned him. I had separately wined and dined a small platoon of British and South African mercenaries, and devised a plot flexible enough to respond to the needs and whims of its characters as the story developed on the page.

I had a beautiful, young female Congolese nurse, a daughter of Kivu, working in an East London hospital and longing only to return to her own people. I had walked her hospital's corridors, sat in its waiting rooms, and watched the doctors and nurses come and go. I had staked out the changing of the shifts, and from a respectful distance followed groups of weary female nurses as they trekked back to their sleeping quarters and hostels. In London and Ostend I had spent long hours head to head with huddles of Congo's secret exiles, listening to tales of mass rape and persecution.

But there was one small snag. I didn't know anything at first hand about the country I was describing, and knew next to nothing about its indigenous people. The three Congolese warlords that Maxie, my head mercenary, had embroiled in an operation to seize the reins of power in
Kivu, were not real characters at all: just identikit men, cobbled together from hearsay and my uninformed imagination. As to the great province of Kivu itself and its capital city Bukavu, they were fantasy places to me, conjured out of old guidebooks and the internet. The whole construct had been dreamed up at a moment in my life when, for family reasons, I had been unable to travel. Only now was I free to do what in better circumstances I would have done a year ago: go there.

The lure was irresistible. Bukavu, built in the early twentieth century by Belgian colonialists at the southern end of Lake Kivu, the highest and coolest of Africa's great lakes, read like a lost paradise. I had visions of a misted Shangri-La of wide, bougainvillea-laden streets, and villas with lush gardens sloping to the lake's shore. The volcanic soil of the surrounding hillsides is so fertile, the same guidebooks told me, and the climate so benign, that there is scarcely a fruit, flower or vegetable that doesn't thrive there.

The Eastern Congo was also a death trap. I had read about that too. Its riches had for centuries lured every species of human predator, from roaming Rwandan militias to corporate carpetbaggers with shiny offices in London, Houston, Petersburg or Beijing. Since the Rwandan genocide, Bukavu had been in the front line of the refugee crisis. Hutu insurgents, fleeing across the border from Rwanda, had used the town as a base to get their own back on the government that had driven them out. In what became known as the First Congo War, the town had been laid waste.

So what did it all look like now? And what did it
feel
like? Bukavu was the town of my hero Salvo's birth. Somewhere close by in the bush lurked the Roman Catholic seminary that had housed Salvo's father, the big-hearted, fallible Irish priest who had yielded to the charms of a tribal woman. It would be nice to find the seminary too.

I had read
In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz
by Michela Wrong, and greatly admired it. Wrong had lived in the Congolese capital,
Kinshasa, and spent altogether twelve years on the African continent. She had covered Rwanda for Reuters and the
BBC
in the aftermath of the genocide. I invited her to lunch. Might she help? She might. Might she even accompany me to Bukavu? She might, but on terms. Jason Stearns would have to come too.

At twenty-nine, Jason Stearns, polyglot and African scholar, was a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. Almost unbelievably, from my point of view, he had actually served three years in the city of Bukavu as political adviser to the United Nations. He spoke immaculate French, Swahili and an unknown number of other African languages. He was one of the West's leading authorities on the Congo.

Amazingly also, it turned out that both Jason and Michela had their own professional purposes in East Congo. They agreed to coincide their visits with mine. They ploughed through an embarrassing early draft of my novel and pinpointed its many transgressions. Nevertheless, it gave them an idea of the people I was keen to meet and the places I needed to see. At the top of my list came the three warlords; after them, the Catholic missionaries, seminaries and schools of Salvo's childhood.

Foreign Office advice was for once clear: don't travel to the Eastern Congo. But Jason had taken soundings of his own and reported that Bukavu was pretty quiet, given that the Democratic Republic of Congo was about to hold its first multi-party election in forty-one years, and there was a certain nervousness in the air. For my two companions this made it the perfect time to go, as it was for myself and my characters, since the novel was set in the run-up to the same elections. The year was 2006, so twelve years since the Rwandan genocide.

Looking back, I'm a bit ashamed that I prevailed on them to take me with them at all. If something had gone wrong, which in Kivu was practically mandatory, they'd have been saddled with a not very agile, white-haired septuagenarian.

Long before our Jeep had left the Rwandan capital, Kigali, and reached the Congolese border my imagined world had receded and the real one taken over. The Hôtel des Mille Collines in Kigali, alias the Hotel Rwanda in that movie, had an air of oppressive normality. I looked in vain for a commemorative photograph of the actor Don Cheadle, or his alter ego Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hotel manager who in 1994 had turned the Mille Collines into a secret refuge for Tutsis in terror of the panga and the gun.

But that story, in the minds of those now in power, was no longer operative. Ten minutes into Rwanda with your eyes open, you knew that the Tutsi-led government ran a very tight ship indeed. From the windows of our car as we wove over the hills towards Bukavu, we glimpsed Rwandan justice at work. In tailored meadows that would not have been out of place in a Swiss valley, villagers crouched in rings like summer schoolchildren. At their centre, in place of teachers, men in prison pink gesticulated or hung their heads. To break the backlog of suspected
génocidaires
awaiting trial, Kigali had reinstated traditional village courts. Anyone might accuse, anyone might defend. But the judges were appointed by the new government.

An hour short of the Congolese border we turned off the road and climbed a hill in order to take a look at a few of the
génocidaires
' victims. A former secondary school looked down on lovingly tended valleys. The curator, himself an improbable survivor, led us from one classroom to another. The dead – hundreds of them, whole families, tricked into assembling for their own protection and every one of them hand-killed – had been laid out in fours and sixes on wooden pallets and coated with what looked like congealed flour and water. A lady with a facemask and bucket was giving them an extra coat. For how long would she go on painting them? How long would they last? Many were children. In a country where farmers do their own slaughtering, the technique had come naturally: first cut the tendons, then take your time. Hands, arms and feet were stored separately in baskets. Torn clothing, brown with blood and mostly children's sizes, hung from the eaves of a cavernous assembly hall.

‘When will you bury them?'

‘When they have done their work.'

Their work as the proof that it had really happened.

The victims have no one to name them, or mourn them, or bury them, our guide explains. The mourners are dead too. We leave the bodies on show to silence our doubters and deniers.

Rwandan troops in green
US-
style uniforms have appeared along the roadside. The Congolese frontier post is a dilapidated shed the other side of an iron bridge across an outlet of the Ruzizi River. A cluster of female officials frown over our passports and vaccination certificates, shake their heads and confer. The more chaotic a country, the more intractable its bureaucracy.

But we have Jason.

An interior door bangs open, joyous cries are exchanged. Jason disappears. To peals of congratulatory laughter, our documents are returned to us. We bid farewell to the perfect tarmac of Rwanda and for five minutes lurch over giant pot-holes of red Kivu mud to our hotel. Jason, like my Salvo, is a master of African dialects. When passions flare, he first joins in the excitement, then gently talks the protagonists down. It's not a tactical thing, it comes instinctively to him. I can imagine my Salvo – child of conflict, natural appeaser – doing exactly the same.

In every trouble spot I have cautiously visited, there has always been one watering hole where, as if by secret rite, hacks, spies, aid workers and carpetbaggers converge. In Saigon, it was the Continental; in Phnom Penh, the Phnom; in Vientiane, the Constellation; in Beirut, the Commodore. And here in Bukavu it's the Orchid, a gated, low-built, lakeside colonial villa surrounded by discreet cabins. The
owner is a worldly-wise Belgian
colon
who would have bled to death in one of Kivu's wars had not his late brother smuggled him to safety. In a corner of the dining room sits a German lady of age who talks wistfully to strangers of the days when Bukavu was all white, and she could drive her Alfa at sixty down the boulevard. Next morning we retrace her route, but not at her speed.

The boulevard is wide and straight but, like every street in Bukavu, pitted by red rainwater gushing off the surrounding mountains. The houses are fallen gems of art nouveau, with rounded corners, long windows and porches like old cinema organs. The town is built on five peninsulas, ‘a green hand dipped in the lake', as the more lyrical guidebooks have it. The largest and once the most fashionable peninsula is La Botte, where Mobutu, mad King-Emperor of Zaire, kept one of his many residences. According to the soldiers who bar our entry, the villa is being refurbished for the new Congolese President, Joseph Kabila, Kivu-born son of a Marxist-Maoist revolutionary. In 1997 Kabila's father had ousted Mobutu from power, only to be murdered by his own bodyguard four years later.