My bucket list gets longer by the day but there are some places that will never be on it. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one such place.
The Congo has been the subject of many books and movies. There is Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. As legend has it, it was the inspiration for the Vietnam movie, ‘Apocalypse Now’, starring Marlon Brando. And there is ‘The African Queen’, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, set in the Congo and Uganda.
The book, Crossing the Congo: Over the Land and Water in a Hard Place, provided me the perfect opportunity to travel there vicariously.
Three Brits, Mike Martin, Chloe Baker and Charlie Hatch-Barnwell, drove for two months through the Congo and encountered unspeakable horrors. Their miseries evoked memories of the ten thousand Greek soldiers of fortune who marched home from Persia, as chronicled in Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis’.
Three Brits, Mike Martin, Chloe Baker and Charlie Hatch-Barnwell, drove for two months through the Congo and encountered unspeakable horrors. Their miseries evoked memories of the ten thousand Greek soldiers of fortune who marched home from Persia, as chronicled in Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis’.
Mike Martin had served in the British Army in Afghanistan, returned home to get a doctorate in War Studies at King’s College, and written, “An Intimate War.” Chloe was an intensive care doctor and anesthesiologist. Charlie was a photographer and manager of a kebab shop. Mike and Charlie had known each other since childhood. Mike and Chloe were engaged to be married.
Their car was a 1986 Land Rover bought online in London. They nick-named it 9Bob “because the man who had sold him to us was bent as a nine bob note.”
In 2013, they drove 9Bob through Europe and then took the ferry to West Africa. They had gone there to learn French but someone ended up in the Congo. The desire of the three Brits to learn French in West Africa would appear to be as sound as that of three Latin Americans wanting to travel for two months in the Subcontinent in order to learn English but ending up in Afghanistan.
‘Crossing the Congo’ is a story of human endurance. Mixed in is a tale of a broken romance: Mike broke up with Chloe. The heartbroken Chloe had no one to console with, since Mike and Charlie are childhood friends. The book is also the story of how the two men became expert auto mechanics. It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention.
In sixty days the trio traveled some 2,500 miles in the Congo, from the Western capital of Kinshasa to Juba in South Sudan. Had they traveled a similar distance from New York to San Francisco, the drive would have taken a tenth of the time.
The Congo sits in the heart of Sub-Saharan Africa and has the distinction of ranking second from the bottom in the World Human Development report. Poverty is pervasive. Roads are often non-existent, washed out, or rendered impassible by falling trees. The deep tracks made by heavy trucks in the dirt roads often double as latrines.
Food is scarce and just about everything that moves ends up on the table, including monkeys and caterpillars. Mosquitoes are everywhere and malaria is pervasive.
The Brits were mobbed by curious onlookers when 9Bob broke down, as it did more than once, or when it got stuck in the mud. The onlookers, often numbering in the dozens, seemed to come out of nowhere. Some wanted to be paid unreasonable amounts for pushing 9Bob. Often they settled for nominal payments coupled with cigarettes. Many thought all Europeans were rich and some wanted to go back to London with the tourists.
Then there were the omnipresent security forces, corrupt to the core and heavily armed, often pointing at them that dreaded solver of all disputes, the AK-47 automatic rifle. Bribery by police, immigration officials and other random security forces was rampant.
And then there was a very officious civilian in a starched white shirt. He seemed to have power over everyone else, including the police and the army, and acted like a warlord. No one would tell them who he was; neither would he. He turned out to be the brother of the MP. Ah, so DRC was a genuine third-world democracy.
Just about all conversations began with four simple words: “Show me your passport.” If there was the remotest suspicion that the visa has expired, trouble ensued. At one point Charlie had his passport stolen and recovered it only by bribing the thief.
Harassment by people in uniform was endless. Sometimes the officer simply said that tourists were not allowed to travel through the area. He did not seem to know that the law restricting travel, which dated back to the Belgian colonial period, had changed. When they passed all the other checks, the trio was branded as spies or smugglers.
When asked why they were in the DRC, they would tell the truth: we came to learn French. But that left one security officer unconvinced. He said: “I don’t know why the English would want to learn French, and why they would come all the way here to learn it.” They were put under house arrest but served food, allowed to have a hot bath with two buckets, and then asked to sleep on a concrete floor. A newly-made friend in the army rescued them the next day.
Mike, Chloe and Charlie also discovered that robbery, rape and death were rampant in the Congo and that heavily-armed criminals roamed the streets, the villages, and the jungle by night and by day.
The climax of their epic journey came when they had to cross a river where the bridge had disappeared. They assembled a boat made of logs, without having any training in civil engineering, and successfully crossed the fast-flowing river with the two-ton vehicle.
Despite the heart rendering travails that the trio endured, they also encountered people who were heart-warming in their kindness, hospitality and generosity. Those people had little going for them and expected nothing in return. The human spirit was alive and well even in the “heart of darkness.”
The book is a searing condemnation of the corruption that is endemic in the Congo and of its woeful infrastructure. One wonders where all the money that the World Bank has poured into the DRC has gone.
In an interview, Martin noted that the DRC was the second most industrialised country in Africa at independence, and that the “DRC had been at its most ‘advanced’ state just before the Belgians left.” Sadly, that is the story of many ex-colonies. Independence has not yielded the promised fruits.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
Published in Daily Times, June 4th 2018.