Mick Hartley

Further to that post about the DfID (Department for International Development), and how it was going to save Burma, here’s an excerpt from Tim Butcher’s “Blood River“, about a journey he took in 2004 retracing Stanley’s epic voyage in the 1870s from the shores of Lake Tanganyika to the Congo river, and then downstream to the Atlantic. Here he’s skirting round the impassable series of rapids, still called the Stanley Falls, just upriver from Kisangani:

The track I was travelling along was the remnants of the main road between Ubundu and Kisangani, which used to have regular four-wheeled traffic back in the 1950s. During my research for the journey, I had had a bizarre exchange with officials from the British government’s foreign-aid arm, the Department for International Development (DfID), in which they assured me the road still existed and was already being upgraded, following the 2002 peace treaty, using British government funds.

This sounded like good news for my plan to travel through here, but when I pushed them a little harder, the DfID people admitted that they had no further information and that I should speak to a UN official appointed as their agent. In spite of various messages and telephone calls, no-one at DfID was able to track down this mysterious agent…. I was saddened by the thought that the DfID people back in London were attending meetings, summits and seminars at which they assured the colleagues in the aid community that the Kisingani-Ubundu road upgrade was in hand when, as I was finding out, this was not the case.

There was absolutely no work taking place on the road. The advancing jungle had choked it to a single-track footpath, snaking aroung mature trees growing up from the centre of ther old carriageway and past vast mudslides and dramatic rockfalls…

The Democratic Republic of Congo, as it is now, has been the scene over the past decade of one of the most brutal and under-reported of recent wars, with maybe 4 million deaths. Over the past 50 years, since independence, it’s effectively been undergoing a process of undevelopment.

Here’s the chief of a village in Katanga province, in the East of the country:

“When I was a child I went to school in Kalemie. It was a great honour for one from our village to go to the big town and I was chosen because I was the son of the chief. My family walked with me through the forest to the place not far from here where the bus passed. I will never forget that first bus journey.” He fell silent for a moment, staring into the fire.

“I was still at school when independence came in 1960, and in Kalemie I remember almost all of the white families fled across the lake because they were scared. I came home and since then I think I have been to Kalemie maybe two times.

“Our village here, the one you are sitting in, used to have cars come through it every few days. Just a few kilometres away is one of those guest houses the Belgians built. They called them gites and they were always open for travellers coming through by car. But all of that went with the fighting.

“Now when we hear the fighting coming our way, my people and I just flee into the bush. We have learned it is the safest place for us. We know how to survive there. And when we come back, our village is almost always destroyed and we have to build it again.

“Over the years, things have got worse and worse. We have lost the things we once had. Apart from what we can carry into the bush, we have nothing. I think the last time I saw a vehicle near here was 1985, but I cannot be sure. All these children you see around you are staring because I have told them about cars and motorbikes that I saw as a child, but they have never seen one before you arrived.”

The author goes on to write about the normal laws of development being inverted in the Congo – “I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.” Well, maybe it wasn’t quite so obvious a couple of years back, but not far to the south Zimbabwe is undergoing its own equally effective – and more rapid – undevelopment process.

The whole book, though, is relentlessly depressing in its depiction of a non-functioning society. There’s no rule of law: every official merely exaggerates his importance the better to extract bribes. Every building in every town (at least outside central Kinshasa) is decaying, every road is pot-holed and virtually impassable, every railroad has returned to jungle. The Congo river itself is lined with rusting hulks of ships, while river traffic is minimal to non-existent. Every so often semi-militarised gangs of thugs roar through, looting and raping with impunity – “by the afternoon they’ll be drunk and stoned – you don’t want to meet them then.”

The author has no particular answers to all this, beyond the familiar tale of a country which for centuries had its population targeted as slaves by the Arabs from the East and Europe and America from the West, then suffered perhaps the worst of all colonial experiences, followed by thirty-odd years under the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko, the original African kleptocrat [this is a good book on that period].

The role of the UN and the omnipresent aid agencies are never discussed: oddly, because they’re absolutely vital to the author’s travels (and to the country’s recent history). Just about every stage of his journey (except, I think, the last, from Kinshasa to the Atlantic coast) is courtesy either of the UN or of locals employed by aid agencies. There’s no choice – any normal travel infrastructure has long since disintegrated. Similarly his sleeping arrangements in towns usually involve the floor of some charity or other, hotels in general having succumbed to ruin and decay. Some of the most telling quotes come from these foreigners, who, in general, can’t wait to leave the place. A Malaysian UN worker in charge of the boat that takes the author from Kisangani most of the way downriver, turning a blind eye the while to the petty scams of his crew, at one point lets his feelings show: Malaysia too has had a hard history; it was colonised. Yet now it’s part of the developing world, a place where people work to earn their money, where tourists come and visit: “But the Congo people. They don’t want to make money for themselves. They just want to take money from others.”

While only one factor among many, it’s difficult not to feel that Malaysia was fortunate to miss out on the agents of virtue, the aid community. I wonder whose pockets our DfID money for that Ubundu to Kisangani road ended up lining.