Zaire—by road, rail, and river

Press, 9 June 1978, Page 13

Zaire—by road, rail, and river

The bloody fighting that erupted recently in Zaire caused no surprise to ERIC HAYMAN, of Christchurch. On a hitch-hiking trip four years ago he visited many of the country’s trouble spots, experienced the latent corruption, and felt the undercurrents of tension.

The recent rebel attack on the copper mining town of Kolwezi in southeast Zaire points up the necessity for President Mobuto Sese Seko’s dictatorial regime to maintain its iron grip on the sprawling country’s 20 million inhabitants. I spent more than a month travelling through Zaire in 1974. I entered the country from Zambia, walking the lonely halfmile between the two border posts as my lift had ended at the Zambian customs post. The Zaire border post was a shabby, concreteblock bailding crowded with new entrants receiving not the slightest attention. I saw this situation repeated at many government and quasi-govern-ment offices. After completing the entry form, I had to fill out a currency certificate

stating that I had a certain sum in travellers cheques on me. One regulation forbade the bringing in and taking out of zaire — it’s also the name of the currency — while another required that travellers cheques be cashed only at banks. Understandable, I suppose, since the black market rate was worth double the bank’s rate of exchange — not that I ever did use a bank to cash my cheques. A further regulation stated that every visitor must spend at least the equivalent of SUSIO a day for every day in the country. For someone such as myself, hitching much of the way and staying with friends, at cheap hotels, or camping out, this was impossible. It also proved bypassable. The 40 miles into Lubumbashi, capital of Shaba

province, were punctuated with three unwanted stops. The dilapidated Morris Minor pick-up I had hitched a ride on was owned by Zambians taking one of their fellow countrymen to the mental hospital in Lubumbashi. For some reasons, the facilities there were preferable to those in their own country. The courtesy of the Zaire military was not. Each of our stops was at a road-block — a pole balanced across two oil drums, and manned by sullen militia toting selfloading rifles. One of these blocks delayed us for more than an hour, while our patience was tested against that of the soldLiS. We were supposed to give in and offer a bribe to be allowed to continue on our journey. With a white person on the pick-up, the soldiers

must have thought their chances even greater. But our patience won, and we reached Lubumbashi before sunset, passing on the way one of the strict’s copper mines. I wanted to photograph the mine’s buildings, but photographing anything but the most innocuous scene in Zaire was forbidden. Lubumbashi had the air of a run-down, post-war town, with much of the spirit knocked out of it. Rubbish filled the street gutters, paint peeled off the facades of shops and offices, the roads needed resealing. The only patches of bright colour were the billboards proclaiming the wonder of the Movement Populaire de la Revolution — President Mobuto’s politico-military organisation that, in a state lottery, demanded “one zaire for a Zaire.” I never did discover whose pockets the lottery lined. A friend who taught at the university in Lubumbashi took me to a convent school 20 miles out of the town. There, the coolness of shaded walks, and the permanence and solidarity of stone buildings designed by someone with an eye to architectural elegance, was shattered by a gutteral voice not unlike a certain leader’s 30 years before. Framed by a stone archway was a netball court packed with standing, wilting schoolchildren, their eyes fixed, their faces expressionless. Beneath a mid-summer African sun, they were being taught the ethics of the new Zaire, and the ways of the M.P.R. Their teacher: a khaki-dressed haranguerwell into his second hour of thumping out the doc* trine. A quiet refreshing swim in a disused opencast copper mine, a look at the university’s derelict observatory — a victim of the fighting of the sixties, and now a sanctuary for wild goats — and we were heading back to Lubumbashi. My friend wanted to be there before sunset — before the police and the military began their nights of extortion, stopping who they cared to and demanding money — or worse.

That evening we went to a restaurant for dinner. For a couple of hours, eating continental food and drinking a reasonable wine, I felt I might have been somewhere in southern Europe. But outside afterwards, driving past watchmen curled up in cardboard boxes erected outside the heavily-grilled plate glass windows of the shops they were guarding, it was Zaire. Back at my friend’s house, we secured the gate in the 6ft-high, barbedwire topped perimeter fence and went inside, locking the front door and checking all windows before retiring. I took the train to Hebo — on the Kasai River, a tributary of the Zaire River — and there caught the riverboat to Kinshasa, capital of the country. The three-day train journey was without incident, the Africans in my compartment surprised to see a white person travelling second-class and eating local food. My school French had re-established itself by now, although little more than pointing was needed to buy bananas, grapefruit, peanuts, or bread from the sellers who thronged the train at every stop. The dining car offered main meals at prices beyond my meagre budget, although I did have the coffee-and-rolls breakfast. Besides, security was as much a problem for me as it was for the State. Leaving my backpack unattended for any length of time seemed to be inviting trouble. The riverboat — a freight barge and two double-decked passenger barges clustered around a diesel-powered “mother craft” — was far removed from Mark Twain or the African Queen. The spartan passenger barges for the second and third-class ticket holders were of allsteel construction and short of a coat of paint. Their cabins were tenfoot square steel walled “cells” holding two double bunks and a wash basin that was either blocked or lacked running water. Food was a ladle of chicken or fish pieces over a mound of rice, with cocoa and bread for breakfast. The mother craft contained the first-class accom-

modation and dining room, with the bridge perched four decks up on a vessel drawing little over three feet. At one stage of our journey down the Kasai River, we became stuck on a sand bar. The barges were all loosed off on long hawsers while diesel engines roared and the riverbed was churned up in attempts to free the main vessel. The only casualty from this diversion was a power cable to one of the barges — someone had forgotten to disconnect it before paying out the hawsers. Kinshasa’s only redeeming feature was the pavement cafe where I passed a number of evenings with friends, awaiting the next boat up the main river. A two-week delay — because one of the boats had broken down and there was no replacement (a shortage not helped by the President having commandeered one for conversion into the Zaire equivalent of a royal yacht) — meant spending 13 days too many in the capital. A visit to Mount Stanley, to view first the city, and then, looking across the expanse of Stanley Pool, a widening in the Zaire River, to see the skyline of Brazzaville on the opposite shore, was the extent of sightseeing in Kinshasa. Taking photographs on the Kasai riverboat had resulted in my camera being impounded for the duration of the voyage, and snapping a nineteenth century steam locomotive on a plinth at Kinshasa railway station led me into a three-quarters of an hour conversation in French, solely to avoid paying a bribe. My four-day journey up the Zaire River — with its many channels, bankside villages, and mistfilled sunsets — was enhanced by the company of a missionary couple returning to their upcountry outpost. They had the fortune to be travelling first-class, but I was again on the second-class barge, with a cell for a cabin and a diet of rice-based meals. The boat was heavily overbooked — the result of the breakdown, I presumed — and I was more

than ready to leave it when we drew into Lisala. I spent the night with two British volunteers teaching at the local school, before hitching out the next morning on the way to Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic. my next country after Zaire. The next few days took me through heavy jungle, past villages in clearings cut out of the forest, and along earth roads that became impassable quagmires when the rains came. The nights I spent at missions or stretched out on the back of a truck.

Having refused to grease the appropriate hand when in Kinshasa, I had failed to have my 30day visa extended — to cover the delay arising from the riverboat breakdown — and I was now overstaying my permit. Getting around both this and the ten-dollar-a-day rule were uppermost in my mind when I walked down to the border post at 7.30 a.m. on a bright Sunday morning. A 20c ride across the Übangui River was the town of Bangui. But I was still in Zaire, with more than a month’s dubious experience behind me.

By chance I had met the immigration officer the night before, and he had explained that, since he would be playing soccer on the Sunday morning, would I come early so that he could get away to his game. He was actually in football togs when he arrived at his office. He took my passport, entered the details in a ledger as thick as St Peter s, and stamped me out of the count.v. Nothing about visas. Nothing about currency forma. Just another side to tna counterfeit coin that was Zaire. 1 laughed all the way to Bangui.