Investment Biker Page 24

  I immediately noticed the contrast with former British colonies. French influence was everywhere, much more evident than the British in their former colonies, which had made a cleaner break. Even the C.A.R.’s president’s chief of staff was a Frenchman, as was the commander of the presidential guard. The French gave French schoolteachers bonuses and tax breaks to come out here to teach. Several times Giscard D’Estaing, president of France, had come to hunt with Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the former “emperor,” who had made him gifts of diamonds. That had caused a scandal back in Paris, where they didn’t seem to value the true nature of post-colonial African politics.

  We rode by a set of buildings that looked like a public-housing slum. The windows were broken, bricks were falling out, and the lawns were unattended.

  My new African friend Jean said, “That’s the university.”

  “How long has it been there?” I asked.

  “About twenty years,” he answered.

  I was amazed. The French government had built it as part of their foreign aid. Whether it was Peace Corps aid or the heritage of the European colonialists, everywhere we turned in Africa the waste of the West’s legacy was appalling.

  We then passed a stadium, ten years old and crumbling from lack of maintenance. Some European agency had come in and said, “What you need here is a soccer stadium.” It gave them one, and ten years later it was falling apart.

  Here we had to make a decision, one we had been wrestling with for days.

  Two routes presented themselves, neither attractive. Should we now drive through Zaire—a rain forest a quarter of the size of the United States, across what we had come to hear were the world’s worst roads—or should we push through Angola, in the midst of a fierce civil war?

  Bangui was like Tam and Arlit, a traveler’s crossroads. Tabitha and I pored over maps and consulted every traveler for news.

  “It would have been tough,” said Walter, a traveler coming west, “but you might have made it over Zaire’s roads if you’d been here a few weeks ago, in the ‘drier’ season. It’s too close to the rainy season now. Even the best jungle roads turn into mud gullies.”

  I thought of Isak Dinesen, who had lived in Kenya only a few miles from the capital. Kenya didn’t have near the rain Zaire had, yet in Out of Africa she wrote that during the rainy season she wasn’t able to travel even into town.

  The maps said the roads were better in Angola, but we couldn’t be sure. Because of the war no travelers came through there. The fighting had died down, but any day it might flare up. On the other hand, Zaire wasn’t at war, but due to the rainy season its roads would shortly become officially closed and there would likely be no gas along them. The rains would become so steady we might be stuck for weeks or months in a village hundreds of miles from any city, ruining our chances of crossing Tierra del Fuego or the Andes before the South American winter locked up travelers.

  Weighing the considerations, we decided to go through Angola. Better a danger that was abating—the BBC’s shortwave broadcasts confirmed the war had cooled—than a known hazard. To motorcyclists who had wrestled with the dunes of the Sahara, Africa’s “passable” roads, and Siberia’s dirt highways, a war zone seemed preferable to hundreds of miles of mud wallows that the locals called roads.

  Back in New York, Eunice, who ran my office, had decided to retire. She had hired a young man named Judd as her replacement. He was a wiz on a computer, she said. Enterprising and efficient, he obtained permission from the consulate in New York for us to go through Angola and sent it to us via express courier. I was relieved that we had such a firm anchor back home.

  Having made this decision, we now faced the problem of getting to Angola.

  There was no road from Bangui to Brazzaville and Kinshasa, our twin-city jumping-off point. The only way to get to Brazzaville with our three vehicles, said the French consul, was to take a barge down the Congo and cross to Kinshasa, the westernmost city of Zaire. From there we could drive south into Angola.

  “Remember,” he said, “there’re no people and no food on the barge. Buy everything you need in advance.”

  “Come on,” I said to Tabitha and Pierre. “Let’s go see this barge.”

  The barge was as long as a football field, rusty and beaten up, with stacks of logs and freight containers in its center and crowds of travelers around its deck. It teemed with people, naturally all black Africans. It would chug down the Ubangi River, which fed into the Congo, “the river that swallows all rivers,” as the Zairians put it. The trip would take eight days because the rains hadn’t yet come.

  I was excited—a trip down the Congo through the jungle! We’d have to rough it on the deck in sleeping bags and tents. Not only would it be an adventure, but it was the only way south.

  Late in January we loaded our motorcycles and the pickup truck onto the barge and pitched our tents on the back deck.

  On schedule, a tug came along and collected us. We were on one of four similar barges lashed together, a floating village containing hundreds of people, pushed downstream by the tug.

  Business was being done on every side at makeshift tables displaying bread, medicines, nets, salt, and soap. The aisles were jammed with people shouting and haggling even over items as cheap as a box of matches. I was offered catfish, eel, and a strange bottom fish with large lips and tentaclelike feelers.

  Farmers, fishermen, and their families were taking their fish and produce downriver to the great market in Brazzaville. They not only smoked the meats and ground the grain into flour as we sailed downstream, they sold their products in villages along the way. A live seven-foot crocodile, tied to a pole, was stuck under one table, his furious eye glaring as if he would show us a thing or two if he could only escape the ropes binding him.

  Hunters and fishermen pulled up next to the barge in pirogues and offered pigs, antelope, bananas, and fish to merchants standing at the rail next to us. Whenever we stopped, villagers crowded on board to sell turtles, lizards, pigs, snakes, and even baskets of caterpillars.

  Slaughtered and alive, ground, cured, and smoked, the harvest of the jungle and the river was gliding down the great waterway to Brazzaville.

  For breakfast our fellow passengers had bread and tea. Often in the late afternoon they ate a bowl of manioc and beans on manioc greens. We never developed a taste for ground manioc, a root vegetable that grew wild, which reminded us of chewy dough. Smoked crocodile, however, was light and tender and surprisingly like chicken. Sometimes we were invited to share our neighbors’ meals of palm grubs, plantains, caterpillars, and roast monkey. We decided that the barge’s “no food and no people” referred to by the French consul meant no Western food or people.

  For the first time on the trip, Tabitha could set up housekeeping and a rudimentary kitchen. In addition to meals made from ingredients all around us, we had the European food bought before we’d left. We ate sumptuously.

  To our right lay the Congo, the former French Congo, and to our left, Zaire, the former Belgian Congo. We were chugging through one of the most fertile regions on the planet, which some scientists call “the lungs of the earth.” A hundred inches of rain fell here every year. Heated by the roaring tropical sun and dumped into the Congo basins’ nearly two million square miles, this rain erupted into thousands of forms of life. The shore beyond our rail teemed with hundreds of species of trees, more than a thousand varieties of flowers, scores of different mammals, and hundreds of types of birds, reptiles, and amphibians.

  …

  The barge itself teemed with life.

  As usual Pierre made himself available to the local demoiselles, hopping from barge to barge, always quick with debonair compliments, Western cigarettes, and trinkets for youthful ears, necks, and wrists.

  On every side of us unfolded the drama of birth, death, mating, deals, squabbles, and reconciliations. Living so close to our shipmates, we came to know all their habits, as they did ours.

  At night we zipped ourselves into our mos
quito-proof tent and carefully killed every mosquito. In the morning we were usually awakened by the whine of a few more, they having somehow infiltrated the tent’s defenses.

  Whenever we stopped, the fellow with the goats went ashore to gather leaves and branches for his herd. A barnyard odor hovered over parts of this floating village.

  The official latrine was in the back of the tug, from which naturally our wastes dropped into the river. Near the latrine stood two river-water showers, available for everyone. Queues formed in the morning and the evening. Tabitha and I showered in the middle of the day, when there wasn’t much of a line.

  The showers’ water couldn’t be turned off and on, as the tug’s motors continuously pumped up water from the river. Since there was no separate changing room, we had to undress inside the stall without getting our clothes wet, not easy. The river water was cooling, but still warm. After the shower, with the water still raining next to us, we had to dry off and dress without getting wet again.

  Our barge was not only a floating village, it was also a floating shopping center.

  From time to time we pulled abreast of villages. Housewives crowded up our gangplank to buy salt, soap, and other household necessities. Traders left the barges and went into the villages to buy fish and game.

  These villages were sometimes a collection of thatched huts standing on poles over the river, at other times mud huts with thatched roofs. Most had yards that were swept daily, on which no grass or twigs grew, which reminded me of the yards of many black people back in Alabama. I wondered if sweeping yards clean of vegetation was a bit of cultural heritage that had survived the migration west and slave times.

  Clotheslines held the wash, and pirogues were pulled up amid the roots of the jungle’s towering trees. Children dashed about while the men, often in blue jeans and tank tops, pushed their pirogues through the lagoonlike waters.

  Whenever we hit one of these quiet villages Tabitha and I went for a walk.

  Frequently we came across a lone Arab in traditional garb in the village’s only merchant’s stall. He would seem out of place in the jungle, a single turbaned merchant in a village of six hundred Congolese. I figured these Arabs to be expatriates like Reinhardt, able to thrive where there was less competition.

  In one village, a white guy drove by in a beat-up Land Rover. About four minutes later he roared back and asked in French, “Who the hell are you?”

  Jean Dieppe, along with his wife, Angelique, had left Paris three years before to develop a logging business. The Congo was trying to bring in entrepreneurs again. He’d been sent by a French logging company to ship out mahogany and other exotic woods. Intelligent, quick, urbane, and sophisticated, he seemed the wrong sort to be living in the heart of darkness.

  By now we’d been on the barge for days without a good wash. Our new friend invited us to his house for hot showers, which sounded like hog heaven to us.

  We drove by a building that I thought was a school.

  “No,” said Jean, “it’s a match factory. It’s fully staffed, but it hasn’t produced a match in years.”

  I asked, “The workers don’t do anything?”

  “They go in to work and sit,” he said; “six employees and a boss—seven of them.”

  Twenty years before, the North Koreans, for whatever political reason, had decided to make a gift of a match factory to the Congo. The country had nothing if not wood, so I supposed it made a kind of sense.

  Unfortunately, as with almost all statist endeavors into commerce, the factory turned out to be inefficient and noncompetitive. The state couldn’t sell the matches partly because the Congo, too, was tied to the overpriced CFA (Central African franc), and partly because nobody here knew how to make matches. This was a national enterprise, however, so the government wouldn’t fire these workers. I remembered that the Congo national airline had only two planes and more than four hundred workers, a similar statist boondoggle.

  Every day these seven people came to work in the match factory, did nothing, took vacations for two weeks of the year, and returned to do more nothing. They hadn’t made a match in twenty years.

  We left Bangui as four barges pushed by a tug. By the time we joined the Congo River, we had become seven barges.

  The Congo River! At 10 billion gallons moving past each second, it was the world’s second most powerful river after the Amazon, and a transportation system of more than eighty-five hundred miles of navigable waterways. Joseph Conrad called it “an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea and its tail lost in the depths of the land.”

  A larger tug took over. Captain Joseph served as captain, mayor, and judge over what was now a floating town. At one point, when a local cop tried to shake us down for the usual cadeau, Captain Joseph stepped in and sent the fellow packing. He was happy to store our beer in his refrigerator, and several times we had a drink with him.

  This wasn’t just a boat, he informed us with a grave smile, but a social service. This part of the world, with no roads and few boats, depended on his barge service.

  “I am this region’s only market,” he explained, his ebony face shiny with pride, “its only pharmacy, clinic, and bar for a couple of hundred miles. I bring the town to the people.”

  The view from the captain’s bridge showed how right he was. We were now eleven barges crammed with more than a thousand people. Smoke rose in a haze across the decks from cook stoves and braziers. Masses of passengers filled every passageway and aisle. Some women nursed babies and yelled at children, while others washed clothes and sang. Men played cards and shot dice. Here and there the odd barber cut hair. Over the back rail of one of the barges a bearded man was butchering a monkey.

  As we moved downstream, commerce became more diverse. Now traders’ tables displayed unwrapped bars of brown soap, cellophane bags of crackers, loaves of bread, bags of rice, and perhaps underneath, a smoked antelope. A witch’s table contained vials, potions, amulets, feathers, and charms of all sorts, along with a dried gorilla’s hand that was supposed to give its owner particularly powerful magic. Yet other tables sold mosquito coils, tetracycline, malaria pills, vials of penicillin powder, hypodermic needles, and piles of brightly colored capsules.

  One table held big porcelain and tin bowls of roasted caterpillars and palm grubs, which seemed to have the appeal of potato chips and french fries for the passengers.

  Finally we were thirteen barges, all still pushed by the single tug lashed in the middle of the four rearmost barges.

  More barges gave Pierre a wider field through which to roam, allowing him to pick off a different Congo lass on every deck, sometimes several in a day.

  One day as we were chugging along, the deck shuddered underneath. There was a loud thud, and Tabitha and I were thrown to the side.

  Around us everyone lost his balance. Soap and salt containers shot off the makeshift tables. We rushed to the rail. This was the tail end of the drier part of the year, on the cusp of the rainy season. The water was low. We’d gone aground on a hidden sandbar.

  At the front of the barges Captain Joseph shoved the tugboat in reverse to push us off. The tug pushed and pulled for a quarter of an hour without any success. We were stuck.

  With some unease, we watched the captain’s roustabouts unlash the tugboat from its surrounding network of barges. The tug maneuvered away into the river. I was worried. Was he leaving for help? Suppose the barges floated away? Maybe he knew what he was doing, maybe he didn’t. How much training did a Congo river pilot get?

  From his position in the middle of the river Captain Joseph fired up the diesel motors of his tug. He rushed toward us as if to ram us—which he did—no gentle nudge, either, but a hard blow. It worked, however, knocking the left-most barge loose from the sandbar.

  Now our thirteen barges, all strapped together, were gliding down the mighty Congo without guidance.

  With another belch of smoke from the tug, the captain revved up his engine and raced toward the rear of the barg
es. If he weren’t skillful enough to navigate the current, manipulate into position, and hook the tug back up, our thirteen barges would float downstream and crash into the bank, one into the other, a real mess and a real danger.

  But the captain knew what he was doing. He skillfully maneuvered into position and hooked up again, and we proceeded downriver.

  Finally, we reached the end of the line, Brazzaville.

  Thirteen days of life on a floating African village. The merchants on board piled off and in jig time set up a marketplace on the dock. Like Americans meeting trans-Atlantic supply ships in colonial times, thousands of urban dwellers streamed down and bought fresh supplies. In a day everything would be purchased.

  Brazzaville, the Congo’s southernmost city and capital, was more developed than Bangui. It had been Charles de Gaulle’s headquarters back when the Free French were headquartered here in the Second World War.

  On the side of a warehouse was a huge picture of Lenin—hand lifted over his head as he led the workers forward—which momentarily made me think I was back in Russia and struck me with culture shock. I remembered that the Congo had gone completely Communist at one point, one of the two or three countries in Africa that had totally bought Lenin’s philosophy back in the seventies, when it was all the rage in the Third World.

  Outside Brazzaville we visited the world’s first orphanage for gorillas.

  Its twenty orphans had been brought in by rangers who by law were now able to confiscate any gorilla offered for sale. The orphanage was funded by a British conservationist, John Aspinall, who owned two wild-animal parks in England. So far he’d spent $1.5 million to build and maintain the orphanage, and he planned to spend another million building yet more facilities. This park would also become a center for the study of primates, whose numbers were steadily declining.

  Many of these orphans had seen their mothers slaughtered by hunters, and their teacher, Henry, told us they were often as wounded by the experience as a three-year-old child would be. These baby gorillas needed twenty-four-hour monitoring. Henry, an English zoologist in his early thirties, explained that gorilla mothers didn’t wean their young for a year and often kept them by their side until they were three or four.