Hanad and Abdi sit up against the courtyard wall in the clammy evening heat. A large straw mat has been laid out, which serves both to keep us off the insects and to catch all the pieces of khat leaves they are dropping as they chew the night away. Nearer the perimeter wall, Mohamed and his men are also reclining and chewing, Kalashnikovs never further than arm’s reach away. Somewhere in the distance, we hear the echo of automatic gunfire. The bursts are short and infrequent. Nobody seems too concerned. I ask where it is coming from.

“It is from the south of the city,” replies Hanad, my fixer, “those people are crazy. You go over there and they will kill you. As soon as they hear which clan you are from, they will kill you, without even knowing who you are.”

I’m sat in Galkacyo in north-central Somalia. The city straddles the boundary between the autonomous regions of Puntland and Galmudug. Due to tensions between rival clans, the city is effectively divided into northern and southern zones. Crossing from one area to another is not advised. My guest house is in the northern zone, controlled by the Puntland Harti clans.

Getting here is a long, uncomfortable journey. It involves jumping from Hargeisa to Berbera, then on to Bosasso in a rusty old Soviet Antonov, piloted by three chubby Ukrainians. As I clamber into the sweaty cabin, which features a mix of different seating (including rather classy tiger print), I wonder how low you have to score at Ukrainian flight school to end up on the Somalia circuit. One pilot walks past my seat, breathing heavily. He doubles as the baggage handler. Was that vodka I smelt? Hopefully not.

My flight is packed with Somalis, many of whom are returning from visiting the vast diaspora spread across Kenya, the USA and Europe. Stood queuing in the sweltering heat on a Bosasso runway, I turn curiously to the person behind me, who is African but not Somali, and ask where he is from.

“Zimbabwe. And you?”

“Italy.” I push him for details on his trip, but he answers my question with another question.

“Well, why are you here?”

“I’m here on holiday.” Technically this is true, although everyone on the plane (and throughout the trip) finds this very amusing.

He smiles a knowing smile. “Me too.” I question Hanad on this strange encounter later. He tells me the man is a private military contractor, training a militia in the south of the country. Later in my journey I meet a number of white South Africans who are also not keen to discuss the reasons for their presence in Somalia. Once again, like me, they are just here on holiday.

The next day we set out in convoy from Galkacyo to Garoowe, the capital of Puntland. Less than twenty kilometres into our trip, one Land Cruiser developed a suspension problem which forced us to stop. As we sat drinking tea and watching the local mechanic hammering away at the bottom of the vehicle, a man on a motorbike arrived with some breaking news from Galkacyo. Sheik Hanad, a Sufi activist from a group called Suma Wal Jama, had just been

killed in a bomb explosion. People were saying it was the work of Islamists from the south, in response to his open criticism. Armed Sufi supporters were rallying in town, determined to find those responsible. We had chosen a good time to get out of Galkacyo.

Our second night was spent in the capital of Puntland, Garoowe. It is a non-descript trading town. We have not been in our hotel for ten minutes before a representative from the government security forces arrives, and demands that I go and register at their headquarters down the road. As always, there is heated discussion between our men with guns and their men with guns. In the end we acquiesce. Hanad, the only one in the group who can speak English, tells me to keep quiet and reveal nothing about our itinerary. I assumed that having the authorities know where you are at all times is a sensible safety precaution, but apparently they are not to be trusted. As instructed, I sat in the Chief of Police’s office and stayed silent, while those around me engaged in another angry sounding discussion. Just as tempers seemed about to fray, the chief picked up my passport and his scowl was replaced with a smile.

Sei Italiano! Benvenuto!

It turns out Somalis in this part of Somalia have nothing but positive things to say about their former colonisers. Most of the older generation could still remember some of the Italian they learnt at school many years ago. Spaghetti is still the staple (when people eat anything at all). The Italian government had recently been trying to strike a deal with the Puntland administration to construct roads in return for oil prospecting rights. This deal was obstructed by the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu, Hanad tells me, because they were worried how oil money would change the balance of power in their relationship with their independent minded northern territory. Given Italy’s current financial situation, it seems unlikely this deal will be revived any time soon.

The main aim of my trip was to get to the coast and investigate the pirates. This was not unrealistic, after all, Hanad had very close connections with them, and had even organised an interview for a European film crew a few weeks earlier. However, things had not gone entirely according to plan. The pirates, an understandably paranoid bunch, would not let the film crew come out and film any of their hostages on a ship they had recently hijacked. However, they did agree to take a camera out onto the boat and ask the hostages any questions they wanted answered. This all went smoothly, but a few days later some of the pirates were captured by the US Navy.

Their first reaction was to blame the film makers, accusing them of putting a GPS tracking device in the camera equipment (which they confiscated). The film crew, along with Hanad, were able to escape, but Hanad’s brother was not so lucky. He was picked up in a tea joint (that we would later visit) and held hostage for weeks while the pirates insisted that Hanad admit he had betrayed them. I will never forget what Hanad said when I asked how he got his brother back.

“First, I paid the tribal elders to mediate in the matter. But they took weeks, and all the time they were just asking me to pay for khat and nothing was being achieved. Eventually, I decided to settle matters myself. I borrowed some guns and an RPG from a dealer. Then I bought the ammunition. Six rockets and thousands of bullets. The bullets were very expensive. Then my friends and I went down to where the pirates were staying, down at the coast, and I told them that if they did not give my brother back, I would use the RPG to sink their boats. ”

The calmness in Hanad’s eyes as he told this story was unnerving. I asked whether he was worried.

“No, I had to get him back. I would have killed them all. They did not want trouble. They returned him to me.”

There were three things I liked about this story. Firstly, that an arms dealer in Somalia will let you borrow the weapon for free as long as you buy the ammunition you intend to use. Secondly, that despite what you might assume, bullets do actually cost a fair bit in Somalia. And thirdly, I was very happy that Hanad was on my side.

Given the current state of affairs, Hanad thought it unlikely that the pirates would want to meet up with me. But we could still head to the coast and see how they worked, and talk to the local communities about how piracy had affected them. The most fascinating thing I wanted to find out about was how some local initiatives had actually defeated the pirates. How and why were the Somalis having some success where international naval forces were failing so miserably? We jumped in our beat up Land Cruiser, and headed off on a six and a half hour drive through the desert to Eyl to find out.

An hour in, we lost phone reception. I enquired what we would do in the event of a breakdown.

Hanad said it was simple. “We use your satellite phone to call for help.”

“And what satellite phone is this exactly?”

“The one I asked you to bring along…”

Arguing about who was at fault was pointless by this stage. We had no sat phone. We would have to hope Allah carried us through without a breakdown. He did.

The journey to Eyl is not an easy one. Although sections of the route are paved, much of it is over rocky terrain, making access to the coastal town very difficult for anything apart from a convoy of 4×4s. Or a shaky lone Land Cruiser, if you are lucky.

Three years ago there was a spike in the level of piracy in Somalia and the Gulf of Aden, with over sixty vessels suffering actual or attempted attacks. This was over double the 2007 levels. Those unfortunate enough to be captured found themselves held hostage for weeks or months while ransom payments were negotiated. If you got picked up by pirates in 2008, odds were high you would have an extended stay around Eyl.

My hunt for the pirates first brought me into the office of the Eyl District Commissioner. The office, like the town, is a simple affair. Behind his desk are two posters. One is by Mines Advisory Group, advising of the different types of UXO (Unexploded Ordinance) found across the country from the civil war. The other is from the Ministry of Justice, funded by

Norwegian Church Aid. It states quite simply “Stop – Piracy money is unlawful in Islam”. The Commissioner’s view of the pirates, like most people I spoke to in Somalia, was very negative.

“The pirates were very bad for this community. They would drive around town at high speeds in their new Land Cruisers causing danger to residents. They would drink and gamble. They even encouraged our young women to prostitute themselves with promises of money. Eventually, the community decided to stand up to them. I gave them 24 hours to get out of the town, or we the citizens would fight them and force them out. There would have been much bloodshed. In the end they went peacefully.”

The pirates have not gone altogether. They have simply moved further south into central Somalia, where there is less government control. They now operate from areas such as Garacad, Hobyo or Haradheere, a day’s drive from Galkacyo, which is currently home to the hijacked Italian oil tanker Savina Caylyn.

The decision to expel the pirates from Eyl was a local one. Similar efforts were made by the communities in Bargal, Laasqoray and Bosasso. The Commissioner and his people received no outside assistance with this task, whether from the central government or the international community. Nor have they received any reward since making this risky decision.

“Since this time, we have received very little assistance from the international community. The UNDP, UNICEF and UNFPA have all visited here, but done nothing to help us. Since the pirates left, the only development work to occur here was the construction of the fish processing house on the beach. Yet even this lacks freezers and other vital elements. It is empty and unused.

The international NGOs do a lot of work on the main highway, but they do not like to stray from it as driving is too difficult.

If we could request one thing from the international community, it would be to improve the road from here to Garoowe. With a good road we could start businesses linked with Garoowe and Galkacyo and sell our fish. Also, the UN workers in the city could come on holiday to Eyl!”

Hearing that the NGOs did not want to risk their shiny white Land Cruisers on that hellish road was not surprising. An improved road does not seem like too high a price to ask for guaranteeing the rule of law in their town. This lack of assistance is especially galling to local politicians when contrasted with the amount of money being spent on anti-piracy patrols. Over a dozen countries have sent warships to protect their shipping in the Gulf of Aden since 2008. There are also the multi-national task forces such as EU NAVFOR. The estimated annual expenditure on all this patrolling, which is split amongst the participating countries, is $1.5 billion.

GorGor, a local journalist, emphasises this feeling of neglect by the international community. “There is a piracy problem here because there are no opportunities. If people remain as fishermen, illegal trawlers have decreased our fish stocks. If you go out fishing today, you will not catch enough to pay for the fuel. Spain, India, the Arab nations, they are all stealing our fish. We require capacity building and investment from other nations to give young Somali men options other than piracy.”

GorGor and his fellow residents in Eyl question the mission of the foreign navies. “Some people say they are here to protect the foreign fishing vessels while they steal our fish.” They also question why navies were not sent earlier to prevent the illegal dumping of European toxic waste in their waters, which they allege has been happening since the early 1990s, and has recently been back in the news after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami washed up the waste on the Puntland coastline.

This suspicion is not helped by what is seen as a heavy handed policy of stopping and searching local fishing boats. The first day that I was in Eyl, there was uproar because a local resident had his boat confiscated on the way back from a fishing trip. While GorGor’s fellow countrymen are incorrect in their assumptions about the foreign naval vessels, these conspiracy theories thrive in an environment in which there is no direct communication or consultation between the foreign powers at sea and the Somali people on the shore.

While in Eyl collecting all this information, I also got a chance to go down to the beach and see firsthand the effects of foreign fishing. There are abandoned boats strewn across the coastline. There was also another visible sign of Somalia’s problems. Backing onto one of the most picturesque patches of beach is a huge concrete compound. Hanad tells me this was built by the former Puntland Finance Minister. I ask him where the minister got the money from for such an extravagant project. This is so funny it warrants translating into Somali for the guards, who also burst out laughing. Apparently this is a typically European thing to ask.

Our time in Eyl is soon at an end, and I (rather unwillingly) leave this pristine Indian Ocean coastline, with waves that could attract surfers under different circumstances, to head back to Galkacyo, and eventually, my exit point of Djibouti. On the way back, we break down outside the very tea joint where Hanad’s brother was kidnapped a few weeks earlier. Monstrous trucks, loaded with cattle and other goods, thunder past on their way to Mogadishu. Hanad gets progressively more agitated, which in turn stresses me. This would not be a good place to run into his former pirate friends. After a tense two hours, we finish repairing our second breakdown of the trip, and get going again. Amid all the tension, it is amusing to see that Somalis have the same attitude to manual labour as most other countries: one guy does all the work, while everyone else crowds round and comments on it.

By the time we return to Galkacyo the security situation has deteriorated. Nine men are dead after a machine gun battle at a mosque, and from the sounds of things outside our compound, far more are keen to join them (or have the other side join them). I try to go up onto the roof to photograph the gun battles, but am prevented by Hanad. He is unsure what the rival militias would do if they spotted a white person in this compound, but neither he nor my guards are keen to find out. So we spent the end of my trip as we had spent the beginning, sat on a mat, chewing khat, talking about Somalia. For a land where life is so uncertain, I was surprised by the warmth and generosity of my hosts. Even my guards, two of whom were Mogadishu veterans, were very sociable, and (albeit through a translator) keen to discuss their lives with me. The next day I left, saddened by the thought of what the West’s $1.5 billion a year could be doing for Somalia, were it not being wasted on naval patrols.

Is The Western Anti-Piracy Policy Working?

Somalia has a coastline of over 3000km. This is an impossibly large area to patrol. It is therefore surprising that foreign governments still choose naval patrols as their preferred option for fighting piracy. Navy patrols off the Somali coast have reduced the success of attacks, but in response the pirates have simply increased the number of attacks. There were 97 pirate attacks in the Somali region (and 142 worldwide) in the first quarter of 2011, which represented an increase of over 100% on the previous year. Many pirates are also captured then released again (following confiscation of their weapons) due to the complexity of putting them on trial. Over 600 have been through this process so far, many of whom no doubt returned to piracy after release.

The war on piracy cannot be won at sea. Piracy in Somalia thrives because the government there lacks the capacity to combat this form of organised crime on land. They require police, courts and prisons, not only to deal with the pirates, but also Islamic extremists and criminal gangs which specialise in people trafficking.

It also thrives because of how easily the proceeds of this crime flow into (and then out of) Somalia. According to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) between $150 and $300 million was paid out in ransoms last year. Tougher regulations must be put in place to prevent ransom payments being made, and make the laundering of these payments more difficult. Yet this is still focussing on cure rather than prevention.

The Somali people need to be given opportunities other than piracy, and this will involve and international effort to develop the infrastructure and economy of Somalia, a far more difficult (and politically less attractive) way of spending taxpayer money. The idea of investing in a country that is at risk of being overrun by Al Shabab Islamist militants does not sit well with potential investors, but the current policy of ‘containment’ is simply not working.

One potential source of funds for this development is oil. Puntland is believed to be rich in the natural resource, but has been off limits to oil companies due to the lack of security. Canadian oil and gas company Africa Oil Corp has recently signed a deal with the Puntland government to sink two exploration wells. Yet it may be political, rather than security, problems that impede this source of revenue for development. Hanad, a Puntland NGO worker and activist, highlighted the tensions between the government of semi-autonomous Puntland, and the Transitional Federal Government, based in the southern capital of Mogadishu. “An Italian company offered to develop the road infrastructure here in Puntland in return for oil exploration rights a few years ago. The Puntland government wanted to go ahead, but the TFG blocked the deal. They do not want the Puntland government to appear to be more powerful than them. They think the Puntland politicians want to take over all of Somalia.”

Hopefully Somali politicians will be able to reach a compromise that reassures foreign investors and begins to create the environment necessary for development. As the British think-tank Chatham House concluded as far back as 2008, “The most powerful weapon against piracy will be peace and opportunity in Somalia, coupled with an effective and reliable police force and judiciary.”

Ever since arriving in Angola for work last year, I had been pouring over maps of the region, examining what travel opportunities my new location afforded me. One neighbouring country in particular stood out: the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The true heart of the Dark Continent, the Congo still seems to capture the imagination, over a hundred years after Joseph Conrad published his seminal Heart of Darkness, or Sir Henry Morton Stanley and Pietro Savorgnan di Brazzà fought it out to establish colonial control of the region for France and Belgium. Today, what people know of the Congo they know through news reports of civil war atrocities and UN interventions. Tim Butcher’s excellent book Blood River echoes the view that Europeans seem to have always had; that the Congo is a dark, dangerous, unknown place, that civilisation abandoned a long time ago.

“The Congo? You don’t want to go there, it’s dangerous. They have no security there.”
“I’m sure they say exactly the same thing about here in Angola.”

This was exactly how conversations played out with everyone I spoke to about my proposed journey. Two weeks and a lot of hassles later, at the end of my trip, I found myself having exactly the same conversation in reverse, with a Congolese policeman I had met by the border with Angola.

“Angola? You don’t want to go there. Didn’t you hear about the Togo football team? It is not safe!”

My journey began in Luanda, the sprawling Atlantic capital of Angola. On a map, it looked simple enough: follow the coastal road north to N’Zeto, then branch inland to the Angolan border town of Noqui, where I would enter the DRC. It was less than four hundred kilometres. How long could it possibly take?

The answer is sixteen and a half hours, over some of the worst roads in Angola. One stretch in particular (between Tomboco and Mepala) seemed to have been abandoned during the civil war and was slowly being reclaimed by nature. We did not pass another vehicle for over two hours as we crawled along, praying that the huge fissures in the mud track would not damage the suspension and leave us stranded. Thankfully, it did not rain; otherwise I doubt the Land Cruiser would have made it.

We spent the night in Noqui, having to sleep in part of the local hospital as there were no hotels in town. It is a small place, which looks out over the Congo to Matadi, it’s much larger Congolese neighbour. It was fascinating to listen to the locals here talk about the Congo with the sort of reverence usually reserved only for the West.
“Over there they have electricity. Look, we can see them all lit up at night, and over here were are in darkness!”

I pointed out that this was not strictly true, as some houses on our side did seem to have power.

“That is the governor’s house, and the centre of town. But they all have to buy the power from the Congolese authorities. We cannot produce our own here.”
My new friends spent the night telling me how much better life was in the DRC, how business opportunities were plentiful, cost of living was low and there were tourists in abundance. I was beginning to look forward to crossing the border in the morning.
This enthusiasm for the border crossing was short lived once I reached the Congolese side of the checkpoints the following day. In what I can only describe as the biggest shakedown I have ever witnessed, the Congolese authorities demanded everything from my trainers to my dollars, and most things in between. The head of immigration, growing frustrated at my unwillingness to produce a “sucrée” (literally a sugary drink, but in this context a bribe) and the fact that my DRC visa was in good order, instead chose a different tactic:

“There seems to be an irregularity with your Angolan work visa.”

I assured him that there was not and that even if there was, it was nothing to do with him and no barrier to my entry into his country.

“My friend, I am only pointing this out for your benefit. I am trying to help you! We wouldn’t want you getting stuck outside Angola…”

After over an hour of assuring me that there was a serious problem (he knew because he had studied Angolan immigration law at ‘Immigration School’) and demanding money to sort it out, he finally gave up and let me go. Sadly, he was only the first of many Congolese officials who tried (and more often than not failed) to extort money from me. It is a simple fact of life in this country. You are immeasurably rich by their standards, and therefore should be willing to part with your dollars. The trick is to remain calm, be patient, and allow plenty of time if you need any sort of official document or visa (a lesson I would forget later on in my trip). Most importantly, never let an official know you are in a hurry, or show that you are becoming impatient or losing your temper. Funnily enough, this will not result in faster service.
Matadi itself is a picturesque market town situated near the mouth of the Congo. The first European here was the Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão in 1485, but it is best known as the start of the infamous Matadi to Kinshasa railway, completed in 1898, and still running until the civil war a few years back. These days getting to Kinshasa is easy, as you can drive for seven hours along one of the few decent paved roads in the country, which is used to move goods between the capital and the port on massive HGV’s.

I spent the next four days on a whirlwind tour of Kinshasa, picking up the shopping list of items I required for my travels within the country. This included changing my single entry visa to a multiple entry visa (to allow a visit to Brazzaville), trying to find the address of the elusive tourist information building, booking flights to Goma for a trip to the national parks as well as flights west for my eventual return to Angola via Cabinda. I soon learnt that people in the Congo are loathe to tell you they do not know the directions to somewhere, and will often have a guess rather that recommending you ask elsewhere.

Interspersed with all this red tape, getting lost and waiting in dingy government offices I also tried to see some of the sights Kinshasa has to offer. As a city, Kinshasa is quite light on tourist attractions, but I still managed to find Mobutu’s old presidential park (complete with empty animal cages and abandoned amphitheatre), the Museum of Kinshasa, the zoo and of course the Congo River itself. Getting anything done was a struggle that involved multiple taxi rides across a hot, bustling, congested city, but it meant getting a real flavour of the place. Everyone was friendly (including the police), and when things got too much there was always an overly priced Western supermarket or Lebanese-run restaurant to duck into for a quick air-conditioned break.

My carrier of choice from Kinshasa to Goma was Hewa Bora Airways. On the negative side, they are banned from EU airspace for not complying with air safety and aircraft maintenance regulations. One of their planes also overshot the Goma runway in 2008 and burst into flames, killing forty two people. On the plus side, their flights have a reputation for running on time, and of those killed in the aforementioned accident, all but one were people on the ground as opposed to passengers on the plane.

It is a testament to the sheer size of Congo that you can take a three hour internal flight. Touching down in Goma felt like a different world to Kinshasa. First off, being a passenger plane we were in the minority on the runway. Most planes here are either UN or mining, bringing in cassiterite for export to the ports of Kenya. There were none of the high rise buildings or queuing lanes of traffic. It was also around ten degrees cooler and rainy, being high up in the green hills looking out over the Rwandan town of Gisenyi. This used to be a lakeside resort for the Belgians back in the early nineteen hundreds, and many of their hotels and buildings are still standing. Side by side with these colonial remnants are reminders of the more recent troubles here. The UN has a heavy military presence, as this is a base for their MONUC peacekeeping force, helping to maintain stability in one of the most war-torn parts of Congo. Although the Second Congo War ended in 2003, this area has remained volatile due to the presence of large numbers of FDLR rebels in the bush.

Despite these problems, there is a spirit of optimism in the air today. One day in town I stopped to see why a crowd had gathered, and watched a local charity organising an arms exchange. For every weapon handed in, locals were given $50 and a piece of cloth. There was all the pomp and circumstance of an official African engagement, as charity representatives mingled with local dignitaries and the press. I did not know whether to be impressed or appalled by the amount of weapons being handed over and stacked up on the ground for disposal.

Goma is one of the main access points for Virunga National Park, where you can engage in all sorts of outdoor activities. It is a very well run park, and it was easy to set up day trips through a tour operator in town. I went and checked out the mountain gorillas for a day, and scaled Mount Nyiragongo, the volcano overlooking Goma that erupted in 2002 and destroyed the centre of town. During my time in Goma I ate a lot of good food (I can particularly recommend the poulet a la mwamba) and drank a lot of Congolese Primus beer. I also checked out one of the obscenely loud clubs, partly out of curiosity and partly because they blasted their music so loud until 6am that it was impossible for me to sleep in my nearby hotel room anyway!

When my time in Goma was finished, I headed back to Kinshasa, hoping to check out Brazzaville before going home. Once again I crossed my fingers and took a Hewa Bora Airways flight back. Upon arrival I marched confidently into the Congo-Brazzaville Embassy, planning to collect my passport (which I had left there a week ago) and go spend a relaxing day over the river. What I actually did was spend 5 hours in the embassy waiting for my passport (which they had  assured me was ready days ago), an hour fending off numerous bribe requests at the ferry port and a whole 45 minutes wandering around Brazzaville before having to catch the last boat back for another shakedown. If worked out as an hourly rate, it had to be the most expensive city break in the history of tourism:

•    Changing my Congo-Kinshasa entry visa to multiple entry: $165
•    Buying a visa for Congo- Brazzaville: $80
•    Return boat ride: $50
•    Shakedowns: $20
•    Taxi to get me to and from the ferry port: $35

Total = $350

After a fortnight in the DRC it was time to head back to Angola. Rather than try to renegotiate the frankly terrible Angolan road I had come up on, I decided to fly. There used to be direct flights from Kinshasa to Luanda with TAAG, the Angolan national airline, but after a political row over expelled refugees a few years ago this was cancelled. Instead I took a tiny plane from Kinshasa to Matadi, where I had started my trip, then it was a ten minute hop over to Boma and finally Moanda, a Congolese town on the Atlantic coast. From there it was a bumpy 25km shared taxi ride north to the border with Cabinda, then a further forty five minutes to Cabinda Airport, which has daily TAAG flights to Luanda.

As with many poor African countries I have visited, I was both impressed and saddened by the optimism of the people. Everyone was very keen to tell me how hard life was, and how much better things must be where I am from (Europe, not Angola). Yet they would always equally stress how much better things are for them now, as opposed to before, during the war. Whenever I pressed people as to why their situation was so difficult, it was always the fault of the fighting. Why do they have no roads? They were all destroyed in the war. Why is there no electricity? Damage to infrastructure during the fighting. Nobody dug any deeper and asked why these things had not been fixed yet.

Whenever corruption was mentioned, it was always as a petty inconvenience, a fact of life, something that only affected them at a local level. To the Congolese I met, corruption was the police hassling them at checkpoints. It was having to pay a little extra to get that document they needed, or see through a business deal. Few people mentioned President Kabila’s rampantly corrupt central government. It seemed fine that provincial governors wore imported suits and drove expensive cars. They are leaders after all; they have to look the part. Politicians are rich because they are successful individuals. Successful in politics and also successful in business. Their gain was not perceived as anybody else’s loss.

One person I met in Goma said he was disheartened by the central government’s decision to spend money on celebrating their fiftieth year of independence from Belgium when there remained so much reconstruction to do, but even he said of President Kabila “at least he’s not Mobutu.” Another old man said to me “We should be re-colonised. Things will never be as good if we rule ourselves.” Of all the things I saw in the DRC, it was this resignation that shocked me the most.

Words and pictures by Giovanni Contadino

It’s been four years since I stepped on the sands of The Sudan, so coming back felt both familiar and a bit strange. Arrivals at Khartoum airport seemed much the same, though arriving at 2.30 a.m. on a Turkish Airlines flight meant that more than half of the only 30 or so passengers on board were actually transiting to Nairobi and Addis, so immigration was surprisingly fast and efficient. Remembering a bit of Arabic eased the way as well.

It was clear in the vivid daylight of a Khartoum morning though that the city has changed a lot since my last visit there. Oil money and Chinese investment has transformed swathes of the city into either endless vistas of new apartment blocks replacing the rather more elegant older villas and low rise suburbs, or in the Mogran area on the junction of the two Niles, a sparkling new city development called Al Sunut (the Sunut is the ubiquitous dryland tree, acacia nilotica) is transforming this part of Khartoum into Dubai on the Nile. High rise superstructures, cranes and building sites are everywhere, overshadowing the comparatively low rise Hilton Hotel, which used to be the dominant building in this part of town. Another obvious development was the burgeoning of new mosque buildings; with elaborately garish fluorescent green and white minarets thrusting into the dusty sky all around the city, the Gulf and Saudi influence clear here. Their volume controls also seem to be set to maximum as well judging by the inability to get any sleep after 5.15 a.m. anywhere in Khartoum.

I spent much of this visit bound to Khartoum but was fortunate to get out to El Geneina, only 20km from the Chad border, in West Darfur for a few days. You may remember my previous series on Darfur from 2005 following some extended time in that region. What’s the phrase? “Plus ça change”, or “same old, same old”. Despite political posturing that ‘The War in Darfur is over’ it didn’t feel much like it actually on the ground in Darfur and daily reports of skirmishes still gave the feeling of a region in active conflict. A ceasefire was signed between the Government and one of the main rebel groups, JEM (the Justice and Equality Movement who audaciously attacked Omdurman across the river from Khartoum in May 2008) on the day I flew out of El Geneina. However reported clashes continued after the ceasefire and there were credible reports of a major fire fight in the mountains of Jebel Mara with the other big rebel group, the SLA or Sudan Liberation Army in late February. It still seemed much like a war zone to me. When I mentioned to people that I was actually evacuated out of Darfur back in 1990, there was incredulity, but as I said, same old, same old.

What has changed since the last time I visited is the overt threat to the international humanitarian community. About a year ago the President of Sudan, Omer el Bashir, was indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. The backlash against the international community was immediate with most of the biggest humanitarian agencies operating in Sudan facing immediate expulsion (on the grounds that they had helped provide evidence to the ICC, a claim that has no base in reality). Another effect was that foreign aid workers became legitimate targets especially for kidnap. This was unheard of when I was in Darfur in 2004 and 2005 but now kidnap training has become mandatory for all humanitarian agency staff. The threat is real and, as is intended, is hampering humanitarian operations as most roads are no-go and the only safe way around much of Darfur is inside a noisy UN Mil Mi8 helicopter.

There were a lot of UN and AU Hybrid Force (UNAMID) Blue Helmets on the ground in Darfur; but as their UN Chapter Seven mandate does not allow them to use much more than strong language against aggressive opposition it left me wondering what was the point. They have taken a lot of hits in recent times but are unable to take forceful action to protect civilians. Highly visible UNAMID APCs dotted around Geneina, and truckloads of swathed armed Blue Helmets scurrying busily around town were testament to the international peacekeeping presence, but there are still large areas of Darfur where insecurity and active conflict precludes humanitarian access and where the people still suffer mass displacement and the loss of home, livelihoods and indeed lives. At least the main IDP camps I visited have grown no larger but they haven’t gotten any smaller either and I met people who had lived there for 6 years now and still saw no prospect of a safe return home. I didn’t see any sign of oil money or Chinese investment in West Darfur, though!

I did find rather disturbing the tangle of wrecked aircraft remains on the ground at Geneina airport. It is an unsurfaced strip, hence a dusty landing and takeoff, but clearly it had been too much for the odd wrecked Antonov or Beechcraft tipped over crazily and by now largely stripped of anything of value. I’ve got used to this type of flying in and out of bush strips in Africa but never fail to find it unsettling and get that sweaty palmed feeling until we are up safe and away. The UN Humanitarian Air Service for Darfur provides largely Kenyan crews, flying Kenyan registered aircraft, which at least all seem to be in good shape (plane and crew!)

One thing that Sudan is not though is a Taliban state. In fact social mores in Sudan seem to be more relaxed than most countries which have adopted Sharia as their legal code. Women are very visible and not at all hidden away, they drive, work and study without apparent restriction. The colourful lightweight taub wrap-around, which still functions as the condescension to social modesty for many Sudanese women, is being replaced in the city by a headscarf and a pleasingly body-hugging long-sleeved top and skirt, which the longer you stay, the more attractive it becomes. A tiny minority has adopted the burka, but they stand out in the crowd. Alcohol is of course illegal but not unavailable, but I was also surprised how much the taste of alcohol free beer compensated for the lack of punch in it, and realised I actually enjoy the taste as much as the kick and can take one without the other.

I got a rare chance (in my line of work) to be a tourist for a day and visited the 2000 year old pyramids at ancient Meroë, 220 km and a three hour drive north of Khartoum near the Nile. Sudan actually has more pyramids than Egypt, although significantly smaller and badly damaged largely by 19th Century European treasure hunters and tomb raiders. It is still a stunning sight and largely free of mass tourism so you feel you mostly have the place to yourself. The Sudanese though are latching on to some of the opportunities of tourism and now offer camel rides around the pyramids for a modest 5-10 Sudanese Pounds (about £1.50 to £3 sterling) and have opened trinket stalls for the few who venture that far. The fact that it is still largely untouched by tourism though is what adds to the appeal.

Sudan is shortly having its first democratic multi-party elections in 24 years this April. Khartoum is full of election publicity supporting the incumbent President Bashir, with the rather dubious supporting slogan ‘For unity and peace’. The opposition candidates (11 of them) barely feature in the public eye, and with the incumbent largely in control of media and election publicity there is not much hope that they will get any comparable public exposure to state their case and make a reasonable showing. At least though it is a rare opportunity to challenge the status quo and show that there is a basis for political dialogue in what for the last 21 years has been pretty much a one party, one man state.

Enough of this… In Mogadishu for how many days – running around in circles, militias in tow – adding to the quantity of armed men surrounding us every time we crossed an arbitrary barrier. Indeed, each time we had to cross into another warlord’s territory, another militia truck would have to be added to our convoy for a few hundred more that day. Expensive? Hell yes. Of course, nothing but the worst in southern Somalia. Nothing but the worst, for all intents and purposes, has all it’s been ever since my last visit there over four years ago.

Sure, it all came to a head sometime in the past two years. People started paying attention again, after all this time, all the while Somalia has been going on near a generation without a functioning government. That means kids growing up without any knowledge of law and order, any idea of what a head of state is, a parliament or some equivalent, or even what the notion of nationhood even means. This is indeed all foreign to us bloated rich western folk that, on this planet in the infancy of the twenty-first century, people can still live off the grid, off the map, with a currency that technically shouldn’t exist, in a country that technically doesn’t exist. I got in and out, officially, by paying my translator ten bucks to handwrite my entry and exit dates inside my passport. All this in the age of the internet, the ever-traceable individual, the see-through body scanner, the Al-Qaeda database (trademark) that can make any man with flammable underwear stop and think twice about taking a flight out of Heathrow to Detroit.

Ah, if it was only that simple. Once in awhile, people head out to Mogadishu, and back in the early throes of oh-six, I was doing the same. The second time, actually – one more than most, almost more than all of the world.

Mogadishu, that time, was a different experience, one that I’d written about extensively some years ago. Few cared then, and few more care now, thanks to a few token white sailors getting stuck on the wrong end of a rusty machine gun. Nonetheless I refuse to repeat that story: what I’m going to tell is the story of an aborted trip south from Mogadishu to Kisimayo, some five hundred klicks southwest, some kind of random mad-max road trip that was never intended to succeed.

Why haven’t I told it sooner? Well, I tried. Selling stuff on the country is a task somewhere between difficult and impossible, and magazines tend to only buy stuff about dumb blondes who happen to appear on American television. Thusly and therefore, no one really cared that I was heading south to Kisimayo.

Back then, in the old days, Mog was a “safer” place – warlords had divided the city into about eight, maintaining a sort of equilibrium amongst themselves, ensuring a basic level of law and order. But back then, things were not going extremely well for these eight folks, as the Islamic Courts (also known as Al-Shabab, sort of, kind of) were jockeying for their own piece of Club Mog and already controlled about half of it. Three months after our departure, they got the other half, and Mog would never be the same. But before this fundamental change in the anarchistic equilibrium of the city, we were planning a road trip south.

Indeed, a road trip with a truck full of Somalis with heavy machine guns, ourselves decked out in abandoned bulletproof vests that the Pakistani contingent of the UN had cast off around 1993, as well as a bundle of satellite phones, laptops, satellite internet, backpacks full of stinking clothes, and of course our guide and driver. We had spent the whole afternoon two days before negotiating a price.

A few grand, the hotelier demanded from us. We said sorry, we’re just poor students, not much in the way of cash, and even if we had extra cash to spare it wouldn’t do you much good as there wasn’t a single working bank machine in your whole damned country – or the three countries that currently make up the geographic boundaries of your whole theoretical damned country. It’s getting confusing already. They had an offer, however – a few friends of theirs (clan members, to be precise) had agreed that for a smaller fee they would meet up with us around the halfway point between Mogadishu and Kisimayo, and ferry us south from there.

Kisimayo, back in these ancient days four years ago, was not yet overrun by Al-Shabab but was naturally no vacation spot either – it too had been divided up between warlords, though they were far less used to receiving international visitors than the community representatives in Mog. (Think that, instead of a handful of visitors each year, you get zero). This was only one of our initial problems with the place – the mystery was, of course, did they manage the same sort of semi-organized law enforcement like the Mog types had created, ad-hoc, over the past fifteen years? Did anyone even know this was going on in Mogadishu? Obviously, no one else had bothered to ask, as I discovered one charming afternoon arguing with some fool from Ottawa who couldn’t believe someone could be calling him from a satellite phone from an airstrip west of Mogadishu asking if he knew anything about chartering aircraft out of Nairobi; but, as I said, that’s another story.

But as for Kisimayo – it was a mystery. Me and my associate had been bouncing around Nairobi for a week before our arrival in Club Mog, asking about chartering aircraft into southern Somalia, and finally found the leading “domestic” airport in Kenya and the office of a charming Somali gentlemen who gave us a price, and then delivered a deep heartfelt sigh. “You guys are young,” he said with sadness, “and perhaps you should think again about your visit to Kisimayo, considering all that is going on there.”

Oh. Did I mention that back in the early days of Oh-six, Kisimayo was the initial flash point for all this piracy-on-the-seas stuff, the jumping-off point for the Islamic rebels? The first place they really managed to gain ground against the warlords, in their mission to consolidate the southern third of the country into some sort of authoritative Islamic state? Well, it must have slipped my mind; as we did, in fact, politely decline the chartered aircraft to Kisimayo and decided to wait out the weekend for a scheduled flight into Club Mog.

Then it all happened – the militia truck appeared out front of the Sahafi Hotel on another scorching day. Over the past week we had spoken to numerous parliamentarians who wandered amongst the walls of the Sahafi Hotel like ghosts, mysterious figures from murderous army generals to intellectuals whom had spent most of their previous years in Toronto and Minnesota. Indeed, we loaded up the SUV with our craploads of gear, various sugary sweets for the journey, and watched our guide down plenty of camel milk. The call to prayer woke me up early, I pushed off the heavy velvet blankets from my hotel room’s bed, looked down from the chain-link screens that covered the balcony, and, in any event, realized it was time to go.

Kisimayo, here I come. No one had managed a road trip through Southern Somalia for, oh, probably fifteen years. Maybe they did back in ninety-three, no one will really know and few will ever really care. Strapped into the vehicle the gates then opened, and we stopped on the outside as the gates closed; from the alleys our two trucks filled with machine-gun men appeared. On our way, it would seem.

It was an innocuous journey for the first couple of hours. Past Merca, our guide kept holding his head. We played with the satellite phone, I took pictures of camels. Looked at the dust trailing us, looked at the militia’s truck trailing dust in the front. No, you don’t get to see the coast as the “highway” is, naturally, a dozen kilometres in. That is, if you can call it a highway – it had been broken into a maze of potholes, and more often than otherwise we drove along the side of the highway than on it.

Low trees, various herds of camels and cows, dotted the landscape. A clear blue sky, random Somali sounds (and of course Bob Marley) blared from the radio. We stopped briefly to fix some tires, the machine-gun men fanned out around us, but soon we were back in the vehicle. Some hours later, again, we stopped. Our guide had chatted with the hotelier back at the Sahafi via a cellular phone. Time for a stretch, at least.

Yet, this was not simply a stretching of the legs. This was another experience, that of the militia commander huddling his troops together behind the vehicle, screaming on the phone, expounding his reasons for something or other, demanding a resolution. Our guide, staring into space while holding his belly, seemed uninterested. Minutes later he turned to us.

“We had planned to hand you to another militia group one hundred kilometres south, but they misunderstood our intention. They are thinking we are coming to fight, not to meet them, so they are expecting to fight us. So we leave the question to you – do you want to go meet them, and fight them? Or, we can go back to Mogadishu,” he said, staring off into space, looking a little ill.

Ahh. It would seem as though that our intensive planning, and road tripping in southern Somalia on the cheap, may have been all for naught. There was something of a communication error here – they had told us that the two clans were friends; they had explained clearly that we were to be handed off between the two militias, without incident. Now we were, apparently, hiring a few local mercenaries to spark a war between clans in southern Somalia. The final showdown between Mogadishu and Kisimayo. Talk about kicking it up a notch.

Par for the course, perhaps. I told them in no uncertain terms that we weren’t going down there to face anyone, to fight anyone, but in fact were simply students on a research project here on the Somali coast, for a second time. When we arrived back at the Sahafi wearing level-three vests and unloading tonnes of laptops and satellite equipment, you could just see the locals drinking tea and muttering to themselves, “students my ass”.

It was not until our arrival back at the hotel, as well, that we had learned that our little road trip was novel enough that a local journalist had found fit to announce it to the entire city on local radio the day before – indubitably with a little bit of circulation to their friends down in Kisimayo as well. The media may have hammed it up, made it out to be more exciting and interesting than it was intended to be, and rumours persisted upon our departure of it appearing in Mogadishu’s daily newspaper as well. Some young white guys road tripping in southern Somalia, Mogadishu to Kisimayo? What are the odds?

But hey, we got our money back. The hotelier blamed our poor guide on wimping out due to “drinking too much camel milk”, which is a line I’ll have to try someday when I don’t want to do something. It’s one thing to say no, but in places like this, the Somalis were still eager to help us at less than half the price – and they failed. Perhaps it’s a lesson for all, and I hate to say that for those east coast Africa overlanders, your time has yet to come. One thing’s for sure, however, you should definitely bring some spare tires. And maybe a few bulletproof vests for good measure.

I spent three weeks in Zimbabwe in December 2009; it was my first return to that country in a little over two years. The last time I was there, in late 2007, inflation was heading into outer space, with more OOOOs on the banknotes than a Venetian orgasm; Comrade Bob was digging his heels in and damning the world to do anything about it, and the general prognosis was that final meltdown was only moments away. 2008 saw inflation continue to expand into the cosmos and the political future hung in the balance. However, two events put the brakes on the cataclysm: These were the power-sharing agreement between the hardliners of ZANU PF under Mugabe, and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change of Morgan Tsvangirai. I noted that in Zimbabwe that these days the ordinary Zimbabwean always talks about ‘Mugabe’, but the Prime Minister is always ‘Morgan’.

The second event was the ‘dollarization’ of the economy, whereby the Zimbabwe dollar has been replaced by the US Dollar and the South African Rand. As a result inflation has been halted in its tracks and is now close to zero, and the Zimbabwe dollar is, if not dead, then mortally wounded. On this latest trip I brought home a 50 Billion dollar banknote, which I was reliably informed would just about pay for a bus ride across Harare and roughly approximated a value equal to 50 US Cents – that’s an exchange rate of one Billion Zimbabwe dollars to the US Dollar. However for most rural Zimbabweans access to USD or SA Rands is hard to come by, and in many rural areas people have reverted to a barter economy exchanging goods and labour rather than cash.

A combination of political compromise and the end of hyperinflation has for the moment pulled the country back from the brink. However it is clear that this is still only a holding action as the political marriage is very shaky and the MDC and ZANU PF are very uncomfortable bedmates. It smacks of an arranged marriage more than a love affair with an element of rape within the marriage characterising the relationship between ZANU and MDC.

My task was to conduct an emergency assessment in the south east of the country in Chiredzi District, bordering Mozambique and South Africa. This was based on uncomfortably high levels of infant and child malnutrition, a serious cholera outbreak in this region in the last year and successive years of crop failures in an area characterised by unreliable rainfall. This region was also once one of the areas in which the former white farmers held large tracts of land as farms and ranches, and as a result, where much of the controversial land redistribution had taken place. It is the area known as the ‘lowveld’; hot, dry and best suited to cattle and wildlife; indeed the second largest national park in Zimbabwe, Gonarezhou, is located in this region just to the east of Chiredzi.

A week’s work in this region actually produced the conclusion that for the moment, the expected emergency is on hold. Decent rains in 2008 (and a promising outlook for the 2009/10 season as well) have produced a better than average harvest and although we did see enough hungry kids to be disturbing, levels of malnutrition were not at emergency levels. It was notable that in this region those who are suffering the worst deprivations are the peasant farmers resettled onto the former white owned farms. These farms are now with almost no services, including no clean water, no tools or seeds, and limited access to health care and education.  The dispossessed remain dispossessed, whatever the political promises of the ruling classes.

My journey took me to within a few kilometres of the South African border, where most of the male population has disappeared across in search of work, and where the women struggle to bring up their children on the few remittances that make it back home, and on whatever little they can produce in their gardens from their own labour. In the dusty frontier town of Chikombedzi I watched the idle youth gather around a storefront to watch the latest Nigerian drama unfold on the Digital Satellite TV network being beamed into the store as the only entertainment in town.  There are few vehicles on the rural roads, as few can get hold of the Dollars or Rands needed to buy petrol, and the roads themselves are falling into disrepair, as there is no money in the government coffers to pay salaries or but the materials needed to supply basic services.

The real emergency in this part of Zimbabwe, and indeed in much of the country, is the HIV/AIDS epidemic , with adult infections rates of 23%, or nearly one in four of the adult population. The health service is unable to cope, with many healthcare professionals having abandoned Zimbabwe for greener pastures, where they are able to earn a decent living. A large proportion of the population has essentially been abandoned to their fate, which is a miserable lingering death. The doctors and nurses I met were working hard against impossible odds.

Back in Harare life seemed to be more ‘normal’ than in recent years. However my memories of Harare from the 1990s are of a clean, modern, functioning city; now it is far more like any other archetypal African city, with piles of rubbish in the streets, potholed roads, power and water shortages, and hungry demoralised people let down by the failures of the government. For all the traumas it has experienced it is not yet a basket case, and indeed, compared to many African destinations, with which I have become familiar in recent years; Freetown, Darfur, even parts of Nairobi, it is still liveable and could still be a very pleasant place to live given access to foreign currency and a decent house and transport.

Zimbabwe, therefore, remains on the brink of a precipice but has maybe eased back a few steps. The future remains very much in the hands of Mugabe and his ZANU PF cohorts and until the MDC are actively, rather than grudgingly, engaged in the Governance of the country, then the future is still in an uncertain balance.

Luanda’s domestic terminal is a crowded, dim, smoky place that definitely has not been affected by the obsession with banning cigarettes that has swept across the globe. Amongst local Angolans hauling piles of luggage were crowds of men from the Philippines and China, packed closely together, dutifully handing their passports over to their handlers when the time for check-in came. Other folks with American accents ran the gauntlet into the waiting room, which was a little less humid, sporting one working air conditioner and some truly squalid bathrooms.

Par for the course, really, in central Africa. Luanda, in spite of Angola’s nascent boom from oil and diamonds now that the war has ended, still sports a grimy little airport packed to the gills with those who would see the country’s industrial revolution arrive in full. I was heading north out of Luanda, to follow the oil workers to their mecca on the African west coast, a tiny dot of a place that few can even find on a map – Cabinda. It’s something of an exclave, wedged between both Congos, and for many, a great unknown as to what would await them there.

Cabinda has trailed far behind in the peacemaking that the rest of Angola has been enjoying for around five years. FLEC, the Cabindan separatists, only really reached a peace deal in 2006 or so, and that was conditional on a whole lot of that oil money staying within the province’s boundaries. This is no small deal – Cabinda’s been called the Kuwait of Africa, and glance at any map of the proven oilfields off Angola’s coast and you’ll see that without Cabinda, the country doesn’t have much oil at all. Angola joined OPEC in 2007 and has recently been exporting slightly more crude than Libya. The promise was, the Angolan government said, that the Cabindan locals would see their standard of living increase from all this wealth, and their life expectancy would be drastically improved thanks to a noticeable lack of bullets flying everywhere.

This may seem to be the case when one arrives at the newly refurbished Cabinda airport – a small but gleaming complex with a beautifully paved runway and glossy luggage belt, full time sweepers and window washers, plasma televisions hung from the rafters with the only channel available interrupting idle chatter. The claptrap of a domestic aircraft I arrived on seemed out of place, and at first glance the new airport could make Cabinda seem almost first world – until one sees the crowds of police officers, razor-wire, and oddly useless passport checks every few meters. And then, nearly an hour for our luggage to arrive from the aircraft and into the arrivals area. A shiny building is only a small part of what makes a country stable.

Cabinda the province has its main economic centre in Cabinda the city, and driving around the sleepy town one will see more effects of the recent peace deal – newly built parks popping up everywhere, with more gleaming fences, statues, and clean streets – at least in the town centre. Indeed, my driver would tell me, all of this has occurred in the blink of an eye, over the course of only a year. Construction is rampant, as the government attempts not only to meet its end of a peace deal but also to prettify the city for an anticipated influx of even more foreigners.

And yet, on the street level, we’re few and far between. The vast majority of the oil employees coming to Cabinda work at a vast complex just north of the capital city, in a town called Malongo – a venerable fortress of its own. Walled off by razor-wire, with unmarked minefields behind it, human rights groups have been in a tizzy for decades over this overprotected enclave within the exclave. Those seeking to escape the conflict on the outside would scale the fence, only to have their legs blown off on the other side. Things are quieter these days, the minefields are marked, but the oil company in question still refuses to let their staff drive the two dozen kilometres to the complex – they all take helicopters. While waiting for my luggage, one would arrive and leave almost every five minutes.

FLEC, or the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, had been battling both Angola and Chevron-Texaco’s interests here for a number of decades. Along a sideline to the protracted and well-publicized civil war of mainland Angola between the MPLA and UNITA, FLEC engaged in a nasty guerrilla war for longer than anyone could remember. Their leaders stipulate that the original agreement signed with Portugal was for independence, in 1885. When independence for Angola arrived in 1975, they said, Cabinda should have become a separate nation. But instead they became another province, and were swiftly invaded by the MPLA. FLEC has been fighting against this ever since, and even though the most recent peace treaty was denounced by some within the group, the province is nonetheless reasonably peaceful these days….. and the government, with its relentless construction initiatives, is trying to prove that it’s worth their while to stay that way.

Cabinda’s city itself is gaining affluence, and the highway north to Pointe Noire is a beautiful and well marked stretch of asphalt. We headed to Cacongo, Cabinda’s second city, which has not seen nearly as much development. Sandy beaches, ancient colonial buildings, the water just over there, it could be a prime vacation spot for some. However, head northeast from Cacongo into the inland of Cabinda and one reaches the homeland of FLEC and its real base of support – as well as more Angolan soldiers.

Buco Zau is a small town carved out from the jungle on a few hilltops, and the residents certainly were not alone in the wilderness with all those uniforms about. I, the hapless white guy, was getting too many stares from the resident army and police – however I was really here to check out the forest reserve in the environs that goes by the name of Maiombe.

One unfortunate fact of so many decades of conflict is the endless placement of minefields across the borders in central Africa. Maiombe is said to have animals, from primates to elephants, yet no one in their right mind would go see them without an idea of where these minefields lay. Or, for that matter, whether any animals still remain. Locals would tell me that the animals do indeed remain, but like so many animals exposed to years of conflict, will find the areas of country where the fewest people are. I went away empty handed, though I poked around further north near the Congo-Brazzaville border for a few more hours. It is in fact open these days – but only to foot traffic. This area is also an excellent place to hide out if you’re a guerrilla group aiming to conduct research initiatives for asymmetrical warfare – in June 2008 there was an attack near the commune of Massabi, near the Congo border. Army leaders quickly issued press releases expounding their efficient success of eliminating the threat.

The invasion and reconstruction, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. Coming up soon are more hotels, and plenty of visits from small-scale VIPS, like Angolan ministers and various people in pressed suits from large organizations like the World Health Organization and the World Bank. In many ways it’s a very Angolan approach to solving the problem of Cabinda: if you throw enough money at the problem, it will go away. Indeed, promoting the idea of being a rich Angolan, rather than a poor Cabindan, is top of everyone’s to-do list in the province these days.

PATIENCE, LUCK and cash. Those are the three things you need most if you are going to travel through the Congo. No matter how crap things look when your riverboat breaks down or your bush aircraft does not turn up or the road you are driving along is suddenly swallowed by the advancing jungle, a way through will turn up eventually.

That’s how this place has always functioned so there’s no point in importing your outsider stress. Just latch onto a good local guide and prepare to drink deep of their fatalism. They will sort it out. It’ll just take time. And you need luck to make sure you don’t run into any of the bad guys. In a country where 1,500 people still die each day as a result of conflict, there are plenty of bad guys to go round. There is also no functioning state as such so don’t expect anybody you meet wearing something approximating a police uniform to 1) be a policeman 2) follow any sort of legal code 3) have any bullets in his police gun or batteries in his police radio.

And you need cash. The remarkable thing about a state as failed as the Congo is that the price of living for outsiders is astonishingly high. Sure you can survive out in the bush on next to nothing but the moment you come to a town you will be shaken down for cash (always foreign currency, US dollars mostly) and at prices that would make a Brooklyn diamond dealer blush.

First, a bit of history to sort out the confusion that so often adheres to the Congo brand. The really big messed-up country attached to the Congo name used to be a Belgian colony, is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo and used to known in days gone by as Zaire, the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo. The smaller messed-up version used to be a French colony, is now called the Republic of the Congo and also has also gone through various name changes. The first country is really, really big. From one side to the other is the distance from London to Moscow. The second one is also pretty big but for the purposes of this article we are going to ignore it as a runt and focus on its huge neighbour. Don’t worry if you get a little confused; people often do. The actor/motorbiker, Ewan McGregor, and his team, who rode down Africa in 2007, managed to muddle the two countries.

The thing these places all have in common is the Congo River. At 4,500 km in length it is a tad shorter than the Nile. But while it might be Africa’s second longest river it is, by several orders of magnitude, its mightiest. The outflow from the Nile into the Mediterranean is weeny in comparison to the 43,000 tonnes of fresh water that belch out of the Congo every second all year round into the Atlantic. That’s a lot of fresh water. Indeed the first white outsiders to discover the Congo river, some particularly nutty Portuguese mariners in the 1480s, described how, twenty miles out at sea from the mouth of the river, they could drink the seawater.

I set about crossing the Congo (the Democratic Republic of Congo, that is) in 2004 as an exercise in part-journalism/part-prove-it-can-be-done/part-midlife-crisis-risk-everything. I had just spent four years covering crises in Africa for a British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, almost all of which had roots in the Congo. The thuggish Lord’s Resistance Army had kept northern Uganda ablaze for twenty years because they could slip across the unmarked border into the lawless Congo and find sanctuary. Ethnicity in Rwanda festered because Hutus responsible for the 1994 genocide were still alive and well, surviving in eastern Congo. Darfuri rebels funded themselves from cross-border smuggling into the Congo. Even Robert Mugabe’s rickety regime down in Zimbabwe was linked to the Congo because he bought off his generals by sending them to the Congo to line their pockets with cash from its alluvial diamond fields. So to try to understand the continent’s major problems I wanted to go the Congo, their common denominator.

But the main reason I wanted to tackle the Congo was that I was told it could not be done. In fact, several people told me it was suicidal. In 1996 a series of wars and rebellions began in the Congo that have continued until today and that have helped turn the country into what most outsiders regard as a no-go area. I had a map in my Telegraph office in Johannesburg of the entire African continent and for years the Congo goaded me from its centre like some sort of cartographical golem. The train lines that used to go into the Congo had been cut, the ferry lines collapsed and the road network choked by the equatorial forest. Like other colonial nations, Belgium loved statistics and I found an unabashed travel guide for the Belgian colony that boasted the country had 111,971 km of road in 1949. When I set about crossing the Congo half a century later I doubt if more than 500 km of road remained.

You might wonder why roads are important in a country so generously endowed with rivers but my problem was that the route I chose to cross the Congo had a long overland component. I wanted to see if it was possible to follow the trail blazed by the first white explorer to reach the Congo, Henry Morton Stanley.

Stanley is best known for his 1871 journalistic scoop where he tracked down David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary-turned-explorer, who had been missing for a few years in central Africa. Stanley, a nuggety little Welsh bastard, came up with the sound bite of the century in “Doctor Livingstone, I presume”, and transformed himself into a global star. But it was his next trip to Africa that was to have a much profounder effect on the continent.

Between 1874 and 1877 Stanley bushwhacked from the east coast of Africa to the west on an epic trip that meandered more than 7,000 km. It was a pretty impressive display of determination and stamina (all three of his European companions died and only a third of his 300 bearer party made it out alive) but it cost the lives of countless Congolese natives. Stanley was of the school of explorer that shot first, and then shot some more and never really got round to asking questions as there was probably more shooting to be done

The reason the trip changed history is that Stanley was the first outsider to chart the Congo River. He went back to Europe with a map of a massive navigable river reaching across the continent. The Belgian King, Leopold II, saw in the river a spine for a new colony bringing African resources downstream and shipping European manufactured the other way. Stanley’s trip fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa. The Belgian king made his move for the Congo River basin around 1880s and within two decades almost all of the rest of the continent had been snaffled up by the colonial powers.

Stanley reached the Congo by crossing Lake Tanganyika and landing on its western shore. He had heard tell of a massive river, the Lualaba, or Upper Congo, deep in the forest somewhere out to the west but he had no idea how to find the river or where it would lead. A not dissimilar sense of mystery descended on me when I set out on my journey in the dry season of 2004. I knew the river was out there in the badlands of northern Katanga province, but the truth was I had no idea how I was going to get there.

It had taken days of messing around with United Nations logisticians to glean a seat on a light aircraft to Kalemie, once a big Congolese port on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, but now a cholera-contaminated ruin. My mum had travelled through Kalemie in 1958 but that was back during the colonial period when things like railways and ferries worked. Since the Belgians pulled out the Congo in 1960, this part of the country had been in a near-permanent state of rebellion. Che Guevara had fought around Kalemie, attacking the tiny hydro-electric power plant that used to give the town its electricity. Mad Mike Hoare, the best known of the white mercenaries who infested the Congo in the 1960s and 1970s, had been stationed here.

My lucky break came when I persuaded some local aid workers from Care International to give me lift on their motorbikes. One of the wars was believed to be ending and they wanted to get to places they had not been able to reach during the fighting. I, quite literally, cadged a lift for 900 km on a journey back in time.

Buses used to cross this region daily along a Belgian road network maintained by “cantonniers” or local labourers. All that had gone, washed away by seasonal rains and consumed by the advancing Equatorial forest. For days we snaked along jungle tracks often no wider than our hips, stopping endlessly at broken bridges and fallen trees. The bikes were tiny little things, small enough to lift over obstacles. Anything bigger would have been pointless.

United Nations peacekeepers didn’t venture into these parts, the stronghold of black magic-using mai-mai rebels and murderous interahamwe fugitives from Rwanda. I passed a village where a skull and other human bones lay thick on the ground the result of some forgotten, bloody skirmish. I biked through burnt-down, abandoned villages and caught the occasional glimpse of people in rags who ran away, petrified of outsiders.

And the secret weapon to get me through these terrors? A pygmy called Georges Mbuyu, a tiny man who stared down red-eyed mai-mai wearing hideous necklaces of animal teeth, body parts and fetishes. “Don’t worry, I know these people, they will not hurt you,” he said reassuringly. He might have only come up to my chest but in these killing fields he was a giant.

But the most moving sight? The Ho Chi Minh trail of Congolese survival – cadaverous men we saw by the hundred wandering the forest, pushing pedal-less bicycles laden with jars of palm oil for hundreds and hundreds of km for the chance of making a few dollars by trading them for another commodity like salt. These men were on six week round trips, drinking when they passed a stream, eating what they could scavenge in the bush, and sleeping on the trail when the sun went down.

“There is nothing in my home town, Kongolo – this is my only chance to feed my family,” Muke Nguy told me before heaving his tottering bike down the trail. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at a loop of vine on his shoulder. “My bicycle repair kit”, he said. The sap, a form of natural rubber, makes a gummy resin, ideal for mending flat tyres. I shook my head in sorry disbelief. Think how great Africa could be if the skills and talents of its people were released from survival and self-preservation.

In 900 km I saw not one other working motorised vehicle. I met village elders who told me VW Beetles used to pass regularly in the 1960s but now their own teenage children had never seen a car. This was a part of the world in regression – the hands of the Congolese clock were not just standing still, they are spinning backwards.

At night I fell asleep in thatched mud huts re-reading Stanley’s diary. He too wrote of burnt-down villages and human skulls littering the ground. Had nothing changed?

When I first glimpsed the river, it was huge. More than 3,000 km upstream from the Atlantic Ocean it was already wider than the Thames in London. But what should be one of the great transport arteries of Africa, shuttling goods and people along a fluvial superhighway, was clotted.

It took weeks to negotiate my way down river past towns like Kibombo, an eerie-looking place where I spent a night. People here cannot remember when the electricity last worked and I saw a ghostly scene of guttering palm oil candles and shadows dancing across hulks of abandoned colonial-era buildings.

The riverside town of Kindu was home to a large UN HQ, fitted out with air-conditioning, satellite uplinks for the internet and a canteen where I had my first fizzy drink for a month. Behind the razor wire these peacekeepers lived in blissful isolation – many did not even know that a few years ago 13 Italian peacekeepers had been dragged through these same streets, disembowelled by a mob and eaten.

After leaving Kindu I had my only truly serene moment in the Congo. There was not a single working Congolese motorboat on this stretch of the river – the rusting remains of paddle steamers, tugs and barges can be seen rotting at various spots on the bank – and the only river traffic was made up of pirogues, canoes made from hollowed out tree trunks.

One evening I took a pirogue with four paddlers and we headed into the midstream of the Congo just south of the Equator. The sun had set abruptly but as the night rushed in and the sky, forest and river merged into one impenetrable whole, an unforgettable thing happened – a moon rose red and full in the east.

As the water lapped against the pirogue and the paddlers sang in gentle Swahili harmony I watched as the slow-climbing moon struggled to light one of the world’s most benighted regions. The next day my pirogue reached the spot where, in 1951, a full Hollywood crew had come to film The African Queen. Katharine Hepburn wrote in her diary of finding a charming riverside town full of helpful missionaries. My experience was different. The priests had long ago been driven out, all the buildings lay in ruins and I was told it was too dangerous to dawdle.

A few days later and I finally reached Kisangani, the city on the Bend in The River. Once an industrial and intellectual centre where multinationals like Unilever maintained large factories, it was a broken ruin. It used to be called Stanleyville, in honour of the explorer who first passed here in a flurry of poisoned arrows and spears from Wagenia tribesmen rightly suspicious of outsiders.

All traces of Stanley have been removed. Where his statue once stood there is now just an empty plinth and a spring where hookers from the local Hotel Des Chutes wash their smalls. A few whites cling on: a French born trader who married well into the clan of Mobutu Sese Seko, the post-independence dictator who single-handedly bankrupted the country when known as Zaire; a Greek trucker who somehow maintains the town’s tatty Hellenic Club with its daily menu of tzatziki and moussaka.

And there was, 83-year-old Father Leon, a tiny, beer-drinking, chain-smoking priest who came from Belgium to the Congo in 1947. He remembers clearly November 24 1964, the day Belgian paratroopers dropped into Stanleyville to rescue him from mai-mai rebels. But the paratroopers only landed on the right bank of the river. On the left, ten priests and fifteen nuns were tortured and murdered.

“I still have a picture of Heinrich Verberne who was killed that day. He was standing in for me when he was captured by the rebels so perhaps it should have been me,” Father Leon said quietly. “Why are you still here after all these years, after all these horrors? I must go where there is need and in the Congo the need is great”.

It took weeks to find a boat downstream towards Kinshasa and the Atlantic Ocean where Stanley’s epic journey ended in Aug 9 1877.The national transport company had long since stopped operating and I was forced to board a Congolese boat chartered by the UN. For days it crawled along the river’s sweeping arch across central Africa. Penniless villagers would paddle out in pirogues and bravely try to latch onto our boat to sell the crew smoked monkey, fresh fish, edible grubs or cassava bread. It was a hazardous exercise and often they were overwhelmed, sunk by our wash shouting forlornly for us to stop.

It was a scene Stanley himself would have recognised and after my journey was over it stayed with me as the perfect metaphor for the region – courageous, desperate people left behind wallowing in the mighty Congo River as the rest of the world steams by.

Tim Butcher’s `Blood River – A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart’ was published October 2008 in the USA by Grove Press and in the UK by Vintage. Read a review of the book here

Author and Photography – Tim Butcher

(Posted by Lee Ridley)

On the day of departure, we received an e-mail from our friend in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which simply read: ”plane crash in Congo”. A humanitarian flight, with Air Serv, had crashed in the mountains near Bukavu the day before and it meant a good deal of changes in our travelling plans.

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We were artists and we were on our way to the Democratic Republic of Congo, our heads filled with ideas, triggered by the whole hideous story of the region. From the early colonial heydays to the present geopolitical mess, which leaves no one free of responsibility.

We were supposed to go with an Echo flight to Goma three days after our arrival in Kinshasa, but due to the Air Serv crash, things were rearranged and all seats were taken on the Echo flight by humanitarian workers, whom for a while at least, didn’t want to use Air Serv. Our only possibility to get to Goma was to fly with the local company, Hewa Bora, which of course as with every other congolese airline, figures on the aviation blacklist. It’s a bit like playing Russian roulette, but we took our chances and arrived safely; the plane coming to a sudden stop on the runway, 2/3 of which is buried in lava.

In 2002 the volcano Nyiragongo exploded and a river of molten rock poured into Goma and created a humanitarian catastrophe, as an estimated 300,000 people fled into the neighboring country of Rwanda. I have always found the whole idea about applauding the pilot when he lands a plane slightly annoying, but on this occasion it seemed appropriate.

In the center of the city, workers were occupied with removing the remnants of a Hewa Bora plane, which had recently crashed shortly after take off. The government forces and the UN peacekeepers, MONUC, were everywhere, patrolling the streets as Nkunda’s rebels had launched a major offensive not far from the city some days before. The rebels were gaining control on the road between Goma and Bukavu, and we were strongly advised not to go by car to Bukavu. Goma, it seemed, was a fortress.

The atmosphere was extremely tense and we could hardly get away with filming, even though we had paid a fair amount of money to get a permission from the Secretariat General Au Tourisme in Kinshasa. Soldiers were keeping an eye on us from everywhere, letting us know that flashing a camera would land us in trouble. Paranoia is like a disease that has spread throughout the whole society. The Congolese don’t want to be photographed. They fear that the pictures will be used for sinister purposes. In addition many believe in witchcraft, and you can be sure that somebody, somewhere, is watching you at all times when you are out in the streets.

Police officers will fine you for the most ridiculous things and you have to bribe and talk your way out of situations time after time. They call it the Article 15: ”You’re on your own”. It essentially means that each has to care for himself, even if it means to violate the law, to cheat and to lie. The corruption runs through the whole system from top to bottom; it’s the legacy of Mobuto.
And as the rain came down hard each night it seemed to me that Goma could have been the perfect backdrop for a post-apocalyptic movie fiction. The city had witnessed heavy fighting since the Kabila war broke out in 1996. Now Kabila Jr. is continuing what Kabila Senior had struggled for in many years, an attempt to wipe out the rebels, a seemingly impossible task. And all along the civilians are suffering from unspeakable atrocities. Many, having fled their villages, now live in the refugee camps surrounding Goma. We arranged a visit to one of these camps, Buhimba, with Christian, a security officer and a journalist.

Bahima Refugee Camp

An NGO had supplied us with shirts and papers saying that we were on an official mission. But it is not so easy to gain access to the camps. At first we were introduced to some suspicious looking aidworkers. A swedish woman, who refused to speak swedish, even though we as Danes could easily have understood her mother tongue, shook her head in disbelief and contempt as we presented her with the concept of our project. Then we were told to turn off our cameras before we could get permission to meet the manager of the camp.

We were taken to a hut and told to wait. After a while the manager came and introduced himself and we told him about our project and showed him our papers. Obviously the papers didn’t qualify for this particularly mean environment, but after some discussion we were permitted half an hour of access on the condition that we would not ask any questions regarding politics. We were told that a gendarme would have to follow us for our own protection. ”The refugees are desperate, we haven’t received any food supplies for three months and we are struggling to limit an outbreak of cholera”, he told us, with undisguised reproach.

The smell hit us hard and sickening as we entered the camp. From far away we could hear the banging rhythm of a drum and we moved in the direction of the sound, followed by forty or fifty wildly enthusiastic and malnourished children.You light a small spark of hope here simply because you are white. Their parents seemed more hopeless, sitting, crouching or simply lying on the ground in despair, following us only with their reddish eyes, barely capable of mobilizing more than a faint greeting.

Is it morally justifiable to exploit such suffering and human indignity? We were not journalists nor aidworkers and you can’t escape the feeling of being a useless and insensitive intruder, hiding behind a camera, keeping a distance, knowing that you will soon leave it all behind again. You are a voyeur, handing out a few dirty, next-to-worthless bills for a short interview, telling the rest that you don’t have any money. You get what you want, justifying to yourself that what you do is important; it is for the benefit of the unfortunate. You deal with political issues and you do it in a sober way. You even tell yourself that you are courageous because you dare to go beyond the headlines. This is what you tell yourself while you adjust your lenses and try to get it all from the right angle, and the truth is that this ”Theater of War” gets you excited. The anxiety and fear fuels you and gets the adrenaline going. It is the return of the ”Real”.

The sound of the drums came from a big rectangular closed tent. Someone told us that a Mass was being held, but it sounded more like an unrestrained village party; we were not allowed to enter. The children were getting more and more excited and tried to grab the microphone from my backpocket, coming at me from all sides. We hastily moved further, Christian telling us that we had to hurry up, obviously a bit uneasy about the whole situation. But we insisted on making a short interview with a female refugee. We wanted a least one individual voice, telling us what we already knew.

You can’t imagine the horrors, the women of Congo have been victims of since the war broke out. You want to escape the Western concepts of ”The Dark Continent” and move on, but it is not all possible. They tell their stories of mass rape and mutilations and they do it without showing any emotions. You are ashamed because you are a man and you wonder if these women can ever gain some kind of confidence in you. You give a bit of money, because they ask for it and now you just want to get away from it all; the stench, the tragedy, the disgust. More people are asking for money on the way out and you gaze beyond the mountains. The sky is very white.

Buhimba Refugee Camp

We leave Buhimba in the afternoon. There are four more camps in the surroundings of Goma and they all contain thousands and thousands of displaced men, women and children each with their own individual story to tell. We are told that the rebels are attacking the camps from time to time. How is this possible considering that the largest UN force in the world is present here? We are also told that both sides of the conflict want the UN to pull out their peacekeepers, the fighting parties want to settle it by themselves. On the other hand, a lot of civilians are blaiming the MONUC for not being capable of protecting them, but Nkunda and his rebels are powerful, he has been in the game for many years.

The government forces and the UN, mainly consisting of Indian and Pakistani troops, are weak. Some claim to be informed about a coming Foreign Legion intervention. The rumors are rife. You genuinely try to understand the complexity of the conflict, this mess they are in and you are thinking this mess we are in, because you know it is a geopolitical game, but you still find it very difficult to comprehend. It is called ”The Forgotten War”, even though an estimated 4-5 million people have lost their lives so far.

A couple of days before, we had returned from Bukavu, the capital of the South Kivu province. We had travelled overwater, across Lake Kivu, the only secure way to travel between the two cities these days. Lake Kivu is a so-called exploding lake, due to the gaseous chemical composition, methane and carbon dioxide, interacting with volcanic activity. The risk from a possible Lake Kivu overturn would be catastrophic, since approximately two million people live in the lake basin. Scientists hypothesize that sufficient volcanic interaction with the high gas concentrations of the lake’s bottom water, would heat the water, force the methane out of the lake, spark a methane explosion, and trigger a release of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then suffocate large numbers of people in the lake basin as the gases roll off the surface. It is also possible that the lake could spawn tsunamis as gas explodes out of it. In every way ”The Kivus” is a dangerous place. After the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the waters of Lake Kivu gained notoriety as a place where many of the victims of the genocide were dumped.

In Bukavu we had spent a couple of days with two priests, who we had met on the boat. One day the four of us went to the Panzi hospital, a place we had heard about one night in Goma. The Panzi is known for its surgical department, treating women who suffer from genital mutilations. The whole staff of doctors and surgeons had willingly showed us every single part of the hospital, the screaming from the operating-rooms sending shivers down the spine, as we moved from room to room. But the Panzi didn’t have the facilities to house everyone who was in need of treatment.

In the surroundings of the hospital, the patients where living in temporary tent camps, preparing their meals on bonfires. Most of them were women, in all ages. Their attitude towards us was inscrutable and again we had the feeling of being overly-inquisitive. We made an interview with the director, who raged against all sides of the conflict, accusing everyone of warcrimes. And by the end of day, just before we were about to leave, the doctors had asked us for money. They too had families to feed, they told us their wages were low. Only later did we discover that each of the patients pays USD50 to be attended by a doctor, a considerable amount of money in this particular part of the world.

Every night we went to bars, to drink, to normalize. To meet people. Mostly NGO’s and their local fixers. Fixers make up a whole industry in the DRC, there are lots of them and they are eager to arrange whatever you might be interested in. This is how they earn their living. Hundreds of dollars are easily spent in a couple of days and the prize is not to be bargained. It is supply and demand. And you depend on good fixers, who know the way around. So we kept on emptying big bottles of Primus, Tembo and Turbo King, while socializing and exchanging small scraps of paper with phone numbers and email adresses, in nightclubs and bars occupied with wazungu and prostitutes. We listened to their stories of war and rape and of children being kidnapped by the rebels and forced to be soldiers. The locals have an almost eerie ability to talk about these things without showing the slightest expressions of grief. Fuck, sometimes they even laughed at the whole tragedy! I guess it is impossible to understand, if you haven’t spend your whole life in a warzone.

The day before we left for Kinshasa, a plane carrying president Kabila landed in the airport in Goma. The president came to attend a meeting, addressing the situation and discussing recent events and as his plane hit the runway, one of the tires blew up. It could have been the end of it, but Kabila got away with it this time.

The author on Lake Kivu

But rumor has it, that a coup is under way. If so it wouldn’t be the first time in the DRC. No one should feel safe here, least of all the ones that are in power. But will it make any difference if it is one or the other that is in charge. Who has the means and the will to end the misery? One night, after we had returned to Kinshasa, we talked with a young student, who we had met at the Academie des Beaux Arts. He told us that he had been serving in Laurant Kabila’s army of child-soldiers when he was eleven years old. He made a drawing of an AK47 on a napkin while we spoke. We bought him beers; he was a sympathic and resonable young man. You wouldn’t have thought that he had participated in the most atrocious cruelties. Suddenly, he revealed that he had a dream and that dream was to become president one day.

We urged him to give a speech and though there were not more than four people present, he spoke for half an hour, with great feeling, sounding sincerely visionary, as if he had been standing before a crowd of thousands. For a moment there I didn’t have the slightest doubt that he would some day succeed. He was only 22 years old. But my french is not very good though and I probably didn’t get half of it. A photograph I had taken of him earlier that same day shows him posing in a green US Army shirt, clutching a book, the collected writings and speeches of Mobuto Sese Seko, with both hands holding it close to his chest.

A future President

Written by Christian Danielewitz

Author, Vince Gainey, travels into the heart of Kenya’s troubles, as the country is still reeling from its recent political and tribal bloodletting.

The recent post-election violence in Kenya has done enormous damage to the reputation and economy of a country famed for stability, peace and for being a tourist-friendly environment. While the political power sharing deal, signed in early March, has done much to pull the country back from the brink, and in general restore peace; deep damage was already done – to the economy but more particularly to the ethnic bonds that hitherto the country had enjoyed. This has now been replaced by mistrust, anger and feelings of revenge, and the wounds of this brief conflict will run deep for years to come.

In mid-March I travelled to the city of Kisumu, the capital of Nyanza province, on the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya. On arrival at Kisumu airport all seemed normal, the regular morning rotation of flights from Nairobi, full of businessmen and other visitors, was arriving for meetings, family visits and other purposes.

Driving into the city, immediately one could see the results of the violence – shops and offices shuttered with temporary steel sheets, and other businesses, many owned by Kikuyu businessmen from the Central highlands of Kenya, had been torched and gutted and reduced to rubble. In fact such had been the outburst of ethnic hatred here that any property and business that was owned by people not of the local Luo community was in ruins. It seemed incomprehensible that people who had otherwise lived closely together for decades could so suddenly turn on each other. It resonated strongly of Rwanda’s past.

Ominous patches of buckled tarmac on the main roads spoke of bonfires that had been lit at roadblocks, as gangs of rampant youths stopped all passers by, demanding to know their ethnicity. Woe betide those of the wrong tribal group. I had pointed out to me the gutted ruins of trucks and buses that had been burned with all occupants inside perishing. I passed scrawled graffiti, ‘Welcome to Darfur’, as the youth turned their neighbourhoods into a sad replica of that war zone. It seemed inadvisable to lean out of my car window and take photos, there is still too much simmering anger and it is still too easy to spark that anger.

I also visited one of the remaining camps for people displaced from Central Kenya and the Rift Valley, who had fled their homes in that region, terrorised out by the ‘Mungiki’-led gangs taking revenge on people from the west to pay back the killings in Kisumu and the northern town of Eldoret. On all sides great brutality had been enacted and great injustices and crimes perpetrated. I spoke to women who had fled with their young children from Nakuru and Elburgon, who had no idea what had become of their husbands. One can imagine the terror of their flight as they passed through the roadblocks fearing that they may have escaped one terror only to meet their ends at another.

One of the few optimistic signs in Kisumu was that businesses were quickly reopening. That is largely thanks to the return of some of the Kenyan-Asian businessmen, who had fled when the violence flared (and many of whom had also had their businesses torched) but came back when given assurances by the political leadership that it was safe to do so. They are single-handedly rebuilding Kisumu’s economy at the moment.

People from Central Kenya are not so lucky. A group of ‘matatu’ mini bus drivers tried recently to return but were badly beaten by a mob before being rescued by the police. The security presence is still high in Kisumu and I saw many Humvees, filled with the Kenyan army, patrolling the streets. There was still tension in the air but a feeling of hope and expectancy that the politicians, who many Kenyans saw sitting on their hands for too long, while Kenya burned, finally opted for peace and a new future for the country.

In Nairobi they were wishing me ‘Happy New Year’. The real Jan 1st had been too traumatic to celebrate. But now all are hoping for a new beginning; for a new Kenya, pulled back from the brink of disaster.

Author – Vince Gainey.

I’m on my own. 3000km to go from from Dakar to Monrovia. It’s July 26th and the rainy season is kicking in. My Land Rover was built 34 years ago and had 7 previous owners. Still, I’ve got a Haines repair manual…

I’d given a lot of thought to the final leg of my journey. The FCO website was less than encouraging. The Casamance region of southern Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia all had plenty of travel warnings. They were particularly against lone travel, and travel through rural areas.

The lush forests of Casamance were an incredible contrast to the arid, desert like north of Senegal. It was also clear to see that the political landscape had changed down here. Military checkpoints guarded every major settlement and crossroads. Soldiers in APC’s, presumably there to confine the separatist rebels to the jungle, didn’t quite know what to make of me as I pulled up to their rope barriers. Everyone was very friendly, especially after I’d distributed some cigarettes, although many were keen to shake me down for expensive stamps in my “laissez-passer” – an unnecessary document I’d been forced to buy upon entering the south. Generally speaking, patience, and a feigned inability to speak French, got me out of paying almost all bribes. The bumbling Englishman abroad was an act which I perfected over my three week trip.

Border crossings are a nightmare for most travellers in developing countries, and getting into Guinea was no exception. My feigned inability to speak French had now turned into a very real inability to speak Portuguese, but I was made to understand very quickly what it would take to get through smoothly. Unfortunately for the guards, I had a lot of time on my hands, and not much money. Two hours (and a very thorough search of the car) later, I was through, without having to dip into my dollars.

The roads in Senegal had been average. In fact, most of the journey from the UK had been on a good tarmac surface. The minute you got into Guinea Bissau, all the development money dried up, and it was dirt tracks all the way. River crossings were mainly on a barge, which always involved a steep and precarious descent of the river bank. The rain, combined with overloaded HGV’s snapping their axles, meant plenty of water filled pot holes. It was difficult to judge the depth, but I went through a few that were waist height, and temporarily submerged my headlights.

Bissau was a beautiful city. The abandoned Portuguese quarter was reminiscent of a disaster film and the place had almost an abandoned feel. Most of the buildings were still riddled with bullet holes, and there was little visible evidence of international aid. Grizzled Portuguese ex-pats sat on their verandas, sipping cups of thick black coffee, watching the few lone locals go about their business. Stray pigs wandered the streets. Occasionally, a shiny Toyota Land Cruiser would glide past. If there were bustling areas, I could not find them.

The people at the Guinean Embassy were delighted to hear an Englishman wanted to visit their country. The Ambassador shook my hand warmly, gave me his card, and said if I had any problems, to get in touch with his brother, whose number he supplied. To ensure I got there safely, he even entrusted me to his driver, who offered to navigate in return for a lift to see his family in Conakry. “I drive this route all the time,” he told me, “16 hours, maximum. It will be easy.” While I didn’t relish the thought of a 16 hour drive, I had pulled longer stints in Mauritania, and knew that I had copious quantities of Red Bull in the back of the car for emergencies.

We left at 10am the next day, in fair weather. Progress was soon hampered by torrential rain, and the shocking road surfaces, which limited my speed to under 20km/hr in many places. My windscreen wipers also only had one setting – useless – which did not help. By 4am, I was beginning to despair. We were nowhere near Conakry, and my guide had taken me on a crazy detour through the middle of the jungle. After arriving at one river crossing, I sat in line, while watching a mango truck on the other side of the bank try to slowly descend the perilous 40ft slope. Predictably, he began to skid, and the cab ended up fully submerged in the river.

Our journey finally clocked in at 32 hours. During this time, I had two half hour breaks, one for breakfast (or dinner) at around 4am, where we sat and shared bushmeat with some local traders, and another stop for Coke to keep me going at around 7am. Over the course of the detour I drank 2 litres of Red Bull. Sometimes, we would have to get out of the vehicle and wade through a puddle to check its depth. Other time, we would have to shift a fallen branch. For most of the drive, visibility was less than twenty metres. Had I not been so wired on caffeine, I’m sure it would have been terrifying. We hardly passed any other vehicles for the entire journey. “What do we do if we break down?” I asked my passenger, in my best GCSE French. “Don’t worry, I used to be a mechanic!” he said, barely suppressing the laughter.

Conakry itself was a bustling metropolis, jutting out on an Atlantic peninsula. The police were just as bad as all the horror stories I had read. On the outskirts of the city, I was pulled over and ordered to pay a fine. By this stage, my Englishman abroad routine was beginning to pay dividends, and was well rehearsed. I began to talk much more quickly, waved photocopied documents everywhere, jabbered in nonsensical French and was eventually released.

After unloading my gear at the Mission Catholique, I took to walking or using public transport to avoid being pulled over and having bribes demanded. On one occasion, I foolishly handed over a piece of original documentation (rather than a photocopy). What followed was a scene that will be familiar to any visitor of a corrupt third world nation. Suddenly, I was politely informed that I had committed a series of grave road traffic violations.

“But sir, you are not wearing a seat belt….but sir, you are driving with flip flops….but sir, right hand drive vehicles are not permitted on our roads….” Mid-way through his attempted shake down, I remember the police officer saying to me, “Listen, you want your license back, give me $100.” I politely informed him that I could report it lost and buy a new one for only $40. “Give me $90 then.” You really can’t argue with that.
Luckily, my passenger had a friend in the police force, so after a few phone calls and an hour of debate, my license was returned to me.

The city was to be my base for the next couple of days, as I applied for a Sierra Leone VISA and planned my onward route. During the day, I would talk with the fellow residents of the Mission Catholique, who were mainly volunteers from France and Spain. Occasionally, I would wander into the city centre to use the internet, but this usually turned into an open workshop on filling out US green card lottery applications. It was sad to see how desperate most people were to get to the West, and to hear their frustration about the lack of development and corruption in their home country.

After handing over $150 and receiving my VISA for Sierra Leone from the very friendly people at the Embassy, I began my drive to Freetown. As usual, the roads were appalling. As I was leaving Conakry, a man on a motorcycle with a Kalashnikov over his shoulder started buzzing at my window and gesturing. Trying my best to ignore him, I sped up, but he was easily able to keep pace. After about twenty minutes of staring dead ahead and attempting to ignore him, I finally gave in and opened the window to see what he wanted. It turned out he just wanted to welcome me to Guinea, and wish me a pleasant journey!

My time in Guinea ended as it had begun: with a shakedown. However, the soldiers at the Sierra Leone border were far more welcoming. The first thing I saw as I pulled up was a huge billboard announcing: “Corruption Hinders Development!” This was a great relief to read, and luckily something that these men had taken to heart. They were amazed when they heard about my journey and one of then even offered to accompany me to Freetown and help me find a hotel.

Once again, I was foolishly talked into following a shortcut, and although the weather was slightly better this time, we were very lucky to make it in one piece. At times, the mud track simply vanished underneath a 200m stretch of water. It is a great credit to the Land Rover (and very lucky for me) that it never once stalled when wading through these mammoth puddles.

The approach to Freetown featured some stunning views of the jungle, as well as a huge mountain. The city itself looks like an amphitheatre, encircling a bay and stretching up steep slopes in every direction. Election fever was in the air, with presidential candidates cruising the streets to announce their policies. Everyone I met would proudly tell me how next week there were going to be free and fair elections in Sierra Leone. I drove past the International Court where various former RUF, CDF and AFRC leaders are being tried for war crimes. Considering the horror that most of these citizens had witnessed only a few years ago, people were incredibly optimistic about the future.

I was sad to leave Freetown, but had to rush as the border would soon close for the elections. I spent the night in Kenema, a rich diamond centre, sharing stories with the locals, and watching the rich Arab traders. I made friends with a man who had lived in New Cross, and now ran an electrical store. It was amazing how closely linked Sierra Leone still is with the UK. My journey from Kenema to Bo Waterside and the Liberian border was the most “off road” of all the off road sections of my trip, taking in rubber plantations, nature parks and more river crossings than I was comfortable with.

It was just before the border that I picked up Senesei. He was a refugee who had fled Sierra Leone to Liberia during the war. He had returned to Freetown for the elections, however, seeing that his party was not going to win, he was returning to Monrovia, where he worked as a mechanic. Once again, I offered him a lift and he helped me find a place to stay once we arrived.

Entering Liberia was a frightening experience. The road was blocked by sandbagged check points, APC’s and heavy machine gun posts, all emblazoned with the white and black UN colours. The first people I met were not Liberian, but in fact Nigerian peace keepers. At the customs post, Liberia’s US heritage was very clear. Everyone was dressed in American style state-trooper uniforms, and spoke with a slightly inauthentic American accent, right down to the “have a nice day” that would always end a conversation.

Although I got stopped roughly every 5km, Liberia was not as bad as other countries in terms of officials demanding bribes. This is probably lucky, as I could hardly claim I did not understand English. The police, customs and army officers (whether they were Nigerian, Namibian, Pakistani or Liberian) were all very welcoming, and eager that I tell the world how Liberia was working towards peace and reconciliation.

My hotel in Monrovia cost an eye watering $60 a night. The only people there were aid workers and western traders, who seemed to have pushed up the price of everything from bread to Coca Cola. I offered to buy Senesei dinner as thanks for his assistance, but he took one look at the prices on the menu and declined. When I reassured him that I would be paying, he said “No, it is not this. It is that this lifestyle is above my means. Once you are gone, I will never be able to come here again, so I should not get used to it now.”

Once in Monrovia I realised that I could go no further. Travel into the diamond fields would have been too dangerous, as would crossing into the Ivory Coast. I decided to sell my vehicle and fly home. Unfortunately, this was far more easily said than done.

Senesei was employed as a mechanic by a man know affectionately as “American”. I was suspicious that he was a local crime figure. These suspicions were confirmed on my final day in Liberia, when he was imprisoned for beating two debtors with a baseball bat. However, he was extremely kind to me, and being the local mechanic, was in an excellent position to help me find a buyer for my vehicle.

The next six days was a frantic tour of Monrovia’s underworld, except out there, it really is the wild-west, and people make very little effort to conceal their sources of income. Despite the UN ban on diamond trading, I met numerous South African and Arab diamond merchants, who said they could use my vehicle out in the bush. I met 27 year old American who had fled the US for some unexplained reason to set up shop in Africa. He imported from South America then exported to Europe. He would not say what goods he traded, but laughed wholeheartedly at my question. Then there was the Arab, who owned a logistics firm based in Angola. Many of these men drove Mercedes, wore Rolexes, had the latest mobile phone and lived in palatial compounds, islands in this sea of poverty. They were all very keen to meet me, however, after a few days of time wasting, I realised they were more eager to hear my story than purchase my vehicle.

There is no doubt that Monrovia was a dangerous place. I would often wander out of The Metropolitan Hotel, past the club on the ground floor, and find dried blood on the tiles. One night, there was a 15 man battle-royale in the street outside the hotel. The numbers of people missing an arm or a leg from the war were astounding, and everyone had their own story to tell, although their motives were often mixed. Despite this, there was a heavy military presence throughout the city, and I never felt unsafe. The people were some of the warmest and most welcoming I had met on my entire journey.

Despite the corruption, the chronic fuel shortages, the weather, the insects, the appalling roads, and the difficulty in finding a postcard, West Africa was a worthwhile destination and an incredible experience. Travelling overland was tiring, and difficult at times, but it meant interacting with far more local people. I helped load a mango truck in the jungles of Guinea Bissau, shared breakfast with game wardens in Sierra Leone and haggled over the price of a spare tyre in Liberia. You can’t pick those sorts of experiences out of a holiday brochure!

Author – Oscar Scafidi.

A full account of Oscar’s journey from London to Monrovia can be read in January’s (2008) edition of Land Rover World in the UK.