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.

The Baloch have been living in a state of siege ever since 1948, when their territory was incorporated into the nation of Pakistan. Under the thumb of Islamabad, their rights and autonomy have been deliberately ignored by the international community, which has its own agenda for the region. Balochistan declared its independence on August 11, 1947, three days before Pakistan.

The sound of the explosion hardly raises an eyebrow among the restaurant patrons. This is the dining room of the bus station in Khuzdar, a Baloch town halfway between Quetta and Karachi. After a couple of minutes, Abdulhamid, a local journalist, gets a call. Only now does the  busy lunchtime crowd pause.

Abdulhamid breaks the dining room’s silence. “It was a communications tower. No injured or dead,” he announces. It’s good news for Sattar, who’s sitting nearby. The guerrillas’ actions won’t keep him from opening his shop in the bazaar this afternoon.

“Whenever the BLA (Baluch Liberation Army) kills somebody there’s always payback in the bazaar. The army drives down Jinnah Road (the main street) and shoots at the people from their jeeps,” says the Merchant, as he uses his fingers to wrap pita bread around a morsel of beef. He explains that four people died that way last June 4th, and a dozen more were wounded. In addition, seven local students have “disappeared.” This was the army’s response after the BLA killed a Punjabi officer a few months ago.

Khuzdar is like lots of other Baloch towns in Pakistan-controlled Baluchistan. Viral graffiti with the initials of the BLA and BRA (Baluch Republican Army), accompanied by the slogan “Down With Pakistan” spreads across the walls of almost every building. On the other side of all these discomfiting acronyms in Khuzdar stands the Pakistani army, the Pakistani Police, the Frontier Corps (border police), the Rangers and other paramilitary detachments, simply called “scouts.”

“Whether the Baloch attack or not, the army fires their bombs and weapons in order to scare us. Their training camps are right next to our houses,” complains Sattar. “Have you seen the barracks they’re building now? Some say it will be the largest military complex in all of Pakistan,” says the trader before leaving for work.

Indeed, the new military site appears large enough to accommodate all 600,000 troops in the Pakistani army. It’s so massive, it has already ‘swallowed’ two mud-brick villages. The villagers, mostly shepherds, continue grazing their livestock inside the huge barrack walls that lead from the road into the mountains. They won’t be evacuated until the wall has completely encircled the area. But it’s just a matter of time before yet another settlement of displaced persons  sprouts up in Khuzdar’s outskirts. Just like in Quetta–head to the settlements around there and ask  people how and why they came to live in the suburbs of a city, which is itself already a huge slum.

Other explosions

“Punjab (Pakistan) treats us like animals,” explains Sirbaz, a trucker who has stopped here on his way to Karachi. This man, around forty, is originally from Dalbandin, a town which lies very close to the place where Pakistan tested its nuclear weapons in 1998. They were five explosions in the Chagai hills–explosions the local people will never forget.

“My sister has skin cancer, and so do two of my brothers. There are also plenty of people with eye cancer, and malformations are not uncommon among newborns,” says the trucker. Islamabad has used every means at its disposal to prevent any investigation into the impact of the nuclear tests on the local population. But today, everyone understands that the radiation, at some stage, reached the underground aquifiers–the only water resource in this arid region.

“If you pass by Dalbandin and the surrounding area, stay away from the water.” Shirbaz warns. “Do not even use it to wash your face.” After lunch, tea with milk is served–yet another British colonial legacy of the region. No one among the elders doubts that life here was much better in Balochistan under British rule than under Punjab’s. “What do people in Europe think about what is happening in Balochistan?” asks Atik, another passenger on the road to Quetta. As he waits for my response, he gazes at me steadily with the eye they didn’t burn out with a cigarette while he was in prison.

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.

Victims of Stalin´s cartography of yesteryear, the inhabitants of this unrecognised territory face an uncertain future. Transnistria could end up as a bargaining chip in the often difficult relationship between Russia and Moldova.

“It´s not fair to call us ‘separatists’. It wasn´t us who wanted to split from the USSR,” says Sergey Simonenko from his bureau at the government buildings of a country that still nobody recognises as legitimate. Simonenko happens to be the Deputy Foreign Minister of the ‘Moldovan Republic of Pridnestrovie’. It´s a patch of land better known outside its boundaries as “Transnistria”.

In the fractured world of post-Soviet politics, Moldova emerged as a separate country, its boundaries conforming to those of the erstwhile Soviet Republic. The left bank of the Dniester had been annexed to the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic by Stalin back in 1940. Mainly populated by Russians and Ukrainians, the inhabitants of this narrow strip of land decided a few years back that they rather fancied being masters of their own destiny. With Moldova’s independence from the Soviet Union, the two factions on opposite sides of the Dniester, those on the west speaking Moldovan and more attuned to Romania, and their neighbours on the east bank, having greater affection for Russia and Slavic values, quickly turned against each other.

“Moldova even considered joining Romania,” continues Simonenko, “but the majority of us here are Russian. What kind of future was there for us under Bucharest´s rule?”

The Moldovan-Transnistrian conflict was one of the many that reshaped the Eurasian map back in the early nineties. Boundaries were redrawn from Tajikistan to the Dniester. “Half a million Transnistrians finally got their independence,” claimed the Slavs. “And half a million Moldovans are kidnapped by a tyrant regime,” the right bank of the river.

Last September, Transnistria celebrated the 18th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, something that had already happened a year before Moldova declared hers. European Union officials like Javier Solana approved moves against Trans-Dniester on the basis of respecting Moldova’s territorial sovereignty. Quite ironic, seeing how many EU governments have applauded and recognised Kosovo´s independence.

Today, no country in the world recognises an independent political entity on the left bank of the Dniester other than the Ukraine. But some “quasi” states as Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been regular attendants to the annual celebrations in Tiraspol, the Transnistrian capital. Moreover, the two breakaway regions recently recognised by Russia have had representatives here for years, a sort of “would be” ambassadors.

Very much the same as the Caucasian republics, Transnistria also boasts its own passport, its flag, car plates…and they go further by printing their own stamps, and even coining their own currency: the Transnistrian rouble. Needless to say that none of these are valid outside this country which barely doubles the size of Luxembourg.

As for the national anthem, there are three versions, one for each official language: Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian. The melody, a candidate for the USSR anthem composed in 1943, is common to the three but the lyrics change depending on the language we use.

“Let´s praise our factories,” says the Russian version. Small wonder here as most of Moldova´s industry was located on this side of the river when the war started. The 90% of the electricity of the Latin country was produced here so the loss of Transnistria left the Moldova in literal darkness.

Lenin versus Sheriff

“No, we are not communists; the Moldovans are!” continues Deputy Minister Simonenko, despite the hammer and the sickle on the Transnistrian flag on his desk, and also on his business card.

“We still keep the Soviet symbols because we are proud of our past, that´s all”

In fact, Simonenko is right when he states that the communists are those on the west bank of the river. Vladimir Voronin is Moldova´s Communist Party´s First Secretary as well as the president in functions of the country since 2001. But his son, Oleg, owns the dubious honour of being the richest man of Europe´s poorest country. It seems that equal share of wealth is still a distant concept in Moldova.

Back in Transnistria, just a light stroll from 25 October street towards Gagarin boulevard is more than enough to realise that this is far from being a communist stronghold. Despite the severe look of Lenin´s red granite statue opposite the government building, Gazprom branches, jewelleries change offices and other outsiders to former Soviet taste work hard in the name of the privatization policies that rule here. The biggest example is probably Sheriff, the company allegedly linked to Igor Smirnov; that Kamchatka born bushy eye browed man who happens to be Transnistria´s first and only president up to date.

Sheriff owns the local petrol stations, a supermarket chain and the telephone company, but also the casino at the city centre, the brandy distillery, and even the local football team: Sheriff Tiraspol FC! Paradoxically enough, football is the only thing that links both banks of the river Dniester. The local team has been the indisputable winner of the Moldovan league since 2000. Moreover, Sheriff stadium is still the only one that fits UEFA criteria, so Tiraspol hosts Moldova´s squad´s international fixtures.

Just clichés?

“Western journalists come here on a daytrip: they take pictures of Lenin, the billboards, the war memorials, and they always write the same cliché afterwards “Transnistria: the last Soviet Paradise”, “the Soviet theme park”…But we are a modern country!” explains Svetlana, a chemical engineer in his late 30´s. “If it were for me, I would pull down all those symbols straight away”.

Svetlana’s anger towards these stereotypes is evident. Yet, the Soviet cliché is far from being not the most harmful of all those Transnistria has to bear.

“Chisinau constantly spreads rumours about arms and drug trafficking here”, continues Svetlana. “European observers have been checking these borders for years and they’ve found none of that”. She refers to the European Mission for Border Assistance that monitors both the Ukrainian and the Moldovan sides of the border. According to them, smuggling to and from Transnistria consists mainly on chicken and alcohol.

Abkhazia and Chechnya are also alleged “black holes” for drugs and weapons, but such rumours are not exclusive for quasi states or “Muslim threatened” areas. “Unfriendly” legal states are also targeted by this kind or accusations:

“During Kuchma´s rule, the Ukraine was also suspected of all sorts of arm trafficking. Surprisingly enough, all those accusations vanished when Yushenko and his ‘Orange Revolution’ came to power,” remembers Svetlana. “Nobody has mentioned the smuggling issue ever since”.

Nonetheless, we could have more easily stuck to an example everybody knows: the also alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction weapons’ in Iraq.

Whether there´s any truth in the rumours surrounding Transnistria, they´re very likely to tone down in the near future. Everything points now that Moldova´s long claimed territoriality will be solved by an agreement brokered by Moscow rather than by any kind of military intervention.

After being backed by Russia in and after the war, it seems that the Kremlin is now putting its weight behind Russia’s Slavic brothers on the Dniester. Moldova has been pressurising Russia for years by boasting her intentions of joining NATO. But now that the US global ballistic missile defence has reached Russia´s very borders, and with the Ukraine and Georgia willing to join NATO, Moscow is likely to buy Moldova´s ‘neutrality’ by forcing the Tiraspol authorities to bend down their knees and fully integrate within the Moldovan state.

For Moldova happens to be now a very strategic spot between the borders of Romania (already a NATO member) and the Ukraine. What can Transnistrians offer today to their former allies?

Not too far from here, the Russians from Crimea gather at the port of Sevastopol in support of Russia´s Black Sea Fleet. Will Russia take military action on the Ukraine in case Kiev finally joins NATO and kicks out the Russian fleet? Can Sevastopol be the future capital city of an unrecognised state like Transnistria is today?

“We feel bretayed,” confesses Yuri, 41, looking at his Russian passport once handed out by Moscow; the same one he used to vote for United Russia, Putin´s ruling party, last March. Yuri also keeps his Moldovan passport for practical reasons, and the Soviet one too.

“I keep it for my children,” says this mechanic from Tiraspol, looking at the CCCP abbreviation in gold on the red cover. “One day I want to tell my children that I was born in the biggest country in the world.”

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

The long-awaited fourth and final part in Chris Afir’s account of being incarcerated in an Iraqi prison cell: Following 17 days in an Iraqi prison in 2005, Chris Afir and companion, Zim, finally get a military escort out of the country.

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Before long we arrived in a guarded compound which I was surprised to see was residential, not military. The house we were taken to was just that, a house, where we were left in the care of an old Kurdish man who balked when he saw us. It wasn’t just the unsanitary conditions of the jail but the weeks prior to coming to Iraq during which we had been less than hygienic. It had been at least six weeks since either of us had bathed or shaved and for the three weeks in jail we hadn’t even been allowed to clean our teeth. To add to the veritable Petri dish that our bodies had become our clothes were completely riddled with lice and I didn’t know it at the time but I had also managed to contract scabies. How Zim escaped this most excruciating of afflictions is still a mystery to me I can only presume that his cell was luxurious.
We wanted to burn our clothes but the Kurdish housekeeper forbade it so they were thrown in the trash.

I then had the best shower of my entire life. A grey-faced stranger peered back at me from the mirror as I set to work in shaving off what can only loosely be described as a beard. The wiry brown pubic hairs that had sprouted from my hollow face were alarmingly long but sufficiently sparse to be identified as individual hairs. The same could not be said for the thick tuft of yellow fuzz that had appeared on my top lip, which in many ways I was just as proud of as I was ashamed. Still, it had to go along with the magnitude of filth that I had accumulated.

Sitting on a huge soft sofa, fresh from the shower in clean clothes, it was impossible to even comprehend that only a few hours ago I was in tears hiding under a T shirt having almost given up hope of ever being rescued. For the next few hours Zim and I talked non-stop recounting stories from our respective cells, and friends that we had made inside. This talking didn’t stop when we were taken to be debriefed by the two uniformed soldiers that came to the jail. In fact it was less of a debriefing and more an evening with Zim and Chris. They just sat back and listened as we rattled on and on. I think that they manage to sieve out the information that they needed from our stories because they didn’t ask many questions.

When Ed finally came in to see us all he told us that he was working on a plan to get us safely out of the country. The obvious option of going back to Turkey was out of the question as he was certain that we would be arrested there as spies. The same was said for Syria. His initial plan was to fly us to Baghdad in a helicopter from where we would catch a commercial jet to Amman just over the border in Jordan. I loved this idea. I would never have gone to Baghdad by myself, but the thought of flying there in a helicopter with an army/CIA escort sounded exciting and rather appealing.

We spent most of our first evening making phone calls to friends and parents back home all at the American taxpayers’ expense. Before we went to bed that night we still had one more thing to do before we were completely out of danger. The small piece of hash that had been hidden in the lining of my bag while it was with the police in the jail. I had had repeated nightmares about this being found and it was the first thing that I checked when we had got our bags back a few hours before. Now we were alone, the rest of the house was asleep and Ed was back out saving the world we had the perfect opportunity to destroy the evidence. We burned it in two very rushed but satisfying controlled fires in the small garden in front of our new home.

Over the next few days we did nothing but watch DVDs. This was all we were allowed to do. Scared that we might wander off in to more trouble they had forbidden us from leaving the compound. Walking round the compound was not even interesting. Lots of houses behind high metal doors with various Iraqi guards outside slouching on their rifles or drinking tea in the shade. Our house was mostly empty during the day. Ed would leave in the morning sporting wrap around shades and brandishing an assortment of weaponry no doubt on a top secret mission so we didn’t see him much. Every now and again a soldier or government employee would pop in looking for Ed or someone else and we would tax them for their DVDs, which they would lend us willingly. I was pleased to see that they all had Team America in their collections.

After a few days, or twenty or so movies, we were told the new plan. The Baghdad idea had been cancelled as it was deemed too dangerous so we were to be escorted by road down to Kirkuk where we would catch a military transport plane to Kuwait.
We were pleased to find out that they were not making a special trip just for us and we would be hitching a ride with some government official who was going there anyway.

Kirkuk was in the middle of the war. There was street fighting on a daily basis and a steadily increasing number of American troops were losing their lives there so the situation was understandably tense. In preparation for this trip an Australian mercenary wearing hot pants (yes, hot pants) came and asked us for our blood types. “In case it goes tits up,” he said. Neither Zim nor I knew our blood types and neither did our parents so we were of no help there at all.
On the morning of the trip everyone was especially tense as the previous day a US convoy had been ambushed on the road to the airport and suffered heavy casualties. The very same road we were about to travel down. Zim, I and the government official donned our bullet-proof vests and helmets and clambered into one of three armoured Chevy Suburban cars. The two other cars were stuffed full of mercenaries from various English-speaking countries. All armed to the teeth and wearing wrap around shades. The driver of our car and the other passenger, the hotpants-wearing Aussie from the day before, were equally decked out. The road to Kirkuk is long and straight and it passes numerous abandoned jails, each of which seemed easily capable of holding thousands of men. Hundreds of little windows in these otherwise featureless buildings whizzing past the car each of them once housed some poor bastard who wouldn’t have been as fortunate as Zim or me. Apart from the prisons and the gas flares of the oil fields burning in the distance the whole area was pretty unpopulated and unexciting. Every now and again we would pass a ridge or a bend in the road and the soldiers would become tense and there would be lots of walkie-talkie banter then cars would speed up until the threat was gone.

As we approached Kirkuk someone pointed out the house of Ali Hassan Al Majid, better known as Chemical Ali. His house was a palace perched atop a small hill. He wasn’t in as we drove past as at that time he was living in less spacious conditions at one of Uncle Sam’s infamous ‘guesthouses’. Say what you will about the man, he may well have been an evil murderous bastard who gassed thousands of Iranians and Kurds but he had great taste in houses.

Once in Kirkuk we were driven straight to the joint US UK embassy compound for another debrief. This compound was completely surrounded by three walls of 15ft concrete blast walls and sandbags. The security was intense but once inside it was much more relaxed. There were a number of buildings stretching off in all directions as well as lots of less permanent structures. Beneath the fluttering twin flags of Britain and America was a basketball court where two sweaty teams of Special Forces and private contractors battled in the sun.

We were ushered in to a meeting room where we got to see firsthand the different working styles of two of the world’s great powers. Two men walked in, one British, one American. The American was a bald giant in his 30s in a tight white T-shirt with a gun on his hip. He strode in to the room with purpose, announced himself as a federal agent and started to lay down the Law.
“You guys are in big trouble.” He started “You have broken the law in two sovereign nations. Iraq and Turkey”
It turned out that the Kurds were now saying that they had caught us crossing in to Iraq illegally and therefore suspected us of running drugs or weapons. Thankfully I had insisted on the border that they stamp my passport and so we easily proved our illegal entry. The agent looked a little deflated although the ease with which we convinced him of our innocence shows how little trust there still was between the Americans and their Iraqi counterparts.

The British man then started to speak. He was at least in his fifties with greying hair on his head and white stubble on his unshaved face. His dishevelled jacket had leather elbow patches and he had bad teeth and bad breath. He was the stereotypical geography teacher. He sat down next to me and asked me if there was anything I needed, a doctor or any provisions? That was it! I thanked him and declined but Zim took him up on his offer of a doctor. When they had all left I sat there wondering how these two so very different men could be working for the same team.

A short while later another group of antipodean mercenaries escorted us to the airbase. For this we again had to put on our bullet-proof vests and helmets and were then taken in two separate cars for the short journey across the city. For the duration of the trip I was forced to crouch in the foot well which meant all I really saw of Kirkuk was a pair of Special Forces boots.

Kirkuk airbase is like a small city, it even has its own bus service as well as a Pizza Hut and a Burger King not to mention literally thousands of planes, helicopters, tanks, and other vehicles. On the base we were handed off to another CIA friend of Ed’s, who was to be our chaperone as far as Kuwait. We were in a large semi permanent tent that served as an air terminal for passengers on the large C130 transport planes. There were a handful of soldiers and others waiting with us all watching war movies on a big screen TV. It seemed somewhat odd to me to be in the middle of a war zone with people dying literally less than a mile away, and watching war movies which all tell stories of the futility of war.

We spent hours here in this terminal tent as we were constantly getting told that our plane was still on the ground in Baghdad so what should have been an hour stretched out in to the whole afternoon and longer. We tried to find ways of amusing ourselves but you cant just wander around airbases like they are your back yard so we mainly hung around outside smoking with a group of soldiers from Idaho. Having seen Napoleon Dynamite only a few days before I sympathised with these poor people and understood quite well why they had joined the army. None were too pleased with having been sent out here to fight and die and more than a few of them had some choice words for Donald Rumsfeld. Of course they thought we were idiots for coming to Iraq and thought it even funnier when we got in to trouble again for taking photos. We had been told by our CIA chaperone that taking photos was fine. There were others there with cameras. Only aircraft were off limits so we were being snap happy trying to document as much of the experience as we could taking pictures of pretty much anything, until Zim took a photo of a particularly angry military policeman who marched right over and demanded to know who we were.

Unfortunately we didn’t have the answers to many of his questions so we took him to our chaperone, who was less than amused. They had a private conversation, IDs were shown and then most of the photos were deleted off the camera. They left some of them but that was the end of our picture taking for Iraq. We spent the rest of the time in front of the TV under the watchful glare of our chaperone while the other soldiers laughed. Shortly before sunset we were told that there was yet more delay and so the three of us decided to get some dinner. We hopped on the bus, which did a huge tour of the base picking up and dropping off various people along the way before it arrived at the Burger King. It was not how I’d imagined it at all; it was a white caravan with the BK insignia on the side and a picnic bench out the front. Next to it was Pizza Hut, which didn’t even have its own bench. The food however was exactly as it is in every BK in the world. It even came in a bag that said Burger King Kirkuk in English on one side and Arabic on the other. I sat and ate my Whopper Meal and chatted with some GI who was about to go out on patrol. He was a big tough looking guy but he was genuinely scared. I didn’t envy him, it was his job to simply walk the streets bearing the stars and stripes on his shoulder. No easy task in a city like Kirkuk. I left him to his thoughts and felt thankful that I was on my way home.

By the time we got back to the terminal tent it was dark but our plane was apparently in the air at last. There was a real buzz around the place. All around us men and women were double-checking their weapons and packs. We were all given luggage tags indicating what plane we were going on and before long we were being ushered out on to the tarmac. The young soldiers that I had seen lounging around earlier and making teas were now dressed in full combat fatigues with helmets and night vision goggles marshalling people around with authority. They spent most or their time shouting at us or into their radios trying to be heard over the din of the arriving aircraft. The area outside the terminal was completely dark the only light was coming from the small flashlights the young marshals had strapped to their Kevlar and the red and green blinking from the wing tips of the two huge cargo planes that were taxiing a short distance in front of us.

With the deafening noise it was very disorientating. We were walking in a line holding on to loops in a rope rather like school children crossing the road being led out over the tarmac. Every now and again I would see one of the planes silhouetted against the clouds as it manoeuvred in the darkness. Everybody seemed to know exactly what was going on and it all seemed very organised. The cargo doors opened and within a matter of minutes one load had come off and another had been prepared for the return trip. People were running this way and that barking orders over the noise and I really began to feel the power of the American war machine at work. Running out towards the plane I was acutely award of the giant propellers that were whizzing over my head but the marshals aided by their goggles steered us around any danger zones and safely on to the plane. Inside there was dim lighting enabling us to scramble over the cargo and to some seating. The seats on cargo planes are in fact long canvas benches that run the length of the plane and they are big enough to hold a GI and his backpack so they aren’t that comfortable but as there were only about fifteen of us there was plenty of space. When the last of the cargo had been packed in behind us the lights went red and the pilot came on the radio.

“People like to shoot at the planes here so we will be taking off lights out.” It was a little disconcerting being told by the pilot that we might not even make it to the end of the runway but I didn’t have much time to think about it as we began to move. There was no stopping and waiting every five minutes like at Heathrow, the lights went out and from the moment we started taxiing we increased speed hurtling round corners until the pilot piled on the power and we shot down an invisible runway. If anyone was shooting at us when we took to the sky they must have missed as we tore up in to the sky at alarming speed made all the more dramatic by the sound of the four massive engines powering us that even with earplugs in were deafening.

Our plane was scheduled to stop in Basra before making the short trip on to Kuwait but the monotonous drone of the engines and the darkness of the inside of the plane sent me in to a deep sleep within minutes so when I awoke we were safely out of Iraqi airspace and on our final approach to Ali Al Saleem airbase outside Kuwait City.
Our trip wasn’t quite finished there. We still had one more task to fulfil before we would be free. As we had landed at a military airport we hadn’t had our passports stamped so were not yet legal in Kuwait.

We were handed off by our chaperone to someone from the British embassy who took us the short drive to the commercial airport where he ran in with out passports and shortly returned with a beautiful fresh stamp in each. Now for the first time in over a month we were actually free from custody – masters of our own destiny again. Although we had to return home and face the music we were free to enjoy the next few days in Kuwait without any worries. The British embassy driver, who was a kind man from Goa, drove us to a suitable hotel where we crashed out exhausted from our long, difficult and often terrifying but ultimately rewarding misadventure into Iraq.

Author – Chris Afir.