By motorcycle, by riverboat, sometimes on foot, Butcher completes his journey - finding a Congo of incredible deprivation. In Mukumbo, a village by the river, reached by an epic motorcycle ride, where the chief apologises for being unable to offer any food, Butcher reports on the people's lives:
The normal laws of development are inverted ... the forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary, and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. (The chief had been school in Kalemie, and he could remember when cars used to pass through every few days. Now only bush tracks remain.)During the colonial era, the Belgian administration paid cantonniers, workmen, responsible for every kilometre of the roads, keeping them free from jungle, the culverts cleared of debris and the bridges maintained. In 1949 there were reportedy 111,971km. Butcher doubts from his experience that there are now 1,000. Reaching Mukumbo took Butcher and his two guides 211 km, 16 hours of bone-shaking travel.
Butcher delivers this difficult brew in reader-friendly style, noting for example that cassava is the dominant crop, despite its very limited nutritional value. But because it is exceedingly easy to grow, the fact that an armed man could forcibly take it from you at any time constitutes a definite bonus. Pounded into a bread called fufu, he notes: "It looked like wallpaper paste, smelled of cheese, and tasted of a nasty blend of both."
In the middle of the jungle near Kindu he finds the remains of a '50s armoured car dating from the Mulele Mai rebellion of 1964, with mercenaries led by Mike Hoare. Butcher explains: "It became routine on operations when entering a Congolese town for the mercenary forces to hurry to the local bank, blow the safe with dynamite and take whatever was inside. This was not small-scale stuff, or the work of just a few psychos and hotheads. Without a functioning army of its own, the government of the Congo came to rely on men like Hoare ... for several years the Congo's combat troops were all foreign mercenaries."
Butcher hears from Louise Wright, 61, the last English missionary. Her account of how the legacy of the infamous Belgian colonial period played out: "The Belgians ran their colony on almost military lines. Black Congolese were only allowed to travel if they had passes from the Belgian authorities, and nothing could be done with the blessing of what was effectively the local Belgian commander ... under Mobutu, everything was run along exactly the same lines. Nothing had really changed.
Article comments
1 - Eminpasha
Hey, good review. One quibble--only the Hiroshima bomb was made from Congolese uranium. The Nagasaki bomb was made of plutonium, refined in Hnaford, Washington (state).
2 - Natalie Bennett
Thanks for the correction.
3 - Natalie Bennett
The author of the book sent me the following note about the uranisum: I noticed a message on your site about the plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb. While that is true that it was a plutonium bomb, the detonator was made of uranium that came from the Congo so it remains fair to say uranium from the Congo was used in both devices.