Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

Tim Butcher, a British journalist working as Africa correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, set out in 2004 to retrace the 3,000-kilometer route that explorer Henry Morton Stanley followed through the Congo between 1874 and 1877. Stanley, also a Telegraph reporter, had mapped the Congo River on a joint commission from the paper and The New York Herald, proving the continent's interior could be opened by steamboat. His discovery caught the eye of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, who claimed the entire Congo River basin as his personal colony, triggering the Scramble for Africa, the late-nineteenth-century rush by European powers to claim African territory. Butcher sees the Congo as a symbol of the continent's failure, a country with immense natural resources whose potential has been squandered by colonial exploitation, the devastating 32-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, and the wars that followed his overthrow in 1997. He spent three years researching and planning, consulting missionaries, mercenaries, aid workers, and diplomats, before booking a flight, writing his first will, and saying goodbye to his partner, Jane.

Butcher flew first to Lubumbashi, the Congo's second city and capital of the southeastern province of Katanga, where he witnessed a cobalt-mining boom driven by surging Chinese demand. Despite the money flowing in, corruption at every level prevented any benefit from reaching the local economy. At the railway station where his mother caught a train across the Congo in 1958, he found no rolling stock, just empty tracks and silence. He took a UN shuttle flight north to Kalemie, a decayed port on Lake Tanganyika that the Belgians once called the "Pearl of Tanganyika." What he found was a hollowed-out ruin: buildings reduced to façades, an overgrown railway station, and bicycle taxis as the main form of transport. The only vehicles were a handful of UN jeeps and one missionary Land Rover.

In Kalemie, Butcher assembled his team. Benoit Bangana, an engineer with the aid group Care International, arrived with two motorbikes and offered to guide him partway. Georges Mbuyu, a pygmy human-rights activist who ran a small organization called La Voix des Minorités (Minorities' Voice), agreed to help negotiate with local mai-mai, militia groups who roamed the region. A third motorbike was rented from Fiston Kasongo, a local man whose bike proved unreliable. After obtaining travel permission from the district commissioner and the local military commander, Butcher faced a deadline: Benoit and his colleague Odimba planned to leave at five a.m. with or without him.

The group departed before dawn. Repeated flat tires on Fiston's bike caused delays. Their first encounter with mai-mai, a teenage girl and an elderly man carrying rusting Kalashnikov rifles, was defused by Georges with cigarettes and calm conversation. At a village called Ngenzeka, a boy led Butcher to human skulls and bones bleached in the undergrowth, remnants of fighting too numerous for villagers to bury. After the fourth flat tire, Georges and Fiston turned back toward Kalemie. Progress improved, and the group sped past the burned-out village of Mulolwa, its huts reduced to ash circles.

Butcher met Muke Nguiy, a palm-oil trader pushing a bicycle on a 600-kilometer round trip, earning $30 profit for weeks of walking. After 16 hours of travel, the group reached a village where the chief said the last vehicle had passed through around 1985 and the children had never seen a motorbike. Butcher notes that the normal laws of development are inverted in the Congo: grandfathers have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren.

On the second day, dehydration and exhaustion took a severe toll. After 535 kilometers, Butcher reached the Care International base in Kasongo, collapsing upon seeing the first electric light since Kalemie. Kasongo, once a major city and the epicenter of the 1892 war between Belgian colonists and Arab slavers, had been swallowed by advancing jungle. Butcher traces the Belgian rubber atrocities that devastated this region, including the severing of hands to terrorize the population into meeting quotas.

From Kasongo, Butcher continued by motorbike with Odimba and reached the Congo River, crossing it by pirogue, a dugout canoe hollowed from a single tree trunk. Two more days of riding brought him to Kindu, a port on the upper Congo where he found no functioning Congolese motorboat. He stayed with the local Anglican bishop, Masimango Katanda, and visited Louise Wright, the last English missionary in eastern Congo, a 61-year-old living in a mud hut. Wright observed that only two options remained for Congolese people: join a church or join a militia.

After days of waiting, Butcher secured a ride on a UN river patrol boat crewed by Uruguayan sailors. As a nearby rebel commander threatened to abandon the peace process, Butcher chose to leave the patrol boat and was deposited alone on the river bank near Lowa. He hired four pirogue paddlers and traveled 150 kilometers downriver toward Ubundu, sleeping in the bottom of the canoe and sheltering from storms in riverside huts. Arriving in total darkness, with the roar of the Stanley Falls growing louder, he doubled the agreed pay to persuade the terrified paddlers to cross the river at night. At the ruined harbor, he confronted a boy soldier, barking orders in a gamble to maintain an illusion of authority. The gunman saluted him.

The town's last Catholic priest, Father Adalbert Mwehu Nzuzi, warned Butcher to leave immediately because of a feared mai-mai leader whose men killed with knives and machetes. Three motorbike riders from an aid group arrived to deliver vaccines, and Butcher rode with them through 143 kilometers of equatorial rainforest to Kisangani, a major city on the Congo River. Along the way, his boot struck a cast-iron railway sleeper buried under leaf mulch, a remnant of the old Equator Express railway and evidence of a modern world that tried and failed to establish itself.

In Kisangani, Butcher spent two frustrating weeks searching for a way downriver. He met Oggi Saidi, a fisherman who spoke English learned from 1980s tourists and who pleaded with Butcher to take his four-year-old son to South Africa. Butcher could not comply. After watching a fuel tanker depart without him, he finally secured a place on a UN-chartered barge heading 1,000 kilometers downstream to Mbandaka.

The seven-day river passage unfolded in torpor. Navigation relied on a moldy 30-year-old map book and a crew member probing for channels with a tree branch. Desperate pirogues intercepted the boat daily, paddlers risking their lives to sell cassava and fish at rock-bottom prices. Butcher reflects on the world's changed attitude toward the Congo: Once the dominant human-rights issue of the Edwardian era, when campaigners exposed Leopold's atrocities and coined the term "crimes against humanity," the Congo now draws international fatigue despite a death toll exceeding four million. On the third day, Butcher fell ill with nausea and headaches that worsened steadily. When he reached Mbandaka and found no boats departing for Kinshasa, he reluctantly took a UN helicopter to the capital, skipping the final river section.

In Kinshasa, Butcher recovered in a luxury villa belonging to the cobalt-mining company, a world of polished floors and designer kitchens disconnected from everything he had witnessed. After regaining his strength, he drove roughly 450 kilometers to Boma, the port near the Congo River's mouth where Stanley's expedition ended in 1877. He reflects that the most valuable asset stolen from the Congo was the sovereignty of its people, stripped first by colonialism and then hijacked by self-interested elites after independence.

At the water's edge in Boma, Butcher thinks about the river as the thread connecting the continent's bloody history. He fingers a pebble picked up 2,000 kilometers upstream: It is the color of dried blood. In an epilogue, he reports that the Congo held its first meaningful election since 1960 in July 2006, but fighting erupted before the results were announced. An estimated 1,200 people continued to die daily from violence and insecurity.