The End of the River

We disembarked in the middle of one of the most inaccessible areas on the planet. We had to start thinking about returning to Europe or crossing the Atlantic.   

It was four thousand kilometers through jungle back to the West Coast where our plans were to find passage on a ship to South America, or if not, travel back to Europe overland over the difficult pistes of the Western Sahara.

When we rolled the bike down a makeshift gangway onto the shore, our voyage had taken us fifteen-hundred kilometers on the Congo River through a primeval labyrinth of islands and wet-lands. We had sailed as far as the river was navigable and by the time we docked on the outskirts of Kisangani near the Stanley Falls, we had already seen more of Africa than we could have imagined when we set out across the Sahara months earlier.

Instead of going into Kisangani, we made a choice to circumvent the city and start out on the long and arduous trip to West Africa. We were in the middle of the rain forest that spanned the continent from the Atlantic Ocean in the west and to the plains of Kenya in the east. Besides the river, there were only two roads out of that vast wilderness.

One followed the Ubangi River and back through the central African countries to the coast, a distance of almost four thousand kilometers.

The other would take us to east Africa through Uganda, where the approaching rainy season would make the unpaved roads there impassible.  Added to that, there were horrific news reports resonating throughout the world that the brutal regime of the dictator Idi Amin was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Uganda’s citizens and deporting or imprisoning foreigners.

On our way to the road that led back through the jungle to Bangui, the descriptions that I had read about a few years earlier recounting the violent ethnic wars around Kisangani, then called Stanleyville, came to life.

The grand and stately villas on Kisangani’s outskirts that five years earlier were inhabited by Europeans and the Congo’s ruling class, were in ruins, abandoned and looted. Their facades were pock marked by bullets, with smashed windows gaping out onto yards and gardens that were being reclaimed by the jungle that had once surrendered them.

We drove slowly through this ghost town on streets where weeds grew from potholes and cracks in the pavement. The decay was not only evidence of the Congo’s turbulent and genocidal history, but a harbinger of the violence that would envelope it in the future. 

We felt as though we were intruders in a place where the law was summarily arbitrated by who was holding the AK-47. We left Kisangani in a hurry and pitched our tent those first nervous nights as far from that sorrowful town as we could.

My intuitive fears were well grounded. It was as though the provinces that we were travelling through had lived through one nightmare, only to quickly glide into another.  There was only a brief hiatus between the Congo’s bloody wars.

It’s estimated that in the second Congo War of the late nineteen-nineties, that three and a half million people died and five million were displaced. Hundreds of armed groups continue to terrorize the country, fighting over control of its enormous mineral wealth or in ethnic clashes.