Bas Congo road trip

I’m back from my road trip across Bas Congo. Five days, 1 400 kms, 4 districts, 10 territories, lots of red dust, countless towns, street-side market stalls, faces peering suspiciously through the window, children yelling and waving, old mamas walking along the side of the road doubled over under the weight of mammoth piles of wood hanging down their backs from bags slung across their foreheads, young men ambling ahead laughing and swinging machetes, etc, etc. All work – but this is the kind of work I enjoy.

I wonder if everyone else finds that sitting in a car, watching the world go by at high speed, catching fleeting nuggets of so many different lives, is particularly cathartic; if others, like me, find themselves thinking about their whole life, not in a particularly introspective way, not really judging, just remembering. I get the same way in aeroplanes. And boats. As long as I’m not driving. And on horses. But not bicycles.

Anyway.

Bas Congo is seeped with colonial history. Boma, a couple of hours upriver from the Atlantic in a fast motorboat (rather longer in a man-powered dug-out), was the first capital of King Leopold’s Congo state. You can still see the old church – the first church in Congo, I am told –the old post office, and a number of Victorian mansions with big windows, covered porches and decorated roofs that must have served as government offices or houses for European officials in the late 19th century. Boma is also where the ceremony took place transferring ownership of the Congo from Leopold to the Belgian government in 1908. In exchange, the Belgian government assumed 110 million francs’ worth of debts, agreed to pay 45.5 million francs toward some of the king’s pet building projects in Europe, and paid another 50 million francs to the king himself. You can guess where the money was meant to come from.

You can also see signs of Mr Stanley across Bas Congo – in Boma we had drinks in a place called “le Baobab de Stanley” where you could pay 200 FC for the pleasure to go inside a baobab which Stanley may or may not have touched himself. Boma is where Stanley ended up at the end of his famous two and a half year trip across Africa covering 7,000 miles from east to west after being the first person to chart the course of the Congo River. And here was I complaining about a sore spot in my back after two hours on a bumpy road.

Bas Congo is where the infamous railway line cuts through, linking the port of Matadi with Kinshasa. The project was described by Adam Hochschild (my reference in most matters relating to Congo’s early colonial history) as “a modest engineering success and a major human disaster.” A plaque just outside Matadi commemorates the building of the railway, which took no less than eight years for only 241 miles. It doesn’t mention how many people died. On the positive side, the railway did replace porterage, which by all accounts was gruesome and barbaric (endless files of starving men chained at the neck carrying monstrous loads, that kind of thing). King Leopold had construction workers brought in from China, amongst other places, to build the railway. Today, you can see Chinese men sitting motionless on their haunches all along the road from Kinshasa to Matadi, supervising lines of Congolese workers contracted to help rebuild the road. Un clin d’oeil au passé peut-être.

P.S: Can't seem to download any pictures. Later then.