“What is your mission? and Pourquoi? (Why?)” asked the Commander of the Congolese National Intelligence Agency (ANR) branch in Mutshatsha.
We were being interrogated by six people in the courtyard of our little hotel a day after arriving in this nondescript Congolese village having entered the country from Zambia via a little-known border post by motorbike taxi.
Why indeed?
When dealing with a local ANR commander while speaking only basic French and Swahili, it’s best to avoid the philosophical complexity of such a question and stick to our straightforward answer that worked a charm, every time:
Dave: “I crossed the DRC in 1998 by foot, truck, dugout canoe and river boat which was a life-changing experience. Whenever I describe the Congo, my stories are very different to the only Congo stories one sees on TV which are about war, corruption and Ebola. My wife now wants to see for herself who is telling the truth.”
This answer charmed the various officials and the police/soldiers/random-people-with-guns and also made them a (tiny) bit embarrassed to ask for a bribe and thus confirm the “corruption” part of the international stereotype. Rejane’s foreign feminine presence was also such a novelty that these officials - always men - struggled to appear both chivalrous and intimidating at the same time. But, most importantly, we were not scared of them and we never pay bribes so our task was merely to communicate this in the most friendly way possible and emphasise that even if they forced us to wait days we would never pay.
Our first major interrogation ended after a few hours with the Commander giving the owner of our hotel a dressing down for not having informed the Intelligence Agency when supposedly “the first tourists ever” to come to Mutshatsha walked into his hotel. We then departed together and the Commander demanded a beer at the bar for his time, which we politely but firmly refused.
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| Intelligence officials also like selfies (he didn't ask for a bribe) |
While we certainly weren’t “the first tourists ever”, it felt that way for most of our travels through rural DRC. Soon after arriving in Mutshatsha we were asked to ‘take away’ a homeless man lying on the side of the road. We were told that he had malaria or was mentally ill or was affected by a witchcraft spell. It seemed that since the only other visitors to Mutshatsha in the distant past were missionaries or aid workers, we were expected to be able to heal the man physically and/or spiritually. To the confusion of everyone, we had to politely refuse the obligation, not being endowed with either international aid resources or spiritual healing powers. The 'ni-hao' greetings we often got and children shouting ‘Chinois, chinois!’ made us think that the only other visitors the town might be familiar with are Chinese businessmen and contractors.
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| Mutshatsha |
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| School in Mutshatsha |
Fortunately, the mobile money revolution that is so visible in Zambia has reached the DRC too and, in the south of the country, Airtel Money is widely used. Initially it seemed like there was no way to transfer money from our bank account to our Airtel phone but then we discovered the World Remit app that allowed you to instantly transfer dollars from your credit card to your DRC Airtel Money account which you could cash relatively easily at little shops and kiosks in the town. At some shops you could even pay for your purchases with the Airtel Money directly. Crisis averted!
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| Mutshatsha main road |
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| Special, off-road truck-buses owned by the DRC government. Unfortunately heading in the opposite direction to us. |
Rested, we were now ready to move on from the border town and deeper into the Congo. On our first day in Mutshatsha, there had been two trucks passing through and then nothing, not one vehicle for two days going in the direction we were headed. The road from Kolwezi to the east of us was so bad that all the trucks were stuck stuck stuck in deep mud. No vehicles could make it through except motorbikes…
There was nothing we could do but find a motorbike taxi again and settle in for the ride. The road was better than the one from Zambia to Mutshatsha but that meant that the motorbike driver increased the speed considerably. While it did feel good to cover the next 100 odd kilometers in four hours rather than six, it was rather jaw-clenching with three people, luggage and no motorbike helmets to be found anywhere.
On the way we passed trucks deeply stuck in giant, smelly mud holes. We later found out that it is quite normal for a truck to take three weeks to complete the 300km from Kolwezi to Kasaji on this, the main provincial highway.
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| Truck stuck on the main highway in Lualaba province, DRC |
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| This is why it can take a truck 3 weeks to cover 300km |
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| Our Congolese friends in Kasaji |
In Kasaji we met a lovely young Congolese couple who were on a mission to find and trade gold. The extraction and trade in minerals seems to be a confusing mixture of official government activities, forays by neighbouring countries to score some easy pickings and civilians who make finds in and around their villages. We even met a young guy who had dreams of coming to South Africa as soon as he could find some gold to pay for the trip. Make no mistake, the DRC has a lot of minerals - while we were there, a small village in eastern DRC struck gold with slightly chaotic results: news article about gold mountain (from BBC Pidgin).
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| Our guesthouse in Kasaji |
Kasaji had a nice food market. Here we were introduced to one local treat called Kikanda. It is locally known as the “African polony” and is a vegan “meat loaf” that it is made from crushed groundnuts and forest orchid tubers. While the food variety was limited, our Congolese diet was very healthy with few processed foods and not even one chocolate to be found in all the rural areas we travelled through. The markets were not close to the diversity of those in neighbouring Zambia but the vegetables we did find included: tomatoes, onions, spring onions, chillies, a good variety of green leaves, lots and lots of groundnuts and palm oil for cooking. Starch: fufu (a hard not very tasty pap made with manioc flour) is ubiquitous, rice (you have to cook your own or wait for the time it takes the restaurant to make it specially), wonderful fresh rolls and baguettes. Meat: goat is most common, then pork but you can find chicken and beef although not all the time. Lots of fish, particularly in towns near the giant rivers. Fruit: bananas, avocados (these are everywhere and cost as little R0.70/$0.05), pineapples and mangos (although we were at the end of the mango season). Excellent locally grown and processed coffee is available everywhere and very cheap, about R30/$2 a kilogram (you would pay at least 10 times that in South Africa). A sad result of the very bad roads is that one never even hears about the existence of Congolese coffee. The only thing that was hard to find was dairy - perhaps evidenced in the sadly bandy legs of little children which could be from calcium deficiencies. We also saw cases of polio in teenage children in the more remote villages.
Kasaji also brought another demand to visit immigration and the National Intelligence Agency. While on the way to the offices to deliver our documents for inspection, Dave spotted an Indian man. This was cause for some excitement as our spices were running low and there was no way to replace them, there being only stock cubes, salt and chillies to be found in the markets. Rejane wasted no time visiting his shop. After a little chit chat about our Indian travels, enquiries were made about how one could obtain some spices. He didn’t sell any in the shop but his wife had lots of spices in the house of course. His wife, who is Pakistani, was called from the house through the back. She was very excited to see Rejane and offers of tea, lunch, dinner and a place to stay for as long as we liked were made. She didn’t speak any French and the last visitors she’d had had been two years previously. When we recognised the pictures on their walls to be that of the Aga Khan, they were very impressed with the knowledge we’d gained of the Ismaili Islamic sect from our travels in the Wakhan and Bartang regions of Tajikistan, where it is the dominant religion. We were thoroughly fed and more spices than we could possibly carry were pressed upon us.
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| A typical small shop in the DRC. Everything has to come down those terrible roads. And you can pay with Airtel (mobile phone) Money. |
After the few days’ rest we needed to recover from the hair-raising motorbike journey, we were ready to move on again. This journey was relatively uneventful except for a moment when we almost slipped into a deep mud hole but were saved at the last minute by grabbing hold of a tree that happened to be within reach… in retrospect, toppling into a mud hole with a heavy bike on top of you could have been quite a serious accident… but in the DRC there is simply no time to spend being retrospective with all the challenges in your face, all the time. The motorbike’s engine also got flooded by a particularly deep river crossing which delayed us for an hour or so while we repaired it.
The next stop was the vibrant and beautifully lush town of Sandoa. A wonderful town to ‘promenade’ in (‘promenading’ very cleverly is a verb in French) with a palm-tree-lined main road and old crumbling colonial buildings, including a lovely Cineplex that had been resurrected to broadcast Canal+, a French satellite TV station, on Sundays. The main road had eroded away exposing the foundations of the old buildings. Congo is many things, and one of these things is that it is a living example of what becomes of towns, villages and a country when no maintenance is done to infrastructure for 60 years. Once again we were celebrities with scores of children following us through the town and crawling under the gate of our hotel for a peek.
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| Sandoa main road |
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| The "Cineplex" in Sandoa |
We would be asked what our mission was in every village or town that we stayed in, and even some that we were just passing through, by National Intelligence Agency officials, immigration officers and policemen. Every village and town has representatives of all three of these arms of the DRC government. In colonial times, immigration offices (DGM) were set up in every town to monitor and restrict movements during Sleeping Sickness pandemics (caused by tsetse flies). Sleeping Sickness is no longer a problem but the many immigration offices remain. The National Intelligence Agency was most likely deemed necessary during the periods of war and due to the ongoing insecurity in parts of the country. The policemen didn't seem to care too much about us but they were curious and we would sometimes be delayed at the rudimentary tree-branch-boom gates that they set up at the entrance to their villages, for a chat or for them to demand a bribe from our motorbike drivers. All motorbike drivers are supposed to have vehicle papers, that none of them ever seem to have, and so a bribe has to be negotiated.
At almost every one of the encounters we had with these government officials there is a polite request for a drink or something for the work they have supposedly done for us. This work being an interrogation of our mission and the painstaking copying down of all the details of our passports. Less often, the bribe request is aggressive. One soldier in camouflage patted his machine gun while Dave explained, as always, that it was completely impossible for us to pay a bribe. When the realisation dawns that we are of the view that we don’t need to pay them anything, incredulity sets in. One officer asked: “Je dois boire de l'eau?" “Must I drink water?” to which Dave replied:”Yes, water is very good for health!”. A bit of a waiting game might then begin until they finally realise that we have more time to spend on waiting out the stalemate than they do. Occasionally one had to be a little more aggressive and, picking the right moment, stand up, take back one’s documents, say goodbye and walk out the door briskly, hoping that they don’t call you back. This worked most of the time.
In their defence, there was a time in the past when these officials received no salary at all and they were expected to earn a living through fees charged to citizens for their “services”. Times have changed and government officials are now earning salaries but, unfortunately, the bribe culture has stuck and even the poorest Congolese are expected to pay something whenever they cross the many checkpoints or if they require some official document or government assistance.
The endless waiting for officials to do their work allowed us plenty of time to contemplate and reflect on their main question: So what is our mission?
Why do we travel the way we do on public transport in some of the most remote corners of the world, often with extreme levels of discomfort? There are a few reasons:
- We are interested in the way people live the best lives they can, the challenges they have to navigate to earn a living and to provide in the best way possible for their families. You simply can’t learn this when you stay in a resort or travel in a way that removes you from the local population,
- We find that one understands one’s own home and challenges when you can put it into a global context. It is sometimes hard to appreciate the history, politics and complexity of a place unless you’ve walked the streets and engaged with its people. You begin to understand the complexity of your own country and the global context of its challenges. You learn new ideas, how to do things better and how not to do things. The work we do in South Africa at the Bulungula Incubator is important to us and this kind of travel enhances our ability to do that work.
- One gets to see the extremes of human endurance in the face of deprivation and also the strength of humanity, human compassion and the scope for connectedness, often when you least expect it.
- It's a reboot for the brain. After a few days of lying on the beach one’s mind inevitably wanders back to the daily problems of work and life. When you’re transported into a totally different reality, a world you don’t understand, where everything is unfamiliar, sometimes even the language, your brain power is marshalled to the present and getting through the challenge in front of you. Your mind has to clear out the debris of the daily work and life stress that accumulates in our regular lives, just to figure out how and what to get for dinner and how to get safely from one place to the next.
Moving on from Sandoa, we felt like we were now experts in motorbike travel. Once again there was no other way to travel. It was about 200km to Musumba. Motorbike travel wasn’t comfortable but it got you there, albeit after many hours of jaw-clenching stress. Getting going was a little slow as usual with the motorbike driver doing all sorts of servicing to his vehicle, filling up of petrol at the roadside petrol stalls and making a few inexplicable trips back and forth to his house. We could never figure out why this all had to be done on the morning of a trip. Anyway we just relaxed into it: we had been told that we had about 6 hours of travel ahead of us so we’d arrive in Musumba in the late afternoon.
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| Stopping for the night en route to Musumba |
While we were merely celebrities in the larger villages, we were treated like psychedelic unicorns in the smaller ones. Large crowds gathered, encircling us to stare in fascination as Dave dressed Rejane’s burn wound and we erected our tent. Despite being so remote, there were nevertheless a few camera phones about and our every move was photographed - a welcome change from the days when travellers were the only people with cameras and felt awkward taking photos. After washing in a nearby stream we had a basic dinner of fufu with some kind of meat we couldn’t identify in a sauce and of course the ubiquitous pondu (pounded cassava leaves) you got with every meal. There was sand everywhere and even the fufu was a bit crunchy. We were grateful though to be washed, somewhat fed and largely in one piece, sleeping in the safety of a village. We fell asleep to the sounds of singing, light drumming and some rowdiness from the local shebeen.
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| A rural DRC "petrol station" |
By 11am we reached Musumba and we decided that our one-motorbike journey experiences were now behind us.
Musumba is the “royal capital” of the Lunda people who stretch from the DRC into Angola and Zambia. The town is bigger than others in the region and stands out for having a rather smart and effective electricity system, thanks to an old Belgian missionary who has lived in a neighbouring village for almost 50 years. The warm and welcoming Frère Jaak runs the Catholic Salvatore mission in Kapanga which was founded in 1955. Frère Jaak arrived in 1976, when he was a young priest, not yet ordained, in his 20s. He remained through the Mobutu years and uprisings by the Katanga Tigers in 1977 and 1978 and even when white people were targeted in massacres in Kolwezi near where we had started our journey. Fifty years later he is one of the few white missionaries who remain in the country and we were told by many local people that he speaks the local language with a deeper fluency than most local people. In addition to a school, hospital and new chapel, Frère Jaak’s most impressive and appreciated legacy is the installation of hydro-electric generators in a nearby river that feeds a large region with reliable electricity.
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| Frère Jaak on the right, Kapanga |
The DRC suffers from acute energy poverty. A country of over 90 million people, it has only 2.75GW of electricity generating capacity and the country’s total consumption of power is considerably less than that of the City of Cape Town. Only 19% of all Congolese have access to electricity with that number falling to just 4% in rural areas. Almost all this electricity is generated by hydro-power, most notably the Inga dam on the Congo river.
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| Our guesthouse in Musumba |
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| Collecting water at the communal tap at our guesthouse |
Despite suffering from such electricity-poverty, it was bizarre to see in places like Mutshatsha - which did have intermittent electricity - that people would leave all their energy-inefficient lights on, even during the day. After making enquiries, we discovered that households pay a flat rate per month for the connection (about $15 per month) and then can use as much electricity as they want. So, as any economist would tell you, there is no incentive for people to save electricity thus exacerbating the country’s energy shortages and resulting in daily power outages. SNEL, the state-owned electricity company, is a long way from having the ability to install and monitor electricity meters and so the country with one of the worst cases of energy poverty, is also one where people often waste electricity without consequences.
The sole exception to the above problem is Frère Jaak’s electricity grid in Musumba/Kapanga which charges users per (prepaid) unit of electricity and is thus both reliable and sustainable. On our daily missions around the town, one could see the impact of reliable electricity, not just in terms of benefits to households but also visible in a multitude of small businesses using the electricity to do welding, carpentry, vehicle repairs and food processing. Read more about this project here.
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| Shopping in Musumba market |
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| The local baker in Musumba |
Frère Jaak treated us to a generous and tasty lunch at which we were joined by some of the young Congolese priests studying at the mission. They provided some insight into the current political climate in which there is some hope for positive change under new president Ettiene Tshisekedi - the first person in almost 60 years to come to power democratically.
In Musumba, there is a large central “plaza” area with an enormous television installed by the local government. Every evening, hundreds of people fill the area watching various much-beloved South American soap operas and the odd movie creating a festive, communal atmosphere. We hung out there a few times, but generally became such a centre of attention that we would move on to find somewhere more quiet.
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| Musumba central plaza with big TV |
Our five days in Musumba were otherwise spent visiting the markets to buy meat and veggies to cook and watching vibrant daily life passing by the verandah of our little guesthouse. The fact that Musumba’s only link to the outside world is the horrific road we had travelled on means that almost all traffic on the bustling main road consists of motorbikes transporting people around the town and bicycles heavily laden with goods being pushed by exhausted men. Very occasionally, a 4x4 vehicle would drive past but the fact that no other form of car can actually get to Musumba means that cheaper smaller cars are totally non-existent.
Daily life in Musumba slowly passing by our verandah
We've seen kids playing this dancing game throughout our travels. We have no idea how it works.
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| Bicycle transporters: the backbone of the DRC's rural economy |
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| The old river ferry is no more |
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| The new ferry |
After a few more hours, thankfully without incident/accident, we arrived at the village near the provincial border where we were dropped off. There we were at a distinct negotiation disadvantage with the few motorbikes in the village wanting to overcharge us. An appeal to the village elders and led to a fairer price and we were on our way again. We soon reached the “border post” of the neighbouring Kasai province. The DRC must be one of the only countries in the world where citizens have to pay import/custom duties when they travel from one province to another. At this border post a group of bicycle transporters were busy paying “taxes'' for the sacks of goods they were transporting. It would be interesting to know how much, if any, of these taxes reach the provincial government. The border military/police/immigration tried to shake us down for money and when we refused they emptied our backpacks onto the ground in search of who knows what. In the end, we were allowed to continue on our way with the unhappy officials none the richer.
After some emergency repairs to one of the bikes that repeatedly broke down, we travelled rapidly through a bustling village with lots of police/soldiers milling about and as we exited the other side, without being stopped, we thought we were in the clear until a motorbike with an armed soldier came chasing after us, shouting that we needed to return to the village to be interrogated. There we found a fairly festive atmosphere with soldiers and police, many clearly drunk, trying to decide whether they were happy to see us or wanting to scare us into giving them money. Dave was taken off for discussions in a separate shack while Rejane had to endure the tipsy though mostly friendly attentions of various soldiers, one of whom had family members in South Africa, who he was hoping to join just as soon as he had found some gold in the forest. Given that our papers were in order, Dave had to give the soldiers the usual spiel about why we were in the DRC and why we don’t pay bribes. The soldiers tried a new trick in claiming that the motorbikes and their chauffeurs were under our control and thus their lack of documents were somehow our fault, but after an hour of banter and quite a few photo shoots, we were on our way again with neither us nor the chauffeurs having paid anything. These delays mean that we had to travel the last two hours of the journey to Luiza at night, but our chauffeurs were skilled and we had no accidents.
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| In the Congo, your interrogators want selfies 😅 |
The Congolese are attractive people, tall, slim and elegant and the women have the coolest hair-styles. While Dave was used to being the tallest person in the Zambian crowds, this certainly was not the case in the DRC. The Congolese are also vocal and extroverted and not at all quiet and deferential like most Zambians. Initially, we often thought that we were witnessing the beginning of a violent fight when in fact the Congolese seem to specialise in dramatic arguments that seem furious but end in smiles. The decades of having to make your own way without any help from the government has also made people incredibly self-reliant and not easily intimidated. Even teenage boys being shaken down for bribes at police checkpoints would aggressively stand up for themselves, not in the least afraid. The DRC is a sleeping giant of human energy - they lack only the infrastructure upon which to build their dreams.
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| Luiza's innovative phone fixer repairing Dave's earphones |
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| Heating his soldering iron in the fire |
Travelling in this part of rural DRC, it would be impossible to know that there is currently a global Covid19 pandemic. In our first four weeks we saw perhaps five people wearing masks. Most government officials wore no masks in their offices. In one of the early immigration offices, there was a temperature check at the door, but when we tried to present our negative Covid test from Zambia, the official wasn’t interested and said that he had just tested us for Covid and pointed to the thermometer. Fortunately, almost everything is done outside where the risk of transmission is much lower. There were certainly lots of people coughing - wet coughs - but when we pointed this out to the people who claimed that there is “no corona in the DRC” they merely replied that this is normal for the rainy season. Those wet coughs may not be Covid19, but they are most likely a flu or cold virus transmitted in the same way. So it seems probable that some Covid19 is circulating. It wasn’t clear whether it is actually possible to test oneself for Covid19 in this region - the giant Kasai province has the questionable achievement of only having one positive Covid test since the beginning of the pandemic. The long motorbike rides certainly gave us lots of time to ponder what was going on. Besides unproven theories on possible forms of immunity that might exist, it is perhaps also worth noting that the global fatality rate for over-70 year olds is one in twenty. Given the poverty and lack of health care in rural DRC, perhaps the death rate for over 70’s is normally higher than one in twenty. In which case, the few people who reach this age would not be dying at a significantly higher rate. Certainly we did not meet a single person in the entire month who thought that Covid19 was present in rural DRC let alone killing anyone. If a tree in the forest falls unheard, does it make a sound? Given that there is minimal access to health care in the region - no oxygen at all, no testing - and that globally it has been almost impossible for poor countries to lock the virus down, perhaps the Congolese are better off living fearlessly, in denial. But then you look at a church, full of people singing, and you wonder... what is the right thing to do in this situation…
After Luiza we looked forward to seeing Kananga, our very first Congolese city, four weeks after entering the country. It was to be our last, long motorbike journey. Thankfully, it was injury free although we did get caught in a rainstorm that turned the road into a slippery mess. We also encountered very deep sand with a few trucks badly stuck and bicycle transporters struggling to push their way forward. While the first two weeks of travel had alternated between grassland and forests, the last two weeks of the journey was dominated by grasslands with just the occasional forested stretch. The tiny villages we passed along the road had beautiful home-made cane furniture and many had attractive, little flower gardens out front. The primary economic activities were growing a few palm trees for palm oil, the farming of manioc/kasava, maize and coffee. As we reached further north there were some cattle farmers.
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| Our motorbike chauffer bought these dried fish en route |
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| Typical village between Luiza and Kananga |
On the outskirts of Kananga we came to an imposing checkpoint where one of our chauffeurs instructed us to go along with his story that we were on our way to meet the provincial governor and thus he should not have to pay whatever fee/ bribe was expected of him. This was a bit awkward as we weren’t in the habit of lying to the police so we just pretended not to speak any French and talked rapidly in English. This seemed to confuse everyone and at least allowed us later plausible deniability that we knew what our chauffeur had been talking about. After passing the checkpoint we were soon entering what felt like a giant city, after the past few weeks in small villages, which had wide tar roads and an abundance of motorbike and pedestrian chaos in every direction. Slightly disoriented, we managed to find an affordable hotel and so, after 900km of crazy motorbike adventures, we ended the first phase of our Congolese travels.
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| Kananga: our first DRC city |
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| A Kanangan bicycle transporter with 400kg of bricks on his bike |
••Congolese song of the month (takes 90 seconds to get going):
••Book of the month (having read a lot of books about the DRC, this is the best):
Congo: The Epic History of a People
by David Van Reybrouck
