Best American Travel writing 2008 by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

During the afternoons, when the heat drove us indoors, the captain would stand at the wheel and mix the bad lessons with the good. His eyes would focus on the channel and he’d explain the things he knew, like how the water silvered at dusk and hid the sandbars, or how the bank appeared dangerously close in the cool morning air. He’d point out whirlpools roiling in the deep spots, crocodiles camouflaged in the mud, or, along a wooded island, a tree whose leaves cured hemorrhoids. After the rains, we trained our eyes upriver and watched ghost ships hover over the water. Low pressure from the storm can play tricks on your eyes, the captain explained, and through a pair of binoculars the boats returned to earth as the rust-eaten barges they really were. At other times Buisine would point to the distant bank, where a brick building stood shrouded in vines and decay, a remnant of colonial days, and tell the story of the hospital or timber mill the locals had permitted the forest to reclaim. He told me how during the grand days of the colony, rivermen pushed more than two hundred million tons of product a year up and down the Congo. Now, he says, they’re lucky if they move even two million. And because there were more and bigger boats, the river was dredged then, and a well-trained captain was easy to find. There were signs posted along the banks indicating sandbars and snags, depth and direction of tributaries; signs telling the rivermen they weren’t alone on the black water at night. The captain would wax sentimental about these years before the collapse, when he was young and the country made sense, and during these reveries his eyes never left the river.

He’d been there from the beginning and had watched the dominoes fall one by one. He’d grown up in the eastern town of Bukavu, where his family owned a quarry and cinchona plantation on Lake Kivu. He later served in the French navy and, once discharged, returned to Bukavu looking for quick money and adventure, organizing gorilla tours in nearby Kahuzi-Biega National Park and leading tourists up the smoldering Nyiragongo volcano in the Virunga Mountains.

But the government seized the family’s plantation in the mid-1970s, during Mobutu’s nationalist land-grab campaign known as “Zairianization.” Buisine’s uncle walked into his office one morning and found an African sitting in his chair, a midlevel government official from Kinshasa who’d never picked up a shovel. Cinchona (the natural source of quinine) requires meticulous pruning and cultivation, but the new owner rushed the harvest, and the entire crop died. “People whose families had worked there a century committed suicide right then,” said Buisine. Years later, Buisine was working at Kinshasa’s Palace of the People when he received a phone call one morning at 5 A.M. It was President Mobutu, screaming over the line: “Buisine! From now on you work for me.” Mobutu had been impressed by the Frenchman’s military background and family history in Congo.

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