Radio Congo by Rawlence Ben;

Radio Congo by Rawlence Ben;

Author:Rawlence, Ben; [ Rawlence, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 1792231
Publisher: Oneworld Publications


15

The intelligence director’s bath

Railway carriages rust in Kalemie

IT IS STILL DARK. The Moba is waiting to dock at Kalemie, once the east’s major port, the end of the railway that Stanley built from the sea. From this town, Katanga province’s grain, beer, timber and metals used to be shipped across Central Africa legitimately, paying taxes, of course. The port brought prosperity, making Kalemie the jewel of the lake: luxurious sleeper trains carried tourists through the jungle to the beaches by the lake. My pre-dawn arrival is not so glamorous, aboard a dilapidated wreck.

The door of one of the berths clangs open and a woman emerges carrying a bowl of water. She sets it down carefully and squats to light a brazier. As the water warms, she looks out at the lake. The sound of humans waking slowly gathers force. Two soldiers quietly murmur to each other while balancing their rifles on the twisted and broken handrail of the barge. Behind the squatting woman, there is an occasional quack from a duck trussed up on the floor of a small cupboard; somebody’s luggage. When the water starts to bubble, the woman takes it off the heat, pours some into a bucket, and adds more cold. She stands up, unhurriedly undresses and deliberately washes herself on deck, in front of the rest of us, still wrapped in our blankets. After a while, a chorus of mobile phones starts up. Before six in the morning, calls are free, so for the poor this is a vital, if a little inhospitable, window.

Amid the wreckage of the commercial port, a brass band on the quayside plays a welcome for a boat full of refugees returning from Tanzania. No such welcome for me: I follow a round man called Pascale towards an old warehouse in which some cardboard partitions have been erected to make a little office for the Direction générale de migration. Each step of my journey must be noted, documented, stamped. The bureaucracy is an obstacle course. A nervous thin man stamps my passport and welcomes me to Kalemie with a formal bow.

I trail Pascale across rusting train tracks, around which goats graze, past train carriages with smashed windows and towards row upon row of hollow and faded colonial buildings. One, a little less hopeless than the rest, has a sign above the door: ‘Health Office’.

Pascale’s job is to protect the people of Kalemie from strangers unwittingly bringing epidemics into the municipality. Never mind that Kalemie has plenty of its own. Unfortunately for him, the door to his office is locked and he has no key so he agrees to take my vaccination card and deliver it to me later at the Hotel du Lac, where, in a delusional moment, I decided to treat myself after this gruelling cruise.

In the port’s busy heyday, the Hotel du Lac was Kalemie’s grandest hotel. Tall white columns of peeling paint face a boulevard that curves elegantly along the lakeshore. I peer in through the broken windows and heave open the heavy door, to find no one at the solid teak reception desk.



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