Blood River Read Online Free PDF Page B

onto the ground. I might not have been able to see the
lake but I could smell it now - a rich, sedgy aroma in the still,
steamy atmosphere. Although Kalemie is in Katanga, the same
province as Lubumbashi, the eco-system is radically different.
The city lies on a dry plateau or veld, but the lakeside port is
surrounded by lusher, more tropical forest. By the time I finished
stretching, I could feel the first drops of sweat pasting my longsleeved shirt to my back.
    There was not a single building in sight, although the MONUC
soldiers had set up a bunch of prefabricated containers to act as
an arrivals hall. These white, box-like units are a common feature
of any UN operation around the world. If connected to an electrical generator and a water tank, they can provide an anodyne,
air-conditioned living space, no matter whether you are up a
snowy mountain in Afghanistan or in the deserts of the western
Sahara. They ensure each UN mission operates in its own little
bubble. There might be a war going on outside, but UN
peacekeepers can expect to have one of these little white boxes in
which to work, sleep, eat or even connect to the Internet .
    `Please follow me,' said a white girl wearing a crisp uniform of
blue and grey. Her English had a Slavic accent and her name tag
bore the flag of her homeland, Croatia. The outside atmosphere
was hot and cloying, but she was wearing several layers of
clothing - her workspace was heavily air-conditioned. After
following her inside to have my name ticked off the passenger manifest, I shivered. I hurried hack outside to wait for Michel
Bonnardeaux, the UN worker whose optimism had brought me
here in the first place. He had promised to meet me off the plane,
but as I stood there with the sedgy smell of Lake Tanganyika in
my nostrils and my shirt increasingly sodden with sweat, there
was no sign of him.

    Kalemie was one of the first settlements developed by Belgian
colonial agents in the Congo after Stanley's journey of discovery.
When the explorer finally reached Britain in 1878 with proof the
Congo River was navigable for thousands of kilometres halfway
across Africa, he first tried to persuade London to claim the
territory as a British colony. He failed. At the time the British
colonial authorities were not impressed with the returns offered
by Britain's relatively modest African holdings. Vast fortunes
were being made in India and the Far East, but Africa, in the age
before its large gold and diamond deposits had been discovered,
was not nearly as attractive. Maintaining the Cape Colony around
Cape Town at the foot of Africa was costing Britain a great deal.
British troops were being lost in a series of frontier wars with the
Xhosa and battles with the Zulu that would lead, within a year, to
the disaster of Isandlwana and the defence of Rorke's Drift. The
timing of Stanley's approach was not good and his suggestion that
Britain should colonise the Congo River basin was firmly rejected
by Whitehall.
    In Brussels, Leopold proved more receptive. He had been
dreaming for years of establishing his own colonial empire, but he
had failed to locate the right piece of territory. When he learned
of Stanley's success in charting the river, he invited the explorer
to his palace in Brussels and made sure Stanley was treated
lavishly. Within a few weeks the pair had hatched an ambitious
plot. The ruler of one of Europe's smallest and youngest nations
(Belgium was founded in 1830) commissioned the Welsh-born,
naturalised American to stake the entire Congo River basin as the private property of the king. Stanley would be paid handsomely
and Leopold would have the foundation for his empire.

    Just two years after he crossed the Congo as an explorer,
Stanley returned as a coloniser. This time he came by ship to the
mouth of the river, before heading inland with a party of roadbuilders, determined to construct an access route through the
Crystal Mountains