A trip to hell and back, on foot
THE rickety twin prop flown by a wizened pair of Russian pilots shudders past Nyiragongo volcano, over the M23 battlefields, landing on a gravel airstrip at Butembo, a dusty town in the heart of rebel-held territory in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
I spend the night at Hotel Butembo, a phantasmagoric huddle of pokey rooms with statues of reindeer, gorillas and elephants outside, that is owned by a suspected gun runner.
Early on Sunday morning, I set off in an SUV for the rebel headquarters at Bunyatenge village, which lies deep in the bush a six-hour drive away. The roads are atrocious. After an hour we cross the equator. At Alimbungu village, a goat is strung up on a wooden frame, its throat gaping red, dripping blood.
On Monday morning photographer James Oatway joins me and we set off for Musia mine, walking down the dusty main road of Bunyatenge, watched by curious onlookers. Our escort consists of General Sikuli Lafontaine, leader of an army of “patriots”, his aide-de-camp Colonel Jacques Safari and a small detachment of soldiers
We call this a Mobutu road. Kabila has done nothing for this country
armed with AK47s and PKM machine guns. The Congolese army, known by the French acronym FARDC, mans a roadblock halfway between Butembo and Bunyatenge, but the forests and villages here are controlled by Lafontaine’s rebels. “The last time FARDC soldiers were here was in Febru- ary,” says Safari. “One of them accidentally fired his RPG inside a hair salon, killing himself and wounding another soldier. They never came back.”
The road to Musia mine turns into a track that plunges down a steep hill into the snake-infested rain forest. Then the rains come. Within minutes, we are slithering down steep muddy slopes crisscrossed with tree roots. On flat patches or in river beds the mud is often knee-deep. After almost eight hours, we hear the sound of picks and shovels and workers singing — the welcome symphony of the mine. That afternoon we are so exhausted that we can barely leave the rain shelter, where we are fed our standard fare of grilled goat, tripe, rice and fried potato. We wash it down with Primus beer before we collapse in our tents, pitched over a bed of leaves and twigs. Lafontaine hardly looks tired.
On Tuesday, after spending five hours at the mine, we embark on the gruelling return journey.
Later that week we hear that Congolese immigration officials and intelligence agents are questioning our contacts about us. The risk of being detained in Butembo is too high, so we ar- range a car to take us south through the M23 battlefields to Goma, for an exorbitant fee of $500. A rare tar road takes us through Virunga national park to a grassy plain teeming with game. Lake Edward is visible in the distance. “We call this a Mobutu road. Kabila has done nothing for this country,” says our driver’s companion, a lawyer from Goma. “There used to be dragons here, but Mobutu sold them to the Chinese,” he adds, deadpan. Right now, anything seems possible.
After travelling through a violent storm in the dark, we reach the vicinity of Three Towers Hill, where, in August, South African special forces teams helped drive M23 rebels from positions used to fire rockets on civilians in Goma. To our right, the Nyiragongo volcano paints the clouds overhead with a ghoulish orange glow. The next morning we walk across the Goma border post into Rwanda and take a taxi to Kigali airport, then catch a flight to Johannesburg.
“Chicken or goat?” asks the Rwandair flight attendant. We decide to give the goat a miss. — Stephan Hofstatter