CONGO NOTEBOOK

Kisangani, capital of the province of Orientale, Democratic Republic of the Congo, once Zaire, is the setting for A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul’s grim masterpiece, published in 1979, about post-colonial reality in central Africa. Naipaul’s plot describes a tribal war that threatens the city. This actually happened 20 years later, when Kisangani became a battlefield for the bandit armies of Uganda and Rwanda. The city is now controlled by General Jean-Claude Kifwa, commander of the 9th Military Region of the Armed Forces of the DRC. We arrive to find that the temperature has reached a seasonal 40 ºC. A thunderstorm lasting most of our first night reduces this to a more bearable level. The Congo River is why we are here, filming Snake Dance, a historical documentary. Luc, the sound engineer, asks our minder, ‘the colonel’, what would happen if we were on the river in a canoe when a storm broke. ‘Then my friend, you would be in the shit, up to your neck.’ And the colonel — ex-Belgian military intelligence — laughs one of his great clanging steel laughs, the only ones that really crack him up. It was Clemenceau who said that military justice bore the same relationship to justice as military music did to music. We begin to worry about the military sense of humour.

Our first day of filming on the banks of the Congo. The delicate pirogues on the waters below seem to be drifting helplessly in the current. From this distance, it is impossible to tell which bank the oarsmen are trying to reach. One man stands with a long paddle in the bows, another stands in the stern, together they spin the narrow craft across to the far bank, 40 minutes away. As we start to film there is an interruption; yet another plain-clothes government agent has crawled out of a log and is banning the shoot.