The 100 km trek (1) – the gold-digger camp
Zaïre, 1984
The quickest and easiest to the Ugandan border was via Beni where I hoped to meet Sophie and Roland again or else find another lift in direction Kenya. I left the house of the good doctors in Mambasa at ten, bought two bananas and one avocado and sat down by the roadside, waiting for a lift. A passer-by stopped and told me a jeep would leave for Beni from the catholic mission. I asked the way.
“2 km, straight on!”
— That was the start of my five-day trek to Beni.
The jeep was not at the mission, it was expected that evening or the next day. Did I want to wait? I declined. I decided to walk ahead along the track which was not much wider than a driveway. But it was marked as a yellow road on the Michelin map and it was the most direct route to Beni. If a jeep came that way I would not miss it.
I started to walk across the gently undulating landscape. On the way ahead I saw some women from the local pygmy tribe, carrying heavy baskets hung from straps around their foreheads. I followed them at a distance. I had always wanted to learn more about them, but before I could work up the nerve to approach them, the strap of my rucksack snapped and I had to fix the wretched thing with one of my pipe-cleaners. By the time I had finished and looked up, the women had vanished into the forest.
From time to time I stepped over ropes of ants stretching across the way; the workers carrying eggs and larvae, guarded on both sides by soldiers with menacing jaws agape. Naturally I had to disrupt one of these ant-highways just to see what would happen. Within seconds, dozens of soldiers had scurried up my legs and bitten through the thick material of my jeans into my skin. Every time I stomped my foot I left a small heap of confused ants and minutes later the occasional sharp pain served as a reminder that the dedicated soldiers were not to be messed with.
It was getting dark. I was hoping to reach a village where I could ask for shelter. Two boys, one of whom was pushing a bicycle, overtook me and had almost disappeared around a bend when a man came into view from the opposite direction.
I recalled a story Reinhold told me about what happened when he was stuck with all four wheels of his jeep in deep mud in Zaïre. A group of locals who walked passed him laughed and joked that a white man could get into such a mess, but then a man came from the opposite direction. He wore an emblem on his jacket, designating him as a local dignitary of some sort. He stopped for a greeting and asked Reinhold where he was headed and how he liked the country and its people. How did he find the local hospitality? Reinhold, biting back a curse, responded politely and the man raised his voice slightly:
“I am sure,” he said, casting a sharp glance sideways: “That these young men would only be too pleased to come to your assistance!” The guys quickly found a shovel from somewhere and dug for eight hours until the jeep was freed.
The man who now headed my way greeted me, asked me about my trip and where I was going to stay the night. I said I wasn’t sure but hoped to come to a village any time soon. “Well,” the man said and raised his voice a nudge: “I am sure these boys will show you the way!”
The boys had stopped in their tracks and turned around slowly. The man turned to them: “Where are you going?”
“Km 28 (from Mambasa)” came the reply.
“Well…” he said and bade his good-byes.
So, I had found companions who would show me the way to a local village and introduce me to the chief, but I was shattered after hiking nearly 28 km with my unbalanced rucksack and I had blisters on my feet. The boys stopped a child to ask the way. We were at km 25.
We passed a pretty little village surrounded by banana plantations where I would have liked to have stopped but they trodded on and I felt duty-bound to follow. Darkness fell and on we walked. One of the boys said his good-byes. Had I misread the situation? I had just resolved to do the same as soon as we reached the semblance of a hut when the second boy stopped, apparently in the middle of nowhere.
“I’m home,” he said: “Do you want to go on?”
I was about to despair when he continued: “I think it is too dark. Why not stay with us?”
We walked down a winding path to a smattering of leaf huts. “We’re here,” the boy said: “It isn’t a village as such. Just a camp.”
A gold-digger camp in the forest.
The forest is alledgedly full of gold and diamonds. The Frenchman had told me that you could find diamonds among the pebbles in the streams and Steve, the German smuggler, told of gold nuggets washed clean after heavy rain which you could just pick up from the ground.
My curiosity aroused, I stepped among the huts where I was soon surrounded by men and women; the children were asleep by now. The chief invited me to his hut which was tiny, the interior almost entirely taken up by a bunk and a little bedside cabinet. A washing line was tied below the roof. His wife and I sat down on the bunk for a chat. Soon, other women arrived with food. The women had rice and Soubé (manioc leaves) but they presented me with a bowl of pungent monkey meat. Honoured as I was by the VIP treatment, I had to force a smile as I chewed on the unusual offering. It was so chili- hot that tears started to form in my eyes (I was a complete chili virgin on that trip!). I consoled myself with what I had read about hot food in my little medical guide: it stimulates stomach acid and destroys bugs. Apparently, that was the idea. When I nearly choked on a bite and hastily downed a glass of water the boss’ wife smirked: “We use a lot of pepper,” she said: “It’s good against the microbes!” They all howled with laughter.
After the meal, the women, other than the wife, left and the boss came into the hut for his own food: manioc paste and more of the meat. He offered me some which I politely declined. When he had finished, he took a tiny set of scales from the bedside cabinet along with a few matches and coins which served as weights and poured gold dust from an cigarette paper into one of the bowls. He dropped the matches into the other bowl one by one: six of them.
“Each match,” he said: “Is worth 30 Zaïre. I’ve got 180 Zaïre worth here and…” he repeated the procedure with a smaller wrapper; “60 Zaïre here — 240 in total.”
His wife was smiling but these were hardly the riches I had imagined.
Denni