Mission to the Congo

John Le Carre (real name David Cornwell) visited Bukavu in the Eastern Congo to make sure his latest novel was accurate. Picture / Michela Wrong

CONGO - It was the strangest journey of my life and it always will be. I was looking for fictional characters I had invented, in a country I had never visited.

The distant town of my imagination was Bukavu in the Eastern Congo, known formerly as Costermansville and built in the early 20th century by Belgian colonialists. It stands at the southern end of Lake Kivu, at 1500m the highest and coolest of all Africa's Great Lakes. I had written my novel in a period when for personal reasons I had felt unable to leave England. Now I was about to check its people and places against the reality.

But the novel isn't really set in the Congo at all - or so I had almost persuaded myself by the time I began my journey. It's a romantic satire, for heaven's sake, written with both feet firmly off the ground.

It's about Tony Blair's England, and good old-fashioned colonial exploitation, and political hypocrisy and shameless public lies, and other scores I had to settle. It's about the quest for identity in our multi-ethnic society, and New Labour's assault on our civil liberties, and a bunch of other similarly lofty themes.

The Congo is just backcloth, an abstraction, a symbol of perpetual colonial exploitation, slaughter, famine and disorder. To meet it face to face would only violate the delicate illusion.

The only problem was that, well before I had added the last full stop to the first draft, the Congo had become the elephant in my drawing room, and no amount of literary sophistry was going to make it disappear.

My central character was the son of an erring Irish missionary and a Congolese headman's daughter. He had been dragged up in a bleak English boarding school, and he and I could get along fine, we had no quarrel.

But when it came to my three Congolese warlords, each one some sort of standard-bearer of the militia or social faction that had spawned him, I had doubts. Neither my research, nor my furtive lunches with Congolese expatriates, had reassured me these characters could survive in the real world.

If my visit to Bukavu did not deliver their likely counterparts - by which I mean, verify their attitudes and beliefs - I might be forced to look for other ways to tell the story, such as writing it again from scratch.

In Belgian colonial memory, as in my novelist's fantasy, Bukavu was a lost paradise, a misted Shangri La of wide, bougainvillea-laden streets and lakeside villas with lush gardens sloping to the shore.

The province of South Kivu was to Central Africa what Biblical Palestine was to Arabia. But the Eastern Congo has like every paradise a flaw: it is a natural treasure chest of gold, diamonds, cassiterite, and now coltan and uranium, which for centuries has lured every known species of human predator to its misted hills and jungles, from free booting Rwandan militias to suited corporate carpetbaggers with nice manners, fat cheque books and shiny offices.

Ever since the late 60s, Bukavu has suffered catastrophe after disaster. In the wake of the Rwandan genocide that hand-killed a million people in a hundred days, the town found itself in the front line of the refugee crisis.

Hutu insurgents who had fled across the border from Rwanda used Bukavu as one of their two main bases from which to attack the Tutsi-dominated revolutionary Government that had ousted them and seized power in Kigali. The Tutsis retaliated in what became known as the First Congo War, and Bukavu took the brunt.

The town barely had time to draw breath before the Second Congo War struck. And in June 2004, Bukavu fell into the hands of General Nkunda, who let his men do with it what they pleased for three days. The town was sacked, and scores of women raped.

There were three of us in the car by the time our Rwandan driver took the winding hill road from Kigali, and headed towards the Congolese border four hours' drive away. The Foreign Office had advised us not to go, but for my two travelling companions such warnings had about as much impact as a footnote in a backpackers' guide.

Michela Wrong had spent 12 years reporting on the African continent. Jason Stearns, at 29 a Senior Analyst with the International Crisis Group, had served three years in Bukavu as a political adviser to the United Nations and was one of the West's leading authorities on the Congo.

Both had ploughed through an early draft of my novel and knew the kind of players I needed to meet, and the locations I needed to see. Both had their professional agendas, but agreed to coincide their trips with mine.

It was April. On July 30 the Democratic Republic of Congo was proposing to hold its first multi-party election in 40 years at a cost of nearly US$500 million ($763 million), US$400 million of them from the West.

For my companions this made it the perfect time to go, as it did for me, since my novel was set in the run-up to the same elections. My only problem was: had I left it too late for my warlords?

In every trouble-spot I have visited, there has always been one watering-hole where, as if by secret rite, hacks, spies, aid workers and carpetbaggers converge. Here in Bukavu it's the Orchid, a low-built lakeside colonial villa surrounded by discreet cabins.

A steamy haze hangs over the lake for most of the day. The border with Rwanda splits it longways. The lake's monster is called mamba mutu and is half-woman and half-crocodile. What she likes best is eating human brains.

My first warlord, Thomas, is about as far removed from my expectations as he could decently be. He is tall and elegantly dressed, and receives us with diplomatic grace. His house, guarded by sentries with rifles, is spacious.

He speaks for the Banyamulenge, and his people have been fighting wars in the Congo since 1966, but his own war was spent in South Africa, lobbying for their cause.

The Banyamulenge are pasturalists originally from Rwanda, who over the last couple of hundred years have settled in the high plateaux of the Mulenge mountains of South Kivu. Feared for their battle skills and reclusiveness, and hated for their supposed affinity with Rwanda, they are the first to be pilloried in times of discontent.

We asked, would the upcoming elections make things any better for them? His reply was not encouraging. "The losers will say the vote was rigged, and they'll be right. The winner will take all, because why else win? Candidates are vying to demonstrate their pro-Congolese, anti-Rwandan credentials, so it will be open season on the Banyamulenge."

Thomas was similarly unimpressed by Kinshasa's efforts to incorporate Congo's many armed groups into one national army: "We have many men who have joined and then defected to the mountains. In the army they kill us and insult us, although we have fought many battles for them."

There was a chink of hope, he conceded. The Mai Mai, who regard themselves as the keepers of a Congo free of all "invaders" and "foreigners" - including the Banyamulenge - are also learning the high price that must be paid to become a soldier of Kinshasa. "Maybe as the Mai Mai learn to mistrust Kinshasa, they will draw closer to us."

Afterwards, I ask Stearns whether Thomas was right to be gloomy about the elections. By and large, he thought he was. Elections were only one trapping of a democratic system. Without a parliament, courts or an administration, they merely decided who got to rip off the country next.

Thirty per cent of Congolese lived on one meal a day. Eighty percent earned less than a dollar a day. The losers had guns, and would very probably use them to contest the outcome. And yes, another Congolese war could follow.

Next we met a Colonel of Mai Mai, the largest and most notorious of Congo's many armed militias.

Like Thomas, the Colonel is immaculately turned out. His Kinshasa-issue khaki drills are ironed and pressed, his badges of rank glisten in the midday sun.

We are sitting in an open-air cafe. From a sandbagged emplacement across the road Pakistani troops watch us over their gun barrels.

The Colonel fidgets a lot, perhaps in embarrassment. Two cellphones lie before him. His heavy French is rich in extraneous additives. Sometimes his language and beliefs seem a bit of a puzzle to him - as if he wants a different role in life, but has been landed with this one.

Like their forebears the Simba, he explains, a little awkwardly, the Mai Mai possess magical powers - dawa - which enable them to turn flying bullets into water.

"The Mai Mai is a force created by our ancestors. There are races in my country that do not deserve to be here. We fight them because we fear they will claim our sacred Congolese land.

"No government in Kinshasa can be trusted to do this, therefore we do it ourselves. When Mobutu's power failed, we stood in the breach with our pangas, bows and arrows. Our dawa is our shield. When you are face to face with an AK47 that is firing straight at you and nothing happens, you know our dawa is authentic."

In that case, we ask, how does the Mai Mai explain its dead and wounded?

"If one of our warriors is struck down, it is because he is a thief or a rapist or has disobeyed our rituals or was harbouring bad thoughts about a comrade when he went into battle. Our dead are our sinners. We let our witchdoctors bury them without ceremony."

And the Banyamulenge? we ask. "They can remain in Congo if they accept Congolese law. If they try to launch another war, we shall kill them."

Venting his anger against Kinshasa, however, the Colonel comes significantly closer to sharing the sentiments expressed by Thomas the night before: "The Mai Mai have been neglected and marginalised. Kinshasa forgets too soon that we fought for them and saved their arses.

"When Mai Mai fighters join Kinshasa's army we become kings without kingdoms. They don't pay us and don't listen to us. As soldiers we are not allowed to vote. Better we return to the bush and look after ourselves."

In my novel, I have sketched in an armed attack on Bukavu airport. We are about to set off to inspect the reality when we learn the centre of town is blocked by demonstrators and burning tyres. It seems that a man mortgaged his house for $400 in order to buy his wife a medical operation. When Kinshasa's unpaid soldiers heard about it, they raided his house, killed him and stole the money.

Angry neighbours seized the soldiers, but their comrades sent reinforcements to get them back. A 15-year-old girl was shot dead and the crowd rioted. In our five nights in Bukavu, there were two riots.

The discotheque is my last and most affecting memory of Bukavu. In my novel, it is owned by the French-educated heir to an East Congolese trading fortune. He is a warlord of a sort, but his real power base is Bukavu's young intellectuals and businessmen: and here they are.

There is a curfew and the town is quiet. A bit of rain is falling. I recall no winking signs or bulky men checking us at the entrance: just a grey row of little Essoldo cinemas disappearing into the dark, and a rope bannister descending a dimly lit stone staircase.

We grope our way down. Music and strobe lights engulf us. Yells of "Jason!" as he vanishes under a sea of welcoming black arms. The Congolese, I had been told, know better than anybody how to have fun, and here at last they are having it.

Away from the dance floor, a game of pool is running so I join the lookers-on. Round the table, deathly silence attends every shot. The last ball goes down. To hoots of joy, the victor is swept off his feet and carted in triumph round the room. At the bar, beautiful girls chatter and laugh.

At our table, while I listen to somebody's views on Voltaire - or was it Proust? - Wrong is politely discouraging a drunk. Stearns has joined the men on the dance floor. I will leave him with the last word: "For all Congo's troubles, you meet fewer depressed guys on the streets of Bukavu than you do in New York."

Would I have written the same novel if I'd gone to Congo earlier? I wonder whether I would have written a novel at all. The reality of the place is so overwhelming that stories about it seem almost an irrelevance.

But then I wasn't really writing about the Congo, was I? It was all those other things. The Congo was just backcloth.