On the muddy banks of Kisangani, the river releases a man who risked cholera and crocodiles and spent three months on a decrepit barge -- all for a chance to travel a thousand miles to sell, at long last, a sack of plastic ladies' shoes.
Outside Mbandaka, where it trips over the Equator, the river glances up at the shell of a dictator's unfinished palace, now home to a pair of cows.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
In a hidden creek in the hard-knocks capital, Kinshasa, the river hears the screams of an unwanted girl. Her father banished her to the water, believing that she was a witch.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Today, as this country tries to knit itself together after a half-decade of war that ended last year, the river is witness to Congo's slow, aching rebirth. It is both symbol and substance of the country's reunification, and the life it nurtures on its banks shows the enormity of the task.
A power-sharing government has been installed, but the authority of the state has yet to reach old rebel fiefs. There is no national army to speak of, only gunmen who remain loyal to rival warlords.
Peace still eludes pockets of the nation, like the mineral-rich Ituri region. Ethnic Hutu militias, some responsible for the 1994 killing frenzy in neighboring Rwanda, squirrel away in the eastern Kivu hills.
Not least, most everything has stopped working. Schools, hospitals and a functioning legal system are but a memory. Roads, train tracks and turbines must be rebuilt. Today the river, coursing 4,350km, is the country's principal highway.
Mighty and mythic, it carries everyone and everything: hyacinths, memories, traders, the dead.
Once, people here called it the Nzere, or the river that swallows all rivers. It could be called the river that swallows all stories. A long legacy of greed and suffering is inscribed on its back, from the brutal rubber empire of a Belgian king in the late 19th century to Congo's latest war of partition and plunder.
That war killed an estimated 3.3 million people, mostly through disease and starvation. It sliced the country into pieces as three major factions, along with an array of militias and foreign sponsors, scrambled for Congo's riches. And it broke the river, the country's spinal column, into bits.
Last July, on the heels of the peace accord, the river reopened and the first commercial barge crawled up, loaded with cement, fuel and hope. Villagers lined the shore. They scrambled up the tributaries to have a look.
"I tell you, it was a grand welcome, like it was Jesus coming!" recalled Antoine Bawe, 48, the captain of one of those first barges.
This evening, as dusk darkened the river at Kisangani, Bawe, fresh from his fifth journey upstream, sat slapping mosquitoes on the long, flat back of his vessel. By this hour, his barge had become a riverside saloon, buzzing with the supple beats of Ndombolo and the clinking of brown bottles of Primus.
Ndombolo and Primus. Music and beer. During the war, these two things defied partition. They unified the Congolese, all along the river.
Today the barges that crawl up and down the Congo River, between Kisangani and Kinshasa, are the most vivid symbols of the country's slow reawakening. For ordinary traders like Gerald Mutuku, the shoe salesman, they represent a long-awaited lifeline.
Even so, his journey upriver to Kisangani -- a trip that should ordinarily take a couple of weeks -- went on for nearly three months.
The tugboat engine broke down twice. The barge got banged up on sand reefs. At least Mutuku, 63, was lucky not to suffer the fate of so many others, on so many other crumbling barges, that capsize and dump their passengers into the mouths of crocodiles.
For a moment, on the glorious Sunday of Mutuku's arrival, it seemed almost worth it. No sooner had he stepped ashore in Kisangani than he was mobbed. With nothing coming in from Kinshasa for so long, the market women descended on his wares, eagerly inspecting his sack of pink and green plastic shoes as though it were Christmas morning.
Early last century, men made ivory fortunes in this trading town. Trucks rumbled into the market, ferrying potatoes and rice from the
interior. Trains departed from an elegant riverside railroad station to get around the impassable rapids upriver.
About the only way to bring goods to the river now is by bicycle. They cut through the bush with sacks of rice on the back, bananas on the handlebars, pedaled by porters who drip sweat from their eyelids like giant raindrops on the dry dirt paths.
The trains have long stopped in their tracks. At the old station, ferns have forced their way into a first-class cabin. The railroad chief, Emile Utshudi, has turned engine parts into a grain mill. He says it is how he makes a living. He has not been paid in six years.
"In the minds of the population, it should be a new start, a new regime that's just and prosperous," Utshudi said. "Me, I too hope it's a new moment, but I have to tell you, it's the end of our sleep, but we haven't yet woken up."
Utshudi, ever the bureaucrat, keeps a desk, stacked high with papers enumerating the needs of his beloved railroad, inside the stately colonial-era post office. Tucked away here, in a dank second-floor chamber, is a memento of the country's most famous postal worker. It is a salmon-colored copy of an employee newsletter, L'Echo Postal, edited by the man who became Congo's anti-colonial leader and then in 1960, until his assassination a year later, its first and only democratically elected prime minister -- Patrice Lumumba.
That such a thing exists at all, in a post office with no glass panes in its windows nor any stamps, is nothing short of astonishing -- except that all that remains is its cover. The pages are gone.
Like a sprawling memorial to greed, Kisangani today stands on layers of splendor and ruin. The palaces of Mobutu Sese Seko, the US-backed dictator who ruled for more than 30 years, still line the river, as relics of meglomania. Policemen and their wives are squatting in one. Another, farther down river, has been put to use as a barn.
Utshudi remembers the parade of rival armies that pummeled his city. Mobutu's soldiers battled -- and lost -- to the rebel forces of Laurent Kabila in 1997. Rwandan and Ugandan armies came in 1999 and 2000. One massacre followed another. Once, Utshudi said, he saw the bodies of 15 children floating in the river.
Today a new Congolese army is being cobbled together from the remains of the old fighting factions. Under the tutelage of soldiers from Belgium, the former colonial ruler, ex-enemies are learning to pitch tents, hold riot shields and march in unison.
A unified army is a centerpiece of the peace deal, and the transitional government has divvied up top military posts among leaders of the former factions. Yet the chain of command is tenuous, at best, and critical questions remain: where the soldiers will be deployed, how they will be paid, fed and equipped, and whose command they will follow.
In recent months, gunbattles have broken out between loyalists of the government in Kinshasa and the ex-rebel army in the east. Military installations in the capital have been attacked by assailants whose motives remain unclear.
Each side has held onto its weapons. Each challenge is an invitation to return to bloodletting. The war may be over, but trust has yet to be won.
With demobilization largely a dream, soldiers still prowl along the river, still with empty bellies. Downstream from Kisangani, before the river touches the Equator, they linger on in a village called Lolanga.
During the war, this was the rear base of government forces. For years, with nothing coming in from Kinshasa, villagers up in the hidden creeks had holed up in the jungle, barefoot or worse still, naked. Civilians abandoned their fields and fled into the bush.
Today, cassava has been planted for the first time in years. The market, the most reliable barometer of war and peace across the continent, bustles with pigs and plastic flip-flops.
But the gunmen -- hungry, greedy, armed -- still hover in sufficient numbers to intimidate the villagers, extract their hard-earned produce and keep them quiet. "If the soldiers aren't paid, they are going to find some other way," one villager, Ambrose Makele, said.
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