reports from beyond
check at the station every day. Rumours spread one day that it was only eighty kilometres away, so I joined the crowds camped patiently overnight outside fences. No one objected; in Zaïre no one expects anything else. The windows of the Kindu–Kalemie ‘express’, when it finally came, had no glass, there was no water or electricity, and seats had been stripped bare, leaving only tortured iron skeletons. But I didn’t care. As we pulled out, five days late, I perched exhilarated on steps of half-empty carriages; it was so liberating just to be moving again in fresh open air. Climbing laboriously, the train left the flat Congo basin, temperatures became less humid and colours sharpened as the jungle thinned to deserted savannah; sometimes hordes of children from crowded thatched villages chased us excitedly until they were just black dots, left far behind. The train didn’t break down until evening and I slept comfortably on the floor amidst peanut shells, decomposed sugar-cane pulp and children’s urine. When I was awakened at daybreak by the sound of rats running along blocked ventilation shafts, the train had been repaired and, having branched off the main Lubumbashi line at Kabalo, we were no longer tracking the River Lualaba but the Lukuga. It was a stunning journey for the next twenty-four hours as we hugged the green torrential river which, like a twisting salmon, leapt through empty echoing hills (the hideout of Kabila’s Marxist guerrillas for over twenty years) until Kalemie’s rooftops and Lake Tanganyika’s seemingly immeasurable expanse lay spread below. We had to show vaccination papers before armed soldiers allowed us out of the cordoned-off station, as the province had been quarantined after forty people had died in a cholera epidemic, and this was the first train through for a month. I didn’t pay much attention; I was infatuated with Kalemie. Graceful columns of coconut palms led along red clay roads to pink-, blue-and-yellow streets, colourfully painted fishing boats were beached on white sands and Tanzania’s distant mountains reared up hazily across the lake. I tramped up to a whitewashed hill-top mission where, keys jangling, White Fathers took me along corridors to empty cells with musty mattresses. Through mildewed cloister arches, I could see overgrown gardens strewn with red rhododendrons dropping down flights of steps to the lake. I was glad of the seclusion; tired of waiting any longer, the international boat for Tanzania had sailed and there wasn’t another for six days. Usually each day began with the inevitable hunt for food. I didn’t want to impose on the Fathers who were generous enough to have given me a free room, so after trying cheap restaurants where invariably I waited patiently while the owner disappeared, returning later to tell me that all the food was finished, I’d retire with stale bread and rotten bananas to the mission. There I’d while away the hours reading about Che Guevara and his band of elite Cuban revolutionaries who tried to train Kabila’s rebels here in the 1970s until, beaten by ill discipline and poor morale, they gave up in despair. When the temperature cooled at sunset, 89