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Authors: Richard Hoskins
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stream. At first I took the Land Rover, but that was only possible on the track to Nko and Mushie, and even that eventually disappeared in a giant quagmire. It wasn’t unusual for it to take seven or eight hours to cover a dozen miles or less, with endless stops to cut a new path through the forest.
I learned not to rely on machines. The long-suffering Land Rover, pushed beyond endurance, broke down several times. On one occasion I had struck out with Tata Mopanda for a remote cluster of villages known collectively as the Nkuboko. After passing Mushie, the track meandered through the forest for another 100 miles, little wider than people could pass in single file and yet the Land Rover was rammed through. After hours of grinding labour, the vehicle finally broke down with fuel pump failure. We spent about six hours trying to fix it and then walked a couple more to the nearest village. The monkeys screamed and gibbered in the canopy above us, ripping off fruit and letting it drop to the forest floor.
The village comprised eight shabby palm-thatch huts. Neither of us had eaten anything all day; we were filthy, exhausted and famished. There was no water to wash in and the villagers only had two eggs between them. I tried to turn them down but the villagers wouldn’t hear of it and graciously made us an omelette. I stretched out that night on rushes in one of the simplest huts I had yet stayed in, staring up through the gaps in the palm thatch at patches of sky between the treetops.
I was desperately lonely that night. My resolution faltered and I remember asking myself what I was doing there when I had a wife and child back in Bolobo. Was I really doing this for God, as a trade-off for my family’s protection? What kind of God would seek such self-denial from me, or impose such a price on Sue and Abigail? I couldn’t find an answer.
Nevertheless, for weeks and months a great restlessness drove me on.
I usually set off into the heart of the rainforest by bicycle, stopping every few miles to hammer the wheel back into shape after the latest buckling. When I came to the frequent streams and rivers that crossed my path I would either wade out with the bicycle above my head, or try and find a villager with a canoe who could ferry me across.
Small victories over big obstacles gave me some satisfaction, but my loneliness never left me. I had a pocket radio with me and in one extremely isolated stretch of rainforest, hundreds of miles from anything resembling a town, I picked up Brian Johnston commentating on the Lord’s Thest. Out in the middle of nowhere, the sound of his plummy, quizzical voice filled me with almost unbearable nostalgia.
I used a dugout canoe to travel on the river. By this time I’d become passably competent at handling it the Congolese way – standing up to paddle gondolier-like from the stern. On longer trips, though, I followed the example of the wealthier local traders and used an outboard motor. I found that if I headed upriver it was possible after a few miles to turn inland through the forest along the smaller tributaries.
Once, I made a month-long trip by canoe through a series of forest streams known as the Sangassi, almost on the Equator. Villages here were built on stilts, because the forest was flooded for most of the year. I stopped to wash my clothes in a brook, beating them against the stones under an extraordinarily hot sun, and as I did so some villagers gathered round me. They seemed amazed at everything I did.
‘What’s so fascinating?’ I asked in Lingala. ‘Never seen a man washing his own clothes before?’
They exchanged bashful glances.
‘It’s not that,’ one of them said at last. ‘We’ve never seen a white man before.’
I stood up, tilted back my straw hat and wiped my forearm across my sweating brow. It was my turn to be amazed. I didn’t think villages still existed where a white man had never been seen.
I glanced down at my lean, tanned body, the rags I
I learned not to rely on machines. The long-suffering Land Rover, pushed beyond endurance, broke down several times. On one occasion I had struck out with Tata Mopanda for a remote cluster of villages known collectively as the Nkuboko. After passing Mushie, the track meandered through the forest for another 100 miles, little wider than people could pass in single file and yet the Land Rover was rammed through. After hours of grinding labour, the vehicle finally broke down with fuel pump failure. We spent about six hours trying to fix it and then walked a couple more to the nearest village. The monkeys screamed and gibbered in the canopy above us, ripping off fruit and letting it drop to the forest floor.
The village comprised eight shabby palm-thatch huts. Neither of us had eaten anything all day; we were filthy, exhausted and famished. There was no water to wash in and the villagers only had two eggs between them. I tried to turn them down but the villagers wouldn’t hear of it and graciously made us an omelette. I stretched out that night on rushes in one of the simplest huts I had yet stayed in, staring up through the gaps in the palm thatch at patches of sky between the treetops.
I was desperately lonely that night. My resolution faltered and I remember asking myself what I was doing there when I had a wife and child back in Bolobo. Was I really doing this for God, as a trade-off for my family’s protection? What kind of God would seek such self-denial from me, or impose such a price on Sue and Abigail? I couldn’t find an answer.
Nevertheless, for weeks and months a great restlessness drove me on.
I usually set off into the heart of the rainforest by bicycle, stopping every few miles to hammer the wheel back into shape after the latest buckling. When I came to the frequent streams and rivers that crossed my path I would either wade out with the bicycle above my head, or try and find a villager with a canoe who could ferry me across.
Small victories over big obstacles gave me some satisfaction, but my loneliness never left me. I had a pocket radio with me and in one extremely isolated stretch of rainforest, hundreds of miles from anything resembling a town, I picked up Brian Johnston commentating on the Lord’s Thest. Out in the middle of nowhere, the sound of his plummy, quizzical voice filled me with almost unbearable nostalgia.
I used a dugout canoe to travel on the river. By this time I’d become passably competent at handling it the Congolese way – standing up to paddle gondolier-like from the stern. On longer trips, though, I followed the example of the wealthier local traders and used an outboard motor. I found that if I headed upriver it was possible after a few miles to turn inland through the forest along the smaller tributaries.
Once, I made a month-long trip by canoe through a series of forest streams known as the Sangassi, almost on the Equator. Villages here were built on stilts, because the forest was flooded for most of the year. I stopped to wash my clothes in a brook, beating them against the stones under an extraordinarily hot sun, and as I did so some villagers gathered round me. They seemed amazed at everything I did.
‘What’s so fascinating?’ I asked in Lingala. ‘Never seen a man washing his own clothes before?’
They exchanged bashful glances.
‘It’s not that,’ one of them said at last. ‘We’ve never seen a white man before.’
I stood up, tilted back my straw hat and wiped my forearm across my sweating brow. It was my turn to be amazed. I didn’t think villages still existed where a white man had never been seen.
I glanced down at my lean, tanned body, the rags I
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