River Monsters (9 page)

By the mid-1980s the roads, railways, helpful officials, and guest houses in the interior were no more. Under Mobutu’s dictatorship, time had run backwards, creating a remoteness that was
more than mere geographical distance. Like a medieval despot, he ruled his vast kingdom through fear, chaos, murder, and bribery. Although some ex-pats were in the capital, now called Kinshasa, the
country was effectively closed to outsiders. Certainly nobody went there as a tourist.

There are many who say that recreational fishing is a form of escapism, and I would agree with them. I do it to clear my mind of everyday concerns. But now my interest in a fish had taken me to
a dark place and alerted me to some realities that might have been best left unknown. All this strife occurred while I climbed trees in a vicarage garden, stared out of classroom windows, and sat
by willow-shrouded carp ponds in the timeless tranquillity of an English summer night. Lumumba’s body hacked to pieces and dissolved in sulphuric acid; a quarter of a million dead; an unpaid
army ruling by extortion; and dissidence kept in check by rival secret police services – all so copper and uranium would continue to flow out of Africa to the right countries. I surfaced as
if from a bad dream. To be concerned about the fate of a mere fish in the face of all this human misery seemed extremely trivial. But then I found myself looking at it in a different way. In a
world where rivers are increasingly overfished, poisoned, dynamited, and left high and dry by dams and drainage, the Congo could be the one system in the world where fish populations have remained
at historical levels thanks to the sheer size of the river, the low human density, and the dictatorial disorder.

This was also, I reminded myself, why no outsiders went there – certainly none with fishing rods. But my thoughts had a certain momentum. I discovered there were flights to Kinshasa, but
these catered only to expense-account businessmen and diplomats, costing three or four times the ‘bucket shop’ prices to India or anywhere else. On top of that, I heard I would need
pocketfuls of $50 bills to buy back my passport from immigration and bid for my luggage, item by item, from customs. The whole idea was a nonstarter. Then I found a French charter company, now
defunct, that flew an aged 707 from Marseilles to Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic (CAR). From here I could cross the Ubangui River to the small town of Zongo in the northwest corner
of Zaire. But neither embassy knew if the border was open. If it was, the CAR staff in Paris informed me, I would need to get a visa in Zaire to allow me back into CAR, but they couldn’t tell
me where I could get this. The only way to find out was to go. After crossing by bus to France, I took off in April 1985.

When I’d come back from India three years before, emaciated and exhausted but with some fish stories under my belt and pocket change from the laughably small amount of cash I had taken
with me, I considered, along with the few other backpackers I’d met along the way, that if I could survive that – the squalid doss-houses, seething trains, days of diarrhoea – I
could survive anywhere. There was also the knowledge that, with a little more money, India could be quite comfortable. But nothing had prepared me for the Congo. From the moment I set foot in
Africa and first inhaled the hot, semiliquid, smoke- and wood-flavoured air, I felt out of my depth: the stampede at the airport, the long night drive followed by threats from the taxi
driver’s sidekick when I refused to hand over more than the agreed fare, and the hour-plus search at the border (‘Nice bag. . . . Nice shoes. . . . ’), after which I was told,
‘If you go anywhere you are not authorised,
monsieur le professeur
, you are in big trouble.’

The next evening I was one of thirty-three people huddled under a plastic sheet on the back of a truck as we came to a boggy halt in a thunderstorm. We lurched into the next town the following
night, where I found a hot concrete cubicle of a room that stank of urine and had no water or light. In the corridor a man I couldn’t see asked me the purpose of my journey. I couldn’t
imagine two months like this, so I was tempted to turn back. But the view behind me was equally bleak. From time to time I sold a magazine article, but this was a long way from making a living.
And, thanks to record levels of unemployment, there wasn’t much else on the horizon. I was back living with my parents, for God’s sake, at twenty-nine years old. Should I go back to
being a motorcycle messenger in London, which I’d quit while I was still alive? Or leave the country like Martin, bumming around Europe as an itinerant English teacher? Even in my dreams, the
future back home was a wilderness. So I decided not to think too far ahead but instead just get through each day.

I reached the river after two weeks – waiting for trucks that never came and sleeping in rat- and bedbug-infested brothels, the only places with spare rooms. I forced myself to eat the
acrid manioc paste that’s the country’s staple source of carbs as well as blackened fish corpses sold from market stalls, fish that reminded me why I was here.

The sight of the river both lifted and overwhelmed me. What appeared to be the far bank was only an island. The true bank was a hazy band of grey-green on the distant horizon. I’ve always
found big waters intimidating: how do you find the fish in all that water? This is one reason I’ve stuck to rivers. But this was like an inland sea. Three days later I was steaming downstream
on a raft of barges pushed by the towering
Colonel Ebeya
, a floating city housing two thousand human passengers and a population of animals that grew by the hour, as dugout canoes
intercepted us to sell smoked monkeys and trussed crocodiles.

As a non-African, keeping a low profile was impossible, and men in plain clothes who were clearly not ordinary civilians constantly asked what I was doing there. My reply, that I wanted to catch
an mbenga, never left them convinced. After two days I joined several other people in a large dugout that peeled off from the moving riverboat and headed for a village on the shore. Here the chief
put me up, as is traditional, and his brother took me fishing. One day we crossed to the large central island, where something hit the silver spoon I was casting, breaking the surface in an
explosion of spray as it spat out the hook. It was the only take I had in the whole time I was there, partly because the dugout and brother were rarely available and partly because, even though the
rains had long stopped, the river was still in flood and the fish were dispersed in the forest. Even the netsmen were catching next to nothing, so there was very little to eat. They told me that if
I stayed another couple of months I would catch goliath, but if I was to make it back to Bangui in time for my flight home, I needed to get going.

For days there were no boats, but then I got a lift in a large dugout with a motor that kept breaking down. Finally, back in Bangui, an immigration officer told me, with a meaningful look, that
they’d lost my passport. By chance I met somebody with influence who helped me get it back without paying the bribe, which I didn’t have the money to pay, just hours before my
flight.

Returning to England – and to a girlfriend who was keen to settle down – the time had come to do some serious soul-searching. Although I was just back from an epic, hazardous, solo
journey through a place where few outsiders dare to go, she said it was now time for me to ‘prove myself’. Like the immigration officer, she made no direct reference to what I needed to
do, but the implication was clear. So when, after a couple of months, I still hadn’t secured myself a proper job with a guaranteed, regular salary, she informed me that I was a
‘waster’ and left.

As it turned out, a few months after that I did get a job as a copywriter in an advertising agency. I stayed there for three and a half years, at first overwhelmed by my workload and then, as I
found my feet, increasingly jaded and unable to take myself seriously. The future looked much more comfortable, but, boy, did it look dull. The excuse to get out came in the form of a phone call.
Paul Boote had recently made a TV documentary about Himalayan mahseer and the production company was keen to capitalise on this by doing a follow-up. How about doing a recce to the Congo?

By rights I should have been in no position even to consider this. However, working in the misinformation business had given me a degree of immunity to the misinformation of others. So I
hadn’t ‘bought a house’, despite a relentless campaign, leveraged by tax breaks and huge doses of collective wishful thinking, to rebrand debt as investment. Instead, I lived in
an unheated room in a downmarket housing estate, with police helicopters providing the soundtrack. However, as ample compensation for the stigma, my annual rent was the same as what many of my
contemporaries paid in loan interest every month. So instead of putting off the decision for twenty-five years, I could consider Boote’s idea for a few moments and then say,
‘Yes’.

On top of that, I simply needed a break. Because of the intensity of my work, for clients that included property firms and oil companies, I’d taken only a fraction of my holiday
entitlement. I had been hoping to take maybe one week of the six weeks I was owed, but my employers had recently told me that they had changed their policy on holidays and that I was no longer
entitled to any of it. I was outraged. This job was eating my life, sucking my blood. And although it was true, of course, that I was getting paid for doing it, I had believed that there was more
to it than that – that stuff about loyalty and being part of a team. I’d been in a similar place before when I briefly worked as a teacher and saw many of my colleagues, hardworking but
undervalued people, desperate to get out of the profession but imprisoned by debt. Along with nearly everybody else, they’d been made dependent on the money-lending industry – all in
the name of independence – and I dreaded the same thing happening to me. But because I had no dependents, I had more freedom than most to indulge my youthful hot-headedness. If I threw it all
in – again – I would not be inflicting my quaint vision of the world on anybody else. What I was looking for, I suppose, was a way to live on my own terms, to survive without selling my
soul. I’d had enough of going with the flow; it’s easy to go far if you take this direction. Kicking against the current, however, is asking to be defeated or drowned. But right then,
that was what I wanted to do, with both arms out of the water, not drowning but waving – giving the soulless, sleepwalking world the finger. I would probably go under, but at least I would
have tried to explore a new direction. As I held my breath and leapt, I thought: maybe there are paradoxical countercurrents, visible only to those who really look for them.

The Congo trip was a disaster. The destination this time was the People’s Republic of Congo, the former French colony west of Zaire – and a more user-friendly part of the river. But
again the water conditions were wrong: a thick brown soup, from which we failed to catch anything. Then we got stranded hundreds of miles upriver. In the end we floated down on a log raft that was
steered by a small tug skippered by an incompetent drunkard. I had persuaded Martin to join us on this adventure of a lifetime, and it did indeed live up to its billing. He remembers to this day
the moment a Congolese man stepped over my prone body as I lay passed out with chronic malaria. ‘I thought I was going to come back home without you,’ he’s told me many times
since. ‘The man just shrugged and said it was possible that you were going to die.’

The TV documentary never happened.

I have a theory that fishing activates some of the same neural circuits that get fired up in gamblers. Many fishermen would disagree with this, arguing that their strategies for success,
although not foolproof, are scientific. Luck doesn’t come into it. Psychologists, however, might nod and talk about ‘reinforcement’: if rewards come along just often enough with
timing that is not totally predictable, the human subject will continue to do the human equivalent of the laboratory rat pushing the food lever. But this doesn’t explain the excessive level
of lever-pushing in some individuals, even when the person should by now realise that the lever isn’t connected to anything. But Paul and I both have a stubborn streak. If television was a
nonstarter, this ought to make for an interesting book. All we needed for an end to this story was the small matter of a fish. We now knew the right season to go, so we planned to do a return trip
the next year. Martin meanwhile remembered something else he needed to be doing.

The rematch got off to a bad start. In fishing-friendly low water the tributaries are hard to navigate because of sandbars, and doing so became even harder when an engine breakdown meant that an
underpowered tug had to push our collection of barges against the current. Most of the time we moved at a slow walking pace, and sometimes we hardly made any headway at all. In some places the
slightest swing of the bow would have swept us around and wedged us immovably in the middle of nowhere. We reached our destination after two weeks, cooking on the tarpaulin-sheltered deck and
sleeping in confined bunks below. After this, things improved once we had regained some physical and mental energy. We set up base in a riverside village, presided over by a soft-spoken chief, and
started to fish. The villagers told us that this was the right time and place for mbenga. But the livebaits that we laboriously caught and fished under floats in pockets of turning water failed to
attract any interest, and likewise for the artificials that flashed and vibrated enticingly. How could such a savage predator be so finicky? We’d written off the Belgian doctor, whose notes
had formed the basis of the old book chapter, as an old duffer whose patchy results would be knocked into a cocked hat by modern-day equipment and know-how. But it looked like he was right about
goliath’s elusiveness. We spoke to an old fisherman who used to catch them on a handline, and he told us to fish lumps of dead fish on the bottom – not dead fish, but pieces of fish
meat. Doubting this would tempt a mid-water hunter, we nevertheless tried it, as we’d drawn a blank with everything else.