Over the last five or six years I have accumulated a ridiculous amount of book tokens from various sources. Some have been birthday presents from colleagues, some were prizes from school awards evenings, others are so old that I have simply no idea how I acquired them. The problem is, much as I read, I never ever buy books for myself. Well, I buy German language books when I am abroad out of the sheer excitement of being able to obtain them, but as a rule for English books I rely either on presents or the local library. I enter bookshops chiefly to buy presents for other people, or to use the travel section as a reference library, and so for ages these vouchers have lurked in the bottom of my sock drawer and gathered dust.

A few weeks ago, I had the idea that I could donate them to my boyfriend, who has a version of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which means he can’t pass an outlet of the Works without making a purchase and goes to sleep fantasising about bookshelves He, however, in a random fit of selflessness decided that he didn’t want to use them to buy books for himself, but was going to periodically buy books for me as a surprise

I received the first of these books, ‘Blood River’ by Tim Butcher last Thursday, and finished it shortly before midnight last night.

Wow. This is a very powerful piece of work. I’m not normally an avid reader of non fiction, preferring to read in order to relax rather than to improve my mind, but this book captured me from the first page.

It tells the real life story of a Telegraph journalist, Tim Butcher, who upon being appointed as the paper’s Africa Correspondent, begins to develop a compulsion to travel the length of the Congo river which runs through that massive country in central Africa which I still have profound difficulties to avoid calling Zaire. Butcher wants to follow in the footsteps of the famous explorer Stanley, who charted the river at the end of the nineteenth century, becoming the first person to travel across Africa from the East coast to the West. After years of dreaming and planning, Butcher finally sets off on a terrifying journey of 2500 miles through one of the most dangerous and primitive places on the planet. His book documents the adventures he experiences on his travels, interspersed with commentary on the history both of the Congo and of Africa in general.

The enormous river Congo is at the heart of the history of the region, its navigability attracting the interest of the Belgian monarch who soon set out to acquire one of the largest countries in Africa as his own private possession. Decades of Belgian colonial rule followed; years during which the country was if not industrialised, at least developed to a standard of “civilisation” comparable with anywhere in the world. Roads and rail networks criss-crossed the jungle, cities thrived off the back of the profitable mining businesses, electricity, running water and telephones were commonplace, and the Congo even served as a holiday destination, with thousands of Western tourists making journeys down the river on steam boats.

It was, of course, a time of great oppression with discrimination against the native Congolese people that excited even human rights campaigners at the turn of the century. When independence came in the 1960s the country was allegedly handed back to the native population, and yet somehow something went wrong.

The recent history of the Congo is a tangled mess of dictatorships, coups and civil wars. What could be one of the richest countries on the planet has been reduced to one of the poorest. For me the striking feature of the book was Butcher’s description of how much the country had physically regressed in the last fifty years. The railways are disused, the once grand colonial buildings have crumbled. There are no longer state schools or hospitals, the power stations have ceased to generate electricity, and the river steamers have been left to decay along the banks. What shocked me most was the extent to which the road network has been reclaimed by the jungle. Nowadays there appears to be only one functioning highway in the entire land

To some extent, the book reminded me the excellent “8.55 to Baghdad”, another travel book in which Andrew Eames describes his attempts to follow in the footsteps of Agatha Christie, travelling from London to Baghdad by train. That is obviously a very different book. It deals to a certain extent with the life of the great detective novelist in biographical style, interspersed with descriptions about the many countries the train route leads through until the author finally arrives in Iraq in early 2002, just before the outbreak of the most recent hostilities. The similarity lies in the idea of regression; back in the 1930s it was a relatively straight forward affair for a woman with enough money to travel alone by rail to Baghdad, and yet today it is a dangerous journey which is almost impossible to contemplate.

Travelling through the Congo is, however, even more extreme. The author not only has to contend with the equatorial heat, lack of food and clean water and complete absence of infrastructure, but also with the bureaucracy of a corrupt and inept regime which is falling apart at the seams. Rebel groups roam through the rainforest, periodically raiding towns and villages to commit atrocities which would be denounced as war crimes if anyone was troubling to keep track of them. At every turn the intrepid traveller is told that his mission is doomed to failure, that no one could travel overland through the Congo and survive, and were it not for the fact that he obviously made it through to come out the other end and write a book, I would have spent the entire week in a state of nervous tension, waiting for him to be killed!

If you want to get an idea of what the situation in the country is like without going to the trouble of reading the book, a quick glance at the advice for travellers on the Foreign Office website suffices.

I would, however, thoroughly recommend the book itself. It cannot honestly be described as a light read and in places it is truly depressing, but it nevertheless tells a fascinating story of a fascinating country and I certainly learnt a lot about Africa through reading it. A couple of parts really challenged me to reassess my own opinion on colonialism; there is a temptation to think in the black and white terms of “colonialism bad, independence good” and yet there are so many people who the author meets in the course of his journey who describe the significantly better quality of life they enjoyed under Belgian rule. One passage towards the end in particular forced me to challenge the idea that all the problems of Africa are a direct result of the mismanagement of the former colonial powers in centuries gone by. Undoubtedly some of them are. Yet the book describes a Malaysian UN worker’s fury at the wasted potential in the Congo; Malaysia, he points out, is also a former colony which is covered by rainforest and has had it’s fair share of political problems, trying to hold out against communism and so on during the Cold War. And yet Malaysia has managed to pull itself together and become a successful and prosperous nation. He questions what excuse the Congo has for failing to do the same.

In any case, this is a tremendously well-written book, composed in a style which lightens the horror of what it describes without lessening it. It’s currently in the running for the Richard and Judy book of 2008, and I would encourage you to read it, then vote for it here. I haven’t read any of the other books which are in the running but I sincerely doubt they deal with subject matter which is more worthy of public attention.

For me on a personal level, this was quite a difficult book to read and I spent certain parts of it in tears. I first became aware of the place then just about still known as Zaire in a form assembly back in 1997 when my class was introduced to a new pupil called Margaret. Margaret, which she herself actually pronounced Marguerite, had recently arrived from Africa and was going to be joining our class for an undefined period of time. She barely spoke a word of English, so we were asked to communicate with her in French. I was dragged unwillingly from my nice safe seat at the back of the room and made to sit next to her, on the grounds that the languages teacher had said I was the best at French.

I was not very impressed to have the role of tour guide and translator thrust upon me, but a nun later took me to one side and explained that Margaret was a refugee whose family was being looked after by the nuns, having had to flee their own country because of a terrible war which was ongoing there. Margaret had seen her own father killed, the nun told me, therefore it was important that we were nice to her and made her feel at home.

It was difficult to make anyone feel at home with my appallingly bad grasp of French, but luckily Margaret was one of those people blessed with a sunny smile and a talent for understanding hand signals As a matter of fact, the French she spoke was pretty incomprehensible even to the French teacher, being strangely corrupted with words from her native African language. As the months went by, her English increased at a rapid pace, however, and we soon became firm friends. I got my only ever school detention in year eight for allowing her to copy my physics homework.

In the class at large, Margaret was sadly rather unpopular, for she soon developed a reputation for two things; smelling rather odd, and not exactly telling the truth. It’s fair to say that when dealing with Margaret, you were never really sure how much of what she said was fact or fiction, and this was particularly true when asking her about her homeland.

She fiercely maintained in a way which was deeply poignant that her father was alive. Sometimes she told us he owned a bank, other times he was in the government, but he was always alive and earning a great deal of money which would allow her to soon go back to Zaire for good. Quite who her father really was I have no idea, but I suspect he had indeed been someone of influence in Kinshasa. The house Margaret described back home was far superior to anything any of us lived in, seemingly set in some sort of walled compound, whilst in the grounds grew bananas, mangos and pineapples. Even if none of her ecstatic descriptions of home were true, it doesn’t alter the fact that she arrived as a refugee from one of the world’s most underdeveloped nations with an education as good as any of ours (for example in maths, where language wasn’t really a barrier) and able to use a computer, at a time when we were still printing on dot matrixes and trying to save the money to buy Microsoft Windows.

As to the rest of her family, it was a near complete mystery. Over the yeas, various girls were introduced to me by Margaret as her “sister”. On one occasion, invited to a party in the council flat which the nuns had somehow procured for them, I met in excess of twenty people who were all allegedly her “sisters”. In truth, I don’t think any of the people she was with were close relations. None of them appeared to share a surname, which could perhaps be explained away by cultural differences, but none of them seemed to share any facial features or family traits either. Perhaps they were just a random group of people who had managed to escape together, who knows…

I know for a fact that they were here illegally. Margaret wasn’t entitled to a free school dinners ticket, because she wasn’t officially on the register. The teacher scribbled her name in pencil at the bottom and kept a record of her attendance, but she was at no point entered onto the computerised system which sent data to the LEA. The nuns paid her meals and donated her school uniform and bought her presents at Christmas. In return, she made a cheerful pretence of converting to catholicism and allowed them to buy her a pretty white dress in which to make her first communion.

I attended her first communion party actually, and her subsequent confirmation, much against the will of my mother who nearly had a blue fit when she dropped me on the now demolished council estate where Birmingham used to house refugees in the old days. It was the first time in my sheltered little life that I had ever seen syringes lying in stair wells, but what frightened me more was the way their front door was reinforced with steel bars.

One day in summer 2000, just before the rest of us were due to take our GCSE exams, Margaret didn’t come into school At first we thought nothing of it; she was often off sick, succumbing to the first sniff of an English cold. She didn’t come in all that week, or all the next week, or all the week after, and gradually we started to wonder. A week later, the teacher stopped pencilling her name at the bottom of the register. I was too scared to go and enquire why, but I asked a friend of mine to do it for me and she was told that Margaret would not be coming back to school again. We were perplexed. Why hadn’t she said goodbye?!

My friend and I were worried there was something seriously wrong with her, and so we resolved to go to her flat and find out. One night after school we sneaked off the bus into the city centre a few stops early and plunged into the frightening rabbit warren of alleyways and balconies which always reminded me of something off one of the more violent episodes of The Bill. We still had her address from one of her confirmation invitations the previous year, but when, shaking, we knocked on the door, it was opened to us by a Kosovan man who tried to grab my friend’s hair, and we both ran for our lives.

It was all so strange, and yet the mystery was soon forgotten in flurry of exams and results which followed that summer. I thought perhaps that Margaret had moved to London, where she was always talking about more “sisters”, but my grandmother died that summer and I didn’t in truth give it too much thought at all. When we came back for sixth form, the make-up of the classes had changed so much that the empty chair was not as prominent as it should have been.

It was almost a year later, when I was roped into attending a voluntary Rosary session on a Wednesday lunch time, that I heard any mention of Margaret again. Voluntary Rosary had died out over recent years but was currently undergoing a revival at the hands of a girl called Miriam. Miriam, who came from a family of fourteen and whose mother was a passionate SPUC campaigner, was one of those people who just oozed niceness, and it was a great loss to society a few years later when she took the decision to join the Poor Clares, an order of nuns who are denied the privelege of speech. Miriam was about the only other person who had been close to Margaret (she lived on the same estate) and her religious devotation mean that she was always close to the nuns and their secrets.

Anyway, at the end of this particular rosary session, which was somewhat sparsely attended by Miriam, myself and one elderly nun, the said elderly nun suggested we say a prayer for the soul of “poor little Margaret”. The chapel was not the place to ask why, but I later cornered Miriam and coaxed the story out of her.

The authorities had somehow got wind of the fact that the nuns were harbouring a group of illegal immigrants. The group of women had first come to the attention to a branch of the Order who are active in southern Africa, and they had succeeded in smuggling them into the UK where they had unsuccessfully tried to claim asylum. Whatever their links to the old Zaire regime, the British government refused them leave to remain and from then on it was simply a case of seeing how long they could stay here unnoticed before somebody came to remove them. In May 2000, the authorities knocked on the door and took them away, earmarked for deportation. Two of the nuns were temporarily taken into police custody to explain their connection in the matter. They were released without charge, but warned not to meddle in immigration matters again.

That was the last anyone heard of them. Miriam and the Sister were both pretty certain that they would no longer be alive; violent chaos was still reigning in Kinshasa and it seemed that they were all connected to people who were out of favour with the state. Even if they weren’t in specific danger, I can only wonder at a government who sees fit to send a group of women and young children back to a country which is in such a desperate state of turmoil

And that was that. The nuns involved have since passed on, Miriam is only allowed to make contact with the outside world once every few years by post, and no one else who remembers the outrageously exuberant person who was Margaret will ever be able to find out what happened to her. We never knew her real name, the surname she gave us was a random invention and Margaret was a Western name the nuns chose when she started school. She told me once that her real first name meant “angel” in her language, although I am confused as to what her language actually was. I am sure she told me it was Swahili, and yet with the benefit of age I know that Swahili is not normally spoken in the part of the country from which she originated, and so perhaps it was something else. In any case, she is the one person from my convent school days who I know will never click to add me as a friend on Facebook, and for me that made this book even more disturbing than it should have been.

Tags: Blood River, Congo, Tim Butcher

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