Always looking for little nuggets of Truth, by which we can gauge history and man's involvement with it. Too much it seems we come across work where no matter how much time has elapsed, the activities of the men and nations in question remains the same and 9 out of 10 times that is not a good thing. I am going to follow along with Tim as he makes his way across the African Continent starting from Zanzibar,into the planets second largest rainforest.

... I had spent three years preparing for this moment, planning and researching, and it had already taken a week of delays and hassle just to reach this spot, but the most dangerous part of my journey was only now beginning. Feeling as if my legs were about to collapse, I croaked a faint curse against the obsession that had drawn me to the most daunting, backward country on Earth.

I fingered a piece of paper folded in my pocket. It was a travel pass bearing the smudgy ink stamps of the local district commissioner, granting permission for `Butcher, Timothi' to make a journey overland to the Congo River 500 kilometres away. It spelled out the modes of transport authorised for the trip: bicycle, motorbike and dugout canoe. To reach the river I would have to travel west, crossing Katanga, a province that has been in a state of near-permanent rebellion for more than forty years, and Maniema, a province where cannibalism remains as real today as it was in the nineteenth century, when bearer parties refused to take explorers there for fear of being eaten. Even if I made it to the river, I would still have 2,500 kilometres of descent before reaching my final goal, close to where the Congo River spews into the Atlantic.

I remembered the reaction of the commissioner's secretary in Kalemie when I had collected the pass a few days earlier. After reading my itinerary he stopped writing, put his pen down very deliberately and raised his head to look at me. The lenses of his thick-framed glasses were misty with scratches, but I could still see his pupils pulse with disbelief.

'You want to go where?'

'I want to go to the Congo River.'

`You want to go overland?'

`Yes.'

`My family comes from a village on the way to the river, but we have not been able to go there for more than ten years. How do you think you will get there?

'With a motorbike and some luck.'

'You are a white man, you will need something more than luck.'

Shaking his head slowly, his gaze dropped back to the travel pass, which he stamped with the seal of office of the District Commissioner for North Katanga. As I turned to leave I looked round the office. It had a crack in one wall so wide I could see blue sky through it, an old Bakelite telephone connected to nothing, and a tatty air that spoke of regular bouts of looting.

Commissioner Pierre Kamulete had hidden his surprise rather better when I approached him for permission to travel. He listened politely to my request, then gestured for me to join him over at the cracked wall where a large map hung. It was foxed with damp patches and bore place names that had not been used for decades. He pointed at the gap between Kalemie and the headwaters of the Congo River.

`You see this road that is marked here?' His finger traced what was shown as a national highway running due west from the lake. `It does not exist any more. And the railway here. That does not work, either. A storm washed away the bridge. I don't know what route you will use, but it will take you a long time.'

But it wasn't the lack of roads that really worried me. It was the rebels, especially the mai-mai.

Mai-mai is a corruption of `water-water' in the local language of Swahili and refers to the magical water with which rebels douse themselves after it has been imbued with special properties by sorcerers. Believers will tell you that bullets fired at anyone sprinkled with the special water will fall harmlessly to the ground. Non-believers will tell you that mai-mai are well-armed, dangerous killers who answer to nobody but themselves.

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/part-1-blood-river-journey-to-africas.html