Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost
Burning in hell for hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off down in hell.
I said it was odd that Belgians were rude to the Congolese, since it was the Belgians who had plundered their country, first in the search for ivory, and then for rubber, and at last for diamonds and chrome and gold. Mostly slave labor had been used, whole villages were turned out to find ivory, or to collect rubber, and the punishment for slacking was murder or the lopping off of hands. Decades of this, an enormous colony bled of its wealth. As the indignant Irishman in the pub in Joyce’s Ulysses puts it, ‘Raping the women and girls and flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can out of them.’
I said, ‘The whole of the Congo belonged to the Belgian king. It was his private property. The Congo was the king’s own shamba.’
This interested the men at the table, and it was an amazing fact. The Congo was not a Belgian colony but for twenty-three years starting in 1885, King Leopold’s private domain. The horror of it had outraged Joseph Conrad on his trip upriver to Stanleyville and had inspired Heart of Darkness.
‘The whole Congo, his shamba?’ one of the crewmen said.
Sneering, John said, ‘In Belgium, they name big streets after Leopold!’
The crew of the Umoja were attentive listeners, they understood the contradictions in the period Hochschild had called ‘one of the silences of history.’ They responded with shrewd questions, and at last when duty called them to their stations on the ferry they said they wanted to read the book.
‘Come, I’ll show you the engine room,’ John said.
Heat and noise rose from the narrow stairwell as we climbed down slippery treads. The last levels were just iron ladders, and the noise from the pounding engines was so loud I could barely hear what John was saying. He was explaining that the ferry was British-built, first launched in 1962. Neither its diesel engines nor its Caterpillar generators, nor its boilers, had been changed in forty years. The company that had built the ferry was no longer in business, the diesel engines were obsolete.
Over the deafening noise in the engine room, John shouted, ‘Very hard to get spare parts! Two engines — so we can always make it! Sometimes we have a steering problem!’
Then he handed me a pair of earmuffs, the sort you see clamped on the heads of cannoneers, to block the loud engine roar. And he led me on into the heat.
One of the oddest sights I was privileged to observe in many months of travel from Cairo to Cape Town I glimpsed below decks, in the engine room of the Umoja. At the lowest depth of the engine room, in the most deafening noise, the worst heat, the hottest pipes — most of them unlagged, some of them spitting jets of steam from their iron elbows — a young African crewman was sitting at a wet wooden table, doing complex mathematical equations. He seemed at first glance to be naked. His thumb was stuck in a book of logarithmic tables, and a textbook was open in front of him. The sheet of paper he used was covered with algebraic equations — numbers and letters, from top to bottom. To me the heat and noise were terrifying in their intensity. But the young man was serene, and he worked with the stub of a pencil, wearing nothing but undershorts, with pink rubber plugs in his ears.
He was so engrossed in his work, which looked like school homework, he did not greet us. Only when I lifted the book cover to read the title did he look up and smile, but then he went back to his work. The book was Principles of Diesel and High Compression Engines.
‘English is the language of the imperialists,’ Tanzanian officials had often said in the past. One of the stated policies instituted by the much-loved first president of Tanzania, Mwalimu (Teacher) Julius Nyerere, was the translation, at great expense, of all school textbooks into Swahili. To prove it could be done, he personally translated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into this coastal idiom. It struck me in the engine room of the Umoja that it might be a little time before Principles of Diesel and High Compression Engines was available in Swahili.
Conversation in this noise was impossible. I took a piece of paper and wrote, What is he doing?
John nodded and took the paper and pen. He wrote, He is studying.
What for? I wrote in reply.
Perspiring in the heat, his jaw fixed — for he was not wearing earmuffs — John wrote, To boost up his academic qualifications for his employment.
Still in the din, we sat down in a caged control room and had a cup of hot coffee out of a Thermos. Once, I removed my earmuffs, but the engine howl was unbearable. John laughed at my reaction — which was like being hammered on the head. He did not seem to mind but perhaps many years of this noise had rendered him partly deaf. I also noticed that the engine room was very tidy and efficient, much more orderly and better maintained than the upper decks of the ferry. Pointing to dials he showed me the boiler pressure, the fuel levels, the temperature and the fact that we were proceeding at between eleven and twelve knots, a pretty good clip.
After twenty minutes or so of drinking coffee in the boiler room I could not take any more of this. I signaled that I was going topside. There, in the cool air and the sunshine we were still at sea, no land in sight.
‘You don’t take passengers anymore?’ I said.
John said, ‘This is designated a cargo vessel. If we take more than six people, we are regarded as a passenger vessel and therefore must enforce very careful safety regulations. Number of life jackets. Lifeboats. Give lifeboat drill.’
‘Because the Bukoba sank?’
‘Yes. We will pass it. It was sailing to Mwanza.’
Later I read that Lake Victoria had never been properly surveyed and that all the available data on hazards was collected in 1954 by the British colonial government. The information about landmarks and warnings was now out of date. The only people qualified to pilot a large vessel in Lake Victoria were those with local knowledge and experience.
John and the captain had worked together on the Umoja since the late seventies. At that time it was a military vessel.
‘During the war against Idi Amin we made trips bringing many soldiers. Five thousand of them, standing like this’ — John tightened his face and stood rigid to show how tightly packed the men were. ‘We took them to Jinja Port and they hid when they went ashore.’
‘What do you bring into Uganda now?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. It is all in freight cars and sealed and packed up,’ John said. ‘Out of Uganda we take, coffee and tea. We ourselves produce cotton, coffee, tea, cashews, and cloves in Zanzibar.’
‘What about cloth?’
‘We have only one textile factory now,’ John said. ‘We sell our cotton, we don’t make it into cloth.’
Forty years of independent rule and foreign investment, forty years of mind-deadening political rhetoric about Ujamaa (‘Familyhood’) and ‘African socialism,’ nationalization and industrialization and neutrality, and this vast fertile country of twenty million people had achieved a condition of near bankruptcy and had one factory.