OHanlon - Congo journey

PENGUIN BOOKS
CONGO JOURNEY

OHanlons best book. Learned and witty, this work is in danger of giving travel literature a good name Harry Ritchie in the Mail on Sunday

From Brazzaville to the interior of the northern Congo, through swamps, forests and jungle, the author strikes out for Lake Tl and the dinosaur rumoured to live in its depths. This is classic OHanlon the encounters are so beautifully crafted, the bad-taste jokes so genuinely funny, the boyishness so utterly unaffected, that the least best part of myself couldnt help but enjoy it. Its a great read. Damn him

Dea Birkett in the New Statesman

OHanlon is aiming at something grander than a mere travelogue. His pages bristle darkly with reflections on death and religious faith superbly written His sprawling Congo epic approaches greatness

Ian Thomson in the Sunday Times

A wonderful book, full of strange insights, erudition and humour

Quentin Crewe in the Sunday Express

This book describes a perfectly awful journey: the horrors of African travel load each page. But from the moment OHanlon thrusts his arm through yours and sets off with jaunty eagerness to catch the ferry up the Congo, you are carried along by his exuberant garrulity

Philip Glazebrook in the Spectator

It is this sense of comic irony, of how African reality imposes itself on white visions, that separates this engaging and beautifully written modern-day travel adventure in equatorial Africa from its nineteenth-century predecessors Robert Harms in The Times Literary Supplement

Redmond OHanlon is an explorer in the nineteenth-century mould. In addition to his bestselling travel books, Into the Heart of Borneo, In Trouble Again, Congo Journey and Trawler, he has published scholarly works on nineteenth-century science and literature. For fifteen years he was the natural history editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He lives outside Oxford with his wife and two children.

Redmond OHanlon

PENGUIN BOOKS

To my wife, Belinda

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First published by Hamish Hamilton 1996
Published in Penguin Books 1997
14

Copyright Redmond OHanlon, 1996

All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted

Grateful acknowledgement is made to James Fenton for permission
to quote lines from his poem The Wild Ones, from The Memory of War
and Children in Exile Poems 196893, published by the Salamander Press

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN-13: 9780141933436

The author wishes to thank Andrew Franklin; Galen Strawson; Simon Stockton; John Stanbury; Pat Kavanagh; Peter Carson; Jonathan Kingdon; James Fenton; Bill Buford; Ursula Doyle and Granta; Ferdinand Mount and the TLS; Linda Hopkins; Rosie Boycott; Andrew Kidd; Alexandra Pringle; Jon Riley; Fred Bayliss; Max Peterson; Will Self; David Warrell; Jacques Meunier; Mark Harvey Smith; Chris Shaffer; Charles O. Warren; Ian Glasby; Tim Gravestock; Keith Taylor; Louis Muzzu; Ossebei Douniam; Yvette Leroy and Assitou Ndinga.

Travels in the Congo

The first journey

The second journey

In her hut in Poto-Poto, the poor quarter of Brazzaville, the fticheuse, smiling at us, knelt on the floor, drew out a handful of cowrie shells from the cloth bag at her waist, and cast them across the raffia mat.

Lary Shaffer and I, despite ourselves, leaned forward on our wooden stools, studying the meaningless pattern; the shells, obviously much handled, shone like old ivory in the glow of the paraffin lamp. The fticheuse stopped smiling.

One of you, she said slowly in French, is very ill, right now.

The rain seemed to clatter with increased urgency on the corrugated-iron roof. I had the absurd feeling that the other objects in the little breeze-block room a pile of laundry in a red plastic bucket, a rough double-bed (its mosquito-net suspended from a hook on a cross-beam) were watching us. Its simply that were not yet acclimatized, I told myself, weve only been in the Congo for two days: a thought which immediately made the humidity and the heat doubly oppressive.

Lary, still staring at the floor, wiped the blisters of sweat from his forehead and the bridge of his nose. His hand, I noticed, was shaking.

Its me, he said, stumbling over his words. Its me. Im the one whos ill. Nine years ago I was in a wheelchair. I have this thing called multiple sclerosis. I forced myself to walk again. One yard one day. Two yards the next. My sight came back. And then last year I cycled across America. Thirty-three days. West to east. Coast to coast. Its okay.

A wheelchair? I said, unable to keep the panic out of my voice.

I swim forty-five minutes a day. A mile and a quarter. Im fit. Im all right. You can see Im fit. And anyway I thought Id rather die in Africa than strip paint in my house in Cornelia Street all summer. Theres no problem. Theres no worry. No need at all.

Please! said the fticheuse, tossing her head right back and pressing her palms into her eyes. You must be quiet. If you talk one to the other I cannot see. And if I cannot see I cannot help you. And then, Here, take these, she said, opening her eyes, reaching forward, gathering up the shells and giving us three each. Hold these against a banknote and breathe your desires into them.

With my free hand I drew two 1000 CFA (two pound) notes out of my leg-pocket, gave one to Lary, and crumpled the other over the shells in my cupped palm.

Now, she said, who is responsible for all this?

I am, I said, puffing out my chest.

Then tell me what is it that you really want? What is it that you want most when you are quiet inside? and dont bother me with anything else, dont tell me the story you prepared for your wives.