It is "the river that swallows other rivers", dozens of tributaries: the Congo River. A watercourse with a soul, the deepest in the world, 4,700 kilometers that cross one of the countries richest in natural resources but with the poorest in income: the Democratic Republic of Congo. A territory to which history has fallen, plundered over and over again by slavers, insane kings like Leopold I of Belgium, dictators and guerrillas hunting rubber, cobalt, coltan. A world immortalized by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness and into which now the journalist Xavier Aldekoa (Barcelona, 1981), who has been reporting on Africa for years, has plunged headlong, touring the Congo River for two months and capturing it in the book Quixote in the Congo (Peninsula). An adventure almost from another time narrated with the pulse of great literature. Precisely on Tuesday, Aldekoa and La Vanguardia received the Ortega y Gasset award for the best multimedia coverage for the series of articles Río Congo. A journey from the sources to the mouth of the great river of Africa.
Has your trip been closer to Dr. Livingstone or the horror that Conrad narrated?
There has been something of both. At first it passed through places that had barely changed since Stanley's or Livingstone's descriptions. The fishermen's huts were the same and the reactions of the people were similar. And I have also seen the external and internal chaos of Heart of Darkness and it has been the trip that has changed me the most. But I have also had a brighter vision, a vital, generous, honest Congo, full of art, writers, history, philosophy.
Have you had the feeling that you were traveling in time?
Almost that he traveled to another planet on some occasions. From being in a place outside of what is happening in the rest of the world, wars, pandemics. Waiting eight days in the hold of a boat for a piece to be fixed is part of normality. It takes you away from our world where everything is marked by the clock.
Even without time, History has passed over them.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo accumulates the essence of all the wounded history of exploitation. There were Arab and European slavers there, there they go for ivory for piano keys, when Dunlop invents the tire, rubber comes from Congo, in world wars, copper. And the uranium from Hiroshima. And the coltan of our mobiles, cobalt. A chain of exploitation. If something changes in the world economy and sugar plantations are created in America with a slave system, it will have repercussions in the Congo. When in Europe we began to sweeten coffee, the Congolese paid for the bitterness.
How do they live it?
Those who have had an education, I don't know if I would say spitefully, but almost. They are aware that throughout their history there has been exploitation and that this lacerating corruption of politicians continues, not only externally, but also internally. In remote towns there is not much distinction between whether the outside is Europe or Kinshasa, it is another world alien to their reality of daily fishing for survival.
He says that only 8% of people have access to electricity.
They have the second largest river in the world and the country is not capable, and they have not allowed it to be, of taking advantage of that hydroelectric wealth so that its population lives well. It could be a wealthy town and you can't even turn on the light.
With so many guerrillas, is it a failed country or state?
It is the essence of Africa, a very diverse country in which one part has nothing to do with another. It is the river that gives unity to a country in which you go from a rich area with mines exploited by Canadians, Chinese and Americans, to another where you have to talk to a rebel chief. You go from an orderly system for exploitation to absolute chaos, but with the same objective: to plunder and exploit the country, some on a large scale and others however they can. It could be from the richest countries, and for this very reason there is a system that is interested in nothing changing too much in order to continue exploiting it. In a crude baroque way in the East, where the rebel groups are guys in Dalinian dog hats and rusty kalashnikovs, or on a grand scale and in ties and suits in Katanga.
Is the Congo the epitome of countries suffering from the natural resource curse?
The Niger Delta in Nigeria was the place where he had seen people cry the most in despair, an area where they found oil and that meant that life expectancy fell by 11 years. There were many leaks and an area that used to be a paradise is now contaminated and people have lost their way of life. But after touring the Congo, now I doubt. That pain of knowing that you are being exploited, that your life is not fair because someone from outside is taking advantage of it, I have seen it many times in the conversations I had with cabin boys or fellow travelers on the boats. They also confronted me directly and asked me: But why have you done this? Congo is where I have seen the most that feeling of knowing that you are being subjugated throughout many generations, not just yours.
He says that the one who plays strong there now is China.
Yes, for years, especially in very specific minerals, such as cobalt, the great mineral for electric car batteries. You see big companies, but also a Chinese guy who has gone to a town or a village where there is an artisanal mine, has a little cabin, has learned Swahili or Lingala and sells retail to the miners who come out of the mine and He buys the mineral from them for four dollars, loads it into a terrifying truck and is going to sell it to another Chinese colleague who already has a somewhat larger structure. They have seen an opportunity and they are going to do their little business.
It is curious to imagine that you have been confused there with a Chinese.
A policeman once told me: "Don't get on the boat because they are going to kill you. They attack the Chinese because they think they are stealing organs." I said, "Well, I'm sure, right? I don't look Chinese." And he explained to me that there they think that a Chinese is the same as a Westerner, it is someone foreign who can come to attack them. History has taught them that and I was part of that of that history. Suddenly I was on the side of the aggressors because history has taught the Congolese that the aggressors are all those who come from abroad.
One of the most defining moments of your book is when you read Don Quixote on the boat, many start to get scared and you discover that they believe that, with such a fat book, you are a witch.
I was a bit amused at first. But my friend Japhet told me: "Either we put an end to this rumor or if a child on the ship gets sick and dies, they can blame you, if someone falls and drowns in the river, they can blame you, and that can have them throw you overboard or make this very complicated". It was a key moment of the trip because I was very attentive to listen, to observe, I thought that my look was important to explain what was around me. And Don Quixote It was a way of seeing that how they are looking at you is also very important. It helped me a lot to get closer to others.
The country, can it change?
Africa today has the most educated generation and that may allow a change, but in the Congo it is still lacking. There are theater directors who fight for there to be a cultural center in Kisangani and continue to criticize politicians from the stage, a doctor who returns from Navarra, although here she could earn four times as much, because she believes that her work is more necessary there. All that resistance is the hope of the Congo. There are elections in December and the Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege could run, but a long transition is needed because the damage of history is long. After independence, Lumumba tried to change things and they not only killed him but also installed Mobutu, a terrible dictator who served outside interests and established corruption as a way of life. The CIA agreed. He was a bastard, but she was his bastard. And we continue in that chaotic ineffective corrupt system that allows a few to continue to benefit.
