66: Tim Butcher | The Congo & Africa's Broken Heart Through The Eyes Of A War Journalist - Blood River

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The following is a conversation with Tim Butcher, author, adventurer, international journalist. 

Tim served as a journalist for over 20 years with The Daily Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom, holding a series of positions including lead writer, war correspondent, African Bureau Chief, and serving as the Middle East Correspondent. 

Tim Butcher travelled overland the great, powerful, consuming and hostile, lungs of the Earth which is the territory we know as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And what makes this one of the great adventures is that at the time he did, and likely since as well, it had been over 100 years since someone had successfully completed the journey.

You can expect to hear in this podcast about the following and more…

• The Risks Of The Congo
• The Beauty Of The Congo
• Tim Explaining Why Progress Is Inverted In The Congo (This Is The Most Important Part)
• Corruption & Kleptocracy Of The Congo
• + A Window Into Tim’s Latest Work

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• 00:00 – Introduction.
• 06:37 – What Makes Traveling The Congo So Exceptionally Difficult.
• 11:41 – The Risks Of Traveling Through The Congo.
• 35:21 – Why The Congo Is So Beautiful & The Unbelievability Of The Congo.
• 45:01 – Tim’s Motivation For Going To The Congo.
• 47:57 – Tim Explaining How Progress In The Congo Is Inverted.
• 1:08:21 – The Corruption, Kleptocracy & Crony Capitalism In The Congo.
• 1:13:47 – Why Nations Fail, Corruption & Giant Infrastructure Projects.
• 1:26:52 – Amazing Anecdote Regarding Health, Corruption & Covid.
• 1:29:28 – Classic Despotic African Corruption & Cliché Yachtlife.
• 1:31:50 – The Illusion Of Normalcy & What Makes A Nation.
• 1:46:46 – On Special Economic Zones In Africa.
• 2:01:36 – A Country You Are Most Bullish On.
• 2:04:06 – Afterthoughts & Ambition For The Podcast

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Tim Butcher Links

• Tim Butcher’s Website
• Blood River

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

The following is a conversation with Tim Butcher, someone who for me embodies the romantic ideal of a traveling journalist and war correspondent. There are some people who are just predisposed to podcasting. Tim Butcher is without a doubt one of them. And as you will see, he speaks effortlessly in an almost finished prose. It reminds me of these interviews and videos with Christopher Hitchens that I have listened to within an inch of their life. And I think that there is something to the international journalists' high writing cadence and British expectations for illusory and ironic inflection at every corner that just crafts this storytelling knack and ability to speak so eloquently, quite frankly. But this intro is going to be a tad longer than usual, but please don't skip it because it will inform some of the context for the conversation that then precedes it. Tim Butcher, the guest on the show, he served as a journalist for over 20 years with the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the United Kingdom. He held a series of positions there, including lead writer, war correspondent, African Bureau Chief, and Middle East correspondent. Tim was reporting from the front lines, as they say, although I do think in this case literally as well, for if not all, at least some of the Yugoslav wars, which were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies fought in the former Yugoslavia, which is Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, this part of the world, from 1991 to 2001. And I think it's worth mentioning that here because there is a wonderful anecdote that Tim told me of riding a tank to the peak of Mount Igman that dominates the cityscape of Sarajevo with his former comrade, former colleague, and now fellow guest on this podcast, the great and powerful Tim Marshall, author of Prisoner and Power of Geography, which, if you're interested, there is a uh several interviews that you could see in the backlog to listen to him. But I mentioned this preamble of his history writing from the Yugoslav Wars because it is what happens after this conflict, which is what dominates our conversation today. Because Tim conducted what is surely one of the greatest adventures of the 21st century. Now, longtime listeners of the podcast know very well how interested and I how interested I am in the great adventurers of history. Episode 55 with Scott Rank is almost exclusively about this topic. The first epaha the first half of the episode 60 with Rudy Lynch, Von Humboldt, James Holman, Percival Fawcett, and hundreds of unnamed people whose journeys and adventures were never recorded. I find it all very, very romantic. The great journeys of ancient Egypt into Scandinavia, the great aboriginal who walked through Asia, the Mayan who ventured north to live among the Apaches. I am very fascinated by these types, and there is an idea that this type of adventure is inaccessible to us in the 21st century. Well, it is true that there are no longer great lands like Australia that could be explored as part of the New World, but great adventurers and truly great adventures are still capable to anyone bold and organized enough to go for them. I am thinking of the great Australian Tim Cope, who in 2004 travelled 10,000 kilometers on horseback throughout the Eurasian steppe, or Robin Davidson, another great Australian who tamed camels and crossed one of the largest deserts in the world on foot. I can only name two and I cannot think of any more, though I'm sure there are. But someone who slots very neatly into this category of the modern adventurer is my guest today, Mr. Tim Butcher. Because he travelled overland the great, powerful, all-consuming, hostile lungs of the earth, which is the territory we know as the Democratic Republic of Congo. And what makes this one of the great adventures of the 21st century is that at the time he did it, at the time he did it, it had been over a hundred years since someone else had successfully made the journey, and it's very likely that since no one has. Because unlike the rest of the world, the hundred-year interlude between the previous adventurer and then Tim Butcher, the interlude had made things worse in the Congo rather than better. I remember during my economics degree at university, we had to start changing the definition of countries from first, second, and third world to developed, developing, and underdeveloped. Well, they need another definition for the Congo because it does not neatly fit into one of these three categories. Because the Congo is undeveloping. They are an undeveloped, undeveloping economy. The rate of progress by all these arbitrary measures is on decline. And such was this the state of affairs in 2004 when Tim made this journey through the Congo. What he sees, experiences, feels, and then learns throughout the journey is impossible to capture in a succinct manner via a podcast, although we do try to give it a go. But make sure, even if you have just a peripheral interest in Africa, but especially the Congo, go and consume the book and the journey entailed. Alright, everyone. Thank you for bearing with me through that. This is that is the conclusion of my overindulgent introduction. Now just the compulsory stuff to benefit your listening. In the chat, we cover Tim and I, the risks of the Congo, the beauty of the Congo, Tim explaining why progress is inverted in the Congo. Sadly, some of the corruption and kleptocracy of the Congo, Africa, and more broadly. But then finally, Tim offers us a worldview into his mind and his current project, his attempt and understanding at what makes a nation, and then the nationalism that goes along with it. I think a magnum opus, which I'm very looking forward to seeing. And as usual, there are timestamps, but as I started with, some people are just predisposed for podcasting. Tim is certainly one of them. So just sit back and enjoy the yarn. Hang around to the end for my afterthoughts, and also for me to explain to you, my very generous and dear listener, my ambition for the podcast. And with that, we close what is potentially the longest introduction of all time. Here is the magnificent Tim Butcher. Thank you so much for joining me this afternoon, mate. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 5:59

I'm good, and I hear you and apology, you've been hunting me these last few months, but COVID got in the way, and I'm sorry for messing you around and leaving emails and things. You're a very determined guy, so your podcast listeners uh uh will benefit from that. When I could assure you, when he gets his teeth into someone, he ain't gonna let him go.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Well, thanks for saying, Tim. Uh I'm happy to see that everything was okay because there was a second there where I was a bit worried, oh shit, maybe I should really stop uh following up with this guy because anyway, we're gonna kick off with Blood River. Um let's start with the geography of the journey. Uh, because you were retracing the steps of HM Stanley in 1871, who travelled overland of the Congo. Can you describe to me and the audience why traveling over land of the Congo isn't like walking or traveling over land like anywhere else? You're not walking the coast of Spain, you're not crossing Mexico, you're not, you're not even crossing South Africa or Botswana, you're crossing the Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo. So it's a very serious ordeal that has very legitimate threats. So uh please, if you wouldn't mind.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

Well, I I guess the easiest way to answer that question would be to you know ask anybody. You go go online, go go find a tour operator, he'll take you to the Congo. Go open a Sunday paper and see, you know, in the travel section, if there's someone going to offer you a trip to the Congo. Because, you know, nowadays, in the 21st century, you can find pretty much anything. I can find a tour operator who'll take me up Mount Everest. I can find a tour operator who'll take me to run a marathon in the Sahara. I'll find someone who'll take me and I'll sail across the deepest oceans, or indeed I'll take a submarine to the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean. But the Congo ain't there, and that's why it's so intriguing for me. A hundred and fifty odd years ago, a writer called Joseph Conrad had a very nice way of describing that part of Africa. He said in prosaic terms, the blankest of blank spaces on the earth's figured surface. Which basically meant everywhere else had been mapped, but we didn't know anything about the Congo. Which is why Stanley is interesting for me. We'll come on to why he's important later. But to come back to your question, what's the real estate like? It's a big lump of Africa, a slap on the equator. QED, it's hot. Lots of forest, tropical rainforest, thick, impenetrable. But to go from go across the Congo, now let's just briefly have a little interlude so we understand what we're talking about. We're talking about a country which is named for a river. There's this massive river. The river bears the name today, it's had different names over the years, but it's known as the Congo, and it gives its name to two countries today: Republic of Congo and the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Let's not go too too hung up on this. One is a former French colony, one is a former Belgian colony. The bottom line is it's David and Golath. One is small, one is ginormous, and the one I'm interested in is the ginormous one. From one side of this single country to the other is the same distance to go from London to Moscow. So it's a big it's a country that could be a continent. But the challenge, the thing that makes it really intriguing, is that it's not like any other continent. No other nothing works there. No roads work there, no airlines travel there, no ferries run on the river systems.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Your cell phone may you know may or may not work.

SPEAKER_02 9:28

Cell phone in some areas, unheard of. So we're talking about an area fabulously challenging from a travel point of view. Forget the politics, forget the history, just beguiling. It's a challenge. It's a kind of red flag for a bull. Are you up for this? And I just genuinely think crossing the Congo, even today, and I did this journey for Blood River 17 years ago. Actually, turns 18 this year. Even today, and I watch the country closely and changes, even today it remains the biggie, the great challenge. It's the Mount Everest of travel. You go to the Congo, you go over land through the Congo and survive.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

There are a number of risks.

SPEAKER_02 10:10

There is warfare in some areas, there's health hazards in another. You know, we're living through you know, you hear the word Ebola, you've had an Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Where does that come from?

SPEAKER_01 10:19

The Congo.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

HIV AIDS, HIV comes from the Congo originally. Original founding moment. Health will get you, war could get you, but much more intriguingly, and the reason you your word in the intro is is uh so powerful, is just the ordeal. Because to travel there, you've really got to use your own wits. There are no roads for vast swathes of the country. There are no meaningful towns. What towns there are are run by warlords. There is no meaningful central government. So from one side, London to Moscow, the capital, which happens to be over on the London side, say, their guys, they don't go over to Moscow. So the guys on the border, well, they're just guys with sharpen, you know, with sharp knives on Kalashnikovs. So there's no central cohesion. So to travel it's not like anywhere else. It's brilliantly challenging on all those dimensions, politically, militarily, culturally, medically, but logistically. And that's what makes it for me the purest journey I could imagine. Because you are asking yourself, can you take yourself as far out of your comfort zone as it's possible to go and give it a crack? And I did, and I was hugely lucky in the way the journey turned out.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Let's talk about that risk then, and I'm sure you'll be able to anecdotally throw out, comment more specifically on um what the what what makes it the ordeal in terms of your experience at the airport, uh, your experience handling bikes, your experience getting bikes, access to fuel, all this sort of stuff, which we would obviously take for granted in any other country. But to ask specifically about the risk, this was something I really it sort of stopped me and I had to really think about because you were um, you know, from most outward measures, a very successful uh journalist, right? Yeah, a foreign correspondent to the continent for the telegraph. Um you also had a wife, so there's extra responsibility there. You know, you could be letting someone else down if you hurt yourself, not just yourself. Um and there was one moment as you were leaving the Uruguayan boatsman and giving uh and you were given a choice to continue alone or to turn back, and you knew if you turned back the journey was over, and if you continued alone, there was absolutely no going back. And you're a white man, you got a couple hundred dollars under the soles of your shoes, you're venturing into territory where there is just no ability to find help, and um you concluded by taking the risk. So um how did you manage to do that?

SPEAKER_02 12:48

I guess um the background, as you say, uh, is that I was a journalist, uh a war correspondent for a number of years in a number of different places, and I had got frustrated by the herd. Everyone, the journalists all hanging together, the same satellite dishes, the same people, the same smells, the same issues. Oh, he's greedy, he takes the food, she's a pain in the arse, she steals the shower back. Yeah, the herd, everyone's together. And I wanted to to to prove myself alone. Because to be in the herd I felt I was lost in a in a in a group. So I was drawn to this challenge, this challenge across in the Congo. Um there's a historical connection with journalism we can have a little look to in the butt in later on if we want. But in terms of risk, I've been shot at in Sario, I've been shelled in Lebanon, I've been shelled in Iraq, I've crossed front lines into Gaza, I've you know you know, m done some cra you know, had bullets wing parsing me in Kosovo. I've done the risk. Risk is not something that I am um unaware of, but let me tell you, I'm very risk averse. I hate it. I'll hide it, I'll hide under the bed. And there's ways of managing risk, and you learn how to deal. If you're gonna go to a potentially go to a hazarded place, really one of the dangerous, most dangerous places everyone was central London. We had a riot in April of 1990, there's a poll tax. Mrs. Thatcher cast your mind back decades into the different century. Mrs. Thatcher, when she was uh British leader, very unpopular, she tried to impose a tax. The the set centre of London was set about set on fire, effectively. Trafalgar Square, 30,000 people fighting with the police, riot gear, the whole lot. And I remember as a journalist running down a main street in London, the strand, running towards the flames, and 30,000 people were running against my flow. And I felt strange, I felt like that sort of Monty Python character when she shouts out, You're all individuals, and the voices say, We're all individuals, the crowd, and it's all a bit sort of confusing. Why am I running to anyway? The point is that was pretty that had its moments. I can deal with risk, but I'm very, very cautious. I will manage it. And I describe in the book actually a little section where you have objective risk and subjective risk. What's the subjective risk? Subjective risk is are you healthy enough? Are you fast enough? Do you know a language? Do you have the right gear? These are the things that you've got control over. They are subject to you. You've got to you know you don't cross a front line at one in the afternoon in daylight. The guys are sober and awake and they can shoot you. You do it at four o'clock in the morning. They're always pissed and asleep. You mitigate the risk, you reduce it. And in the Congo, there's a knot of warry area, so you you you you manage to I I knew I could handle that. Subjective risk. Objective risk is something that's out of your hands. It's the objective risk of walking across a glacier field on the and at the height of an alpine climb. There could be a crevasse beneath you. You will fall to your death if you go into that crevasse. But the only way to get up this hill is to go out across that that uh glacier. So do you accept it? And it comes in and you don't walk across the glacier at three in the afternoon when the sun's been on it, you walk across it at half past early when you know blah blah blah blah blah. So you reduce and you manage. And I apply the same principles, which is you know, I will do everything I can subjectively to reduce it, but I will accept a level of objective risk. And I hope that doesn't sound blase, but it's exactly the same objective risk that you, listener, subject yourself to when you drive a car, when you break the speed limit, which we all do. You drive, you know, you know, it's that sort of thing. You're rolling the dice. And I rolled the dice in the Congo, and I came up with these extraordinary help, uh, the assistance of some amazing people, these great guides. I've rolled the dice, and it was a series of episodes of rolling the dice. I don't want to sound too grand, but you know, a guy like me did a similar trip down the Niger River, which is in a different part of Africa, the name that gives its uh the river that gives its name to Nigeria, of course. Only a couple of years before I did my trip. His body was never found. He rolled the dice, he came up one and two. I rolled the dice and I was fortunate. So there is, you have to accept a degree of not being in control, but you reduce that to as much as you possibly can. And then you acknowledge that you're putting yourself at risk, but is it worth it? And for me, proving myself away from the herd, challenging myself to do something was worth it. It was it was the return on investment, crude terms, um, was yes. It made, it just, it just changed my life because it gave me such a better understanding of a fundamentally important but often overlooked part of our world. Not just the physical part of the world, the Congo. I'm talking about how people behave under pressure. And we see it now, whether it's January the 6th in the Capitol, when you get a different form of American than you've never seen before, you know, challenging and breaking sitting in the speaker's chair in the House of Representatives. Or you see it in UK, where you've got you know personal conciliaries and advisers of the Prime Minister lying, lying about COVID rules. It's about what you accept as a person, as a person in the modern world, is part of your nation-state, part of the night the community that you're in. And the Congo, it strips it back. I love it because it strips back all the camouflage and the bullshit and the artifice. It leaves you with very pure forms. What do you do to survive? And uh the journey was a constant process of making that decision. And you you picked up a nice moment. There was a moment, dear a listener, where I'm on the upper section of the Congo River trying to make progress, and there are no powered boats on a 700 kilometer stretch of a river in the 21st century. Not a single powered boat, not a single local powered boat. There's one UN boat, United Nations boat, run by some Uruguayans, and they go down to maybe 150 Ks. And that's good. It's gonna take me in that direction. But then after that, I'm gonna have to leap. I'm gonna have to make my way, I'm gonna have to leave them and make a plan. And um these guys took me that day. I'll never forget, because my that by then I've been travelling a while, my belly was just not used to food because I, you know, everything is everything changes. And they had plates of chips on their boats in Kraken River. Strange you smoke, remember these chips, fresh chips, because these are Uruguayans. They eat chips and steak all the time when they're not drinking mate, that green drink. So these guys chew it, they're ch they're chowing on steak and chips in the Congo, in their own bubble of Uruguayan-ness, desperate to get back to Uruguay, I don't want to be anywhere near the Congo, desperate to get back to their next mate. And we we pull over and it's it's it's twilight, and we come to a village, um, and uh the captain, Jorge, was his first name, but weirdly, because of Britain's influence in Montevideo, his surname was Wilson, Jorge Wilson, Captain Wilson, Spanish speaking, he says, Um, you realize you know, do you really want me to leave you now? Because there's no helping you if you're out in from here. And I by then I got up into the village, I spoken to some fishermen, would they prepare to take me? Yes, they would. So I had a plan, I had a move. You know, they could take me in a in a in a hollowed-out tree trunk, a prirogue as their name, priog uh canoe. And I made a plan with them and I said to him, yeah, this is the moment. This is my crossing the front line at two in the morning moment. This is my going into Gaza with a 120mm main battle tank armament tracking me across the open the open ground near the Erasum border checkpoint. This is the moment. This is Sarajevo Sniper Alley 1994. Just you have to accept this risk. And um he shook my hand, got his guys back in his little rubber dinghy, and it was a tender, put us into the shore, and I tell you, the sound of that engine, of that boat going back up river, left me with a silence that was more deafening than any silence I have ever heard in my life. That sound of modernity, of normality, an internal combustion engine, which implied fuel and it parts and skills and engineers, all of that. It was diminishing, and it kind of just fell to weigh to nothing. And then I was there, I was left with this deafening silence. And uh it was a very pure moment. Strangely, it was twilight now. Obviously, we're on the equator, so when t you know, uh evenings come very quickly, bam, the sun goes down, and it was um these guys I say, right, we get on our boat, we let's go now. I don't want to hang around, become a sec you know uh focus of attention. So we go on the boat, and within an hour the moon rises. And uh you could even look it up. It'd be the full moon of August 2004. I can't remember which day that would be, maybe late late August, early maybe the first two few days of September. It rose and it was a a hunter's moon. It was that pink large moon. And as a traveller who's travelled in many places, many places, I have to may say, that moment on the river, dealing with the afterwash of adrenaline coming out of my system, dealing with the fear, dealing with the uncertainty, and now dealing with beauty unbridled. A pink full moon rising over the rainforest of Central Africa in total silence. And just the drip drip drip of the water falling off the blades of these imperial geasts as they moved me gently, moved us gently down the stream. Up the stream, actually. Um down the stream. Uh it was amazing. It was a sublime, sublime moment. And so, long answer. Risk is real. Risk, don't ignore it. Risk, learn to manage it.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

It's certainly not crude. Uh the audience is very familiar with the language of risk. Most of them actually came to this podcast from a piece of Nasim Teleb content that I have made. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with the guy, but it's it's uh a discussion of risk, randomness, chance. Um he really is kind of a big guru on this topic. So um yeah, it's it makes a lot of sense. It more than I think you can appreciate, especially to me, uh, separating your tasks and things in front of you into objective and subjective risk. But maybe you could say specifically what your objective risks were, um, because they in a war-faring country where there is large um distances without any roads and uh you know people living lawlessly in the jungle, uh, cannibalism was still around, uh, you weren't exactly sure who you could or could not rely on. Can you explain uh explicitly what the objective risks were?

SPEAKER_02 23:57

The Congo, the area that I was passing through is a mosaic of tiny little tiles, and each tile is a fiefdom, and the fiefdom belongs not to the central government because, as I said, that doesn't function. It belongs to whoever carries the biggest weapon. And there might be a group there who are known as the Interrahamwe, who were the former genocide from Rwanda been hiding in that area for the last 30 years because they can't go to Rwanda because the Tutists kicked them out. Or it might be the Maimai or subfactions of the Maimai who are rebels, or it might be disaffected Ugandan soldiers who left, or Joseph Coney's crew, the Lord's Resistance Army, or disaffected Burundians who are having a fight with the government. So every piece of land you're in has the potential to put you up against some people who are use violence to control. And as a white person, I you know, clearly I'm going to stand up and be very visible. So one risk, one risk is being taken hostage, one risk is getting killed straight up for violence, one risk is straightforward criminality. You mentioned a couple of thousand US dollars. I I had them on the insoles of my boots, so you know, under the insole, between the insole and the shoe itself. And uh as I say, and uh there are plenty of cases of journalists or wanderers or travelers who was who were killed for their their gear. Um the other major risk was health. Um you're in an area where you know clean water isn't a given, clean food isn't a given, uh, tropical disease is very real. And you're in an area where logistics make mean you get, you know, you can risk a lot crossing a river. How do you cross a river when the bridges are down? Well, you know, take a ferry. There are any ferries. Um take a boat on the river. Ah, okay. I mentioned that there were no powered boats in that upper section of the river. That's that was factually absolutely true in 2004 when I did this trip. Nowadays there are a few. Um and on the lower section when I did it, there were some. But I can't tell you how risky they are, because they sink. And you just Google Congo River disaster. Just Google it now. And there will be within the last month several incidents where ten lost their lives, 150 lost their lives, unknown numbers lost their lives. So the um logistical risks, you know, boats sinking, engines catching fire, that sort of thing. Um, but my major risk, the thing that sticks above in the thing I was more worried about, was just lawlessness. You're coming across people who are in a broken society, which is what makes it so pure, because it holds a mirror up to all of us. That this is what happens to your fuel society if it goes all Lord of the Flies, right? It goes this is when you break away, if you strip away everything, this is what happens. Lawlessness, the potential for the negative human behaviors, human characteristics to come out. And I was more scared of that, of of just being the victim of someone who said, Oh, he's got shoes with laces, boots with laces. That's worth cutting his throat for. And I'm just trying to, and I'm trying to, you know, it's it's hard to convey. But about the same time I was there, about a year later, two European guys, they happened to be Norwegian, were travelling, not on a boat and not in the remoter areas, but an area where there was a road, they could take a taxi. Well, they just something happened. Something went wrong. And that there was a crash or a vehicle. The driver is dead. Those two guys ran into the bush. They were caught, and one died of malaria four years later. Uh, the other just about survived after years and years of being held effectively hostage by the government of the Congo who went to the Norwegians and said, These people are spies, you need to give us millions of pounds for the damage that they've wrought, and of course they did no damage at all. So it's that sort of thing. But the wonderful so those are those are without sort of laboring the negative, what are the positives in terms of risk management? The really helpful thing about the Congo is that it is very, very big. And you can hide in a big space. And I learned this really weird reversal of my perceived normality. And I say my perceived because really I'm just it was just an illusion. My perceived normality is towns are the places you go for safety, right? Villages, rural areas, that's where it's a bit wild. There'd be dragons, you know, outside the town walls. Those are kind of that's the kind of medieval view. And today, towns police are, order, traffic lights, people queuing up at the post office, all that sort of thing. Reverse in the Congo. Towns bad. Villages, rural, bush, good. Because the guys in the towns, they are corroded. That authority has been twisted and decomposed. The negative has bubbled to the surface. There's no court system. It doesn't belong. The rights of law? No one's heard of that. It evaporated fifty years ago. So in towns you could be there could be the Hedoncho who is the local cut who wants, hey, who is this European who's turned up, bring him to bring him now? Where's his paper? Where's his pass, his uh you know uh you know, order de mission? Your purpose of reason, your reason for traveling. Could you imagine him to come up with a piece of paper that gives the reason to travel nowadays? You know, it isn't the 19th century anymore, but that's the demand. Well, order de mission. What is your actual function here? Unless there's a official stamp piece of paper, you're a spy, you're clearly a spy, and I'm gonna put pressure on you. And uh that happened a couple of times, that threat. But interestingly, as I chatted to people through this journey, I had this constant refrain. Whenever people told me their story, at some point there was always this Nous avons fouy à la brush, we fled into the bush. And just pause and think what that means. We fled into the bush. They ran away from the trappings of civilization, the towns, cities, groups, communities, and they went feral because that was better. And so my big plus is that I could hide myself in this vast, wide, huge canvas. And there was a lovely moment I remember when I was quite early on in the trip, I was on a motorbike, as you mentioned, worming down a tiny little footpath where a road had once been, but that road had been eaten by the bush, with a really brave pair of motor bicyclists who prepared to take me. They themselves had never been in this area, they were just pushing a route through for an NGO and they would they I was happy to have a sort of coincidence of our interests, we're gonna go into the same area. And I knew that there were some woop some rebels, and I knew that there were some soldiers in this area. And I bumped into rebels at one point and they kind of let us go because it was, you know, half past early in the morning trick, so you move quickly. But then later in the day we went past a military checkpoint, and I'll never forget, because we were going at 25, 30 Ks an hour down a trail, this soldier at the checkpoint was literally asleep because he hadn't heard an industrial an internal combustion engine for six months. He was not exactly ready for an internal combustion engine. And the sound of this motorbike didn't stir him till we were past him. So we were gone, and I looked over my shoulder and he got up with his gun and he's flapping and shaking. But if you'd move quickly, you know, you can people can be a bit flat-footed, and uh this soldier who would have been a massive pain. Guns, pieces of paper, accusations of being a spy, the routine, the routine of traveling Congo is if you meet anyone from the authorities, they won't know who you are. Unless they've got a piece of permission that they recognize from their authorities, they will demand, they will impose one on you. There will be money, there'll be threats, there'll be coercion, and there'll be weapons. You'll the word you hear all the time, espion, espion. You're a spy. And uh once they unleash the espion word, you know you've slid down the snake and you're going back to the start. Anyway, so this soldier, there he was. And I looked at my shoulder as I was riding pilon on this tiny little 125 bike. Could you imagine in your listeners uh picture uh a bike? 125cc. That's you know, that's a deliveroo bike for delivering pizza around the corner. That's just scooter, but they that was a fabulous bike to use. Because anything bigger just couldn't deal with this horrific terrain of ruts and gullies and potholes and this is not tarmac. Tarmac's gone, finish, gone, chalas. That was eaten years ago. It's mud and branches and roots and tree trunks and rocks and just the general sort of jungly stuff. So you need a bike that you can physically pick up and uh drag over an obstacle. Um anyway, so there I was on this pill and I looked over, and there was a soldier, and he was sort of jumped to attention, but we were gone. And so that was one method. And traveling in these areas, I've always learned, you know, you you travel light, you don't you learn to dance. I had no, you know, no film crew, no accompaniment, no partner, just me, my rucksack, and my two thousand dollars in my boots.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

And if you'd been any more, you would have you would have drawn too much attention. You know, you would have had to have gotten the armed brigade everywhere you went, it would have been totally different.

SPEAKER_02 33:11

I've I've I've I mean I'm still so into the Congo, I I watch, and occasionally on the internet you'll f a flicker will come up with someone will have traveled. Journeys are done in the Congo, it's rare, but it's interesting, people tend to write about them or advertise them or do a film or what have you. And there was six South African motorbikes, bicyclists uh about four years ago, um, had a crack, and they had a wealthy guy who was one of them, and he had this thing about biking through Africa. But it was quite interesting because you could tell how his little film had been put together that he each town had, you know, basically there were these six white guys on big Swedish motorbikes. Are they Huskvana? Huskvana's. Yeah, that's another Swedish brand. Yeah, it's a Swedish brand. And they were on these. They did macho macho bikes. Um, but occasionally, occasionally in the corner of the shot, you saw their guide on a 125, and he was zipping ahead, getting to the local town, and making sure that the governor was squared away and la la la la la la la. And that's how you have to work if you're gonna go in a group. Um no, I I travelled light, I didn't those guys could afford it. They would have burnt lots of cash, making sure how does one say it. Paradoxically it would have been a very expensive place to go. Oh wow, you can't believe it's so cold, you know, the the numbers are terrifying, but i I had a couple of advantages. If you're in a rush, that immediately makes you uh puts you in a weak position. Because people can exploit that. Oh, you're in a hurry, are you? You just sit there and you just boil for half a day, and you'll get your passport back, you know, if you give us some money.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

If you're not in a rush, you say, Okay, half a day, half a week, I don't mind, I'm here.

SPEAKER_02 34:56

People do get bored. So you've got to learn to be have a lot of patience. You've got to learn how to count cockroaches going up the wall of a cell. That's quite a useful skill to have, because you just race them in your mind past the time. And if you're cool, then that takes away the leverage from many uh coercers who try to be a pain in the arse. But uh let's not dwell on the negative too much. Let me just mention that um everyone's seen Africa from the sky, from the satellite image. There's a great lake in the middle of it, Lake Tanganika. It's long and thin, it's like a little tear. My journey starts halfway up the left-hand side of that, the western bank of Lake Tanganika, and I go for 700 K's through the bush to the upper Congo River. And in essence, the journey has two parts: a land part and a river part. And the land part is getting across this terrain, and it is fabulous. It is the richest, most fertile, most verdant, most interesting, most aesthetically beautiful, most rewarding terrain possible. It has rivers to die for, extraordinary rich rainforest, extraordinary trees with great buttresses on the side that look as frankly, the creators of those gothic cathedrals didn't even come close in terms of beauty to the flying buttress of the sinew of a cotton tree that stands 80 metres in the sky and it needs these buttresses to support it. Amazing, extraordinary insect life, um bird life, uh butterflies, flowers, ex giant palm trees. I remember going through this giant palm tree plantation, which had echoes of something that had been there before, an old palm industrial plantation, long since gone, and these palm trees have gone to seed, and their fronds were hanging down like some sort of rag doll's limbs. Absolutely extraordinary. On a scare you can't the beggar's belief. It was very, very attractive. And just so much hope there. So much I mean the soil is so fertile. You talk to the villagers, they don't have to put fertilizer in, they don't have to put inputs, phosphates, all of these things that the industrial western farmer has to think of because Mother Nature does it for it. Every year the floods come, you know, and another bunch of fertilizer comes, the soil comes down. So extraordinarily positive things, but measured against the negative of modern human extreme behaviour. And I say extreme because the the guys I'm talking about, they are the minority. The thugs, the brutes, the coercers, the bullies, the gangsters, the warlords, the soldiers, they are the minority. Most of the people in the Congo just want to crack on, and they're fabulous. So the guys who helped me on the motorbikes, the villagers who pass through. Time after time after time. We came to one village where it was too dangerous for us to light a fire. The the the village chief said we can't light a full fire to welcome you as we would normally, because if we have a fire, the people will know, the word will spread that we've got visitors. So we'll just sit here quietly. And we arrived after dark and and moved, you know. You have to hide this is a weird consideration. But then five miles back we'd seen the villages burnt up with the little circular rings of ash where the houses had been burnt to the ground, and they just were circular, you know, and they'd been burnt by the rebels uh you know a short while before. And five miles before that, ten miles before that, or whatever, a kid, when I'd stopped, we had a flat tire, and this kid said, Do you want to see the bones? And I said, What do you mean the bones? And you said in your intro with a few questions ago, you mentioned cannibalism and the bones. And these it sounds awful to it sounds a bit of a cliche to kind of keep referring to those old stereotypes from Africa. The Africa of the kind of patronizing 19th century, oh, it's a dark place, and we're civilization is lifting the veil of uh barbarity, and it's only us jolly jolly white chaps at the public schools in England who are going to sort it all out. And that's all bullshit. But I'm telling you, that in the 21st century this kid says to me, Do you want to see the bones on the floor? And I kind of went, Yeah, sure, would I know what he meant? We walked, and there were these human bones, skulls, ribs, femurs. And I know I recognise a similar pattern in a war area in Kosovo, for example, where I've seen war graves, or I've seen war dead, um, I've seen uh you know atrocities. And I said, But in Kosovo, someone, you know, you rank you asked the guy when did this happen? They said, Oh, that was in July when these rebels fell fought with the KLA or the the the Kosovo Liberation Army fell in with the whatever. So they've got a narrative. I asked this guy in the Congo, where are these bodies? And this was the really spooky thing. I don't know, he said, can't be sure. Could be the Ugandans who were here last year, might have been the Romanans who were there the year before, then there was the Interhamway and then there was the Mailai. Well when did it happen? Well, I don't know, maybe a year ago, maybe three years ago, can't tell really, the bones are bleached by the sun. And that was an amazing lesson. Because you could imagine going to a society or a place with no institutional memory. Sure we all grumble about journalists, we all grumble about social media, about transparency, about all that yeah, we all grumble, that's quite quite rightly so. But if you didn't have it, that if a political leader could destroy a community and walk away, what sort of society are you living in? And that was what was extraordinary. That in the Congo it is so common for bodies to litter the ground that no one buries them. There's no one left to bury them. And that was just one little snapshot. So it that was this amazing contradiction. A beautiful place, a piece of real estate as attractive as any. The Belgians, when they went there, they used to write rhapsodies about it in the 1930s and twenties about how high it was, it was no m no mosquitoes, no malaria, beautiful, rich soil, blah blah blah blah. And yet, juxtapose that with this extraordinary reality, and that's what made the journey so so powerful and so unforgettable.

SPEAKER_00 41:04

I had no idea it was um just as beautiful as you're saying. Clearly, it's beautiful, it's in Africa and it's you know untouched country. But my impression of rainforests is it's tough to appreciate the beauty because you're constantly under a canopy. Um but truly, so I imagine you've travelled to most of the, you know, Namibia, Botswana, Latin America, beautiful places in the world. Congo exists as the most beautiful place you've been?

SPEAKER_02 41:32

I wouldn't say most beautiful and make as if that's a single meaningful superlative. Oh what I because you know what how could one compare you know the rainforests of the Irrawaddy Valley in Burma with you know Pakistan or or Congo or or the Andean Mountains or whatever. In um I would say this, that it is rewarding aesthetically. It is a tantalizingly beautiful place. And and that doesn't sit with that kind of cliched view. When you you know most people who's you know understand the where the co the what the Congo is as a place, as a space, they can be forgiven for you know holding on to the old cliched images, which is in Heart of Darkness. That was a novel published 130 years ago by a person, a traveller, who travelled on the river in the Congo. His name was Joseph Conrad, which is his pen name. He was in fact Polish, with a very long and unpronouncedable Polish name. And he went there as a genuine skipper, a sailor, a mariner, a guy with a mariner's ticket, very competent man. And what he saw in terms of human behavior, this was not behavior of the locals, this was behavior of the outsiders, the colonial agents, the colonial pioneers. What he saw was so vile and so bestial and so brutal that it fermented in his heart for almost ten years. He was there in 1890 and he publishes in 1899. It's not a very long novel, it's 33,000 words long. It's a novella, it's very short. Um, but he frames it as the heart of darkness. And some people have said, oh, he's telling us that Africa is the heart of darkness. No, he's not. No, he's not. He's telling us that every human heart has a propensity to darkness. Doesn't matter what colour the package is, what skin colour, eye shape, texture of hair, that's all bullshit, that's all irrelevant. Every human heart has the potential for darkness. And that's what's a buffer. Anyway, point is heart of darkness, that's the cliche, that's the image, Apocalypse now, Francis Four Coppola, Martin Sheen going up the river, all of that. Um and yet I didn't find darkness, I found bright I mean incandescent light in the middle of the day, different learning of different versions of green. You can look at a bush in the rainforest, as you say, if you're away from the canopy. If you're under the canopy, it's impenetrable. And you learn what green is, because where the sun is in the sky dictates the type of green. It's amazing. Dawn, it looks like this, ten in the morning it looks like that. Twelve, it looks almost gunmetal grey, it's washed out, it's vertical. And then as the sun loses the angle of approach of the light, anyway, you just get to learn different different greens. I love that as I, you know, as I as I would travel on these way to say it. You learn different greens. And um it ain't a dark place. What it is, is a place where humanity has r has has attempted to come up with something, and largely um failed to come up with a place that's comfortable and easy. It is tough, it's subsistence living. The colonial project there was vile. And can I just briefly at this point say what I'm doing this for? Why I went to the Congo, why I was attracted, why I was drawn there were two reasons. First of all, just about every modern African story has its root in the Congo. You know, every issue, whether it's the Rwandan genocide directly connected with the Congo, uh, Angolan War genocide directly, Mr. Mugabe clinging on to power directly connected to the Congo. It's just like the mother Darfur, directly connected with the Congo. Laws Resistance Army in Uganda and and and. All of these stories, they have this kind of influence with this one place. But because it's so chaotic, it's hard to grasp it. And then you run the tape back a bit, you go run the hold on, when does this what's the history of this place? The modern history of the Congo begins with outsiders, white explorers. Locals had lived there for centuries, for millennia, they tamed the landscape, they knew how to move along the rivers. But the modern history begins with in the era of Victorian explorers, and it begins with a guy, as you said in your intro, H. M. Stanley, Henry Morton Stanley, and he changes everything by forcing a route through the rainforest that I've just described, crossing on the motorbike to the river and then down the river. And this is so important. It's the turnkey moment in white exploration in the Victorian era. It's the turnkey because all those others, Burton, Speake, Livingston, De Braza, one names you've heard of elsewhere, Mungo Park, they did great things, but they didn't really impact history, they didn't change stuff. Stanley does because the moment he emerges and he charts the river, a colonial power says, Oh, I'll use that river for a colony. We'll start grabbing land in Africa, and that's why it's important. And this guy, who was he? Was he a scientist? No. Was he a geographer? No. Was he a government agent? No. Was he a diplomat? No. He was the worst of all things, Ryan. He was a grubby journalist. He was a journalist for a British newspaper, and the perverse and weird and slightly curious and tantalizing thing, the same newspaper that employed me. So he was sent by the Daily Telegraph in the eighteen seventies, and I see that moment as the founding the original sin. The original sin of white colonial rule is a journalist. Fiddling his expenses, bullshitting his stories, spinning up what he achieved, lying, being vainglorious, just like, say, another telegraph journalist, uh Boris Johnson, today, the same, exactly the same logic, self-aggrandizement, self-importance. He does something and he changes the course of history in Africa. I come all these years later, I want to go back to the founding moment. And so in a strange way, I'm kind of following my journalistic forebear, if that's not too pompous.

SPEAKER_00 47:46

I'm glad you uh brought in HM Stanley because it's going to inform my next question. This this question for me really is what the whole book is about, and um, you've just reintroduced HMS Stanley. Um, you have all these synchronicities with him. Uh same same trip, same dirty journalist from the same dirty rag. And uh the point was to almost juxtapose your experience from his, or maybe not the point, but at least a big revelation that came out of the trip was juxtaposing the difficulty of the trip and so forth. And there's this anecdote that you tell with um an old man in Manatu, I think, was the tribe, though I might be getting it wrong. Um, and it was this just such amazing insight that this guy gave, or that you noticed in this man, which was that he had experienced as a 70, 80-year-old man, more modern more modernity than his grandchildren did. And you make the point that progress in the Congo is inverted because this man back in the 50s, when things were thriving, he experienced functional trains, cars, riches, foreign food, European beers, um, all the stereotypes of a rich colonial town. Um, whereas his this same man's grandkids in 2004 lived in the shells of these former buildings. They never got a break from their cassava diet. Uh they had never seen a car, let alone driven in one, and then as you say, it's inverted. And this is a quote from the book while the rest of the world is steadily making improvements, somehow the Congo, despite its riches, is declining. The forest, not the town, offers the sanctuary. I cannot think of anywhere else in the world where this is true. And a place with an amazing history, but no present.

SPEAKER_02 49:32

Anyway, yeah it is it's my it's my the the the most powerful single motif I take with me from the trip, which is that this presumption on the outside world, and sure we get wobbly periods of recession when you get too, as we all know, the definition of a recession is too uh particularly negative growth. We can run the uh the economics uh uh 101 definition of it. We get that, but what you don't get is catastrophic regression and decline. And that's why the Congo is so important for me. Yes, anecdotally it's very strong. There were images that moment in the village round the fire, and he himself knew more about the internal combustion engine 870 than his grandchildren. We turned up on a motorbike, the kids, it was the dragon. They had no idea. What the hell is this what is this thing? We've heard grandpa talk about it. Maybe the dragons are true, maybe the stories he told us are true. Where are where are you know everywhere else in the world, it's the grandkids who are re-plugging your phone, right? They're kind of reprogramming the apps on your on your on your computer because they're all so kind of savvy. The reverse is true. But the really the most powerful thing is it challenges your naive self-delusion that growth and advancement and thriving are all inexorable. You know, we're all baby boomers or kids of baby boomers brought up post-1945. It's been a hell of a run. The world has just been steady, real terms grow since 1945, thank you very much. Surges of periods, quieter periods than others, oil crisis certainly, but wow, what an economic run and extraordinarily peaceful since 1945, thanks to NATO and the European Union. And we I think there's a danger that we think that's normal. We think that's inevitable. We think that is inexorable. In fact, we might even use that terrible word that's so common. It's our right! We're right, we have rights. Rights and inexorability and inevitability mean the square root of fuck all in the comment. Nothing. Because it's paired back. There is no right there at all. All the things that you take for granted. There's a policeman who'll come and sort you out, there's a fireman who put a fire out in your house, there's a postman who's gonna deliver a letter for you, there's a road that the postman can drive down, that there are lights on the road that the postman can it's all gone. And that is why the Congo I think is so important. Because it reminds us to challenge that thinking. And yes, I'm serious. January 2006, sorry, 6th of January 2021 in the Capitol in Washington, that was a moment, a wobbly moment that reminded me, ooh, ooh, that's a little bit Congolese, isn't it? Isn't that a little moment? And then when I see Boris Johnson's government at the UK trying to change the rules to protect one corrupt MP, he will change the entire disciplinary process to protect one crony. And I just think, ooh, isn't that a little bit Congolese? And when I hear about national groups being persecuted for no reason, Belarusians taking Syrians and dumping them on the border in in Poland as a deliberate political act to destabilize Poland QED, the European Union. I just think, ooh, haven't we been there before with the ethnic Rwandans, the Banyama Lengi and Eastern Congo? It's a bit complicated and it's a bit opaque, but if you dare to pull back that rainforest canopy, I wonder if in the Congo we're not looking at something very, very important, potentially the ghost of Christmas to come. And that's why I think it's so important, and that's why I think it was worth doing. You have to be wide-eyed about it. And you people could challenge me and say, Oh, you're not comparing apples with apples, you're completely fabricating it. But I wonder, I do wonder, because I think humans are the same. And that sense of everything will grow forever. I wonder if after banking crises of 2008, after COVID, after now we're looking at stagflation, you're looking at um growth but wages going backwards, um real-term wages declining. Ooh, aren't these the wobbles that lead to the power grab of the few, which is the Congolese history, a power grab, a dictatorship, a rule. The reason the country is so broken, the one I described, is not because it's inevitable, it's because some the government at the centre stole everything. Just said it's more important to line our pockets than it is to maintain those post offices and those roads and those power lines. And therefore, this is why I think it's very important. Um and as I said in the book several times, a country where the hands of the clock go backwards, not forwards. And I just wonder if that might not apply to other parts of the world very soon or sooner than we might be comfortable with.

SPEAKER_00 54:50

It made me think uh obviously you're speaking about this notion of there being a thin veneer of society, or society is the thin veneer. One of those and the the bubbles quote in the wire, there's a thin line between heaven and here. Uh I thought about when you were in the bubbles in the wine.

SPEAKER_02 55:08

Oh my god, we're jumping. Excellent. The woman, let's talk about the winner for six hours. We love the woman, the ballsymbol. West Baltimore, East Baltimore. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 55:17

He is in the hood. As he's stepping out of the car from you know, the nice day with the cops, and he walks into his like homeless place to sleep for the night. His drug pit. Yeah, you had an experience like that. Um, I forget the name of the big functioning city in the Congo, but you were sort of um at the end of your trip, you'd rolled into town and you were swept up by the local diplomats and whatever, and they made a big deal about your trip, and you sat down to European beers, beautiful food, beautiful garden, and it's like, you know, there's a thin line between having beers and the that's the same country.

SPEAKER_02 55:53

Um you're right. That was a there was a I had a without without wanting to disturb your listeners too much. I went, I had a shower, and um I had there was a button in the shower that I'd never seen, and it was an all-over body massage button. Can you believe? I had to go to Kinshasa, the capital city of the Congo, to have my first and only ever shower with an all-over-so I was in a house owned by a squillion air guy who made money from mining, inevitably, and a little bit of mining, a little bit of diamonds, a little bit of arm smuggling. And the money that he had meant that he could bring in the finest wines and the finest food and the finest trappings. So he had like basically a Milan, really cool apartment on the river in a house built on the river of Lincoln. Beautiful. Um, and so I pressed this button in the shipwater. Where the hell does that water come from? I wasn't expecting that, and it kind of goes up and down, and um it was an extraordinary moment. I mean, there was I mister Mr. Magoo, the simpleton, oh I didn't know they'd invented these things. But your image of a thin veneer, let me tell you, that was a uh an estate of houses on the river, the the banks of the river, landscaped, cleared, attractive. And outside there was this perimeter wall of high breeze blocks with broken glass set in cement at the top, and a cast iron, rusted gate that was armed by manned by armed guards, and you used to have to drive to that gate, and they would swing it open, and you went out into the chaos of Kinshasa, and then went back, and then the cast iron door would uh swing back, and then you'd be in the noise, and the anyway. So that's your thin veneer. The thin veneer there was a rusted cast iron gate. I can picture it now. And from one side it was 21st century luxury, and the other side was medieval madness. Um it was a a very, very striking juxtaposition.

SPEAKER_00 57:46

Um could you speak about how without you know labouring on the history of the Congo and the role that the Belgians did in there? Because there's so much there's so many places people can learn about that. But you making commentary on how people would travel back when there was this infrastructure in the country versus how you had it now. Um, you know, comparing the two modes of life, you know, I think is the most tangible way to understand just how backwards the country had had gone.

SPEAKER_02 58:15

Okay, so as I said at the beginning of this chat, you don't go and look for a ticket to the Congo now. There isn't a part of your Sunday supplement where you can turn and say, Ah, Congo, it's there. There's Morocco, there's this, there's Chile, there's Andes, there's but there ain't no Congo. The really weird thing is that I found a book from the 1950s, which was a travel guide, effectively, let's call it the lonely planet of the 1950s, for the Congo. And it was enormous, it was huge, of course, it's a big piece of real estate. And I couldn't believe the detail in this book, it's absolutely fabulous. It was a guide for people to travel through the place where I was travelling through, and it told them, it is possible to drive from one side of the country to the other in 16 hours. You can average a speed of 84 kilometers an hour. I said, excuse me, how on earth would you be able to get 84 kilometers an hour? We grade the roads, we have a system of cantoniers. A cantonier is a local uh uh uh person employed to maintain a road for five kilometers stretch, and he's paid a sum of five francs per month, whatever. And if you think about it for a second, what a brilliant idea. Cantonnier. Everywhere there's a local pair of eyes looking at a road. So leaves are swept. If a crack starts, you fill it in quickly before it gets f uh before the river, you know, rainwater opens it into a chasm, or if there was a blockage in a culvert, you can clear it. All that. So we have a system and we employ 34,000 cantonnier, and we have 109,000 kilometres of road. They had th 109,000 kilometres of paved road. That was a wonderful statistic from that book. But more importantly, it would literally say, if you want to go the route from Kinchelta to Bukavu, you must set out, and 162 kilometers after you've been in an easterly direction, you will see on your left. And it literally said that, and I couldn't believe it. There was Git, that old French concept of a guest house, git, G-I-T-E S. There was git every 400 clicks. So you could always have somewhere to rest your head. Just a basic house with a room, ozzinette, clean bed, bed linen, place to wash, and someone to uh prepare a meal. Couldn't pre-book, but you just pitched up. Travellers travellers' hostels. And my god, it said there were these jeet. And I remember at one point on my trip coming to a building and working out what I was looking at. And I was looking, as you said earlier so eloquently, at a shell of a building. But it was actually an old jeet. And I remember seeing uh written in the cement, scoured in the cement. There was a bridge nearby in the cement. The bridge had fallen down, but the cement with underneath the the the building element of the bridge, the kind of cement, was still and someone in w written in their fingers, sort of uh Emile 1956. So in 1956, an engineer called Emile had put in that bridge and left with his little finger mark, or his trial mark, a little scar mark, and of course gone to hell in a handbasket. So um for me that was as much you know, forget the politics. You know, it was a functioning place you could drive a Volkswagen beetle across. You could get food, you could take a holiday, you could take photographs of this waterfall, you could go to this church, you could go to this festival, you could attend this seasonal food was available at this time of year. It said, here you get your hunting license for this, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And I just thought, how wonderful. I was like looking at a book that belonged to sci-fi. And this was the book I was reading compared to the reality, is exactly of the Congo. But it's pretty much the same gap between a you know reading a book, you know, Isaac Asimov in your bedroom and then looking out the window in Sweden. You know, that's the difference. Only one is going forward in time, one is going back in time. The j the gap was that yawning, and uh it's just that functionality. And just briefly, my own mother um, as a British person, travels to Africa in the late 1950s, comes to South Africa, and to cut a long story short, she passes through the Congo as easy as anything at about 1958-59. She just buys a ticket, you know, ticket. This train connects from Northern Radesia, what is now Zimbabwe, into the Congo, and then you take a train to this place, and you get off, and then you join another train, and then in the middle of the night you get off the train, you walk down a riverbank, you get into a ferry, and the ferry takes you up here, and then that connects with another, and then that connects to a l to a ferry across a lake. Sounds a bit complicated, but it's all written down. You know, this train leaves at ten eleven, this the the ferry arrives at two minutes past three. You know, it all worked. And it was that sense of once working juxtaposed with what I was seeing, which was relics of buildings, rusting hogs of ships on the upper river. They looked like beached whales, like the rib cages of a decomposing whale, looking at a huge metal superstructure, like a Mississippi power boat, a Mississippi paddle boat, you know, in your imagination, Mark Twain. There they were, but just abandoned. And that's what made us so um visually in terms of human influence, so visually striking with a sense of decay.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:05

And you opened up the chat saying uh how even today barely anything's changed. So in the last 20 years, it's r either remained a constant or even maybe more of a decline. Uh so are we 70 years out now?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:20

Yeah, the um the truth is, uh, as I say rather glibly, uh, since I did this journey, a lot has happened in the Congo, but not much has changed. There have been two election cycles, which makes it interesting. It was never democratic before I was there. It always had a dictator in power. Since then, uh which was funny for a country called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, because it had dictators who handed that who handed power to their sons, so it wasn't very difficult.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:44

But you've got to be skeptical of countries that have like uh People's Republic or Democratic in the title.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:51

Um so uh it's had two election cycles, which is great, but what does that do? It simply gives a rubber stamp of international acceptability and approval to a dictator. Let me be honest, and let me be frank, and let me not um have any illusions about this. We have a dictatorship that's maintained part because you run the media, you can send your agents to smash up opposition groups, you can defuse all opposition by relying on lots of independent parties. Blah blah blah blah. Bottom line is it's had a couple of election cycles, it's had a lot of Chinese interest in the last 15, 20 years, which it didn't have before. Chinese promised to build a lot of the roads I said weren't there. Um Chinese promised to build bridges I said were not there. They promised. Let me tell you how much they delivered. The um the the sad truth is, you know, there are some areas where there might be some mining asset, the Chinese are heavily there. But did they build the school 30 K's away, or the bridge 50 K's away, or the promised infrastructure harbour 120 K's away? Uh no, no, no, no, no. They just built the perimeter of the mine, got the stuff out of the ground, they don't even process it there, they just ship it, get it on a boat, they actually drive it all the way to South Africa, can you believe? To Durban, which is a big port, and all they're interested in is how the hell do we get this stuff to Shanghai? And um that is a slight difference. Uh the war, the war that was active when I was there, has eased off, and yet other wars have flared up. So sadly, we have instability on the Ugandan border, which is now has an Islamic flavour, an Islamist flavour. You have that very nasty influence pervading through Africa now, the sort of jihadist, as they get as America silenced them in the Middle East, in Iraq and Syria, they've popped up like a you know, whacker bowl, bang, hit them there, the bam, they're up in the Maghreb, or in the Al-Qaeda in uh West Africa in uh Sahel, in the Sahel in Niger and um Mali and uh Burkina Faso, they've also appeared in the Congo Sally. Um the town where I started my journey, the beautiful little port town. On the western side of Lake Tanganika, tiny little pretty place called Kalemi, very pretty in its own day. That has seven hundred thousand people sleeping in the in the bush behind it now. They were destabilized by some fighting and they haven't been able to get out of the house. That's insane. You know, let me just give you the figures. You know, when London was bombed during the Blitz, they didn't 700,000 people didn't lose their homes. You know, but in Eastern Congo, that was just another of the many rebellions, and seven hundred people left their homes. They're warped those that survived made it to Kalemi and they're sleeping under the under the s under the trees. Uh in abject misery as a result. So there's a huge UN thing there. Um lots has happened, not much has changed. And the bottom line is you know, I'm always intrigued. I occasionally people who par pass through the Congo, because I wrote a book that you know had a big degree of publicity, they they get in touch, and I'm always fascinated. I've kept in touch with my guides and asked them about their changes of life, you know, what's happened. Benoit, who was the guy at the beginning of the journey, he's still around. I get better connectivity with him now because he's got a cell phone tower in his town instead of him having to go to a UN base. Umgi Saidi, the guy up in Kisangani, is a river guy. I've been able to get a message to him, so I get a feel. But my sense is it's still the same extraordinarily challenging uh environment of having to survive rather than to th rather than to thrive.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:33

So to um try and answer some questions for why that might be, uh we move away from the narrative of Blood River, but still family in the Congo. Um I just have some questions in the economic development of the country and also just I suppose the economy itself. Um you uh, you know, the book's riddled with uh just case after case of classic sort of corruption. Everyone's hands need to be greased along the way. Um are you sort of well researched on the typical the um kleptocrats of the country and the corony capitalism on the country? Are you you know, is this something that you have paid and still pay a lot of attention to?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:18

Yes. In as much as it's possible to. Um Joseph Kabila is the name of the dictator, he took over from his father, was assassinated, he's had been legitimized by two elections, he has nominally stood down, but you read any of the uh decent objective research organizations, and they'll tell you how he has not really stood down, he's just replaced himself with a puppet and he maintains a little bit like Putin in the Prime Minister, the premiership position of Russia, of course, that he had a you know he had a when he was moved from president to prep to prime minister and back again. Um occasionally you get extraordinarily brave whistleblowers and they will flag up uh individual instances. Uh there was a very controversial orthodox Jewish Israeli investor called Dan Hertler, who was just emerging when I was travelling there. Since then, he snaffled up absolutely all of the assets in cobalt, cobalt being a substance that that you are dirty for. Oh, he's fabulously dirty. What's his what's his name? One more time. Dan Hertler, G-E-R-T-L-E-R, Dan, and as I say, very interesting. Orthodox Jewish Israeli. Very interesting. The last the last man that Donald Trump tried to offer an amnesty for against criminal charges for illegal financial activity in America before Mr. Trump stood down was Dan Hertler. He's very well connected. And um he had charges against him in America for uh financial irregularities, all because of dodgy contracts in the Congo. But the terrible truth is you could take that name, Dan Hertler, and replace it with others in the years and indeed the decades before, and he already has been replaced by others who have taken over. So it's the same constant stream of outsiders who exploit the institutional. I use that word institution. See, you and I we live in a society where there's institutions. There are courts, there's uh local councils, there's electricity and the light behind me, there's glass, glaziers who put windows in here. There are building standards officers to make sure these walls don't fall down. There's an internet, there's a fiber optic company who gives me internet and I can talk to you and from 6,000 miles away. All kind of boring things. But my God, the going to the Congo just drills home how important institutional strength is, and it is institutionally compromised. You know, the just aren't, you know, the things that you or I take for granted, just the rule of law. You know, um if I do dirty malpractice financially, you you know, you can get away with it for a while, but you there's ultimately you're looking over your shoulder because you know the one day it's gonna it's gonna catch up with you. The terrible reality about the Congo is that you can get away with murder forever. You buy the right people off, uh you grease those palms, as you say. And um, you know, we've had an incident where the prayer, the governor of the big province where all the mining is, lots of money, uh Moisi Katimbi was a rival, a political rival of uh Joseph Kabila, and he was doing really well, this uh Kenibi guy. He was doing really very powerful, and suddenly, bam spurious political charges, politically generated, financial, irregular, he gets neutralized. Whereas he could have been a very good force, uh potentially good force. But the the lesson I take from this experience is that a country that relies only on its leadership to define what that country is, is a weak country. If you let the elite, if you let the leadership elite dictate terms, then you're you've lost, you've lost the game already. A country is as is as strong as you and I. A string is as cohesive as you and I. And a country is as long-lasting as you are. Do you and do you and I, and do you cure the lights? Do you observe the red lights? Because the moment you don't, the whole thing spins. What was that? I think there's probably another thing from the Y about the broken window, the broken window downtown. If you don't the broken window downtown leads to drugs and gangster war, just a broken window. How does that work? Because the institutions can't be bothered to replace that window, therefore, that tells you how responsible they are for funding the police properly and uh investigations and narco blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. The Congo has been so pummeled by history, by events. People who live there are no different from you or I but they do not see the power in coming together because it's never worked. So having having to learn that lesson of coming together and cohesiveness has yet to happen. And it's still a wild outlaw place where individuals can exploit that we that central weakness. And um yes, I follow it very closely without ever going there. Um I'm fascinated, I want to see it turn a quarter. I want this I'm just interested to see if the common decency of the people who help me will eventually prevail. It's a struggle. Um it hasn't they haven't it doesn't prevail yet. It will do one day, but it hasn't prevailed yet.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:41

James Robinson, uh, you know, co-author of Why Nations Fail, like the guy who who wrote the book on um inclusive and extractive institutions and ultimately, you know, the idea that institutions is everything. He has been a developmental economist consulting with the government Democratic Congo for the longest time. And when I interviewed him, he said such a strange thing. He basically said, like, we don't necessarily understand corruption uh in the West, um, and that corruption isn't necessarily a bad thing. And um I don't know, I found it such a bizarre such a bizarre take from this guy who wrote the book on how institutions is everything.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:21

Was that the guy was that the book was that the book that was double byline? There was a Turkish name and then his. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:27

Okay, okay. And cologul or something like that. Yeah, one did you fail?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:32

I've read it with interest, and interestingly, I laughed my little Wats off because in the first few pages he refers to an idealized society in the Congo, the original Congolese community that was found by the Portuguese. And he paints a picture of this is how the developing world could have worked out. If only everything had been as wonderful as San Salvador, which was the name that the Portuguese gave this small community of the Macongo people near the mouth of the river. It made me wet myself. I thought, how extraordinarily naive that you can accept an account by Portuguese colonial occupiers painting themselves as benevolent and positive of a of a paradisical society where they managed to balance out the travails of uh the normal pressures of uh of African communities, African rural communities, tribal groupings. And you you will accept that as an objective truth, which is absolute baloney. I thought it was hysterical. Um but notwithstanding that, he went on to make some nice points, and I and I am fascinated by I'm fascinated by the concept of nation and nationality and the cohesive forces, the the the the the the the contradiction between the centripetal forces and the centrifugal forces. There's something we were talking about before we were recorded about patriotism and nationalism. They're very subtle margins between the two, because um, you know, the Congo, let me be honest, a bit like India, we were talking about uh as well, the Congo was never a nation in any meaningful way. Um what we call the Congo today never, ever purported to be a single grouping, community, entity, call it what you will. It was never an imperial ambition, it was nothing, it was just too big. It was only it's only been lassoed together because of the colonial ambitions of a bearded European king who never once went to Africa, who just said, I fancy a bit of land. And he said to his agents, go out there, I'll give you more gold the more land you get. So he they did. And they just took this bit from the Atlantic to the Great Rift in the middle of the continent. And so there's no cohesive national sense to it whatsoever. Um but as for the point about corruption there are degrees. Take five percent, that leaves ninety-five, right? Ninety-five could still work. Take ten, it leaves ninety. Take ninety leaves ten. What do you grow out of ten? That's an old joke. And it goes like this that a West African finance minister goes to Malaysia and is met at the airport in Kuala Lumpur and uh leaves Kuala Lumpur International Airport on an eight-lane highway, brand new. And they sweep into town and go to a posh hotel. And as he's going along the eight-lane highway, the finance minister from Kuala Lumpur says from Malaysia says to the Nigerian, to the West African, You see this eight-lane highway, and he pats his back pocket. Ten percent. Two years later, there is another economic summit hosted this time in West Africa, and the Malaysian flies in and is met by his counterpart who from the same story. And he meets him at Lagos Airport, and he goes outside and he goes down a single track road, two two carriages, one one way each other, completely full of chaos and potholes and broken this and the other. And the Nigerian points out the window and says, Do you see this eight-lane highway? And there ain't an eight-lane highway, there's nothing there. He patches his pocket and says, 100%. So there the joke is its degree. If you take your golden goose and kill it to steal one egg, you're gonna have it won't lay any more. If you wait for it to lay an egg, you can parse some of that. And that is, I guess, the point he was making.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:38

Tim, where did you hear that story? Because I have uh I have something potentially really, really interesting to say. Um, but who told you that story?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:48

I can't remember. I often pres when I do my Congo talk, I often refer to it, or indeed my West Africa talk, or any talks, um, it comes up. I don't remember. Why what what are you gonna say?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:00

So I'm recording uh the audiobook for a fantastic book called Blood Bankers, which essentially was work from the investigative journalist Jim Henry, and it looks at the development crisis in the 80s and 90s, specifically in Latin America and the Philippines. And he opens up the chapter on Brazil, which has literally hundreds of examples of giant public infrastructure projects failing or being built and all of the proceeds going to a couple of pockets. And he has an exact same story, and it is and it comes from it comes from a Brazilian official. So it's not like it comes from the white journalist who you know goes around the world telling this same story and just repurposing it. This came from a Brazilian, and it was, you know, one minister flies in to see the other, he goes, Hey, how did you get this really nice house? He goes, I'll show you. Takes a drive to a dam and says, You see that dam there? 50%. And then later on, the next one they they travel to the next town, and he's got an even nicer house, and then they go, Hey, uh, how did you get all this nice stuff? And then they go for a drive and they point to a river and they say, You see that dam?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:02

No dam. I'm with you. That isn't well.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:05

It's crazy that it's the exact same allegory spread across the two separate continents, you know?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:10

But to be honest, it is powerfully applicable, and that is why it you know it is in the Congo the ext the extreme nature of the corruption. Oddly enough, Australia. Um Australia's wealthiest man, I don't know his name, wrote about him about six weeks ago. He has just signed a contract with the Congolese government.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:32

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:32

Pacam? A mining guy. No. Mining guy chubby chubby guy. That's a woman. Chubby's the chubby no chubby guy with curly hair. Definitely male, definitely not a woman. Um I don't know. Any um Clive Palmer? Well, anyway, point is super super wealthy Australia super wealthy Australian has just signed a deal in the Congo, and he's signed a deal for uh unique um rights to develop the section of the river um downstream from the capital. We haven't even touched on the river. The river is not a river, it's a force of nature, it's a it's an absolute vortex of power, and Mother Nature flexing its muscles and showing you how cool how cool Mother Nature can be. It is a ridiculous river. And in this one section of river, 45,000 tons of water go past a second. 45,000 tons.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:28

Sometimes it's fifty, sometimes it's forty, but it averages 45 in the air. Every second, every second you've ever drawn breath, it has never dipped. It never dips. There's seasonal rains that hit that will hit this river system somewhere because it spreads across both hemispheres, so the flow is constant. Anyway, if you could tap that hydroelectric power, you're sitting on the kind of answer to the to to the human problem because you get green energy, you get non-impactful energy. You can take 30 gigs here, kilometer down, you can take another 30 gigs. It just flows. It's tantalizing, huh? I mean, isn't that extraordinary? Um, the problem is they've known about this for 80 years. Um in the 1950s, American hydrologists were drawing up plans to exploit this as an asset. And they've never been able to deal with the corruption, the 100% problem we've just described. So in the 1960s, a Canadian company put in a very, very small um power station on the edge of this area and run six turbines. And then ten years later, Mabuto allowed uh another one to be put in with eight, so that's 14 turbines. Today, one turbine turns. One. Thirteen are broken, knackered. Easily to fix, easy peasy lemon squeezy to fix. Can anyone get the pieces through the airport? No. Can they get the permissions? No. Can they get the lorry licenses to drive? No. Can they get access? No. So if the government was remotely serious, that would be solved in minutes few. But there's one frigging turbine. But the point is the water is still flowing. And it could generate 30, 40, 50 gigs of power at a fraction of the cost of the three gorges in China because you don't need to build a retaining dam. Mother Nature's done it for you. The mountains are there. You just need to cap a tiny area and bam, you're in. Suddenly you've got a guaranteed flow of steady water. So this Aussie has signed a deal. It'll come to nothing. There was a lot of publicity when it happened. But he has the same dream that Stanley had, that uh Unilever brothers had when they went to the Congo for the for the palm oil, that um uh the Oppenheimers did when they went for the diamonds, uh, that the Cobalt engineers did all of this stuff. Um it's all so tantalizing because what is on offer is so potentially powerful. Open brackets, lucrative, close brackets. And yet, you know, you you you talked about economics a second ago. The normal rules of economics do not apply here. You know, we we we've got our Keynesian model. We know that if uh we drive up demand and there's economic activity, there's trickle down, there's taxes, right? Everyone, everyone benefits. They might not earn an enormous amount, but at least they've got a disposable income by spending it locally, that generates more and that generates more tax, and la la la. It's all wonderfully self-supporting. We know that Keynesian multiplier that literally is um economics 101. Doesn't work in the Congo. But in lots of money, it seeps out. Acceptable corruption? Bullshit, with the greatest respect to your interviewee. There isn't acceptable corruption. It leaches cash away from the system. That money doesn't leak flow back in, there isn't a self-generating tax take, there's no multiplier, nothing, nothing at all. Because there are these seams that are broken and it leaks out. Into private bank accounts in Switzerland, offshore, trust, the normal dance. Panama Papers, when the Panama Papers came out, bam, there's the Congolese government and its senior figures, they have a fabulous section of the Panama Papers. You know, these people are well, they are so lucrative, it's so the the money that can be made if you run a if you allow a Chinese company to run a mine out in the east of the country, but the money that money doesn't go anywhere near the country. They don't bank it in their own country. They certainly don't pay tax, they're not registered. There isn't an income tax, there's no tax authority. The only tax in a country like the Congo is on choke points, which is stuff coming in and out of the country, right? So you you tax stuff at the border, which makes international trade so problematic in Africa. It shouldn't be, it should be brilliantly fast, but it's slow because that's the only way a government can guarantee an income tax uh tax income, because the income tax that you're used to paying or that I'm used to paying doesn't apply.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:01

Because that's just And one of the one of the unsung devils of this entire corruption story is the ease of which offshore is accessible and the ease of which financial and tax secrecy is accessible. It's something that you know a flash in the pan comes, the Pandora papers, the Panama Papers, um, but at the end of the day, that's that's kind of the true cancer, and all of the other ailments on the body are just consequences of that financial secrecy at the core of it. Because if if it wasn't as easy to just re-divert foreign income into another place, you might actually get some of that trickle down, which is promised by the city.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:42

I agree, I totally agree. And let me give you a little anecdote. Since COVID, where in the world have more world leaders died of the virus? Answer Africa. There have been various prime ministers and presidents and plenty of senior ministers and senior civil servants who have croaked because of COVID. Do you know what's interesting about that? The most interesting thing for me is that these people wouldn't have died if the normal rules had applied, because they're all used to getting public health care outside their country. Because it's seeped out of the country, right? So they fly to Singapore, they fly to Malaysia, they fly to Chile, they fly to London, they fly to Paris, they fly to Brazil. That's the standard route. The dictator parks his money in London, has the flats in Knightsbridge, and he goes there when his prostate swells the size of an apple. When he gets COVID, he's expected, oh, I'm ill. I'm gonna go there because of course I've taken all the money from the state, so there's no public health capacity in my country whatsoever. Holy shit, they won't let my flight plane take off. I can't land in London. I die. And that replicated, I think there are five or six African leaders, and it's all a tiny little vignette that proves exactly what you just said. The money leaks out, the locals' capacity. suffers whether it's healthcare, tax, banking, education, infrastructure. Because the leaders bank their money in the British Virgin Islands and do their shopping in Paris and go for their cosmetic surgery in Kuala Lumpur. And I just found that very, very interesting.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:23

Tim, that is such a fascinating anecdote. It is so understandable to understand. No, that that really is an amazing anecdote. I hope that it gets sort of picked up from one of these financial journalist writers and they can make that connection. Because that is a really, really good one. You can make a lot of it. I mean it it's kind of I wouldn't say that mainstream but you know there's a lot of chat about um the corrosiveness of financial secrecy. Very popular books like Kleptocracy a year or two ago by Tim Burgess, um, you know, Billion Dollar Whale, Bradley Hope, Tom Wright and then Oliver Bolo, uh these are all your native comrades um writing Moneylands and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:07

I don't know, maybe maybe it's becoming more noticed, something more people are paying attention to but that specific anecdote there would just I can see that being like a Well let me give you another let me give you one little Australian anecdote that I made of I was in I met I met a I met a former naval officer from Australia and he had retired from the Navy but he had skills and he he had repurposed himself and he's now the skipper of super yachts which is a great skill to have the skill can drive your yacht into Monte Carlo Saint-Tropez or Antigua wherever but it means he gets to meet uh to hang with extraordinary people. And he's the he has he has this sort of skill set that you know Paul Allen calls him up Paul Allen's people call him up and say can you drive Paul Allen's very large yacht open brackets the second largest in the world to Antigua who's Paul Allen? Founder of Microsoft with um Yuman Gates and uh park it next to the biggest yacht in the world which is also owned by Paul Allen. He bought the two largest at one point it was a crazy crazy one. And the point the point of the story was that this guy the this skipper has a skill set and he worked on a particular yacht with a Swiss billionaire who has a yacht and who charters it. And one week he gets the call fly to this place you are taking out the next clients and the next client well the president of the DRC the president of the Congo with an entourage and I can't because this is a public forum discuss what I was told about the behaviour and the money and what went on. But the bottom line is it makes Boris's bring your own party white wine parties in Downing Street look slightly tame. It makes Silvio Berlusconi's bongo bonga parties look quite tame. But the point the point was it was just another little proof that in a country that I touched on with poverty on a level that you cannot imagine where you have ten kids because you know six of them are going to die in the 21st century. You're rolling the same dice that the people that medieval Europe was doing. At the same time that that is true the actuality on the ground in the Congo the leaders are partying in a private jet in a private yacht. That's all you need to know. So trickle down economics economic analysis where nations fail you what I I call it the the illusion of normalcy people are desperate to project normalcy onto a place. Yes illusion of normalcy I love the Economist Intelligence Unit or the economist if you pick up a couple of the economists I love it because it's a great read it's very well read very beautifully written and and they always offer a table at the back of GDP figures, growth figures, you know real wage growth all that sort of stuff. And I love it because it's fabulous because you'll sometimes occasionally they do Africa and there's DRC and I love running my finger across these numbers because there they are printed you know on a page in a nice grid and these are numbers. And let me tell you what relationship those numbers bear to reality and that'll be none whatsoever. But we're so desperate we are so desperate to project normalcy onto a place which is so abnormal like the Congo that we will cut corners and say well actually well we'll just agglomerate this. Oh round it up and who cares and it doesn't really matter and I um I wonder if a lot of the shenanigans of corrupt leaders isn't camouflaged by that they can exploit the fact that the world just oh we'll just make it all tidy. And in crude terms the reason dictators are allowed to exist is because the Western world says you can promise us stability and we prefer stability to instability and we will tolerate so Saddam Hussein was a good dictator for the ten years he was fighting against the Iranians. He was our bitch he was a bitch but he's our bitch he was killing Iranians on the Shahat al Arab thank you very much in the 1980s we love him so much that doesn't stop him from being a dictator and a murderer and a vile leader and an anti-democrat and gassing the Kurds and uh draining the marshes in the south but because he was fighting our enemies he was our friend when that war finishes his character hasn't changed one iota and I had a weird experience in 2003 I managed to get onto a yacht forgive me I'm obsessed with private yachts um a yacht that Saddam kept his own private yacht which was down in Basra and to call it a yacht is wrong it was like a cruise ship it was insanely big and it had been bombed to hell by the Americans that attacked it something like 16 times had been hit in 16 different bombing raids and it was burnt and battered but it was still it wasn't sunk. It wasn't sunk and I took a little boat out and clambered up a derrick that was hanging off and there was diesel damage everywhere it all been the diesel had burnt so everything was covered in that black soot and I found why it's it hadn't sunk. There was a plate there it was made in Bremen by a fabulous German shipmaker. So it was a brilliant it was a very very very impressive ship. But the other plaque that I saw was a dedication plaque the ship was called El Mansur it means victor in Arabic and it was from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to thank the great leader Saddam Hussein for his courage and steadfastness in the eternal fight against the Shia revolutionists of Iran and I just thought hold on Saudi who were backing America who just bombed this gave this thing to you and that just shows you how you can you can spin things around 180 degrees very very quickly. So where were we we're talking about nation states it's my big it's my big it's my big issue it's my big it's my it's probably gonna think it's gonna kill me take me to my grave but um nationhood nation states patriotism the cohesiveness of community the the trade off of individual interests that is human history and in the Congo you see it laid bare in a rather tough way but it all you're seeing in the Congo is a reflection of the stuff that can happen elsewhere not least in your own home country. Because you know I write books some call them travel books. I hate it when it's just called a travel book yes there's travel in it but travel hopefully is so much more it's a bit of politics a bit of adventure bit of excitement bit of geography a bit of geology a bit of anecdotal bit of reportage a bit of this and the other it's it's a whole range of things. But the common theme is this it's about communities and individuals the trade-off creating a nation a workable way of assembling people and colonialism is very interesting because it was a moment when the world rebooted how societies were ordered society has been ordered for millennia in a certain way colonialism because of the Industrial Revolution bestowed upon a very few countries the ability to go out and kick ass and dominate and they did they went to Australia Europeans went to Australia and they destroyed an indigenous community. They went to America and it destroyed an indigenous community. They went to New Zealand and did the same thing. They went to South America and did but it had a slightly different relationship with the groups that they came from the Spain the Spanish Empire that the the Spanish capital that they came from. They did the British couldn't destroy India so it massaged India and it sent a very few colonial operatives to coerce and bribe the leadership of certain local potentates to then keep it all together. And I think the the capitalist moment the great industrial revolution changes everything in terms of building the nation state and leaves countries such as the Congo or Syria and Liberia blah blah blah blah blah blah blah large space of Africa they were taken over but they couldn't be destroyed in the same way that the indigenous community of Australia New Zealand and America was so the indigenous community gets rewired rebooted and what you're seeing today is a reboot of how that society then post industrial revolution capitalist involvement colonial occupy creates. And whether or not that's a theme people want to listen to you must make a think about you can think about but that's my that's my theme and no they certainly will be but that's a it's a very interesting thing. I mean you don't it's it's terrible to think about it but you know America the land of the free you know just pause and think um if there was one book I would recommend your readers consider reading if they haven't read it's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It's a history of America written from the perspective of the people who used to live there before the Europeans turned up and it is an extraordinary story. Wounded knee obviously is a battle we all have this image filtered slightly through Hollywood a little bit of history perhaps a little bit of modern modernist stuff but the relationship between those Europeans and the original the communities in North America is so fascinating and so problematic. There ain't anything remotely free and there ain't anything remotely democratic about it. So America's amazing I'll definitely read that oh I can't I cannot recommend it um more highly it is extraordinary because it tells me that at the heart of the American model now this isn't to criticize America this is at the heart of the colonial mindset there is a lie and the lie is this you the insider trust me you'll be alright trust me we'll sort you out trust me and in bury heart at Undidney you hear lie moment after it's their betrayal but it's exactly the same that the British did in India exactly that they did in Nigeria that the Belgians did in the Congo that they did in Australia and New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 the only treaty in the history of the world to create more fighting than it was meant to stop in New Zealand. There's a lie, trust me. And the White Outsider has a lot to answer for so much of our history today of our actuality of our politics is bequeathed by that and we forget it. Now why nations fail it's a wonderful book I enjoyed it very much I love the ideas I love the concepts but it felt to me as if it had lost a connection because it had missed the fundamental point which is where the betrayal comes from the this sense of betrayal. Because if you betray if you if you show a model of betrayal and lying then what's the elite that takes over from you going to do when they're going to betray and lie right now we have this image in India of Gandhi. Gandhi is a national hero he was a national he brought the nation together who killed Gandhi an Indian nationalist killed Gandhi an Indian nationalist killed Gandhi because Gandhi wasn't extreme enough in the eyes of the murderer. And the mer the person who killed Gandhi wasn't a white colonial oh this put this back go back in this box. He was killed by an Indian who represented the extreme form of what Gandhi represented and there's that terrible truth about nationalism which is that it is there's a propensity to extremism. We haven't even come on it come to Israel and Palestine I lived there for four years. But Israel the the the the Zionist the Zionist project is a fabulously justifiable project to give a home to the Jewish people there's absolutely no doubt about it. It is fabulously justifiable but it is unjustified when extremist fundamentalist measures are taken which might be the destruction of communities the murder of people the breaking of international conventions which is what the modern state of Israel does whether it's you know by unilaterally declaring East Jerusalem an Israeli state in breach of international convention or whether it's using white phosphorus over Gaza which is in breach of war you know blah blah blah blah blah you know it is justifiable fantastically justifiable but there is a propensity to it being taken by extremists by extremists and I wonder and I wonder if that is a model that doesn't apply it the when I go to the Congo we've talked richly and for me very engagingly and I thank you for your interest in the book and the whole the whole concept but what I'm looking at is a country which has been chewed by a process. Outsiders came in and they chewed it up and I'm looking at what's left the physical space is beautiful the river is amazing force of nature cathedral trees all those sorts of things but what's the human agency there? The human agency has been corrupted and that's what I find so intriguing. And it's what makes me read newspapers every day. It's that what you know I follow you know I think all human history is dealing with that exact same the afterwash of the the the of of those things we'll have different tools whether or not we're financial or economic or commercial or scientific to deal with them. But I try and fly my drone a little bit higher than all of them and just look down and say what's the common feature?

SPEAKER_00 1:43:14

Is this what you're currently working on? Because there's been a bit of books.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:20

Yes and no yes I am and uh it's kind of defeated me I've got lost in a certain way so I'm having to restructure it but when I embarked on a on a history of a nation state uh I got lost in a forest the forest had no there was no way out because it's just everywhere. Every single human interaction has been to a greater or lesser extent creation, protection, maintenance of a community of a nation state. I mean what an extraordinarily ambitious uh question to ask though at least and try to answer I'd be thrilled to to schedule something like that and well we can talk about we can we can talk things to read beforehand so I might be able to you're bloody well read already you've got you're you're telling me books I didn't know about the cleptocracy um uh issue you ran through two or three titles there I was going well I hope it doesn't ask me about those I've got nothing to say um okay well you've got to do it perfect financial secrecy stuff okay one measurable index metric was in the 1940s if you were a businessman from Europe you invested money in the Congo in Africa you didn't invest invested in South Africa South Africa ended up being a very successful place with gold mining and other uh uh investments but no no no no it was a wild place South Africa Congo was settled and it had copper and Europe and Japan were being rebuilt with copper every bloody house needed a copper phone wire and copper pipes for their plumbing and where does copper come from uh the Congo uh the Cold War the Cold War where did all those weapons come where did the weapons grade uranium come from that made the yellow cake uranium come from that was refined to make those weapons? The Congo. We blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki with Congolese uranium processed Congolese uranium all the uranium for the Manhattan project in um uh New Mexico and Arizona came from the Congo um and and and and and and um that's why it's I find it you know if the normal rules applied you and I wouldn't be sitting in Cape Town and Stockholm I would be in Kinshasa and you would be in Goma and you would be living a fabulous life in a beautiful mountainous resort with lakes outside and on the equator and weekends away and I could drop I could we could meet up Tuskers walking under you could have your tusk your Tusca elephants walking in the horizon you could be drinking your Tusca beer from Kenya and you could get in your car and pick up the modern or you're on your app on your phone and get the modern app version of the Lonely Planet guide I described from the 1950s and you could du drive west for 500 clicks and we and I could make a tell you what we'll meet in Kisangani you and I no let's meet in Boomba it's only up the road we'll meet in Boomba let's go to Mabuto's old palace b Badalite let's go there we'll have a beer together and you and I could drive there meet in a restaurant have a normal thing go to an ATM machine take c take stuff out of the take money out of the out of the machine pay for our drinks uh take photographs upload them on the internet all of these things everything that I've just said everything is perfectly reasonable reasonable to expect not one of them can be done and that's for me what's so beguiling about the Congo.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:39

Since you've now made this uh lovely alternative universe where we're both living in the glories of Africa and it's super well developed and we can drive everywhere I'd like to tell you about this anecdote that I have um from a guy called Alexe Bamazovic lovely Serbian man works for a company called the Adrianopal group and they're special like special economic zone consultants and they have a massive project in Kigali Rwanda um and everything you just said without the hyper romantic idea of it with the big tuskers and perhaps the lovely waterfalls is uh happening there and so you have an ultra modern small little economic special economic zone in the middle of Kigali that is producing uh phones that are made all from African products so it's African software hardware all the products come from Africa it's like an African phone and many other things Uber is working very well restaurants are amazing a lot of foreign imports um it's like a tiny little ish western city in uh you know a landlock country in Africa and I just want to ask you what you think about that because clearly this question is on your mind where special economic zones fit into it and whether that is like some sort of explanation for it's just policies fucked in all these other countries and the special economic zone got got it just right and managed it because of its smaller population because it's such a you know there's there's less people so there's less variables to go wrong there's less chances to grease palms with corruption uh jobs are guaranteed before it's all set up they don't have to like organically come so I don't know whether there's something in that you you you can pick up on but very happy to very happy to give it a go.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:27

So Paul Collier in the bottom billion writes about SEZs and how they become his economic model is look at the world there have been places of huge financial success that have been paradigms and they have spread and they've been replicated and he's the one he obsesses about is Singapore. Singapore dirt poor 60 years ago 50 uh you know 70 years ago malaria and uh mango swamps now look at it insane and it spread up the Malaysia peninsula and from there it spread into Indonesia and from Thailand and you know and it's that can the idea of a contagion Kuwait especially on its own contagion it spreads uh and the question is um the assumption is that's a uh objective inextrable reality replicate that in Africa it will spread has been tried various places they had free trade areas in Mombasa and in Djibouti failed um is being tried in Rwanda what is the difference massively powerful dictatorial regime financially not very corrupt but politically exceptionally corrupt if you're an opposition figure against Paul Kigali you disappear in the middle of the night you might flee the country and come to South Africa. Three of his senior spooks intelligence officers did. One was murdered about two years ago, one was murdered last year and one had an attempted murder against him. Paul Kigali is a very powerful and popular figure in the West But the reality is that he has the same brutal methodology of clinging onto power as Mabuto or Gaddafi or Charles Taylor. He's just more refined. So he has the ability to to say, I dictate, as you well probably well know, in Rwanda there's a day a week where everyone goes out and tidies in Kigali, in the city. Everyone. Everyone goes out and tidies. And if you don't, the boys come round and knock you out of bed. And if you don't have an excuse, you get beaten up. So the streets of Kigali are exceptionally clean. But the question is, Hitler made the trains run on time, but having fast trains, having punctual trains, is that is that the measure of your society? The streets of Kigali, and I'm not I'm not making a moral equivalence between Adolf Hitler and Paul Kigali. What I'm saying is that the behaviors of leaders can lead you, can lead sp people and spaces in directions they need not they don't want to be taken. Now, what's going on, Rwanda? That's as an example in Kigali. I'm not aware of it, I'm blindsided, I don't know about that particular, but I can imagine it happening, and if it's gonna happen now, you're in Africa, Kigali would be a very good place, because you have a very strong authoritarian rule. They decide this is what we want, we want an African paradigm, it's got we're gonna create it. The test is is it replicatable? Singapore was the Djibouti, Mombasa, various projects, attempts around the coast of Africa have never ever spread because the political leadership that was allowed them to happen didn't have the author couldn't let them spread because they need they needed to be organic, they need to catch fire, they need to, oh I like that so much we can do it here. In Kuala Lumpur, we can outdo the Singaporeans, we can have bigger casinos, let's build a bigger tower, let's build Patronus Towers. Um the test of what you're talking about will not be in whether or not it it in itself is successful in isolation. The test will be is it replicated? And I wonder if that's possible, given that it hasn't happened without the diktat and the fiat of an extraordinarily powerful leadership.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:27

I just think that like it works because it has had all of the economic necessities guaranteed beforehand, which is to say job security To say that got jobs were there, it's an amazing point.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:39

That's an amazing I caught that when you said that early, I couldn't believe it. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:43

There will be jobs. Um so that's I mean, but but it's it's almost like guaranteed before it's built, and so there's a uh security in putting up all the local time investment or local risk trade-off for potentially doing something else, and that's why it might work on a small scale. I think the question is then as you grow as more people and also a key thing to note about the special economic zone is that it's um you know it's not for everyone, you know. To to get a job there, you have to have a certain level of education, which means in Zimbabwe you come from a certain caste, which means you come from a certain amount of wealth, which means you come from a certain amount of connections, all the rest. Yeah, sorry. Um and then I think the the problem of replicating it or doing it on a bigger scale just becomes as you add more variables to the mix, complexity can feasibly double with each additional variable, and you going from a hundred people to a hundred and one people doesn't make it one percent harder, it makes it a hundred percent harder, and then 102 is an another 100% harder. And so if you try to replicate something that could feasibly work, like Singapore, relatively small population, absolutely nothing going for it except uh you know, good political economy, you can uh not necessarily repro replicate that and say Indonesia, where there's like 300 million people or something like that, micro 300 million. Yeah. Um, even though you could say, hey, but look, look at their um look at their geography, look at their look at whatever they're predisposed with, why couldn't they just replicate someone like that here? I think I think at least this is me again coming from a very unsophisticated uh angle, but it's simply just a case of how much more complex and difficult things get as the group size gets bigger. You know, it's harder to organize 15 people than 14, and it's I think it can kind of or simply just be drawn down to that.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:30

Um but there's also an element of for me is that these things work if they are ground up. You know, if you start small and grow, imposing it from the outside is the wrong way round. Um, India as a colonial project was not a British colonial government plan, as you know. India was a bunch of freeboating mercenary capitalists called the East India Company. And for 300 years they went out there and they took enough muskets and muscle to enforce in a tiny this town, Pondicherry, this town, Madras, this town, Mumbai, and it grew. And when it got too big, they then called up the British government in 1856 after the Indian mutiny, and the government turned up. What I'm saying is start small and grow up. The idea, what you're telling me, you're telling me about a beautiful laboratory experiment. It sounds like a laboratory experiment. But the best laboratory experiments are replicatable. That's what science is, right? You can re doesn't matter where you do them on, you know, which side of the Southern Hemisphere, Norman said, two o'clock in the morning, one o'clock in the day, any scientist can do and replicate the thing. I wonder, I wonder if what you're describing um can be. Because it has to come from the ground. Um and going back to my my this central theme, I'm wondering if my my view is that countries were made so big with envelopes around them by colonial powers. African countries are literally created, Nigeria, never a single entity at all, ever, created by the Brits in 1918. Congo, created by the Belgian king, and then the Belgian state. It's so big, it's never had the chance to organic you know, it's so large to hold the hold together that the the the low it doesn't the small community the Joe Schmoe on the ground can't grow up because there's something powerful above it.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:36

And that's Kinshasa has a low ceiling because it's within this much bigger Congo, which it has nothing to do with the. Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:43

And there's we haven't even talked about and we haven't um even talked about the disc the disconnect between the city of Kinshasa and the rest of the country. But anyway, the point I'm making is that you're telling me something which sounds wonderful and admirable, but it sounds imposed from above rather than organically growing. And the capitalist model, you know, the the the the Marxist, the alternative to the Marxist class war thing was always that individual groups solve a plan. So yeah, the jobs in that industry go, all the coal mining jobs go, but it doesn't matter, everyone rebrands as service sector tech, blah blah blah blah blah, and suddenly the old mining areas of the north of England are uh people got jobs again. You start small, you can't you can't impose it. Um I have a personal antipathy for the Rwandan regime. I see them as a destabilizing force. The Congo part of the fighting I was passing through was directly encouraged, energized, supported by the regime of the Congo of Rwanda. They desperately wanted instability in eastern Congo because it allowed them to send their mercenaries in to plunder gold and diamonds. Rwanda declares gold exports every year. The United Nations asked them, why do you declare hundreds of tons of gold going from Rwanda to Dubai when there isn't a single gold mine in your country? And they could not answer that question. Wow. So but the world feels the the Western world feels guilty about the events of 1994, and so the Western world is not in the habit of telling the Rwandans how to behave themselves. And they will say, they'll roll over to Mr. Kagami. Well I'll tell you one thing about Mr. Kigami. This is how extraordinarily ambitious and powerful the man is. He had a falling out with France, as you know. The French dared to suggest that the Rwandans were involved in the shooting down of the uh that the Sutzis were involved in the shooting down of the uh juvenile Habirana's plane in April of 1994, the act that precipitated the war. And this is a one of those historical scabs that never heals. The French accused Kagami, Kagami said, okay, France, even though you were never a French colonial power in my country, you were a French cultural influence. So we are a francophone country. I'm having nothing to do with France. I dictate today that our language is going from French to English and flipping the switch overnight. Every secondary school teacher must learn English to fluency and teach every subject in English. Not just teaching English, but teach geography and maths in English, history, everything else. Could you imagine how ambitious you have to be? It's literally saying, I'm the dictator, I'm the dictator of Ruratania, we drive on the left-hand side of the road, but tomorrow we're going to drive on the right. But it's more ambitious than that, because it's a language. And do you know what? They've done it. Rwanda is in the common. Is it actually working? Yeah. Rwanda is in the Commonwealth. Rwandan runners are going to be running against Australian runners at the Commonwealth Games. Rwanda had that much to do with Britain in its colonial project. And yet two countries, Mozambique and Rwanda, have snuck into the Commonwealth. I never quite got to the bottom of why. I mean the Commonwealth is about Brotherhood of Nations, nothing to do with they don't like to explicitly acknowledge that it's a post-imperial construct to appease people. But Rwanda is in the British Commonwealth. Hold on. It's because their hatred of the regime directed towards France is so intense they want to have nothing to do with it.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:35

The anecdote of the gold is just another crazy, wild, egregious str show of strength and corruption that you you you would only see from a satirical villain in a movie. Exactly. I don't mind not having any gold mines, gold mines, but I'm going to declare you know. Declare it. That's the thing. It's like it's it's just insane. Um but it look, Tim, you have to go and uh like I said to you before, I have I I have also an equal amount of questions more about you, and so I'm hoping maybe we'll get another chance and we can do one.

SPEAKER_02 2:01:10

But you're gonna have a miserable time editing this two and a half hour um thing, but enjoy it. Uh and uh uh I look forward to the final cut, as it were, the uh the silk purse out of the cell's ear. Um and if you felt like you wanted to talk some more or you get reader feedback from your or viewer feedback that you know blah blah blah.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:28

Thank you. But before you leave, we have to leave on a high note, and so I want to ask you what a country is that you're most bullish on. So we've spoken a lot about the depravity of uh many countries. What about a country that you think has just a most terrific future ahead of it?

SPEAKER_02 2:01:47

That is a brilliant uh question for um cutting me dead in my tracks. I tell you what, a country that I hope will have an amazing future, which are the two countries in well, basically all of the Yugoslav countries. If they can just stop that eternal issue about nationalism and chauvinism. You've got places of Croatia, Slovenia, and uh Bosnia in particular. Uh they are the most beautiful places I've ever been. If I if I could live anywhere in the world that it wasn't Cape Town, it would be on the the coast, the Adriatic coast of Croatia. Um and I th the talent of the people, the physical location, Europe, but the nicer part of Europe, the Europe where you're not getting snowed on like you are in Stockholm for nine months a year. Um I uh I would be hopeful about that. Um let me be honest. What I'm optimistic about is that uh in any country you find extraordinary people. It's just the the few, the elite, that we allow to dictate terms. So is Russia Putin and his cronies? It's not. I know plenty of Russians. The scale of the place, how could you possibly boil it down to just a few cronies? Is South Africa just a dodgy corrupt government, Jacob Zuma stealing everything? No, because I live here. I know amazing people. So I'm optimistic that good will prevail. Uh not in in not in any particular country, but I'm optimistic that you know there's enough good in all of us. But in order for that good to prevail, we have to recognise where we've gone wrong. And that's why the Congo is and some of the journeys I've made, that's really why I do it. To try and recognize our missteps and our muddles and our confusions, and so that we could all move in a better, better direction.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:42

Well, amazing, Tim. Uh, been a true pleasure. Thank you so much, and uh also amazing work on the book. It's such an extraordinary modern modern day tale of adventure. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 2:03:54

Thanks for your enthusiasm, and I hope your uh your listeners have enjoyed our conversation. I certainly have. Cheers, cheers.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:01

Well, I hope you all saw what I meant by some people being predisposed for podcasting. That was a standout episode for me for sure, but it's just the case as I'm you know doing more of these podcasts, you sort of realize that some people just make better guests than others, but not because of their capacity or their work or their interest or anything like that, just their ability to speak. Tim and I spoke a little bit before and after the recording, and it's just the exact same there. He was giving me this very beautiful, sort of succinct analysis of why cricket unifies what nothing else could in India. And anyway, really interesting. But thank you. You're a very generous person for still being around. I assume you enjoyed it, unless there is masochistic tendencies to you, in which case, absolutely welcome. But my ambition is to corner the podcast market with this show for eclectic curiosities in whatever country it is you're listening in from. So obviously, this episode was with him butcher about the Congo, the last episode with Marcel Van Houston about Dutch photography, the next one's going to be about NFTs with Danny Miranda. So, look, it's got a wide and varied interest. I understand not all episodes will be for you, but especially if this is the first time you're listening, subscribe to the podcast. But more importantly, leave a review. The uh algorithms and the podcast distributions are in the Stone Age. They are beyond terrible a discovery. So I listen to my podcast on thing called good pods. You can rate and review each episode. You likely are mostly listening on Spotify or Apple. If it's Spotify, go to the show, follow it, and leave that five juicy five-star review. If it's Apple Podcasts, go to it, subscribe to it, leave that five stars, and then also say something very complimentary and nice about the show. I know it's a lot to ask, but truly, it is the best thing you can do for me if you can manage it. I would appreciate it very greatly. And then go a step further and get your kids, get your boyfriend, get your girlfriend, get your mates, get everyone you see on the street, pull them over and subscribe to the show and pull five stars in. That's all from me. Thank you so much, you're a legend. This was a great episode. Ciao.