even once famously cutting a twenty metre liana vine to suspend between two trees in the depths of an Indonesian rainforest.  Well, famous to me it was.  But this time I was well and truly stumped.  The rotting shell of a house I was staying in, a gnat’s spit from one of the many tributaries of the Congo River, seemed devoid of ways to hang the net.  In the forests of central Africa, concrete-hard wood is the norm - a sure bet for erecting tents, laying out bivouac frames, or fixing stanchions if you have a decent machete; but this time, in the tiny village in which I’d found myself, the wood seemed to be crumbly, termite riddled and no support at all. What made it so much worse was that the walls of the battered old hut were made from flaky sun-baked mud, which at first seemed to offer placements for my hooks and screws, but which pulled out whenever even the light weight of the net was put on them.

I was struggling, to say the least.  What little concentration I had left – after having to imbibe the vicious palm whiskey with the chef de village for several hours – dissipated after about twenty minutes of various entanglements.  I was fed-up, sweaty, pissed and totally knackered.  It had been a bone-crunching day.  All I wanted to do was crawl under my net, away from the hordes of mosquitoes that were no doubt by now smelling me out as keenly as a truffle to a pig.  But try as I might, I couldn’t find any decent placements.  Eventually I had to accept it; one of life’s fundamentals was flawed.  I was resigned to getting bitten to death, and with malaria prevalent in the area, that may well have been a fact rather than a prediction .  There may be some things more attractive to central African insects than white Englishmen with A+ve blood, but if there is then I have yet to hear about it.  In my experience, I was ultimate animal for attracting female Anopheles, the mosquito that requires a blood meal in order to lay its eggs.  How blood-sucking evolved as a competitive advantage I’ll never know, but mosquitos, black-fly and no-see-ums have been one of the banes of my travelling in the tropics.  I was it; the juiciest morsel around. Even briefest exposures of skin signalled stealth-fighter like approaches from things with wings (and without) armed with lancing needles for teeth, desperate for a shot of Ol’ Aardie.  I simply didn’t have enough eyes or hands to see and swot them away.  Any bites erupted with a bump that could rival a small hill.  And boy, did they itch.  If my brain didn’t kick in with overriding logic, I’d scratch my way to bone.  So to say I don’t like mosquitos is a bit like saying Osama Bin Laden didn’t think much of Americans.  I’d nuke every mozzie if I could; this is one bit of biodiversity I could do without, which was at odds with my life as a field conservationist who also happened to be a vegetarian.  But mosquitos are excluded on my list of saving species from extinction.  Sorry, but as subjective as it is, that’s my world.  Planet Earth shouldn’t have enabled such nasty little parasites to develop and survive and so I exterminate them whenever possible.  If I can’t, I avoid them.  It’s not always possible, and I’ve had malaria twice (more of elsewhere), which is why the issue of not being able to hang my net was such a big deal .

Then I had a brainwave; or perhaps cerebral plasmodium had already snuck in.  I’d stay up and swat them, finding them by the light of my torch.  It seemed to make sense, and what made it even more attractive was that I had a few boiled yams and locally made ‘piment’ – a fiery-red paste made from local peppers and with a Scoville rating of  50,000.  Armed with head-torch, soft vegetables and the devil’s own condiment, I sat and waited for the gossamer vampires to arrive …

 

The trip through the forests of northern Democratic Republic of Congo had begun interestingly enough, with an evening out in Mbandaka, the capital of Equatorial Province, 500 km up the Congo River from the capital city, Kinshasa.  The town isn’t so much a reflection of Belgian colonial days, when it was developed into a regional administration centre, but more of a testimony to the madness of Mubuto Sese Seko, the crazed, paranoid, ex-President of what was then Zaire, then later the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Working to his bizarre vision of what constituted threats to his power, Mubuto systematically murdered anyone with an IQ over 50 and who could talk, and isolated most of the population from one another, presumably with the idea that anyone who could meet could talk, and hence plot ways to kill him.  On reflection, I’m sure he was right – people would have tried to kill him. It’s difficult to understand how such a lunatic managed to seize as much power as he did – presiding over what was then the second largest country in Africa (with the splitting of Sudan, DRC is now the largest).  He isn’t unique amongst world leaders though; just look at the insanity of Amin, Mugabe, Kim, Pol Pot, Taylor … the list is long and reads like the world’s ‘most scary’ list.  In my experienced  of working in Africa, having a paternal head may work reasonably well at village level, but the further up in civil society you go, the temptations for self-interest seem to destroy any hope of acting in the best interests of all.  As the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the legacy of African leaders who start half-way sane and end up as despots of a magnitude beyond anything we can comprehend – even in the context of many other ego-orientated leaders including the west – is proof that those who want leadership in Africa should be banned from ever fighting for election (all too often literally ).

Mbandaka is a ghost town reclaimed by those that managed to escape the carnage of Mubuto’s regime, and their families - mainly squatters from the surrounding villages - who arrived after all the fighting had finished, and who have found enough of a living to justify staying in the decaying town.  The immigrants have taken up residence in the former – once very splendid - colonial homes and office buildings, at density levels above those of most battery farms.  Extended families cram into old shops, sixteen, twenty at a time, making open fires on the ancient concrete floors and sleeping on beds made of cardboard, packing crates and old bits of twisted metal from the dock.  Or they just roll over and sleep on the solid surfaces, exhausted by their days’ labours.  I’ve been to meals, attended loud gatherings even, where people – mostly women– would be crashed out, sprawled on the decking, or the floor, or even just the mud-baked earth, their tiredness so complete that they seemed dead to the world around them.  The party would continue around them, raucous and alcohol fuelled.  But on they’d sleep.

The streets are wide, the buildings spaced widely along the old boulevards, and everywhere the eerie feeling of a time long since passed.  On my first walk to the old Governor’s residence (the only one with a street light in front of it, shining on the razor wire and absorbed in the ebony faces of the guards) it took me a while to place the reason for the similarity, but disconnection between this western-looking town and those I’d grown up in.  Then it struck; the absence of cars.  Even in a town of half a million people there wasn’t a single car to be seen or heard; there wasn’t even a petrol station – the few motorbikes that were there were serviced by entrepreneurs settling plastic bottles of fuel from the roadside, brought up the river by boat.  It was only later that I learnt that all roads into Mbandaka had been destroyed in the civil war that brought Laurent Kabila into power.  Equatorial Province - almost bang in the middle of the country - had been the battle ground for supremacy in the fight between Mubuto and Kabila, and if that wasn’t enough, it was also at the centre in the civil war several years later, between Kabila and Jean Paul Bemba, the millionaire Congolese businessman, who had made his fortune under the Mubuto regime and then wanted absolute power (see earlier under 'despotic ego-centric dictators’); the resulting destruction of the town’s roads had yet to be repaired.  Now the only way to travel to Mbandaka was by boat up the Congo, or flying in from Kinshasa, as we had done earlier that day.  The city was an urban island, and it felt that way; cut-off, abandoned and a very long way from the shops.

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