In December 1984, I was on the small Cessna plane that had left Kinshasa to fly about a thousand kilometres up the Congo River to an airfield at a plantation called Yaligimba.
Now we were flying over the green mat of forests, with Didi the Belgian pilot keeping his eye on the Congo River as his guide.
Sitting behind me was John Dodd, the plantation’s director.
A Scotsman, who had joined the industry in 1954 about nine years before I did, he had started his career planting rubber in Kedah.
I met him when he was a planter near Kluang managing an oil palm plantation and later on he was in Sabah where he had opened a new area for planting cocoa.
I knew he was a good manager who would complete whatever he set out to do and a man of few words.
But at a meeting in Sandakan, he had said he wanted to move on and asked me to put in a word to Leslie Davidson in London. I had agreed to do so.
He was about three years in Zaire (today named Democratic Republic of the Congo) and his hair had turned completely white.
Doreen, sitting next to him on the plane, was a young Eurasian nurse in Penang hospital when he had met her. It was required in those days for an assistant to get permission from his general manager if he wished to get married on his first tour before the four years had ended.
Not being a European did not make it any easier for her in those days.
John set his mind to marry her, he did not get sacked and now they had three grown children studying in university.
I had watched Doreen while we stayed for two days in Kinshasa after I arrived and each morning she left the security of the company rest-house with the iron gates and high walls to go and buy the provisions.
Among the purchases were butter, cheese, marmalade and jam for John, and cartons of cigarettes to last until the next planned trip to Kinshasa.
She was attentive to his every need. She also told me not to drink coffee that morning and not too much water because it was a three-hour flight and the small plane had no toilet.
Below, there was not much to see and I began to reflect about the country that had been changing yet remained unchanged in many ways.
In my school days, Congo was in the headlines after independence from Belgium in 1960 when President Joseph Kasavubu sacked Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.
Everyone knows what happened to Lumumba.
More troubles followed when another leader, Moise Tshombe, tried to break away in the south where the copper and diamond mines were in the rich region of Katanga.
Finally, the United Nations was called in and that was how our Malaysian troops arrived by ship from Port Klang together with young officers who were my schoolmates at Royal Military College.
Among the troops was my brother Corporal Alias who was in military transport, posted mainly in the eastern part near Goma.
From Kindu, my brother had written letters with tales of what he had seen and the adventures he had, and I detected a degree of braggadocio. I was here in another region called the Equateur.
Equateur was the heart of the oil palm country, with plantations that would be close to the river and the natural highway to Kinshasa.
Over time, the plantations expanded to allow work at the Yangambi research centre. The team discovered in the 1950s that they could get more oil by using the dura palm and crossing it with the pisifera palm to get the seeds called tenera.
On its own the dura palm produces many bunches, but with a thick shell and thin mesocarp that has a low content of palm oil.
On its own, the pisifera has a thick mesocarp and no shell, but the palm bears only a few bunches.
The product of pollination, tenera, has the best qualities of both, with thin or no shell, and thick mesocarp with a high oil content.
The knowledge was brought to Malaysia. By the end of the 1950s, most plantings were with the tenera seeds.
Another success in research at about the same time was on milling which was done in collaboration with equipment suppliers and resulted in the Mongana report.
The work helped to add precision to sterilising the fruit with steam pressure, followed by extracting oil in the new press to raise the oil recovery rate and with an improvement in oil quality.
Both discoveries had benefited the industry worldwide, more so outside Congo which had gone through a series of upheavals.
At one time the government had seized the plantations and mills but found it hard going, and the majority holdings were handed back to Unilever, which managed them with all the social obligations such as road repair for the outlying villages and the donation of some palm oil to the chiefs each month. Stability had come back.
By the time I arrived, there was no news of any uprising or border incursion under the dictatorship of General Mobutu Sese Seko.
On the big estate of over 7,000 hectares at Yaligimba, I stayed with John and Doreen.
In the four days there I had asked him and the estate manager Citoyen Kalinda, why the yields were low.
It was less than eight tonnes of fresh fruit bunches per hectare, while in Malaysia it could be two or three times that figure.
It had very much to do with the uneven rainfall and a dry season far longer than that we see in Malaysia, resulting in a severe water deficit.
There are other reasons of course, for remedy through action by management on things that were within their control.
John provided the leadership to see that fertiliser arrived on time, stored securely and applied in the right way.
He had said the fertiliser bags and fruit bunches could grow feet and leave the estate, and it was his job to put in systems to limit that.
He saw to it that all the work was done on time and that costs did not keep rising.
He had a methodical way of being focused on the issues when he visited the field and he would not allow topics that could be put in to distract him. He did not accept excuses.
He would be speaking in French, learned in Switzerland before he came, and he could give instructions without pause and with the right words, and he did not mind it if he had to repeat himself to avoid mistakes.
In the office, he would sit to write to Kinshasa to ask for more supplies.
He wrote in English, neatly in capital letters so that the clerks and the Belgians in the office there would be clear about what he wanted and when they must arrive.
We had another five estates to cover.
The writer has extensive experience in the management of oil palm plantations. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
