THE next day the pilot Didi came to the bungalow early and said the clouds were low, and we must take off to get to Lokutu Estate.
I had no time to see Colin Bewick, the personnel manager whom I had promised to chat with. I could sense he had something on his mind. I made a point of asking John Dodd later about that.
Although Lokutu was far upriver, the Congo was still wide, and from the air I could see the islands and the far bank before Didi throttled down and the Cessna wheels rolled on the grass airstrip.
Doreen got into action unloading the luggage and the provisions. She would sort out the guesthouse where we were going to stay.
Citoyen Batanga was the manager, a bright young man who gave a briefing, and although the yield was low he did not use the usual excuses of the weather, old palms or labour shortages that I was prepared to hear. Instead, he listed the things he was doing to raise the crop.
John sat silently, with his chin up, looking pleased. He had promoted Batanga only a few months before I arrived.
We covered the field visits and I got to understand how big the area was. It was divided in two parts, mainly of old palms, with a big mill that was at the river’s edge. It had a hospital, which I visited as scheduled. The elderly Belgian nuns were proud to show the beds of clean white sheets, taking me through the wards of patients.
I listened to the Congolese nurses explaining in French. They could turn to the nuns to explain further. I saw that the operating table was old, and the room for childbirth was bare, with a wooden bed and a gap in the middle where the baby would be received.
At the school, the children stood in their neat blue uniforms and sang the school song led by a nun.
I learned that the missionaries and the nuns had worked there from the early years, even during the civil wars.
The next day, John and I were sick. Fortunately, it was a Sunday, and as both of us tried to recover on the verandah, Doreen came with spoons and a bottle of medicine, now in her role as a trained nurse.
By evening, both of us felt better. Dinner was my favourite rice and curry with the spices Doreen had brought from Penang while John stuck to his bread and butter. We sat looking over the Congo River. A pale moon was shining.
I let John talk.
“We have plenty to do here. Usually, we try to get an expatriate to lead each estate. We had Jacques Dumont for a while. But you know that he had to resign. Could not take the loneliness.”
I met Jacques when he was an estate manager near Kluang. He had worked in Indonesia in his early days and then came to Malaysia with his wife.
It was a good life, close to Singapore. But in retirement and back in Belgium, his wife left him, and he had come to London for a job. Being a Belgian, and he spoke French, he would fit in well, but loneliness got to him. He fell sick, and soon he could not go on.
I could get the feeling of isolation, cut off from all that was familiar.
“It can be easy to feel depressed,” John said. “This river has seen some rough times, too. It used to be the route where the raiders would come and capture the villagers to sell as slaves. The biggest slave trader was called Tippu Tip because the villagers said that was the sound of his guns. He was part Arab and part African. He brought the captives back to Zanzibar. Before that, he held them in a castle at a town upriver, called Basoko.”
We had some time in the next afternoon to visit Basoko. The wind was up and the boat went through choppy waters, and when we arrived at last, there was nothing to see except for a low stone wall that was once the castle.
John had heard of a Portuguese trader who lived in town, and we found him lying sick at the back of a hut, skin and bones, unable to get up. He had lived there for years. He refused any help. His Congolese wife, hardly in her teens, played with a baby chimpanzee tied to a post outside the hut.
On the way back to the boat, John said:
“That man has gone bush.”
That evening after dinner, and over his biscuit and cheese, John had more to add:
“It can happen easily. That is why when I accepted the job, it was on condition that I had Doreen travelling with me. Without her support, standards would go down, and all is lost.
“Doreen takes care of everything. I need her with me so I can do my job.”
John also told me that Tippu Tip was a friend of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. He was famous for finding David Livingstone, who was working as a missionary in Tanzania across the border, although it was said that he did not need to be found. Tippu Tip knew Livingstone, John said, as he went deeper into local history.
Tippu Tip had helped Stanley on his expeditions, even into south Sudan. The expedition went to rescue Emin Pasha, the German-born governor of a province there. It turned out Pasha did not want to be rescued. On that journey, Stanley had lost many of his men in the Ituri forests past Basoko.
Years later, I was to recall what John said about Doreen. But for that evening, I forgot to ask him about Bewick.
The writer has extensive experience in the management of oil palm plantations. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
