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National Geographic : 2015 Oct
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82 national geographic • october 2015 The boat is dangerously encumbered. It pushes three barges by means of an engine that was built to convey about 750 tons. The cargo— iron rods, sacks of cement, food products— exceeds 900 tons. Ruffling over the barges is a patchwork roof of tarps and cloth, and beneath it are some 600 human passengers. Perhaps half of them paid up to $80 for the journey upriver. The rest sneaked aboard. Many are city dwellers hoping to find work harvesting corn and peanuts. A few of the wom- en, toting portable charcoal stoves, have hired themselves out as cooks. Others, as prostitutes. One does as one must. There is singing, bicker- ing, praying. The aromas of charcoal smoke and mortal claustrophobia. Jugs of home-fermented whiskey make the rounds. Now and again an overserved passenger falls overboard. So far no one has drowned, but the journey is still young. In a berth on the upper level of the boat a slightly built man in his 40s sits in a corner reading a Bible by flashlight. His name is Jo- seph. Two years ago he acquired this vessel for $800,000. He had been in the air freight business and believed at the time that the rules of the sky would more or less apply to the river. He has come to learn otherwise. His crew consists primarily of thieves, one of them a nephew by marriage. Joseph estimates that they have smuggled maybe 200 tons of excess cargo onto the boat—taxing the engine, slowing the pace, risking running the boat aground and thus imperiling everyone on board, and of course cheating the owner out of the profits. Joseph worries that the crew knows he’s on to them. He fears they will pay the cook to poison his food. Bread and butter are all he’ll take for nourishment. He is disgusted by all the deprav- ity. The other night the captain cut the engine for a few hours so that he could climb down to a barge and have his way with some of the female passengers. And so Joseph takes refuge in his Bible. He is surrounded by sinners. He is one himself. Others in his family are preachers, but Joseph loves money. At the end of the year, after all is said and done, he will be $100,000 wealthi- er. By then, perhaps it will be worth it. “Do you have more aspirin?” he asks me. The boat travels under a sky seething with starlight. It thrashes its way through a body of water that sometimes seems oceanic in its vastness and at other times barely more than a shallow creek, which is why it is foolish—and for that matter illegal—to be traveling in the dark. To those on the boat, such considerations—what is prudent, what is lawful—are not entirely insignificant. Ulti- mately, however, a single rule supersedes all others: Here on the Congo River, one does as one must. By Robert Draper Photographs by Pascal Maitre
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