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National Geographic : 2015 Oct
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Congo River 101 downstream, when another motorized pirogue roars up from the far shoreline. In it are four young men in camouflage uniforms, bearing AK-47s. They are hollering in Lingala. One of them ropes our boats together. Two of them step aboard, holding their rifles at their hips. Their eyes widen when they see two Western- ers. The scenario is a familiar one; it usually doesn’t end well. The young men claim to be policemen of some sort. They say that we deliberately skirt- ed their village without stopping to “register.” We are unauthorized, they maintain. Our fixers and the pirogue captain are all prideful young men who yell back at them. Pascal and I beg for calm. Our ANR passenger remains, as always, exquisitely useless. We are a mere 30 miles from our destina- tion, Mbandaka, where I plan to catch a flight to Kinshasha. The 345,000 inhabitants of that port city might as well be on another continent. The river at this juncture is a mile wide. Its sov- ereignty is its wildness. One does as one must. The pirogue that these men have intercepted carries two laptops, four cameras, thousands of dollars in cash, and eight human lives. We are not going to win this. The only question is how much we will lose. After 30 minutes, a few cigarettes, a couple of bottles of water, and a dialogue that settles into a kind of fatigued stalemate before taking a weirdly jovial turn—Hey, you like Congo? I like America!—the young men finally name their price. Their outboard motor is out of gas. And so they would like a full tank. And ten dollars. A fair price. We shake hands—it was only river commerce, after all—and then wave goodbye as the grinning young men with their guns swerve away from us, eventually disappearing into the silver-dark current somewhere beyond. j himself,” Celestin says. “Then he can go find the good life. Maybe in Europe or America. Not here, unfortunately.” During my last day on the Congo River the weather is placid, and we are proceeding briskly A contributing writer for National Geographic, Robert Draper has written more than a dozen stories for the magazine, traveling to locales as varied as Madagascar’s rain forests and Greece’s monasteries. visited. Life there may seem sweet and simple to the passerby, but in truth, it’s one of depri- vation, with virtually no economic opportunity. What amazed you about life on the Congo River? I was most surprised by the nearly complete absence of infrastructure in the river villages we REBECCA HALE, NGM STAFF
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