have your own open route down the middle. If you’ve walked the forest, which is difficult though not sponge-thick, river journeying is an escape from impediments that feels almost akin to flight.
For a while after leaving Kika, we favored the Congo side, riding a strong channel. Sylvain knew his preferred line. His assistant, a Baka man named Jolo, handled the outboard while Sylvain supervised, signaling directions from the bow. The pirogue was large and steady enough that Max and I could sit on the gunnels. Immediately we passed a small police post on the right bank, a Congolese counterpart to the Cameroonian one at Kika, and fortunately no one flagged us to stop. Every such checkpoint in Congo is an occasion for passport-stamping and minor shakedowns, and you want to avoid them when you can. Then we puttered past a few villages, widely spaced, each just a cluster of wattle-and-daub houses sited on a high bank to escape inundation in wet season. The houses were topped with thatch and surrounded by banana trees, an oil palm or two, children in rag dresses and shorts. The kids stood transfixed as we passed. How many hours to our destination? I asked Sylvain. Depends, he said. Ordinarily he would stop in villages along the way for trading or passengers, delaying long enough to enter Ouesso by darkness so as to escape notice by the immigration police. Not long after that explanation he did stop, guiding us ashore at a village on the Congo bank, to which he delivered a large plastic tarp and from which, on departure, we gained a passenger.
It was my charter but I didn’t mind. She was a young woman carrying two bags, an umbrella, a purse, and a pot of lunch. She wore an orange-and-green dress and a bandana kerchief. I might have guessed if I hadn’t been told: She was a Buy ’em–Sell ’em. Her name was Vivian. She lived down in Ouesso and would be glad for the ride home. She was lively and plump, confident enough to be traveling the river alone, trading in rice, pasta, cooking oil, and other staples. Sylvain liked to give her a lift because she was his sister—a statement of status that could be taken literally or not. She might have been his girlfriend or his cousin. Beyond this, I didn’t learn much from Vivian except that her niche still exists, the Buy ’em–Sell ’em role, offering independent-spirited women a form of autonomy not easily found within village life, or even town life, and that the river still functions as a conduit of economic and social fluidity. Mostly she seemed a charming throwback and, though this might be unfair to her, put me in mind of women that the Voyager might have met almost a century earlier. She was a potential intermediary.
When the rain returned, Max and I and Sylvain and Vivian hunkered beneath our tarp, heads down but peeking out, while Jolo the Baka stolidly motored us on. We passed a solitary fisherman in his canoe, pulling a net. We passed another village from which children stared. Then the rain died again and the storm breeze fell off; the gentle chop disappeared, leaving the river as flat and brown as a cooled café au lait. Mangroves reached out from the banks like groping octopuses. I noticed a few egrets but no kingfishers. In midafternoon we approached the confluence with the Sangha. Along the left bank, the land fell gradually lower and then tapered, sinking away into the water. The Sangha River gripped us, swung us around, and I turned to watch that southeastern wedge of Cameroon recede to a vanishing point.
The air warmed slightly with an upstream breeze. We passed a large, wooded island. We passed a man standing upright in his dugout, paddling carefully. And then in the distance ahead, through haze, I saw white buildings. White buildings meant bricks and whitewash and governmental presence in something larger than a village: Ouesso.
Within half an hour we landed at the Ouesso waterfront, with its concrete ramp and wall, where an officer from the immigration police and a gaggle of tip-hungry, scuttering porters awaited. Stepping ashore, we had reentered the Republic of the Congo. We completed the immigration formalities in French and then Max dealt with the bag-grabbing porters in Lingala. Sylvain and Jolo and Vivian melted away. Max was a shier, less forceful fellow than Neville but conscientious and earnest, and now it was his turn to be my fixer.