Bonjour from the Republic of the Congo. No, not that Congo. The one on the other side of the river. There are two Congos. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is most unfortunately often in the news for conflict, political instability, and Ebola. It’s smaller neighbor to the west is the former French colony Republic of the Congo (ROC). ROC certainly has its political and civil problems, but at the moment it is a country at peace and fortunately not suffering from an Ebola epidemic.
While the company I work for has extensive operations across Africa, ROC is one of our more isolated outposts. In northern Congo, we have a timber operation. The Congolese government has granted us forest concessions in which we fell tropical soft and hardwood trees. In one small town, we have built a compound to fully process the logs and export timber. The town is a thousand kilometers from Brazzaville, ROC’s capital, 1,000 kilometers from Douala, Cameroon’s largest city and port, and 1,000 kilometers from Libreville, the capital of Gabon. Some may call it “the middle of nowhere.”
Day 1 – Paris
I left Chicago on Thursday night and got to Paris on Friday morning. Air France’s Brazzaville flight was scheduled to depart 40 minutes after touchdown, so I gave myself a daylong layover in Paris rather than dart through the airport and inevitably miss the flight.
Despite my prudence, Air France still left my bag in Chicago. I didn’t let it get me down, and I took the opportunity to visit the Louvre, which I deliberately skipped on my previous visit to Paris.
I also visited Zara to get some emergency fashion provisions. They proved to be unecessary because Air France did reunite me with my bag that night. I celebrated with galettes.
Day 2 – Brazzaville
Most of day 2 was spent crossing the Sahara on an Aircamel 330. Five minutes from landing we “aborted” our approach and circled for nearly an hour due to a thunderstorm at the airport. When we did finally land it was pouring rain and the plane’s wheels shot up big curtains of water on both sides of the plane. There were shouts of joy from passengers and uproarious applause for the pilot. I was just glad we landed in Brazzaville and we didn’t have to divert to Pointe Noire or Kinshasa.
As customary for my company in Africa, we were immediately treated to dinner at an Indian restaurant.
Day 3 – Pokola
Being 1,000 km from Brazzaville, the most convenient means of conveyance to Pokola, the home of our operations in The Congo, is by flight. There is one fly-by-night operator that plies the route, and we had heard much about them before arriving in The Congo. Sometimes the flights go, sometimes they don’t. For a few weeks, all flights were suspended because their insurance had lapsed. Earlier this week the flight had not departed, likely due to weather (or at least that was the likely explanation from the airline). All we knew today was that it would certainly not depart at 8:00 AM, the scheduled time.
At 8:00 we gave our suitcases and passports to the driver and he brought them to the airport. We went for Indian brunch and were given assurances that the plane was going to leave Pokola bound for Brazzaville and then return to Pokola with us onboard. Apparently, we had agents at both airports monitoring the situation and feeding information to the Finance Controller, who was accompanying us.
After brunch, we went back to the guesthouse overlooking Pool Malebo (Stanley Pool, on the Congo River) and just waited for a raven from the airport.
At around 11:00 we received confirmation that the flight had taken off from the north, so we got the rest of our stuff together and headed over to the airport. We received VIP treatment at the airport, which included private security screening and an escort to the gate. Sometime later a turbo-prop landed at the airfield and we were soon boarding a bus to take us to the plane.
The plane was ghastly. It was dirty and smelled like a toilet. The door to the cockpit kept flopping open during taxi, takeoff, and landing. There were two flight attendants and they did offer beverages, but I didn’t want to drink the water because I wasn’t sure if it was from an unopened bottle of water or one just refilled at the tap. I could not see the scenery either because the engines and wheel compartments blocked the view from most of the seats. It was also a full two-hour flight, which was longer than I was expecting. We basically flew to the southernmost part of Cameroon.
Upon landing at Ouesso (the largest city in the north and the closest to our operations) we were again ushered to the VIP area and then to a waiting car from the company. We didn’t even have to retrieve our bags. They were later brought right to our guesthouse at the compound in Pokola.
We had been told that Pokola is 40 km from Ouesso and that there is a road, but it is on the other side of the river. At that time I did not ask if there was a bridge. As we approached the river my suspicion was confirmed without needing to ask. We would be crossing on a barge.
The company actually owns and operates the barge. Not only is it useful for moving people and small vehicles, but it allows us to load trucks at our compound and drive them to port.
In addition to the barge crossing, we have constructed and maintain all of the roads in the vicinity of Pokola and throughout our forest concessions. They are packed dirt, fairly wide, and in decent condition (at least when it is not raining). Other than the roads and some small villages and huts along the roadside, all I saw was the forest. Pure jungle for 40 km.
Ouesso, Pokola, and our compound are on the banks of the Sangha River, which feeds the Congo. Everyone kept mentioning that the river was very high due to the rainy season. The whole area is very muddy, and the banks of the river are all flooded out due to the swollen river. Despite the high water level, there are no rapids and it’s a pretty and tranquil river, with birds chirping in the bankside trees and clumps of dislodged river reeds occasionally floating on by.
Being Sunday, we did not work or have any meetings. We just got acquainted with the area and Sapelli Restaurant. Sapelli is on our property although managed by a sub-contractor and will be our source of lunch and dinner on most days of our visit.
We are staying in one of the VIP guesthouses (I’m not complaining about the VIP status we seem to be getting throughout this trip). The company engages in the fabrication of wooden houses and furniture, so the VIP guesthouse is a showroom of sorts. Visitors to the compound can see what they can have made for themselves or their clients with the wood we harvest from the forests. The exterior facade is made out of stained wooden panels, and the interior has hardwood floors, wood paneling, wooden cabinetry, and hardwood furniture in the dining room, living room, and bedrooms. It is a tad too lush for my tastes. Everything is dark and covered in varnish. I need some pop to here and there to distract my gaze.
Day 4 – Trees
Today was more introductory than anything else. We received an overview of the business and met most of the management team. We devoted the rest of the morning to understand the whole process. We focused on forest management and identifying the trees we are going to cut.
The government grants us tracts of forests for 30 years which we refer to as concessions. We pay annual taxes on the land area conceded to us. We break up the forests into five-year management plans, and then further into one-year parcels. Every year, we can only cut down trees within that year’s parcel. After the year is up we cannot go back and touch that parcel. We can only extract from one-thirtieth of the forest every year.
Every year we do a complete land survey and tree inventory of the following year’s parcel. Every tree is identified and classified by species, height, diameter, quality, and maturity. After the inventory, we submit a report to the government, specifying which trees we want permission to extract. The government approves every tree. We leave immature trees, and certain species are off-limits because they have low re-generation rates, they have ecological value (by being home to a rare species), or are valuable to people that live in the forest and forage for their livelihood. There are also species that we could cut down but we do not because there is not an overseas market for the wood. The whole process is a delicate balancing act between the market and the forest. If we get to our annual parcel and our most valuable export species are scarce there is nothing we can do about it. We just have to tell our customers that they will need to wait a year and see if the next parcel has more of that particular species. However, for commercial and sustainability purposes, we do try to develop new species in the markets.
Day 5 – Timber
The best way for us to understand the whole wood products value chain is to start at the beginning: in the forest. We put on some boots and piled into a Land Rover with the Head of Forestry for a 2.5-hour drive into the rainforest. The forest concessions are enormous multi-thousand-hectare tracts of land. Before we came along they were virgin rainforest. The only difference today is that we have built forest roads to get in and get out in the year that the government has allotted to us.
We were hoping to see some wildlife along the way. Elephants and gorillas are common in our concession areas. Unfortunately, we did not see any large mammals. I saw one monkey sitting in a tree. That was it.
We knew we were getting to the active parcel of the forest when we began to see logs lining the sides of the forest roads. These were recently felled trees that we waiting to be picked up and brought to a sawmill.
Off of the forest roads you are in the jungle. The areas are remote. When workers bushwhack off of the roads into the forest they have to blaze trails and festoon leaves on machete-sharpened poles so that they can be tracked down if they get lost. They use maps to find the trees they have to cut down. Trucks and vehicles cannot make it into the jungle. The feller and his or her assistant are on their own. They bring very big chainsaws (I doubt I could hold one up for very long) and once they find the tree and clear the land around it they get to work. It takes more than 10 minutes to cut through the log and fell the tree. Some of the trees are hundreds of years old and very wide. The whole time they are being swarmed by little stingless bees that cover all of your exposed skin.
As soon as that tree fell it got a lot brighter and the temperature went up probably 10 degrees. More flies found us. Fragile trees are extracted as soon as possible to prevent damage. Sturdier trees may sit for a month so they dry out a bit before we haul them to our sawmills.
Day 6 – Lumber
The Congolese government only allows us to export 15% of the trees as logs. The rest has to be cut into lumber in-country before export. We have three sawmills in our Pokola compound and an additional one in one of the forests. They are pretty much what you would imagine. Big logs of wood getting moved on big conveyor belts to saws that slice and dice them to exact specifications. The result is neatly stacked bundles of lumber that can be exported as-is or further processed. Fun fact: the saw blades have to be sharpened every three hours (we have a whole sharpening workshop on-site).
We don’t stop at the cut lumber. A lot of the wood is dried in climate-controlled cells. We also have moulding for hardwood decking, we make hardwood flooring, pre-fabricated wooden housing, indoor wall paneling, and a full line of wooden furniture, cabinetry, and closets.
Day 7 – Money
Today was my absolute favorite day of every audit. Today we sat in an over-climatized conference room and went through the financial accounts, line-by-line by every single line.
Day 8 – The Compound
It is very impressive what we have managed to accomplish in Pokola. It’s more than an office building and the sawmills. I was astounded at the infrastructure we have put together in the small town. The company runs or has financed:
- A library
- The school
- A private hospital for employees and the general public
- A 30-bay vehicle garage and workship
- A fully functional biomass power plant
- A water treatment plant
- A riverport and barge that regularly crosses the river
- A road-building crew
- The three sawmills
- A moulding factory
- Drying cells
- A furniture factory
- Pre-fab housing fabrication
- An airstrip
- A restaurant, night club, and hotel
- Shops
- Guesthouses
- A pool, gym, and volleyball court
- Houses for all employees
- A radio station with Lingala (local language) programming
- A furniture showroom (in Brazzaville)
- Personnel camps and one additional sawmill in the three furthest forest concessions
Day 9 – Downriver
After the extensive reviews of operations and finance in Pokola, it was time to depart. Just like our flight up to Pokola, our bags and passports were picked up early in the morning and we mysteriously waited around until we were informed that it was time to head to the airport. We were lucky that the flight was operating because the alternative is a 12-hour drive down the river back to Brazzaville. The flight was uneventful. The plane smelled even worse on the return. We spent the last day and a half in Brazzaville, admiring the Congo River, trying recommended restaurants, and poking around the company’s properties in Brazzaville.
Brazzaville seems like a small and tranquil city. Directly across the river is Kinshasa, the capital of DRC and a much larger city. They are the closest national capitals in the world to each other, except for Rome and The Vatican City (but does that really count, since the Vatican is its own capital?). It feels surreal to gaze out on The Congo. It’s a very large river with a very dark history (Billy Joel, Belgians in The Congo, Heart of Darkness, the horror). It has the second largest discharge by volume in the world, behind the Amazon, and it is also the deepest river in the world, reaching up to 800 ft.
I hope Air France doesn’t lose my bags on the return trip! Au revoir Congo.
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