THE JOY OF THE OILY RAG

I have just completed reading Tim Butcher’s BLOOD RIVER, a description of his extraordinary journey in 2002 to follow the steps of Stanley as he traced the Congo 3,000 kilometres from its source to its mouth on the Atlantic, through some of the most inhospitable country in the world. Much of what he described did not surprise me - the complete lack of infrastructure, the poverty and the brutality. I spent three weeks in 1972 working on a remote farm in S W Zaire, passing through endless blockades manned by intoxicated young men wielding AK47s – who insisted on reading my passport, even if they did so upside down. And again in 2006, working in northern and eastern Congo, travelling by canoe up the Congo river to a hospital similar to that where Albert Schweitzer had worked. Although these earlier experiences helped me to appreciate the reality of Tim Butcher’s journey, there were two particular incidents where I felt a surge of recognition.

He started the journey through this most inhospitable country with two aid workers and two 100cc Yamaha bikes. Bikes smaller than that would have lacked the power, and larger than that would have been too heavy to carry over the many streams they encountered. The first stretch was 700 km through tracks in the forest. From start to finish, there would be no town, no fuel and no clean water. One bike carried a Congolese aid worker with the luggage for three of them piled on the back seat, tied on with the spliced bicycle inner tubes that are found everywhere in Africa. The other bike carried the other two men. Several times, they had punctures and, without a thought, the relevant tyre was removed and repaired. But then came that awful moment when the engine of one of the bikes suddenly coughed and stopped in the middle of nowhere - 300 km from the nearest town. I smiled as I read on….”Odimba unpacked an oily rag wrapped around his tool collection - which would not have passed muster on the Paris-Dakar rally - but his battered spanners and pliers were up to our needs, removing and cleaning the fuel lines, collecting the teaspoon of drained fuel and putting it back into the tank……….and we continued as if nothing had happened”. What struck me about that incident was the confidence to respond calmly to a serious crisis and the vital role played by the “oily rag” – a term and reality I recognized from my farm student days.

The second instance was when they met a man in rags pushing a bicycle laden with 20 x 5 litre plastic containers of palm oil. He was on a 300 km round trip that would take him 2 months, progressing at about 11 km a day, and which would yield him a net profit of around £20. The bike had neither pedals nor chain - only a cycle pump. It was entirely a beast of burden. But it was not this that caught my attention - such sights are common in deep rural Africa. What fascinated me was that he was carrying a loop of “ivy” - and when he was asked why, he explained that if he has a flat tyre, he can squeeze out from the ivy a “latex” that will “heal” his tyre - a repair kit from and for the forest. This man was poor beyond poor, but he was rich in knowledge and confidence. The ivy was his “oily rag”. Like Odimba, he had no fear of experiencing a fault in this remote environment. Both demonstrated extraordinary resilience.

Both of these men had their own oily rag and it reminded me of mine when I was a farm student in the Peak District of Derbyshire in the 1950s - with its spanners to fix the binder or the muck spreader; the stone to sharpen the scythe for those corners too tight for the binder; the billhook to cut the kale on days it was so cold that your ungloved hands would stick to the tractor mudguard and the file to sharpen the finger mower, resting between two milk churns. But my oily rag was not only a set of basic tools, it also extended to that emerging ability to sense when a ewe was in trouble or a calf slightly off colour or a pasture under-nourished - as well as to know when you had reached the limits of experience and needed to call in the vet or the soil scientist. To me, the oily rag is the embodiment of the deep knowledge and respect that farmers accumulate of their environment, of the species they nurture and of the equipment they use - building a relationship that encourages each to nurture the other within the realities of our broken economic system. The oily rag can also represent what the Buddhists call "suchness" - or the essence of who we are.